The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (reading an ebook TXT) 📗
- Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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He kept the two thousand roubles left to them by the general’s widow
intact, so that by the time they came of age their portions had been
doubled by the accumulation of interest. He educated them both at
his own expense, and certainly spent far more than a thousand
roubles upon each of them. I won’t enter into a detailed account of
their boyhood and youth, but will only mention a few of the most
important events. Of the elder, Ivan, I will only say that he grew
into a somewhat morose and reserved, though far from timid boy. At ten
years old he had realised that they were living not in their own
home but on other people’s charity, and that their father was a man of
whom it was disgraceful to speak. This boy began very early, almost in
his infancy (so they say at least), to show a brilliant and unusual
aptitude for learning. I don’t know precisely why, but he left the
family of Yefim Petrovitch when he was hardly thirteen, entering a
Moscow gymnasium and boarding with an experienced and celebrated
teacher, an old friend of Yefim Petrovitch. Ivan used to declare
afterwards that this was all due to the “ardour for good works” of
Yefim Petrovitch, who was captivated by the idea that the boy’s genius
should be trained by a teacher of genius. But neither Yefim Petrovitch
nor this teacher was living when the young man finished at the
gymnasium and entered the university. As Yefim Petrovitch had made
no provision for the payment of the tyrannical old lady’s legacy,
which had grown from one thousand to two, it was delayed, owing to
formalities inevitable in Russia, and the young man was in great
straits for the first two years at the university, as he was forced to
keep himself all the time he was studying. It must be noted that he
did not even attempt to communicate with his father, perhaps from
pride, from contempt for him, or perhaps from his cool common sense,
which told him that from such a father he would get no real
assistance. However that may have been, the young man was by no
means despondent and succeeded in getting work, at first giving
sixpenny lessons and afterwards getting paragraphs on street incidents
into the newspapers under the signature of “Eye-Witness.” These
paragraphs, it was said, were so interesting and piquant that they
were soon taken. This alone showed the young man’s practical and
intellectual superiority over the masses of needy and unfortunate
students of both sexes who hang about the offices of the newspapers
and journals, unable to think of anything better than everlasting
entreaties for copying and translations from the French. Having once
got into touch with the editors Ivan Fyodorovitch always kept up his
connection with them, and in his latter years at the university he
published brilliant reviews of books upon various special subjects, so
that he became well known in literary circles. But only in his last
year he suddenly succeeded in attracting the attention of a far
wider circle of readers, so that a great many people noticed and
remembered him. It was rather a curious incident. When he had just
left the university and was preparing to go abroad upon his two
thousand roubles, Ivan Fyodorovitch published in one of the more
important journals a strange article, which attracted general
notice, on a subject of which he might have been supposed to know
nothing, as he was a student of natural science. The article dealt
with a subject which was being debated everywhere at the time-the
position of the ecclesiastical courts. After discussing several
opinions on the subject he went on to explain his own view. What was
most striking about the article was its tone, and its unexpected
conclusion. Many of the Church party regarded him unquestioningly as
on their side. And yet not only the secularists but even atheists
joined them in their applause. Finally some sagacious persons opined
that the article was nothing but an impudent satirical burlesque. I
mention this incident particularly because this article penetrated
into the famous monastery in our neighbourhood, where the inmates,
being particularly interested in question of the ecclesiastical
courts, were completely bewildered by it. Learning the author’s
name, they were interested in his being a native of the town and the
son of “that Fyodor Pavlovitch.” And just then it was that the
author himself made his appearance among us.
Why Ivan Fyodorovitch had come amongst us I remember asking myself
at the time with a certain uneasiness. This fateful visit, which was
the first step leading to so many consequences, I never fully
explained to myself. It seemed strange on the face of it that a
young man so learned, so proud, and apparently so cautious, should
suddenly visit such an infamous house and a father who had ignored him
all his life, hardly knew him, never thought of him, and would not
under any circumstances have given him money, though he was always
afraid that his sons Ivan and Alexey would also come to ask him for
it. And here the young man was staying in the house of such a
father, had been living with him for two months, and they were on
the best possible terms. This last fact was a special cause of
wonder to many others as well as to me. Pyotr Alexandrovitch Miusov,
of whom we have spoken already, the cousin of Fyodor Pavlovitch’s
first wife, happened to be in the neighbourhood again on a visit to
his estate. He had come from Paris, which was his permanent home. I
remember that he was more surprised than anyone when he made the
acquaintance of the young man, who interested him extremely, and
with whom he sometimes argued and not without inner pang compared
himself in acquirements.
