The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky [children's books read aloud TXT] 📗
- Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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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 neighbourhood 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, a short time. So Fyodor Pavlovitch began to take advantage
of this fact, sending him from time to time small doles,
instalments. 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.
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, Adelaida 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.”
Exactly three months after Sofya Ivanovna’s death the general’s
widow suddenly appeared in our town, and went straight to Fyodor
Pavlovitch’s house. She spent only half an hour in the town but she
did a great deal. It was evening. Fyodor Pavlovitch, whom she had
not seen for those eight years, came in to her drunk. The story is
that instantly upon seeing him, without any sort of explanation, she
gave him two good, resounding slaps on the face, seized him by a
tuft of hair, and shook him three times up and down. Then, without a
word, she went straight to the cottage to the two boys. Seeing, at the
first glance, that they were unwashed and in dirty linen, she promptly
gave Grigory, too, a box on the ear, and announcing that she would
carry off both the children she wrapped them just as they were in a
rug, put them in the carriage, and drove off to her own town.
Grigory accepted the blow like a devoted slave, without a word, and
when he escorted the old lady to her carriage he made her a low bow
and pronounced impressively that, “God would repay her for orphans.”
“You are a blockhead all the same,” the old lady shouted to him as she
drove away.
Fyodor Pavlovitch, thinking it over, decided that it was a good
thing, and did not refuse the general’s widow his formal consent to
any proposition in regard to his children’s education. As for the
slaps she had given him, he drove all over the town telling the story.
It happened that the old lady died soon after this, but she left
the boys in her will a thousand roubles each “for their instruction,
and so that all be spent on them exclusively, with the condition
that it be so portioned out as to last till they are twenty-one, for
it is more than adequate provision for such children. If other
people think fit to throw away their money, let them.” I have not read
the will myself, but I heard there was something queer of the sort,
very whimsically expressed. The principal heir, Yefim Petrovitch
Polenov, the Marshal of Nobility of the province, turned out, however,
to be an honest man. Writing to Fyodor Pavlovitch, and discerning at
once that he could extract nothing from him for his children’s
education (though the latter never directly refused but only
procrastinated as he always did in such cases, and was, indeed, at
times effusively sentimental), Yefim Petrovitch took a personal
interest in the orphans. He became especially fond of the younger,
Alexey, who lived for a long while as one of his family. I beg the
reader to note this from the beginning. And to Yefim Petrovitch, a man
of a generosity and humanity rarely to be met with, the young people
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