It was discovered only later that Ivan Fyodorovich had come partly at the request of his elder brother, Dmitry Fyodorovich, whom he got to know—and indeed virtually set eyes on for the first time in his life—during this visit, but with whom he had already entered into correspondence over an important matter which mainly concerned Dmitry Fyodorovich alone. What this matter was the reader will learn in full detail in due course. Nevertheless, even after I found out about this extraordinary business, Ivan Fyodorovich was still a mystery to me, and his visit defied all explanation.
I should add that at this time Ivan Fyodorovich gave the impression of being a go-between and peacemaker between his father and elder brother, Dmitry Fyodorovich, who was having a bitter quarrel with his father and had even instigated legal proceedings against him.
This little family, let me say again, had assembled for the very first time in its history, and some of its members only now met one another for the first time ever. The youngest son, Aleksei Fyodorovich, had been living in our town for about a year and had thus become known to us before his brothers. And I find Aleksei the most difficult of all to speak about in this story, which precedes his arrival on the stage of the novel itself. But I realize that he too needs an introduction, at least in order to explain one very strange point: namely, that I am obliged to present my future hero to the reader in the very first scene of his story wearing a novice’s cassock. He had already been living in the monastery near our town for about a year, and it looked as though he was preparing to spend the rest of his life there.
4
THE THIRD SON, ALYOSHA
HE was just twenty years old at this time (his brother Ivan was twenty-three, and his eldest brother Dmitry twenty-seven). I should explain at the outset that this youth, Alyosha, was no fanatic and, at least in my opinion, no mystic either. Let me make myself clear: he was simply a youthful philanthropist, and if he had chosen the monastic way of life, this was only because at the time that alone had captured his imagination and, as it were, offered his parched soul the true path from the darkness of worldly evil to the radiance of love. And the reason that this path had so enthralled him was because on it he had met someone he considered to be an extraordinary being—our monastery’s famous starets* Zosima, to whom he became attached with all the fervent first love of which his generous heart was capable. Now, I will not deny that even then he was very strange and, indeed, had been so from the cradle. By the way, I have already mentioned that, having lost his mother at the age of four, he remembered her all his life, her face, her caresses, ‘just as though she were alive and standing in front of me’. It is possible, as everybody knows, to have such memories from an even earlier age, from say two, which will continue erupting throughout one’s life like points of light in the darkness, like a fragment torn out of a vast canvas which, except for this one tiny corner, has faded and disappeared. And so it was with him: he recalled one still summer evening an open window, the slanting rays of the setting sun (he remembered the slanting rays most of all), an icon with a lamp burning before it in the corner of the room and, in front of the icon, his mother on her knees, sobbing hysterically, shrieking and wailing, clutching him with both hands, clasping him in a painful embrace, praying to the Mother of God for him, holding him out with both arms outstretched towards the icon as though placing him under the protection of the Mother of God… and suddenly the nanny bursting in and snatching him from her in terror. That was the picture! Alyosha remembered his mother’s face as it had been at that moment; he would describe it as frenzied but beautiful, as far as he could recall. But he rarely confided this memory to anyone. In his childhood and during his youth he was not very outgoing or talkative, not from mistrust or shyness or sullen unsociability, but rather because of something quite different, some kind of inner preoccupation altogether private which was of no concern to others, but which was important enough to him to make him appear oblivious of others. Yet he loved people: it seems that he lived his whole life with an absolute faith in people, though no one ever thought of him as simple or naïve. There was something in him that said, and made you believe (and this was so throughout his life), that he did not wish to sit in judgement on others and would never take it upon himself to censure anyone. He seemed willing to tolerate licence in everything without any kind of opprobrium, though he would often be overcome by bitter sadness. And such was his capacity for tolerance that, from his very earliest youth, nothing seemed able either to scandalize or frighten him. Entering his father’s household at the age of twenty, chaste and innocent, and then finding himself in a den of iniquity, he would, when he could no longer bear to look, merely retreat in silence, but without the least indication of contempt or reproach towards anyone. His father, on the other hand, who had once lived on charity and was consequently irritable and quick to take offence, initially received him grudgingly and mistrustfully (‘doesn’t say much and keeps his thoughts to himself’, he would say), but within two weeks he was hugging and embracing him at every turn—with drunken tears and maudlin sentimentality, it is true, but nevertheless with a deep and genuine affection such as he had never shown towards anyone before.
