The Karamazov Brothers Page 5

  In the first place, this Dmitry Fyodorovich was the only one of Fyodor Pavlovich’s three sons who grew up in the conviction that he would one day inherit an estate and that, when he came of age, he would be independent. He spent a desultory boyhood and youth, leaving school without finishing his studies; he entered a military college, served in the Caucasus, was promoted, fought in a duel, was demoted, regained his rank, and spent a small fortune on wine, women, and song. He did not begin to receive any money from Fyodor Pavlovich until his majority, by which time he was deeply in debt. He first saw and got to know his father only after his majority, when he came to our neighbourhood with the object of settling the matter of his inheritance with him. By all accounts he disliked his father even then, and departed after a short time with only a meagre sum in his pocket and some sort of agreement regarding the receipt of further income from the estate, without (and this is significant) managing to extract from Fyodor Pavlovich on this occasion any idea either of its value or of the income from it. From the very first (and this is worth bearing in mind), Fyodor Pavlovich perceived that Mitya had an exaggerated and mistaken idea of his own wealth. Fyodor Pavlovich was well satisfied with this, in view of his own personal calculations. He simply concluded that the young man was thoughtless, unruly, passionate, impatient, and dissipated, and that, provided he was given something from time to time, he would be immediately, if temporarily, satisfied. Fyodor Pavlovich began to exploit this by sending him small remittances from time to time, so that when some four years later Mitya, having lost all patience, again arrived in our town for a final showdown with his father, it turned out to his utter amazement that nothing remained to him, that, though exact figures were difficult to obtain, over the years he had already received monies to the full value of his property from Fyodor Pavlovich, that he might even be in debt to his father, and that, in consequence of such-and-such agreements which he had chosen to enter into at such-and-such times in the past, he had no further claim to anything, and so on and so forth. The young man was flabbergasted; he suspected dishonesty and fraud, was beside himself, and was almost like one demented. Such were the circumstances which led to the catastrophe that will be the subject of my first, introductory novel, or, more precisely, its external aspect. But before I proceed with this novel I must also say something about Fyodor Pavlovich’s other two sons, Mitya’s brothers, and where they fit into the story.

  3

  SECOND MARRIAGE, SECOND BROOD

  HAVING got the four-year-old Mitya off his hands, Fyodor Pavlovich married again very shortly thereafter. This second marriage lasted about eight years. Fyodor Pavlovich took his second wife, Sofya Ivanovna, also a very young girl, from another district to which he had gone on one occasion to conduct some minor business in partnership with a Jew. Though Fyodor Pavlovich was given to revelry, drinking, and getting into scrapes, he was assiduous in the management of his capital, and he always settled his affairs successfully, though almost invariably dishonestly. Sofya Ivanovna, an orphan bereft of family from early childhood and the daughter of an obscure deacon, had been brought up in the wealthy household of her benefactor, guardian, and tormentor, an aristocratic lady, the widow of one General Vorokhov. The details are unknown to me, but I did hear that the meek, inoffensive, and uncomplaining ward of this widow once had to be taken down from a noose which she had slung from a nail in the storeroom; she had been unable to endure any longer the wilfulness and constant nagging of the old woman, who, though not exactly unkind by nature, had through sheer boredom turned into the most insufferable despot. Fyodor Pavlovich offered his hand, enquiries were made about him, and he was shown the door—and there he was again, as with the previous marriage, proposing to elope. It is highly likely that Sofya would have had nothing to do with him had she known more about him beforehand. But she was from a different province, and anyway, what else was a sixteen-year-old girl, who would rather have thrown herself into the river than remain with her benefactress, to do? And so the poor creature exchanged a benefactress for a benefactor. This time Fyodor Pavlovich did not get a kopeck, because the General’s widow, in her fury, refused to give them anything, and laid a curse on them both into the bargain; but then, he was not counting on getting anything on this occasion, being attracted solely by the remarkable beauty of this innocent girl, especially by her innocent demeanour, which had fairly captivated him, the corrupt sensualist, who up to that moment had always admired only the coarser kind of female beauty. ‘Those innocent eyes of hers slashed me like a razor,’ he would repeat later, with one of his vile chuckles. For a debaucher like him, this could not fail to be a sensual attraction. Not having received any dowry, Fyodor Pavlovich was quite unceremonious with his wife and, under the pretext that she was, as it were, ‘guilty’ before him and that he had virtually ‘cut her down from the noose’, and also taking advantage of her exceptional meekness and timidity, he even began to defile all the normal marital decencies. He would invite loose women to the house in his wife’s presence, when licentiousness would commence. As an indication of how things were, I will relate that the servant Grigory, a gloomy, slow-witted, and stubborn stickler for morals who had detested his former mistress, Adelaida Ivanovna, this time sided with his new mistress, defending her and quarrelling over her with Fyodor Pavlovich in a manner almost unwarrantable for a servant; on one occasion he even broke up one of these gatherings, forcibly ejecting all the unseemly visitors. Subsequently, the unfortunate young woman, who had been frightened out of her wits from early childhood, succumbed to a kind of female nervous disorder more commonly encountered amongst simple peasant women, the sufferers being known, after the symptoms of the disorder, as klikushi.* As a result of this illness, which was accompanied by terrible bouts of hysteria, the sufferer would at times even lose her reason. She did, however, bear Fyodor Pavlovich two sons, Ivan and Aleksei, the former in the first year of marriage, and the latter three years later. When she died Aleksei had just turned four, and, though this may appear strange, I do know that he remembered his mother all his life—as in a dream, of course. After her death exactly the same thing happened to the two boys as had happened to Mitya, the first-born: they too were totally ignored and neglected by their father, and they too eventually lived with Grigory in his hut. And it was in this hut that the old General’s despotic widow, their mother’s benefactress and guardian, discovered them. She was still alive, and for eight years had been unable to forget the offence committed against her. Throughout those eight years she had kept herself minutely informed of her Sofya’s doings and circumstances, and on hearing of her sickness and the depravity surrounding her, had exclaimed two or three times to her cronies: ‘It serves her right, God is punishing her for her ingratitude.’

