person
Mitka
also: Митька
A ragged, badly cropped boy with sticking-out ears, the son of the widow day-laborer Nastasya; Fedya's rival and occasional tormentor, whose sins Fedya resents seeing forgiven ahead of his own -- the object of the narrator's damnation-fantasy and, after his own confession, an uneasy reconciliation.
Reading notes
- During Holy Week §8 deep down I resent that this little wretch is about to have his sins forgiven
Fedya's jealousy that Mitka -- whom he has just imagined as a great sinner condemned to hell in section 4 -- is nonetheless first in line to be absolved is presented without irony or adult correction: a child's competitive, wholly literal understanding of forgiveness as a scarce resource he is being cut in line for, rather than a theological abstraction. As with the damnation material at section 4, this is rendered as unmediated childhood psychology and period religious pedagogy, not authorial endorsement.