I have been reading The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky this summer. While It is tempting to comment first about the Grand Inquisitor and those chapters, there is much commentary on them available, and I have found another excerpt which has been quite thought provoking for me, so I thought I might share it and see what you think. The chapter is called One Onion.
“I was bragging to Rakitin about giving away one onion. I don’t want to brag to you, but I’ll tell you about it for another reason. It is just a fairy-tale, but a good fairy-tale, and I heard it from Matryona (who’s my cook now) when I was a little girl. This is how it goes. Once upon a time there lived a very nasty, horrible old woman. When she died, she didn’t leave behind her one single good deed. So the devils got hold of her and tossed her into the flaming lake. Meantime, her guardian angel stood there, trying hard to think of one good deed of hers that he could mention to God in order to save her. Then he remembered and said to God: ‘Once,’ he said, ’she pulled up an onion in her garden and gave it to a beggar woman.’ So God said to him: ‘Take that onion, hold it out ot her over the lake, let her hold on to it, and try to pull herself out. If she does, let her enter heaven; if the onion breaks, the old woman will just have to stay where she is.’ So the angel hurried to the woman, held out the onion to her, and told her to take hold of it and pull. Then he himself began to pull her out very carefully and she was almost entirely out of the lake when the other sinners saw she was being pulled out and grabbed on to her so that they’d be pulled out of the flames too. Buth when she saw them, that wicked, horrible woman started kicking them, saying: ‘I’m being pulled out, not you, for it’s my onion, not yours!’ As soon she said that, the onion snapped and the woman fell back into the flaming lake, where she’s still burning to this day. And her guardian angel wept and walked away.
I’ll offer some thoughts soon enough, but in the meantime, what do you think of this story?
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