In the opening chapter of this section, we receive much information about the Karamazov servants. Dostoevsky is not being needlessly thorough; these servants will play a significant role in the murder of old Karamazov, and it is well that we become acquainted with them early in the novel. We learn that Grigory was a determined and an obstinate man, for example. "If once he had been brought by any reasons to believe that it [his viewpoint] was immutably right," Dostoevsky tells us, "then nothing can make him change his mind." Consequently, some of the damaging evidence at Dmitri's trial is given by this old servant, a man who would never change his story even though the reader knows that the servant's evidence is false.
Besides the character of Grigory, Dostoevsky also deals with the relationship between Alyosha and his father. "Alyosha," he says, "brought with him something his father had never known before: a complete absence of contempt for him and an invariable kindness, a perfectly natural unaffected devotion to the old man who deserved it so little." We, of course, understand that Alyosha is only following the dictates of Father Zossima, who advocates that we must love indiscriminately, even those who do evil to us.
Also dealt with in this section is one more highly individual character in this Karamazov tangle of personalities — the village idiot, "stinking Lizaveta," whose depiction grandly displays Dostoevsky's greatness in capturing the essentials that round out and animate his cast of minor characters. Here, in a few sure strokes, he creates a grotesque creature to whom we respond as a human being. Lizaveta is strikingly real; we believe in this creature who sleeps in barns and in passageways and whose appearance is so repulsive that some people are actually appalled. And we learn that it was Karamazov who fathered her child; now all of his noxious qualities suddenly become putrescent. To dare think that anyone might embrace her is shocking, but to think that Karamazov satisfied his lust upon her is to equate him with a barbaric and sordid savage; the man is bestial. He later tells Ivan and Alyosha that "there are no ugly women. The fact that she is a woman is half the battle."
