Lizaveta’s death and Smerdyakov’s birth form a grim conjunction of loss and adoption: on the night after Grigory and Marfa bury their own child, Grigory finds Lizaveta dying in a garden bath-house after giving birth. The infant survives because the couple take him in, but his beginnings remain marked by public suspicion and his alleged father’s denial. The episode establishes both the circumstances of Smerdyakov’s birth and the household into which he is absorbed.

The Night of the Birth

The discovery follows the burial of Grigory and Marfa’s child. On the next night, Marfa wakes to what she believes is a newborn’s wail, at first hearing it as the cry of her own dead baby. Grigory listens, thinks the sound more like a groan, and goes into the garden. Near the gate, he traces it to the bath-house and recognizes that a woman is in distress.

Inside, Grigory finds Lizaveta, a speechless, intellectually disabled girl known throughout the town by the nickname Stinking Lizaveta. She has given birth and lies dying beside the baby. The scene’s sequence turns private mourning into an unforeseen encounter with another life: what Marfa first hears as the return of her own child’s cry comes from a woman whose labor has ended in mortal danger.

Rescue and Adoption

Grigory sends Marfa to Lizaveta and runs to fetch an old midwife who lives nearby. They save the baby, but Lizaveta dies at dawn. The rescue therefore cannot restore the mother or undo the loss that has just occurred; it instead leaves the newborn dependent on the people who have found him.

Grigory carries the infant home and places him on Marfa’s lap. He calls the orphan a child of God and says that their lost child has sent them this one, urging his wife to nurse him and weep no more. His words make the adoption an answer to grief, though not a replacement that erases it. Marfa brings the baby up, and the household’s care gives him a place where his birth had left him without one.

A Name and a Contested Paternity

The child is christened Pavel, and people add Fyodorovitch, meaning son of Fyodor. Fyodor Pavlovich does not object to the naming, and finds the situation amusing, but vigorously denies responsibility for the child. The townspeople, by contrast, are pleased that he has adopted the foundling. Their interpretation and his denial coexist without resolving the question of paternity.

Fyodor Pavlovich later invents the surname Smerdyakov, taking it from Lizaveta’s nickname. In this way, the name that identifies Pavel in the household also carries his mother’s stigmatized public identity forward. The child becomes Fyodor Pavlovich’s second servant and, at the time the story begins, works as a cook while living in the lodge with Grigory and Marfa.

Narrative Significance

The episode binds birth to bereavement without making them interchangeable. Grigory and Marfa’s own loss shapes the welcome they give the foundling: Grigory understands the infant as arriving in the place left empty by their child, and Marfa raises him. Yet the new household does not settle the questions surrounding the infant’s origins. Fyodor Pavlovich’s denial stands against the townspeople’s assumption that the child is his, while the chosen surname preserves the link to Lizaveta.

The account also gives Smerdyakov an origin defined by other people’s acts and judgments: Lizaveta is identified by a nickname, Grigory and Marfa save and raise her son, and Fyodor Pavlovich supplies a surname while denying responsibility. The discovery in the bath-house is thus both an intimate rescue and the beginning of a contested family history. The episode ends not with a resolution of that dispute but with the boy’s incorporation into Grigory and Marfa’s household, where he grows up as a servant and cook.