  Exactly three months after Sofya Ivanovna’s death, the General’s widow suddenly appeared in our town in person and went straight to Fyodor Pavlovich’s house; she spent no more than half an hour in the town, but accomplished much in that time. It was evening. Fyodor Pavlovich, whom she had not seen for eight years, came out to meet her rather the worse for drink. It is reported that, as soon as she saw him, she dealt him two resounding great slaps on the face without any explanation, pulled him up and down three times by a tuft of his hair, and then, without a word, proceeded straight to the two boys in the hut. Noticing at a glance that they had not been washed and that their clothes were dirty, she immediately dealt Grigory a similar slap and announced to him that she was taking both boys away with her; she led them out just as they were, wrapped them in a rug, bundled them into her carriage, and drove off back to her home town. Grigory accepted the slap without a word of complaint, like a devoted slave; he escorted the old lady to her carriage, bowed from the waist, and pronounced gravely that God would repay her for taking the orphans. ‘You’re an ass all the same!’ cried the General’s widow as she drove off. Fyodor Pavlovich, after some reflection, concluded that it was all for the good, and in his formal agreement that the General’s widow take over the boys’ u
pbringing did not impose a single condition. As to the slaps on the face that he had received, he himself went all round the town recounting the story to everyone.

  It so happened that the General’s widow also died soon afterwards, and in her will she left a thousand roubles to each of the young boys ‘for their education’, stipulating that all the money should be spent on them without fail and that it ought to suffice until they came of age, as even a sum such as this was more than sufficient for such children, but that, should anyone wish to contribute financially, by all means let him do so, etc., etc. I did not read the will myself, but heard that it contained something strange to this effect, expressed in rather odd terms. The old lady’s principal beneficiary, however, turned out to be an honest man, one Yefim Petrovich Polyonov, the district Marshal of Nobility.* After writing several times to Fyodor Pavlovich and soon realizing that no money would be forthcoming from him for his children’s upbringing (though there was never a direct refusal, merely perpetual procrastination and, from time to time, sentimental outpourings), Polyonov took a personal interest in the orphans and became particularly fond of the younger one, Aleksei, to the extent that the boy spent much of his childhood as one of his family. I ask the reader to note this fact at the outset. If there was any one person to whom these young people were indebted throughout their lives for their upbringing and education, it was certainly this Yefim Petrovich, as noble and humane a person as can ever have been encountered. He preserved untouched the thousand roubles left to each of the boys by the General’s widow, so that by the time they came of age both sums had accumulated with interest to two thousand roubles, and, moreover, he spent his own money on their upbringing, which of course amounted to considerably more than a thousand for each. Again, I shall not enter into a detailed account of their childhood and early youth now; I shall merely record the principal events. Of the elder, Ivan, I shall say only that he was a rather morose and introverted young man, far from shy, but acutely aware from the age of ten that he and his brother were growing up in a strange family, dependent on the charity of others, and that their father was the kind of man it was too shameful even to mention, and so on. Very soon, almost from infancy—or so it is said, anyway—this boy began to show an extraordinary and brilliant aptitude for learning. I do not know the details, but he left Yefim Petrovich’s family before he was quite thirteen years old, and entered one of the grammar schools in Moscow, lodging as a boarder with an experienced and famous pedagogue, a friend of Yefim Petrovich’s from childhood. Ivan himself subsequently recounted that it had all come about from ‘a passion for good deeds’, as it were, in Yefim Petrovich, who had been carried away by the idea that a brilliant boy ought to be educated by a brilliant tutor. However, by the time the young man left school and entered university, both the brilliant tutor and Yefim Petrovich were dead. Since Yefim Petrovich had not managed to settle everything, and the money left to the boys by the General’s widow (its value having doubled with accrued interest) was not immediately available, owing to various formalities and delays of a kind inevitable in our country, the young man found his first two years at the university hard going indeed, having to feed and maintain himself throughout this period