Jealousy

Jealousy is presented as a state of imagined betrayal that can overtake love without evidence and drive the lover toward suspicion and spying. The novel contrasts it with Othello’s trustful response to the destruction of his ideal, then gives the idea a concrete, recurring form in Mitya’s unstable feelings for Grushenka. In his case, jealousy briefly vanishes in the beloved’s presence, only to return when she is gone, exposing both the depth of his attachment and its susceptibility to suspicion.

A distinction from Othello

The narrator invokes Pushkin’s observation that Othello was not jealous but trustful. Othello’s outlook is shattered when his ideal is destroyed, yet he does not begin by hiding, spying, or peeping. He has to be led toward the possibility of deceit. The contrast defines jealousy not merely as grief at a suspected betrayal but as an active disposition: the jealous person imagines what the beloved may be doing in their absence and can descend into surveillance and suspicion.

The narrator also resists reducing this disposition to simple vulgarity. A person of lofty feelings may recognize the shameful depths into which jealousy has carried them and still voluntarily continue there. The resulting tension is moral as well as emotional: awareness of the degradation does not necessarily prevent it.

Mitya’s recurring suspicion

Mitya’s jealousy follows a repeated cycle. When Grushenka is absent, he invents terrible possibilities about what may be happening to her and how she may be betraying him. Yet he can be shaken, heartbroken, and convinced of his own love; jealousy does not amount to a settled judgment about her so much as a recurring rush of imagined scenarios.

The cycle becomes visible in the contrast between Grushenka’s presence and absence. At the sight of her, Mitya’s jealousy disappears. For a moment he becomes trusting and generous, and despises himself for his suspicions. But once she has gone, he again suspects her of low cunning and faithlessness, without feeling a sting of conscience. The return of suspicion is not preceded by proof; it follows her departure.

Love and the limits of trust

The brief interval of trust matters because it reveals something about the attachment jealousy distorts. Mitya’s love, the narrator suggests, contains an element higher than he himself had imagined. It is not only sensual passion, or merely the bodily attraction he had described to Alyosha. His generosity when Grushenka is before him points to a capacity for trust and esteem that his jealous imaginings cannot sustain.

The passage therefore sets two versions of Mitya’s feeling against each other: in her presence, self-reproach and generosity; in her absence, suspicion that returns without remorse. Jealousy is not shown to cancel love, but to constrict it repeatedly, turning the distance between the lovers into a space Mitya fills with imagined betrayal. Its force lies in that recurrence: the moment of trust is real, but it does not last once Grushenka is gone.