Dostoevsky was concerned lest his depiction be considered blasphemous, and he thus includes in his postscript “one small nota bene: please don’t imagine that I would allow myself, in a work of mine, even the slightest doubt about the miraculous power of relics. The matter concerns only the relics of the deceased Father Zosima, and that is quite another thing. A commotion like the one depicted by me in the monastery once occurred at Mount Athos, and is narrated in brief and with touching naıvete´ in The Wanderings of the Monk Parfeny.” Dostoevsky also requests Lyubimov “to do a good job” of proofing the legend about the “onion,” narrated by Grushenka and used as a symbol for the gratifying stirrings of kindness and compassion even amidst the more powerful drives of egoistic self-concern. “It’s a gem,” Dostoevsky declares. It was “written down by me from the words of a peasant woman, and, of course, is recorded for the first time.” Here he is mistaken. A Russian folklorist had printed a very similar legend in 1859 but this only illustrates the authenticity of his use of the moral-religious creations of the folk tradition.
–Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time, 800
