The Brothers Karamazov
his release, and at the same time wept for her who released him. As a
general rule, people, even the wicked, are much more naïve and
simple-hearted than we suppose. And we ourselves are, too.
Chapter II.
He Gets Rid Of His Eldest Son
You can easily imagine what a father such a man could be and how he
would bring up his children. His behavior as a father was exactly what
might be expected. He completely abandoned the child of his marriage
with Adelaïda Ivanovna, not from malice, nor because of his matrimonial
grievances, but simply because he forgot him. While he was wearying
every one with his tears and complaints, and turning his house into a
sink of debauchery, a faithful servant of the family, Grigory, took the
three-year-old Mitya into his care. If he hadn’t looked after him there
would have been no one even to change the baby’s little shirt.
It happened moreover that the child’s relations on his mother’s side
forgot him too at first. His grandfather was no longer living, his
widow, Mitya’s grandmother, had moved to Moscow, and was seriously ill,
while his daughters were married, so that Mitya remained for almost a
whole year in old Grigory’s charge and lived with him in the servant’s
cottage. But if his father had remembered him (he could not, indeed,
have been altogether unaware of his existence) he would have sent him
back to the cottage, as the child would only have been in the way of
his debaucheries. But a cousin of Mitya’s mother, Pyotr Alexandrovitch
Miüsov, happened to return from Paris. He lived for many years
afterwards abroad, but was at that time quite a young man, and
distinguished among the Miüsovs as a man of enlightened ideas and of
European culture, who had been in the capitals and abroad. Towards the
end of his life he became a Liberal of the type common in the forties
and fifties. In the course of his career he had come into contact with
many of the most Liberal men of his epoch, both in Russia and abroad.
He had known Proudhon and Bakunin personally, and in his declining
years was very fond of describing the three days of the Paris
Revolution of February 1848, hinting that he himself had almost taken
part in the fighting on the barricades. This was one of the most
grateful recollections of his youth. He had an independent property of
about a thousand souls, to reckon in the old style. His splendid estate
lay on the outskirts of our little town and bordered on the lands of
our famous monastery, with which Pyotr Alexandrovitch began an endless
lawsuit, almost as soon as he came into the estate, concerning the
rights of fishing in the river or wood-cutting in the forest, I don’t
know exactly which. He regarded it as his duty as a citizen and a man
of culture to open an attack upon the “clericals.” Hearing all about
Adelaïda Ivanovna, whom he, of course, remembered, and in whom he had
at one time been interested, and learning of the existence of Mitya, he
intervened, in spite of all his youthful indignation and contempt for
Fyodor Pavlovitch. He made the latter’s acquaintance for the first
time, and told him directly that he wished to undertake the child’s
education. He used long afterwards to tell as a characteristic touch,
that when he began to speak of Mitya, Fyodor Pavlovitch looked for some
time as though he did not understand what child he was talking about,
and even as though he was surprised to hear that he had a little son in
the house. The story may have been exaggerated, yet it must have been
something like the truth.
Fyodor Pavlovitch was all his life fond of acting, of suddenly playing
an unexpected part, sometimes without any motive for doing so, and even
to his own direct disadvantage, as, for instance, in the present case.
This habit, however, is characteristic of a very great number of
people, some of them very clever ones, not like Fyodor Pavlovitch.
Pyotr Alexandrovitch carried the business through vigorously, and was
appointed, with Fyodor Pavlovitch, joint guardian of the child, who had
a small property, a house and land, left him by his mother. Mitya did,
in fact, pass into this cousin’s keeping, but as the latter had no
family of his own, and after securing the revenues of his estates was
in haste to return at once to Paris, he left the boy in charge of one
of his cousins, a lady living in Moscow. It came to pass that, settling
permanently in Paris he, too, forgot the child, especially when the
Revolution of February broke out, making an impression on his mind that
he remembered all the rest of his life. The Moscow lady died, and Mitya
passed into the care of one of her married daughters. I believe he
changed his home a fourth time later on. I won’t enlarge upon that now,
as I shall have much to tell later of Fyodor Pavlovitch’s firstborn,
and must confine myself now to the most essential facts about him,
without which I could not begin my story.
