Dmitri Fydorvitch is on his way to Mokroye and Grushenka and the Pani that has come back to claim her, he that ruined her and left her a prey to a rich merchant, Samsonov. His life is going to change and the pistols won’t save him. Plug the Pole and then himself in a grand guignol of atrocity and take the rap for parricide, Daddy weltering in his blood and brother Ivan Fydorvitch in colloquy with a junior devil. Give me the pistols at once he says to the man he pawned them to. His destiny is there in Mokroye and is the significance of the Elder’s bow before him.
It is just as De Quincey wrote in essay on ‘The Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’ tension is heightened by business which delays the denouement of the horrible event that is to come. We give the shopping list, load the troika, show fistfulls of money, describe the grasping nature of the landlord, the foolery of Maximov and Kalegnov. There is an atmosphere of unconstrained hysteria and folly. How are we to go on? Send for Jews with fiddles and cymbals. Dmitri dissolves in tears and then laughs woodenly. Round his head the terrors begin to gather.
Dostoyevsky is at full strength automatic writing here, his genius has taken control and everything must be said. The things that ought not to be said, that are left for us to find, the parallels between the early life of Zosima the Elder and Dmitri are flickering shadows. As in life personalities blend together and at once are separate and alone with personal guilt that denies mitigation. Its not that we should have known but that we in fact did know. A great novelist creates that symbiosis, the sense that we are dramatis personae, flowing together in a single mind.
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