But then everybody loved this young man, wherever he went, from his earliest childhood. When he went to live with his benefactor and guardian, Yefim Petrovich Polyonov, the whole family grew so attached to him that he was treated without reservation as one of the family. And moreover, he entered the household at such a tender age that there could be no question of deliberate cunning, subterfuge, or artful sycophancy, or of trying to win affection. The gift of engendering love was innate, therefore, stemming from his very nature, as it were, without artifice or stratagem. This was also how it had been at school, and yet he was just the type of child, it would seem, to provoke mistrust, ridicule, or even hatred in his schoolfellows. For instance, he would sometimes become so lost in thought as to seem detached from all those around him. Even as a young boy he loved to go off into a corner and read books, and yet his classmates loved him so much that throughout his school-days he was undoubtedly the most popular boy at school. He was seldom boisterous and seldom even happy, but just one look at him was enough to see that this was not on account of any sullen streak in his nature, and that, on the contrary, he was even-tempered and serene. He never sought to assert himself amongst his peers. Perhaps this was why he was never afraid of anyone, and yet the other boys understood immediately that he took no pride in his courage, but seemed completely unaware of his own bravery and fearlessness. He never bore a grudge. Within an hour of receiving some slight, he would be replying to a question from the perpetrator, or striking up a conversation with him so openly and trustfully that it seemed as though nothing had happened at all. Nor was it that he had forgotten or forgiven the slight; he simply did not look upon it as such, which appealed to the other boys enormously and completely won them over to him. He possessed only one characteristic which, in every class from the lowest to the highest, produced in all his schoolfellows a desire to tease him, not for the sake of malice or ridicule, but purely for fun. This was his excessive, compulsive shyness and modesty. He could not bear certain words and certain conversations about women. These ‘certain words’ are, unfortunately, endemic in schools. Young boys, although pure in heart and soul and still children, very often like to whisper amongst themselves in class and even to talk out loud about things, pictures and fantasies, of a kind seldom spoken of even by troopers; for even soldiers are in fact ignorant of much that is perfectly well known to the young offspring of the educated and higher circles of our society. Admittedly, there is no moral corruption here as yet, no real, depraved, inner cynicism, but there is the outward appearance of it, and this is frequently regarded by schoolboys as something sophisticated, subtle, smart, and certainly to be emulated. Seeing that Alyoshka Karamazov would clasp his hands over his ears as soon as they started talking about ‘it’, his schoolfellows would sometimes deliberately crowd around him, force his hands away from his head,
and shout obscenities into both his ears, while he struggled and sank to the floor, lay down and shielded his face, without a word, without protest, bearing the insult in silence. In the end, however, they would leave him in peace and not mock him as a ‘cissy’, but rather pity him for what he had endured. Incidentally, he was always near the top of his class academically, but never actually top.
After Yefim Petrovich died, Alyosha stayed on at school for two more years. Almost immediately after her husband’s death, the inconsolable widow set off on an extended visit to Italy together with all her family, which consisted entirely of women, while Alyosha went to live in the house of two ladies whom he had never seen before, distant relatives of Yefim Petrovich, but under what conditions he had not the slightest idea. Another very distinctive characteristic of his was that he never showed the slightest concern about who was supporting him financially. In this respect he was the complete opposite of his elder brother, Ivan Fyodorovich, who had been in a state of poverty during his first two years at university, earning his keep by his own efforts, and who from early childhood had been painfully aware of living on his benefactor’s charity. But it seems that this strange trait in Aleksei’s character ought not to be judged too severely, because anybody who became in the least acquainted with him was convinced the moment this question arose that Aleksei was clearly one of those young men with an aura of the holy fool* about him, and that, were he suddenly to come into possession of a fortune, he would not hesitate to give it away at the first request, either to a good cause or to any plausible confidence trickster. And on the whole he appeared not to know the value of money, figuratively speaking of course. When he was given pocket money, which he himself never asked for, he would either spend weeks on end not knowing what to do with it, or was terribly careless with it, so that it vanished instantly. Pyotr Aleksandrovich Miusov, who was extremely punctilious where money and bourgeois honesty were concerned, once offered the following character sketch after close observation of Aleksei: ‘Here we have perhaps the only person in the world who, if he were to be suddenly abandoned without a kopeck in the central square of a strange city of a million people, would never come to grief, never die of hunger or cold, because somebody would immediately feed him, immediately take him under their wing, or, failing that, he would survive by his own wits, which would be no hardship or humiliation for him, while anyone who helped him would not find it a chore at all, but perhaps, on the contrary, would even look upon it as a pleasure.’
