Grushenka recounts a Russian folktale about a wicked woman who dies and is condemned to the burning lake. Pitying her, her guardian angel recalls that the woman did one good deed in her life: she gave an onion to a beggar. You take that onion, says God, and pull her out of hell with it. As the angel lifts the woman from the burning lake, other sinners grab onto her and she kicks them away: “it’s my onion, not yours!” At that moment, the onion breaks, and she has been rotting in hell ever since.
The smallest good deed, like giving an onion, can save someone. Other small deeds recur in the novel. When Dmitri was a neglected child, Dr. Herzenstube gave him a pound of nuts, and Dmitri remembered the kindness decades later. Waking from sleep after a grueling interrogation, Dmitri rejoices to find that some good soul has placed a pillow under his head. This small, gratuitous act of kindness greatly moves him. The onion fails to save the wicked old woman, but the story of the onion restores Alyosha’s faith.
Returning to the monastery, Alyosha hears Father Paissy reading the story of Cana of Galilee over Zosima’s corpse. In Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky chooses the most dramatic of Christ’s miracles, the raising of Lazarus, as the epitome of Christian faith, but here he makes the opposite choice. The miracle of Cana, where Jesus turns water into wine at a poor wedding, occurs in only one of the four Gospels; as he says, it has nothing to do with his mission; and most people at the wedding do not even notice it. “Was it to make wine abundant at poor weddings He had come down to earth,” Alyosha asks himself, and the answer is that, in a sense it was. It is the small acts of goodness that are truly miraculous.
–Gary Saul Morson, Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions ,And Why Their Answers Matter, 334
