Fyodor Mikhailovich—
The room is in shadows.
Reality gives way to FEDYA’s imagination.
FEDYA and ALYOSHA are lit by an incredibly white light.
ALYOSHA is on his knees.
FEDYA: Off your knees.
You’ve no need to mourn.
ALYOSHA: He’s dead.
FEDYA: I know.
ALYOSHA: My teacher.
FEDYA: Another will come.
ALYOSHA: I want no other.
FEDYA: This is not your path.
ALYOSHA: His body’s fallen to dust.
FEDYA: As any man’s.
ALYOSHA: I believed him more than a man.
FEDYA: You must abandon him.
ALYOSHA: It has hardened me—
FEDYA: Yes.
ALYOSHA: Hardened my faith.
FEDYA: No, no, the miracle didn’t come.
ALYOSHA: That I am on my knees. That I have seen my way. Is that not miracle enough?
FEDYA: There’s no truth to be found here. Not in abject service to prayer and ritual. To venal laws. That’s what you will come to understand.
ALYOSHA: I understand all I need to understand. Have seen here—on my knees—all I need to see.
That there is only one doorway to perfection and that is death.
That demand all you want your heaven here on earth, you can never have it.
That you, brother—you’re just as scared as the rest of us.
A shift in the light. ALYOSHA recedes into the shadows as FEDYA suffers a fit.
ANNA can do nothing but watch.
SCENE TWENTY-THREE
FEDYA’s flat. ELENA sits reading through the pages of a manuscript. KOLYA enters.
KOLYA: How is he?
ELENA: He’s sleeping.
KOLYA: Anna said it was bad.
ELENA: No worse, I expect, than usual.
KOLYA: Were you here?
ELENA: Anna hasn’t already told you?
KOLYA: Would I be asking if she had?
ELENA: The landlady’s girl fetched me.
KOLYA: You know what’s brought it on.
ELENA: Do I?
KOLYA: Letters defending the students?
He’ll not be your propagandist.
ELENA: You think the money you keep feeding him will one day make him yours?
KOLYA: He has friends who’ll ensure he travels no further down that road than he already has.
ELENA: He’s not forgotten, Nikolai Ivanovich—he’s been betrayed before, when he believed himself among friends.
FEDYA emerges. He is weak.
FEDYA: Here we all are. Together again.
He sits at his work table, stares at it as though he wants to do something, but lacks the wherewithal to begin.
FEDYA: But you were talking. Don’t let me stop you.
An argument. About my future. My intentions.
KOLYA: It’s all moved too fast, Fedya. The risks now far outweigh any good you can do—
ELENA: Better to do nothing then—to stand up bravely for the status quo—
During the following ANNA enters. Her arrival is barely acknowledged.
KOLYA: Support the students and you give your name to every madness they enact. You might as well hold the gun yourself.
ELENA: It’s a risk worth taking—
KOLYA: Easy to say when it’s not your liberty at stake—
ELENA: It’s precisely my liberty at stake—
ANNA: Do you hear yourselves?
Can you not understand what you’re doing to him?
ELENA: Get out. Both of you.
FEDYA: You say you want a book from me, Kolya?
KOLYA: Your first contract after Stellovsky’s is done.
FEDYA: How about this? A man at a crossroads. Three possible ways before him. Pilgrim. Revolutionary. Or husband. Which does he choose? Which would you have him choose? What’ll get me the most money?
KOLYA: You cater your writing to the buyer now?
FEDYA: It’s what I’m known as, isn’t it? A hack?
KOLYA: I thought Crime and Punishment changed all that.
FEDYA: Yet here I am, still expected to churn out novels under the threat of a stick.
KOLYA: They all come with their own risk. It’d depend on what he intends to wager, this hero of yours.
FEDYA: Not on how much he might win?
KOLYA: Is he likely to win?
FEDYA: What do you say, Anna? Which road is my hero’s way to happiness?
A beat.
FEDYA: Which road?
ANNA: Husband.
FEDYA: No doubt?
ANNA: None. If those are his choices…
FEDYA: Should he seek then an intelligent companion, or merely a kind one?
ANNA: [deferring to ELENA] An intelligent one.
FEDYA: I think he should choose a kind one. So she’ll take pity on him and love him.
ELENA: Have you done with your love play, Fedya? Shame on you, to turn a young girl’s head so cruelly. You know which road you must take. You know where/ you should be—
FEDYA: They’ve offered me a fine choice, Anna. The terror of revolution or the terror of the state—our lives balanced on whether we set our bet on the red or the black.
What is it? Tell me. That one thing that will push a man full over the edge. Not teetering at its brink, but…
ELENA: You should rest now, Fedya.
FEDYA: We have work to do. Anna and I.
ELENA: Leave it for another day.
KOLYA: She’s right,/ Fedya.
FEDYA: You want me to work. Let me work.
A beat.
KOLYA leaves.
ELENA waits.
FEDYA makes it clear he expects her to go also.
A beat.
ELENA exits.
ANNA readies herself for work. FEDYA struggles for something to say.
FEDYA: It’s still dark…
There’s a place I go, Anna—before the fit overtakes me—a place of such transparency… I’d give my whole life to stay there for one moment longer…
A beat.
I have in my mind such a tale. A story that is everything I need to say. Of a parricide.
ANNA: You’ve told me.
FEDYA: I have?
ANNA: A little.
FEDYA: A mystery. Which of the father’s two sons was it who killed him? But they refuse to do my bidding. The sons. Refuse to act as I would have them act.
ANNA: Perhaps they know best.
FEDYA: Know more than me? Yes. Yes, perhaps they do. Only…
There seems to me now to be a third son—it becomes clearer and clearer to me—but I don’t know who he is—not yet. I don’t understand him—but he won’t let go of me—
My mind is filled day and night with nothing else—and whenever I seem on the verge of understanding, this piece of nothing I’m writing for Stellovsky pushes itself into my brain…
Minutes ago, when I walked into this room, it seemed to me to be teeming with life. Now it seems like nothing so much as a tomb—and all I want to do is run from it.
ANNA: Finish the little of Stellovsky’s book that is left to finish, then there’ll be nothing to do but write your parricide.
FEDYA: Will you help me? Will you stay?
ANNA: One book at a time, Fyodor Mikhailovich.
FEDYA: How many pages have we done?
ANNA: One hundred and sixteen.
FEDYA: Thirty-four to go.
ANNA: You write your books by the page?
FEDYA: If it’s what I’m paid by.
ANNA: You stop when you’ve reached the required number?
FEDYA: I see it looming and wrap things up as quickly as I can.