while keeping up with his studies. It is worth noting that he made no attempt at this time to enter into correspondence with his father—whether from pride, contempt, or perhaps simply from cool rational deliberation, which told him that it was no good whatsoever expecting serious assistance of any kind from his father. Be that as it may, the young man was not to be dispirited, but went out and found work for himself, first giving lessons at twenty kopecks an hour and later peddling ten-line reports of street incidents to newspaper editors under the byline ‘Eyewitness’. It is said that these pieces were always so fascinating that they were soon in great demand, and in this alone the young man demonstrated his practical as well as his mental superiority over that multitudinous, eternally indigent, and miserable band of students of both sexes which is to be seen in our capital cities hanging around from dawn to dusk in the doorways of newspaper and magazine publishers, with no other thought in their heads than the endless search for translations from the French or for copywork. Having made himself known to the editors, Ivan Fyodorovich kept in touch with them and in his final years at university began to publish well-received book reviews on various specialist subjects, so that he even became known in literary circles. However, it was only quite recently that he had suddenly succeeded in attracting the attention of a much wider circle of readers, so that many immediately took note of him and remembered him. It was a rather curious case. Ivan Fyodorovich had already left university and was planning a trip abroad on his two thousand roubles, when one of the leading newspapers published a very unusual article of his which attracted the attention of even the general reader, and, what is more, on a subject with which he was presumably quite unfamiliar, his degree being in the natural sciences. The article was on ecclesiastical courts,* the subject of much debate at the time. After analysing some current opinions, he put forward his own personal view. The most important thing, however, was the tone and the unexpected nature of his conclusion. As a matter of fact, many of the clergy took the author for one of their own. And suddenly, along with them, not only the secularists but the atheists too began to applaud. Finally, some perceptive minds concluded that the article was simply a brazen attempt at mockery. I mention this matter particularly because in due course the article reached the famous monastery outside our town, where the whole question of ecclesiastical courts was arousing intense interest, and, having appeared there, it created general consternation. As soon as the author’s name was discovered, further interest was aroused by the fact that he was a native of our town and the son of ‘that Fyodor Pavlovich’. And then, just at that very moment, who should appear in the town but the author himself.

  Why should Ivan Fyodorovich have come to us at that time? I remember asking myself that question even then with a feeling bordering on anxiety. That fateful visit of his, which was to have so many repercussions, remained, and perhaps always shall remain, an enigma to me. For was it not strange that such a scholarly, proud, and apparently discreet young man should suddenly appear at such a disreputable house to visit a father who had ignored him all his life, who neither knew nor remembered him, and who, though he would never under any circumstances have parted with any money in his possession if his son had ever asked him to, had nevertheless always been afraid that his other sons Ivan and Aleksei might one day come and ask him for money. And now here was the young man suddenly turning up at the house of such a father, staying with him for a month or two, and the two of them getting on famously. This last fact was cause for astonishment not only to myself but to many others. Pyotr Aleksandrovich Miusov, a relative of Fyodor Pavlovich’s by his first marriage and of whom I spoke earlier, again happened to be back on his estate near our town on a visit from Paris, where he had now settled for good. I remember it was he who showed the most surprise of all on making the acquaintance of the young man, whom he found fascinating and whom he would, not without an inner disquiet, engage in intellectual debate. ‘He’s full of pride,’ he would say of him. ‘He’ll never be short of a kopeck—now that he’s got money to go abroad, what’s keeping him here? Everyone knows he hasn’t come to ask his father for money, because he certainly won’t get any. He’s not one for drinking or debauchery, and yet the old man seems totally dependent on him.’ This was perfectly true; Ivan Fyodorovich had a marked hold over the old man, who on occasion, despite his wilful and at times malicious disposition, even appeared to be dominated by his son; he sometimes even began to behave less outrageously…