The Karamazov Brothers Read online

  The Insulted and the Injured

  A Series of Essays on Literature

  1861–2

  Memoirs from the House of the Dead

  1862

  His first visit to Western Europe, including England and France.

  1863

  Winter Notes on Summer Impressions Vremia is banned for political reasons but through a misunderstanding, by the authorities.

  1864

  Launches a second journal, Epokha (March).

  His first wife dies (15 April).

  His brother Mikhail dies (10 July).

  Notes from the Underground

  1865

  Epokha collapses for financial reasons (June).

  1866

  Attempted assassination of Alexander II by Dmitry Karakozov (April).

  Crime and Punishment

  The Gambler

  1867

  Marries Anna Grigorevna Snitkina, his stenographer, as his second wife (15 February).

  Dostoevsky and his bride leave for Western Europe (April).

  1867–71

  The Dostoevskys reside abroad, chiefly in Dresden, but also in Geneva, Vevey, Florence, and elsewhere.

  1868

  The Idiot

  1870

  The Eternal Husband

  1871

  The Dostoevskys return to St Petersburg.

  1871–2

  Devils (also called The Possessed)

  1873–4

  Edits the weekly journal Grazhdanin.

  1873–81

  Diary of a Writer

  1875

  An Accidental Family (also called A Raw Youth)

  1878

  Death of Dostoevsky’s beloved three-year-old son Alesha (16 May).

  1879–80

  The Karamazov Brothers

  1880

  His speech at lavish celebrations held in Moscow in honour of Pushkin is received with frenetic enthusiasm on 8 June, and marks the peak point attained by his reputation during his lifetime.

  1881

  Dostoevsky dies in St Petersburg (28 January). Alexander II is assassinated (1 March).

  PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS

  Names in capitals denote the character’s most common

  appellation in the text.

  FYODOR PAVLOVICH Karamazov, landowner

  Adelaida Ivanovna, née Miusova, his first wife

  DMITRY Fyodorovich Karamazov (also Mitya, Mitenka, Mitka and Mitry), his son by his first marriage

  Sofya Ivanovna, his second wife

  IVAN Fyodorovich Karamazov (Vanya, Vanechka), his elder son by his second marriage

  Aleksei Fyodorovich Karamazov (ALYOSHA, Alyoshenka, Alyoshka, Alyoshechka, Lyoshechka), his younger son by his second marriage

  Pyotr Aleksandrovich MIUSOV

  Pyotr Fomich KALGANOV

  GRIGORY Vasiliyevich Kutuzov

  Marfa Ignatyevna, his wife

  LIZAVETA Smerdyashchaya

  Pavel Fyodorovich SMERDYAKOV

  KATERINA IVANOVNA Verkhovtseva (Katya, Katenka, Katka)

  Agrafena (Agrippina) Aleksandrovna Svetlova, GRUSHENKA (Grusha, Grushka)

  MATRENA, her cook

  Katerina Osipovna KHOKHLAKOVA

  LISE, her daughter

  HERZENSTUBE, doctor

  Starets ZOSIMA

  Father THERAPON

  Mikhail (Misha) Osipovich RAKITIN (Rakitka, Rakitushka), seminarian

  MAKSIMOV (Maksimushka), a landowner

  Nikolai Ilyich SNEGIRYOV, STAFF CAPTAIN

  MIKHAIL MAKAROVICH (Makarych*) Makarov, Chief of Police

  NIKOLAI PARFENOVICH, Investigative Magistrate

  IPPOLIT KYRILLOVICH, Prosecutor

  MAVRIKY MAVRIKYEVICH (Mavrikych*), District Police Officer

  FETYUKOVICH, Counsel for the Defence

  TIME CHART

  The Karamazov Brothers

  For Anna Grigoryevna Dostoevskaya*

  Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.

  John 12: 24

  FROM THE AUTHOR

  EVEN as I begin to relate the life story of my hero, Aleksei Fyodorovich Karamazov, I feel somewhat perplexed. The reason is this: although I refer to Aleksei Fyodorovich as my hero, I know very well that he is by no means a great man, and I foresee inevitable questions such as: What makes this Aleksei Fyodorovich so special; why have you chosen him as your hero? What exactly has he done? Who has heard of him, and in what connection? Why should I, the reader, spend my time studying the history of his life?