He did not finish school; he still had one year left when he suddenly announced to the ladies in whose household he was living that he was going to see his father about a matter that had suddenly occurred to him. They were very protective of him and did not want to let him go. The fare was no great expense, and the ladies would not let him pawn his watch, a present from his benefactor’s family before their departure abroad, but provided him handsomely with money and even with a new set of clothes and underwear. However, he returned half the money to them, insisting that he would travel third class. Arriving in our town and being at once questioned by his father as to why he had come without completing his studies, he gave no direct reply, but was, it is said, unusually pensive. It soon transpired that he was looking for his mother’s grave. He told himself at the time that that was why he had come. But it was unlikely to have been the sole reason for his visit. It was more probable that, at the time, he himself neither knew nor could have explained what it was that had welled up in his soul and begun to draw him relentlessly along a new, unexplored but inevitable path. Fyodor Pavlovich could not tell him where he had buried his second wife; he had never once visited her grave after her interment, and over the course of the years had completely forgotten where she was buried.
And now a word about Fyodor Pavlovich. For a long time before this, he had not been living in our town. Three or four years after the death of his second wife, he had gone to the south of Russia and eventually landed up in Odessa, where he spent several years. There he began by getting to know, as he put it, ‘lots of yids, moishes, and shifty back-wheel skids’; eventually, however, he not only found himself dealing with yids, but ‘even came to be accepted by respectable Jews’. It is to be assumed that at this period in his life he acquired the knack of making money by fair means or foul. He had returned to our little town, this time for good, only about three years before Alyosha’s arrival. His former acquaintances found him terribly aged, although he was by no means an old man. It was not so much that he behaved with more circumspection, but rather that he was simply more arrogant. The former clown had a malicious impulse, for example, to make fools of other people. He still continued to womanize, if anything in an even more flagrantly despicable manner than before. He very soon opened a number of new taverns all round the district. It was apparent that he could be worth as much as a hundred thousand roubles, or not far short of it. Many of the townspeople and many others from all over the district immediately borrowed money from him, on very good security of course. Of late he had become somewhat flaccid in appearance, had begun to lose his composure and self-control, and had fallen into a desultory way of life, flitting from one thing to another, becoming quite scatterbrained, and all the while drinking more and more heavily, so that, were it not for the aforementioned servant Grigory, who by this time had also aged considerably and was looking after him almost like a nurse, Fyodor Pavlovich would very probably have been unable to avoid a great deal of unnecessary trouble. Alyosha’s arrival seemed to have a beneficial ameliorating effect on him; it was as if something had awakened in this prematurely aged man that had long lain stifled in his soul. ‘You know,’ he would often say to Alyosha, looking at him closely, ‘you look just like her—like the klikusha.’ That is what he called his deceased wife, Alyosha’s mother. It was Grigory who eventually pointed out the klikusha’s grave to Alyosha. He took him to the town cemetery and there, in a distant corner, showed him a cheap but respectable cast-iron memorial plate bearing her name, social status,* age, and year of death; inscribed below these details was an old-fashioned quatrain of the sort that used to be common on the tombstones of the middle classes. Surprisingly, this gravestone was the result of Grigory’s initiative. It was he who, at his own expense, had erected it over the grave of the poor klikusha after Fyodor Pavlovich, whom he frequently confronted with reminders about the grave, had finally left for Odessa, abandoning not only the grave but all memories of the past. Alyosha betrayed no particular emotion at his mother’s grave; he merely listened to Grigory’s dignified and rational account of the erection of the memorial, lingered awhile with bowed head, and departed without a word. After that, he probably did not even visit the cemetery for the rest of the year. But this minor incident also had its effect on Fyodor Pavlovich, and a very strange effect indeed. He suddenly produced a thousand roubles and donated it to the monastery for the remembrance of his wife’s soul—not the second wife, Alyosha’s mother, the klikusha, but the first wife, Adelaida Ivanovna, the one who used to beat him. The very same night he got drunk and ridiculed the monks in front of Alyosha. He was far from being religious, and probably never so much as lit a five-kopeck candle in front of an icon in his life. But strange and unpredictable indeed are the thoughts and emotional excesses to which such individuals are sometimes prone.
