Grushenka’s fable is in fact a parabolic gloss on Zosima’s often repeated aphorism that all are responsible for all. Had the old peasant woman not kicked away the other sinners who were clinging to her in the hope of being saved, she and all the rest—in a living great chain of being—would have been saved.
–Robin Feuer Miller, The Brothers Karamazov: Worlds of the Novel, 85