  This last question is the most important, and all I can say is: perhaps you’ll find out for yourself from the novel. But what if my readers should read the novel and fail to find out, fail to agree that there is anything remarkable about my Aleksei Fyodorovich? I say this because, sadly, that is precisely what I foresee. To me he is remarkable, but I very much doubt whether I can convince the reader of this. The point is that, in a sense, he is a man of action, but one of indeterminate character, whose mission is undefined. Still, it would be strange in times like ours to expect to find clarity in anyone. One thing, however, is indisputable: he is an odd, not to say eccentric, figure. But oddity and eccentricity, far from commanding attention, are calculated to undermine reputations, especially at a time when everybody is striving to unify what is disparate and to find some kind of common meaning in our universal chaos. And in most cases the eccentric is the very essence of individuality and isolation, is he not?

  Should you not agree with this last thesis, however, and reply, ‘It is not so’, or ‘not always so’, then I might perhaps take heart over the significance of my hero, Aleksei Fyodorovich. For not only is an eccentric ‘not always’ a man apart and isolated, but, on the contrary, it may be he in particular who sometimes represents the very essence of his epoch, while others of his generation, for whatever reason, will drift aimlessly in the wind.

  Now, I would not have indulged in these tedious and obscure explanations, I would simply have got on with my story, without any preamble—if they like it, they’ll read it—but the trouble is, I have one life story and two novels. The second novel * is the main one; this concerns my hero’s actions right up to the present time. But the action of the first novel takes place as long as thirteen years ago, and is not so much a novel as a single episode in my hero’s early youth. I cannot dispense with this first novel, for that would render much of the second novel incomprehensible. This only compounds my original difficulty: for if I, the biographer, find one novel excessive for such an unassuming, ill-defined hero, how can I possibly produce two, and justify such presumption on my part?

  As I am unable to find a solution to these problems, I shall venture to leave them unresolved. Of course, the perceptive reader will have discovered long ago that that was just what I had in mind from the very beginning, and he will only be annoyed with me for wasting so much precious time on so many irrelevancies. To this, I can reply very precisely: I wasted all that precious time on those irrelevancies, firstly, out of politeness, and, secondly, out of canniness—at least people cannot now turn round and say: He didn’t even warn us! Anyway, given the essential unity of the whole, I am glad my novel has fallen naturally into two stories: having acquainted himself with the first story, the reader will decide for himself whether it is worth tackling the second. Of course, nobody is under any obligation; anyone is free to close the book after two pages of the first story and never to open it again. But there are readers who are so conscientious that they will undoubtedly want to read to the very end so as not to commit any error of judgement: all our Russian critics, for instance, are of such ilk. There now, I already feel relieved in my own mind with regard to these fastidious and conscientious readers, for I have provided them with the most legitimate excuse for abandoning my story after the first episode of the novel. So much, then, for the introduction. I quite agree it is superfluous, but since it has already been writ
ten, let it stand.

  And now to business.

  PART ONE

  BOOK ONE

  The Story of a Family

  1

  FYODOR* PAVLOVICH KARAMAZOV

  ALEKSEI* FYODOROVICH KARAMAZOV was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, a landowner of our district, extremely well known in his time (and to this day still remembered in these parts) on account of his violent and mysterious death exactly thirteen years ago, the circumstances of which I shall relate in due course. All I shall say now about this landowner (as we used to call him, even though he scarcely ever lived on his estate) is that he was an eccentric, a type not uncommon however, not only worthless and depraved but muddle-headed as well, yet one of those whose muddle-headedness never stops them from making an excellent job of their business affairs. Fyodor Pavlovich, for instance, started with next to nothing at all; the smallest of landowners, he used to do the rounds and cadge a meal off other people, was content to be a hanger-on, but at the time of his death it turned out that he was worth a round hundred thousand roubles* in cash. And yet all his life he had been one of the craziest crackpots in the whole of our district. Let me repeat yet again: this was not a case of stupidity—most of these crackpots are shrewd and cunning enough—but of muddle-headedness, and of a special, typically Russian kind.

  He had been married twice and had three sons: the eldest, Dmitry* Fyodorovich, from the first marriage, and the other two, Ivan* and Aleksei, from the second. Fyodor Pavlovich’s first wife came from the comparatively wealthy and eminent Miusov family, who were landowners in our district. Precisely how it happened that a young girl possessed of a dowry, and a beauty into the bargain, as well as being quick-witted and clever, of a breed encountered frequently enough in our generation though found in the past too, had married such a ‘simpleton’, as everybody then called him, I shall not attempt to explain at any great length. Now, I did know a certain young lady of the ‘romantic’ generation of not so long ago who, after being mysteriously in love for several years with a certain gentleman whom she could have married at any time without the least difficulty, suddenly broke off their relationship, inventing for herself all manner of insurmountable obstacles, and one stormy night plunged from a high, precipitous cliff into a fairly deep and fast-flowing river, where she perished from her own caprice solely through her attempt to imitate Shakespeare’s Ophelia, for, had the precipice, which she had long before singled out and been compulsively drawn to, been less picturesque, and had there been only a prosaically flat bank in its stead, perhaps there would have been no suicide at all. This is a true story, and it would be fair to assume that other such cases have occurred not infrequently in Russian life over the past two or three generations.