I have already mentioned that he had become very flaccid in appearance. His face bore ample witness to the manner and nature of the life he was leading. Besides the drooping, fleshy bags under his small eyes, always arrogant, suspicious, and mocking, and besides the multitude of deep wrinkles on his puffy little face, he had a large, fleshy, elongated Adam’s apple which dangled like a pouch under his pointed chin and gave his face an aspect of repulsive sensuality; in addition, his wide, carnivorous, thick-lipped mouth revealed small, black stumps of badly decayed teeth. Every time he began to speak, he spattered saliva. Although he enjoyed poking fun at his own face, he seemed well satisfied with it. He particularly liked to draw attention to his nose, w
hich, though not large, was very fine and distinctly aquiline: ‘A truly Roman nose,’ he would say. ‘What with that and my Adam’s apple, this face has got decline and fall written all over it!’ He appeared to be proud of it indeed.
Shortly after discovering his mother’s grave, Alyosha told his father that he wished to enter the monastery and that the monks were willing to accept him as a novice. He explained that this was a very special wish and that he was appealing to him in all seriousness for his consent as a father. The old man already knew that Starets Zosima, who was leading a holy life in a hermitage at the monastery outside our town, had made a deep impression on his ‘quiet boy’.
‘Of course, this starets is the most honest monk of the lot of them,’ he said, after listening in pensive silence to what Alyosha had to say and showing hardly any surprise at his request. ‘Hm, so that’s what you want to be, my quiet boy!’ He was half drunk, and suddenly grinned a wide, drunken grin, full of cunning and inebriated guile. ‘Hm, do you know, I had the feeling you’d end up as something like that, can you imagine? That’s just what you were heading for. Well now, you’ve got your two thousand, that’ll get you in, and I’ll never leave you in the lurch, my dear boy; I’ll stump up whatever else is owing now, if they ask. But if they don’t ask, why insist, wouldn’t you agree? After all, you don’t cost more to feed than a canary, two grains a week… Hm. And how about that monastery that runs a little village near by, everyone knows it’s where their “apostolic wives” live, that’s what they call them, isn’t it? There’s about thirty of them altogether, I think… I’ve been there and, my word, it’s fascinating, in its own way, of course—and different, you know. The only snag is, it’s all so awfully Russian, not a single Frenchwoman in sight, and they could have done with some, it’s not as though they couldn’t afford it. Still, once the word gets around they’ll come flocking in. This place is all right though, no apostolic wives here, just monks, about two hundred of them, and no mistake. Ascetics to a man, that’s for sure… Hm, so you want to join the monks, do you? My heart bleeds for you, Alyosha, really it does; if only you knew how I’ve grown to love you… Still, it’s an ill wind… you can pray for us sinners, we’ve certainly done some sinning. I’ve always wondered who was going to do my praying for me, and indeed if there was such a person in this world. My dear boy, if you only knew how terribly stupid I am in these matters, you wouldn’t believe me. Terribly unknowledgeable. See here: I may be unknowledgeable, but I think about these matters, not too often, of course, but still… Surely, when I’m dead, there’s no chance the devils will fail to drag me down with their hooks. So that gets me thinking: hooks? Where do they get them from? What are they made of? Iron? And where do they forge them? Have they got their own works down there, or what? The monks in your monastery probably suppose that hell comes with a roof, for instance. Now I’m ready to believe in hell, but it shouldn’t have a roof: it’s in better taste without one, more enlightened, Lutheran-like,* if you see what I mean. But really and truly, what does it matter, roof or no roof? But then, that’s what the whole damned question is all about! For if there’s no roof, it follows there can’t be any hooks either. And if there aren’t any hooks, then it’s all a sham, and it’s even harder to swallow: who’s going to drag me down with hooks then, because if I’m not going to be dragged down with hooks, what’ll happen next, what will become of truth and justice on earth? Il faudrait les inventer,* these hooks, just for me, for me and me alone, because if only you knew, Alyosha, how low I’ve sunk!’
The Karamazov Brothers Page 6