In the first place, this Mitya, or rather Dmitri Fyodorovitch, was the
only one of Fyodor Pavlovitch’s three sons who grew up in the belief
that he had property, and that he would be independent on coming of
age. He spent an irregular boyhood and youth. He did not finish his
studies at the gymnasium, he got into a military school, then went to
the Caucasus, was promoted, fought a duel, and was degraded to the
ranks, earned promotion again, led a wild life, and spent a good deal
of money. He did not begin to receive any income from Fyodor Pavlovitch
until he came of age, and until then got into debt. He saw and knew his
father, Fyodor Pavlovitch, for the first time on coming of age, when he
visited our neighborhood on purpose to settle with him about his
property. He seems not to have liked his father. He did not stay long
with him, and made haste to get away, having only succeeded in
obtaining a sum of money, and entering into an agreement for future
payments from the estate, of the revenues and value of which he was
unable (a fact worthy of note), upon this occasion, to get a statement
from his father. Fyodor Pavlovitch remarked for the first time then
(this, too, should be noted) that Mitya had a vague and exaggerated
idea of his property. Fyodor Pavlovitch was very well satisfied with
this, as it fell in with his own designs. He gathered only that the
young man was frivolous, unruly, of violent passions, impatient, and
dissipated, and that if he could only obtain ready money he would be
satisfied, although only, of course, for a short time. So Fyodor
Pavlovitch began to take advantage of this fact, sending him from time
to time small doles, installments. In the end, when four years later,
Mitya, losing patience, came a second time to our little town to settle
up once for all with his father, it turned out to his amazement that he
had nothing, that it was difficult to get an account even, that he had
received the whole value of his property in sums of money from Fyodor
Pavlovitch, and was perhaps even in debt to him, that by various
agreements into which he had, of his own desire, entered at various
previous dates, he had no right to expect anything more, and so on, and
so on. The young man was overwhelmed, suspected deceit and cheating,
and was almost beside himself. And, indeed, this circumstance led to
the catastrophe, the account of which forms the subject of my first
introductory story, or rather the external side of it. But before I
pass to that story I must say a little of Fyodor Pavlovitch’s other two
sons, and of their origin.
Chapter III.
The Second Marriage And The Second Family
Very shortly after getting his four-year-old Mitya off his hands Fyodor
Pavlovitch married a second time. His second marriage lasted eight
years. He took this second wife, Sofya Ivanovna, also a very young
girl, from another province, where he had gone upon some small piece of
business in company with a Jew. Though Fyodor Pavlovitch was a drunkard
and a vicious debauchee he never neglected investing his capital, and
managed his business affairs very successfully, though, no doubt, not
over-scrupulously. Sofya Ivanovna was the daughter of an obscure
deacon, and was left from childhood an orphan without relations. She
grew up in the house of a general’s widow, a wealthy old lady of good
position, who was at once her benefactress and tormentor. I do not know
the details, but I have only heard that the orphan girl, a meek and
gentle creature, was once cut down from a halter in which she was
hanging from a nail in the loft, so terrible were her sufferings from
the caprice and everlasting nagging of this old woman, who was
apparently not bad-hearted but had become an insufferable tyrant
through idleness.
Fyodor Pavlovitch made her an offer; inquiries were made about him and
he was refused. But again, as in his first marriage, he proposed an
elopement to the orphan girl. There is very little doubt that she would
not on any account have married him if she had known a little more
about him in time. But she lived in another province; besides, what
could a little girl of sixteen know about it, except that she would be
better at the bottom of the river than remaining with her benefactress.
So the poor child exchanged a benefactress for a benefactor. Fyodor
Pavlovitch did not get a penny this time, for the general’s widow was
furious. She gave them nothing and cursed them both. But he had not
reckoned on a dowry; what allured him was the remarkable beauty of the
innocent girl, above all her innocent appearance, which had a peculiar
attraction for a vicious profligate, who had hitherto admired only the
coarser types of feminine beauty.
“Those innocent eyes slit my soul up like a razor,” he used to say
afterwards, with his loathsome snigger. In a man so depraved this
might, of course, mean no more than sensual attraction. As he had
received no dowry with his wife, and had, so to speak, taken her “from
the halter,” he did not stand on ceremony with her. Making her feel
that she had “wronged” him, he took advantage of her phenomenal
meekness and submissiveness to trample on the elementary decencies of
marriage. He gathered loose women into his house, and carried on orgies
of debauchery in his wife’s presence. To show what a pass things had
come to, I may mention that Grigory, the gloomy, stupid, obstinate,
argumentative servant, who had always hated his first mistress,
Adelaïda Ivanovna, took the side of his new mistress. He championed her
cause, abusing Fyodor Pavlovitch in a manner little befitting a
servant, and on one occasion broke up the revels and drove all the
disorderly women out of the house. In the end this unhappy young woman,
kept in terror from her childhood, fell into that kind of nervous
disease which is most frequently found in peasant women who are said to
be “possessed by devils.” At times after terrible fits of hysterics she
even lost her reason. Yet she bore Fyodor Pavlovitch two sons, Ivan and
Alexey, the eldest in the first year of marriage and the second three
years later. When she died, little Alexey was in his fourth year, and,
strange as it seems, I know that he remembered his mother all his life,
like a dream, of course. At her death almost exactly the same thing
happened to the two little boys as to their elder brother, Mitya. They
were completely forgotten and abandoned by their father. They were
looked after by the same Grigory and lived in his cottage, where they
were found by the tyrannical old lady who had brought up their mother.
She was still alive, and had not, all those eight years, forgotten the
insult done her. All that time she was obtaining exact information as
to her Sofya’s manner of life, and hearing of her illness and hideous
surroundings she declared aloud two or three times to her retainers:
“It serves her right. God has punished her for her ingratitude.”