  Likewise, Adelaida Ivanovna Miusova’s act was doubtless both a response to foreign influences and an act of defiance of an enslaved soul. Perhaps she had set out to assert her feminine independence, to rebel against the social conventions of her time, against the despotism of her kith and kin, and her fertile imagination had convinced her, let us suppose only for an instant, that Fyodor Pavlovich, despite his notoriety as a ne’er-do-well, was nevertheless one of the boldest and most sharp-witted men of that transitional period before the age of enlightenment, whereas in actual fact he was nothing but a nasty little clown. Piquancy was added to the whole affair by its ending in an elopement, which greatly appealed to Adelaida Ivanovna. As for Fyodor Pavlovich, he was at that time only too ready for any such exploit, his inadequate social standing alone acting as the principal spur to the pursuit of advancement by whatever means, and nothing in the world could have been more alluring to him than the prospect of worming his way into a good family and laying his hands on a dowry. As for mutual desire, it seems not to have existed at all, either on the bride’s part or, despite Adelaida Ivanovna’s beauty, on her fiancé’s. This situation seems to have been unique in the life of Fyodor Pavlovich, a life-long sensualist, ready at the drop of a hat to pursue any petticoat that gave him the least encouragement. His wife, however, happened to be the only woman in his life who failed totally to arouse any passion in him whatsoever.

  No sooner had Adelaida Ivanovna eloped than she realized that she quite simply despised her husband. Hence the consequences of their union manifested themselves in no time at all. Even though her family quickly became reconciled to events and granted the runaway a dowry, the newly-weds entered upon a life of complete disorder and constant disharmony. It was said that, during this time, the young wife displayed immeasurably more honour and rectitude than Fyodor Pavlovich, who, as we now know, pocketed her twenty-five thousand roubles at one stroke as soon as she received it, so that, as far as she was concerned, her few thousand vanished into thin air. He made numerous and strenuous attempts to have transferred to his own name the title to the hamlet and the rather fine town house that had come with the dowry, and such was the feeling of disgust and revulsion aroused in his wife by his constant and shameless begging and wheedling, and so exasperated was she and so anxious to be left in peace, that he would in all probability have succeeded, had not her family intervened, fortunately, to stop the blackguard in his tracks. There is firm evidence of frequent fights between husband and wife, but rumour has it that, curiously, the blows were meted out not by Fyodor Pavlovich, but by Adelaida Ivanovna, a fiery, bold, quick-tempered lady of dark complexion and endowed with remarkable physical strength. She finally left home to run off with a practically destitute student teacher from a seminary, leaving Fyodor Pavlovich with the three-year-old Mitya on his hands. In a trice Fyodor Pavlovich set up a veritable harem in his house and plunged into a life of wildest carousing, setting off at intervals on trips around the district, tearfully complaining to all and sundry of having been abandoned by Adelaida Ivanovna and disclosing details of their married life that no husband ought to have revealed. Above all, he seemed to enjoy and even to be flattered by the comic role of cuckolded husband, and he savoured every opportunity to enlarge upon and embellish the details of his grievance. ‘Well now, Fyodor Pavlovich,’ people teased him, ‘anyone would think you’d been decorated, you seem so pleased in spite of all your grievances.’ Many said that he was happy to appear in his new-found role of clown, and that for extra comic effect he deliberately pretended not to notice how ludicrous his situation was. And yet, who knows, perhaps he was simply naïve. He finally succeeded in tracking down the runaway wife. It turned out that the poor woman had gone to St Petersburg with her student, and there entered wholeheartedly into a state of total emancipation. Fyodor Pavlovich immediately began to fuss and make preparations to go to St Petersburg—for what, he had not the slightest idea. He would probably have gone, but as soon as he had taken the decision to do so, he considered that he had a perfect right to cheer himself up for the journey by indulging in another of his unrestrained binges. It was just at this time that his wife’s family received news of her death in St Petersburg. She had died suddenly in a garret somewhere, some say from typhus, others say most likely from starvation. Fyodor Pavlovich learned of his wife’s death when he was drunk; it was said that he ran out into the street with his hands raised to heaven in joy, shouting: ‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant…’;* others say he wept convulsively like a child, so much so that, despite all the revulsion he aroused, he was pitiful to behold. Very probably, both accounts are true—that is, he rejoiced in his liberation and shed tears for his liberator at one and the same time. In most cases, people, even evil-doers, are much simpler and more naïve than we generally suppose. And the same is true of you and me.

