Murazov promises famine relief and seeks to persuade the Old Believers

Murazov promises to relieve famine-stricken communities and personally approach the Old Believers, making compassion a practical undertaking rather than a pious abstraction. He offers grain from his own stores, arranges for more to come from Siberia, refuses public money, and argues that a plain man may win a hearing where officials have failed. The action places spiritual responsibility beside the machinery of government—and measures both by whether they reach people in need.

Relief Beyond Official Procedure

Murazov tells the Prince that he will send corn to the localities suffering most severely and personally see to each person’s needs. He considers himself better suited to this work than the tchinovniks, whose reports and documents, in his account, lead nowhere. The contrast is not simply between private charity and public administration: it is between attending to people’s needs directly and allowing paperwork to substitute for help.

His offer is materially specific. Murazov has a large stock of grain in his granaries and has already ordered a new consignment from Siberia, due before the coming summer. He declines payment from the Prince, saying he is ashamed to think of his own pocket while people are dying of hunger. His pledge therefore commits both existing resources and future supplies, while presenting relief as a personal obligation rather than a paid service.

A Mission to the Old Believers

Alongside famine relief, Murazov asks permission to speak with the Raskolniki, the Old Believers. He judges that they are more likely to listen to a plain man than to an official. He does not claim certainty of success: he acknowledges that he may fail to calm them, but insists that officials of the kind he criticizes could not succeed either. The mission rests on trust and direct encounter, not on the authority of reports.

Murazov’s proposal joins two forms of service—feeding the hungry and seeking to calm a religious community—with the same distrust of procedures detached from human contact. His willingness to go himself gives the promise its force: he does not merely recommend that someone act, but offers his own time, effort, and stores.

Mercy, Work, and Responsibility

This public commitment belongs to a wider ethic Murazov articulates elsewhere. He tells Khlobuev that honest toil is as meritorious as prayer and urges him to perform even the cleaning of a floor as if doing it for God. Work, in this counsel, occupies the time that might otherwise be spent in card playing and feasting; spiritual renewal must take the form of disciplined action. Murazov’s famine mission applies that principle beyond private conduct, directing labor and resources toward the suffering of others.

He also describes strength as dependent on prayer and divine help, telling Khlobuev to accept a demanding task as a commission from God. That language makes service neither self-sufficiency nor easy confidence: a person may feel unequal to the work and still accept it as a trust. Murazov’s promise to the Prince embodies the same logic. He acknowledges uncertainty about persuading the Old Believers, yet proceeds with relief and mediation as duties that cannot be reduced to a guarantee of success.

Justice and the Limits of Judgment

When the Prince asks whether he may overlook the case against offending officials, or whether it would be just to leave them unpunished, Murazov refuses a definite answer. Human problems, he says, are difficult to resolve; some rascals are inwardly rectitudinous, and a man may enter a vicious circle in which he ceases to be himself. His answer complicates the Prince’s effort to balance punishment with mercy without dismissing the need for justice.

The episode thus places Murazov’s aid to the hungry beside a wider crisis of public responsibility. The Prince recognizes that bribery has become deeply rooted and that even men not innately venal may find it a necessity or a way of moving with the current. Against that system, Murazov offers direct relief and personal persuasion—not as a complete solution to corruption, but as an immediate form of service grounded in compassion, effort, and accountability.