In Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov the body of the ascetic, the elder Zossima, is prepared for burial and placed in his coffin in the room where he once gave audience. But towards the end of the day while the Gospel is read over him, a distinct odour of corruption exudes from the coffin. Of course, this should not happen to an ascetic saint whose body, according to the Orthodox tradition, should remain pure even in death. Alyosha's puzzlement over this event and Rakitin's cynicism reflect a deep concern not simply about the sanctity of this particular holy man, but about the very notion of sanctification itself. Dostoyevsky expresses in this image a rampant, rationalist modernity at odds with tradition, and with the death of Zossima we can see the modernist death of faith in the old cosmology, a death that itself is presaged by the holy man's own ‘modernism’ in apparently denying the existence of devils. Zossima should emit no scent of corruption in a cosmological structure that identifies corruption with unredeemed matter and the sanctification of matter with the saint. The ordered universe of the monastery is challenged by the wind of modernity that had been blowing for several hundred years by the time Dostoyevsky enlivened his characters.