“He is proud,” he used to say, “he will never be in want of pence;
he has got money enough to go abroad now. What does he want here?
Everyone can see that he hasn’t come for money, for his father would
never give him any. He has no taste for drink and dissipation, and yet
his father can’t do without him. They get on so well together!”
That was the truth; the young man had an unmistakable influence
over his father, who positively appeared to be behaving more
decently and even seemed at times ready to obey his son, though
often extremely and even spitefully perverse.
It was only later that we learned that Ivan had come partly at the
request of, and in the interests of, his elder brother, Dmitri, whom
he saw for the first time on this very visit, though he had before
leaving Moscow been in correspondence with him about an important
matter of more concern to Dmitri than himself. What that business
was the reader will learn fully in due time. Yet even when I did
know of this special circumstance I still felt Ivan Fyodorovitch to be
an enigmatic figure, and thought his visit rather mysterious.
I may add that Ivan appeared at the time in the light of a
mediator between his father and his elder brother Dmitri, who was in
open quarrel with his father and even planning to bring an action
against him.
The family, I repeat, was now united for the first time, and
some of its members met for the first time in their lives. The younger
brother, Alexey, had been a year already among us, having been the
first of the three to arrive. It is of that brother Alexey I find it
most difficult to speak in this introduction. Yet I must give some
preliminary account of him, if only to explain one queer fact, which
is that I have to introduce my hero to the reader wearing the
cassock of a novice. Yes, he had been for the last year in our
monastery, and seemed willing to be cloistered there for the rest of
his life.
The Third Son, Alyosha
HE was only twenty, his brother Ivan was in his twenty-fourth year
at the time, while their elder brother Dmitri was twenty-seven.
First of all, I must explain that this young man, Alyosha, was not a
fanatic, and, in my opinion at least, was not even a mystic. I may
as well give my full opinion from the beginning. He was simply an
early lover of humanity, and that he adopted the monastic life was
simply because at that time it struck him, so to say, as the ideal
escape for his soul struggling from the darkness of worldly wickedness
to the light of love. And the reason this life struck him in this
way was that he found in it at that time, as he thought an
extrordinary being, our celebrated elder, Zossima, to whom he became
attached with all the warm first love of his ardent heart. But I do
not dispute that he was very strange even at that time, and had been
so indeed from his cradle. I have mentioned already, by the way,
that though he lost his mother in his fourth year he remembered her
all his life her face, her caresses, “as though she stood living
before me.” Such memories may persist, as everyone knows, from an even
earlier age, even from two years old, but scarcely standing out
through a whole lifetime like spots of light out of darkness, like a
corner torn out of a huge picture, which has all faded and disappeared
except that fragment. That is how it was with him. He remembered one
still summer evening, an open window, the slanting rays of the setting
sun (that he recalled most vividly of all); in a corner of the room
the holy image, before it a lighted lamp, and on her knees before
the image his mother, sobbing hysterically with cries and moans,
snatching him up in both arms, squeezing him close till it hurt, and
praying for him to the Mother of God, holding him out in both arms
to the image as though to put him under the Mother’s protection… and
suddenly a nurse runs in and snatches him from her in terror. That was
the picture! And Alyosha remembered his mother’s face at that
minute. He used to say that it was frenzied but beautiful as he
remembered. But he rarely cared to speak of this memory to anyone.
In his childhood and youth he was by no means expansive, and talked
little indeed, but not from shyness or a sullen unsociability; quite
the contrary, from something different, from a sort of inner
preoccupation entirely personal and unconcerned with other people, but
so important to him that he seemed, as it were, to forget others on
account of it. But he was fond of people: he seemed throughout his
life to put implicit trust in people: yet no one ever looked on him as
a simpleton or naive person. There was something about him which
made one feel at once (and it was so all his life afterwards) that
he did not care to be a judge of others that he would never take it
upon himself to criticise and would never condemn anyone for anything.
He seemed, indeed, to accept everything without the least condemnation
though often grieving bitterly: and this was so much so that no one
could surprise or frighten him even in his earliest youth. Coming at
twenty to his father’s house, which was a very sink of filthy
debauchery, he, chaste and pure as he was, simply withdrew in
silence when to look on was unbearable, but without the slightest sign
of contempt or condemnation. His father, who had once been in a
dependent position, and so was sensitive
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