  2

  THE ELDEST SON IS PACKED OFF

  OF course, one can imagine the sort of parent that such a man would turn out to be, and what sort of upbringing he would give his offspring. As a father, his behaviour was quite in character—that is, he completely and utterly neglected the child of that marriage, not out of malice, nor out of any feelings of ill-will towards his former spouse; he simply forgot about the child’s existence. Whil
e he was wearying everyone with his tantrums and complaints and turning his house into a den of iniquity, the faithful house-servant Grigory took the three-year-old Mitya into his care, otherwise the child would never have had a change of shirt. Furthermore, Mitya’s relatives on his mother’s side also appeared to forget all about him at first. His grandfather, that is old Mr Miusov, Adelaida Ivanovna’s father, had died by this time; his widowed wife, Mitya’s grandmother, had moved to Moscow, where she had fallen ill, and Adelaida’s sisters were all married—so that Mitya spent the best part of a year with Grigory, living with him in his quarters across the yard. However, even if his father had remembered him (after all, he could hardly have been totally unaware of his existence), he would have banished him to Grigory’s just the same, in order to have the child out of the way during his bouts of debauchery. It so happened that at about this time the late Adelaida Ivanovna’s first cousin, Pyotr Aleksandrovich Miusov, returned from Paris; he subsequently lived abroad for many years, but he was at this time still a very young man; he was unusual among the Miusovs in being educated, sophisticated, and cosmopolitan, a true European throughout his life, ending his days a liberal of the ‘forties and ‘fifties. In the course of his career he maintained relations with many of the most liberal people of his era, both in Russia and abroad, was personally acquainted with Proudhon* and Bakunin,* and towards the end of his peregrinations was particularly fond of recalling the three days of the Paris revolution of February 1848,* hinting that he had very nearly been on the barricades himself. This was one of the most cherished memories of his younger days. His independent means derived from a holding of about a thousand serfs,* according to the old reckoning. His splendid estate was situated just outside our town, bordering the lands of our famous monastery, with which Pyotr Aleksandrovich was engaged in an interminable lawsuit initiated in his young days just after he had come into his inheritance, over certain fishing-rights on the river, or was it timber-felling rights—I really do not know which—anyway, he considered it a matter of civic duty, indeed of enlightened obligation, to instigate proceedings against ‘the clericals’. On hearing all about Adelaida Ivanovna, whom he of course remembered and, indeed, had once even seen, and learning about Mitya, he intervened on the latter’s behalf, despite all his youthful indignation and contempt for Fyodor Pavlovich. Thus he got to know Fyodor Pavlovich personally for the first time. He came straight to the point by declaring that he would like to be personally responsible for the child’s upbringing. Many years later he would often recount, as an example of Fyodor Pavlovich’s character, how, when he had first spoken to him about Mitya, Fyodor Pavlovich had stared at him for some time as if in utter bewilderment as to the identity of the child, at the very idea that somewhere in the house there could be a little son of his. Even if this story of Pyotr Aleksandrovich’s was exaggerated, there was surely a good deal in it that could pass for truth. Now the fact is that, throughout his life, Fyodor Pavlovich liked to play-act and would suddenly start acting out, as it were, some unexpected role, often without any apparent reason, even, as on this particular occasion, directly against his own interests. But such a trait is characteristic of very many people more intelligent than Fyodor Pavlovich. Pyotr Aleksandrovich pursued the matter enthusiastically and was even appointed, jointly with Fyodor Pavlovich, the child’s guardian, for after all there was the matter of the mother’s estate—the house and the hamlet. And Mitya actually went to live with this uncle of his, but as the latter had no family of his own, as soon as he had settled and secured the income from his estates he immediately hurried back to Paris to spend another long period abroad, leaving the child with one of his distant aunts, an old lady who lived alone in Moscow. It turned out that, having settled permanently in Paris, he too forgot about the child, especially with the outbreak of the February revolution, which captured his imagination vividly and remained in his memory all his life. Then the old lady in Moscow died, and Mitya was taken in by one of her married daughters. I seem to remember that he had a fourth change of home. But I shall not dwell upon that just now, especially since I shall have a great deal to say later about this first-born son of Fyodor Pavlovich’s—for the moment I shall confine myself to the essential information about him without which I cannot even begin my novel.