The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky [children's books read aloud TXT] 📗

and ready to take offence,

met him at first with distrust and sullenness. “He does not say much,”

he used to say, “and thinks the more.” But soon, within a fortnight

indeed, he took to embracing him and kissing him terribly often,

with drunken tears, with sottish sentimentality, yet he evidently felt

a real and deep affection for him, such as he had never been capable

of feeling for anyone before.

 

Everyone, indeed, loved this young man wherever he went, and it

was so from his earliest childhood. When he entered the household of

his patron and benefactor, Yefim Petrovitch Polenov, he gained the

hearts of all the family, so that they looked on him quite as their

own child. Yet he entered the house at such a tender age that he could

not have acted from design nor artfulness in winning affection. So

that the gift of making himself loved directly and unconsciously was

inherent in him, in his very nature, so to speak. It was the same at

school, though he seemed to be just one of those children who are

distrusted, sometimes ridiculed, and even disliked by their

schoolfellows. He was dreamy, for instance, and rather solitary.

From his earliest childhood he was fond of creeping into a corner to

read, and yet he was a general favourite all the while he was at

school. He was rarely playful or merry, but anyone could see at the

first glance that this was not from any sullenness. On the contrary he

was bright and good-tempered. He never tried to show off among his

schoolfellows. Perhaps because of this, he was never afraid of anyone,

yet the boys immediately understood that he was not proud of his

fearlessness and seemed to be unaware that he was bold and courageous.

He never resented an insult. It would happen that an hour after the

offence he would address the offender or answer some question with

as trustful and candid an expression as though nothing had happened

between them. And it was not that he seemed to have forgotten or

intentionally forgiven the affront, but simply that he did not

regard it as an affront, and this completely conquered and

captivated the boys. He had one characteristic which made all his

schoolfellows from the bottom class to the top want to mock at him,

not from malice but because it amused them. This characteristic was

a wild fanatical modesty and chastity. He could not bear to hear

certain words and certain conversations about women. There are

“certain” words and conversations unhappily impossible to eradicate in

schools. Boys pure in mind and heart, almost children, are fond of

talking in school among themselves, and even aloud, of things,

pictures, and images of which even soldiers would sometimes hesitate

to speak. More than that, much that soldiers have no knowledge or

conception of is familiar to quite young children of our

intellectual and higher classes. There is no moral depravity, no

real corrupt inner cynicism in it, but there is the appearance of

it, and it is often looked upon among them as something refined,

subtle, daring, and worthy of imitation. Seeing that Alyosha Karamazov

put his fingers in his ears when they talked of “that,” they used

sometimes to crowd round him, pull his hands away, and shout nastiness

into both ears, while he struggled, slipped to the floor, tried to

hide himself without uttering one word of abuse, enduring their

insults in silence. But at last they left him alone and gave up

taunting him with being a “regular girl,” and what’s more they

looked upon it with compassion as a weakness. He was always one of the

best in the class but was never first.

 

At the time of Yefim Petrovitch’s death Alyosha had two more years

to complete at the provincial gymnasium. The inconsolable widow went

almost immediately after his death for a long visit to Italy with

her whole family, which consisted only of women and girls. Alyosha

went to live in the house of two distant relations of Yefim

Petrovitch, ladies whom he had never seen before. On what terms she

lived with them he did not know himself. It was very characteristic of

him, indeed, that he never cared at whose expense he was living. In

that respect he was a striking contrast to his elder brother Ivan, who

struggled with poverty for his first two years in the university,

maintained himself by his own efforts, and had from childhood been

bitterly conscious of living at the expense of his benefactor. But

this strange trait in Alyosha’s character must not, I think,

criticised too severely, for at the slightest acquaintance with him

anyone would have perceived that Alyosha was one of those youths,

almost of the type of religious enthusiast, who, if they were suddenly

to come into possession of a large fortune, would not hesitate to give

it away for the asking, either for good works or perhaps to a clever

rogue. In general he seemed scarcely to know the value of money,

not, of course, in a literal sense. When he was given pocket-money,

which he never asked for, he was either terribly careless of it so

that it was gone in a moment, or he kept it for weeks together, not

knowing what to do with it.

 

In later years Pyotr Alexandrovitch Miusov, a man very sensitive

on the score of money and bourgeois honesty, pronounced the

following judgment, after getting to know Alyosha:

 

“Here is perhaps the one man in the world whom you might leave

alone without a penny, in the centre of an unknown town of a million

inhabitants, and he would not come to harm, he would not die of cold

and hunger, for he would be fed and sheltered at once; and if he

were not, he would find a shelter for himself, and it would cost him

no effort or humiliation. And to shelter him would be no burden,

but, on the contrary, would probably be looked on as a pleasure.”

 

He did not finish his studies at the gymnasium. A year before

the end of the course he suddenly announced to the ladies that he

was going to see his father about a plan which had occurred to him.

They were sorry and unwilling to let him go. The journey was not an

expensive one, and the ladies would not let him pawn his watch, a

parting present from his benefactor’s family. They provided him

liberally with money and even fitted him out with new clothes and

linen. But he returned half the money they gave him, saying that he

intended to go third class. On his arrival in the town he made no

answer to his father’s first inquiry why he had come before completing

his studies, and seemed, so they say, unusually thoughtful. It soon

became apparent that he was looking for his mother’s tomb. He

practically acknowledged at the time that that was the only object

of his visit. But it can hardly have been the whole reason of it. It

is more probable that he himself did not understand and could not

explain what had suddenly arisen in his soul, and drawn him

irresistibly into a new, unknown, but inevitable path. Fyodor

Pavlovitch could not show him where his second wife was buried, for he

had never visited her grave since he had thrown earth upon her coffin,

and in the course of years had entirely forgotten where she was

buried.

 

Fyodor Pavlovitch, by the way, had for some time previously not

been living in our town. Three or four years after his wife’s death he

had gone to the south of Russia and finally turned up in Odessa, where

he spent several years. He made the acquaintance at first, in his

own words, “of a lot of low Jews, Jewesses, and Jewkins,” and ended by

being received by “Jews high and low alike.” It may be presumed that

at this period he developed a peculiar faculty for making and hoarding

money. He finally returned to our town only three years before

Alyosha’s arrival. His former acquaintances found him looking terribly

aged, although he was by no means an old man. He behaved not exactly

with more dignity but with more effrontery. The former buffoon

showed an insolent propensity for making buffoons of others. His

depravity with women was not as it used to be, but even more

revolting. In a short time he opened a great number of new taverns

in the district. It was evident that he had perhaps a hundred thousand

roubles or not much less. Many of the inhabitants of the town and

district were soon in his debt, and, of course, had given good

security. Of late, too, he looked somehow bloated and seemed more

irresponsible, more uneven, had sunk into a sort of incoherence,

used to begin one thing and go on with another, as though he were

letting himself go altogether. He was more and more frequently

drunk. And, if it had not been for the same servant Grigory, who by

that time had aged considerably too, and used to look after him

sometimes almost like a tutor, Fyodor Pavlovitch might have got into

terrible scrapes. Alyosha’s arrival seemed to affect even his moral

side, as though something had awakened in this prematurely old man

which had long been dead in his soul.

 

“Do you know,” he used often to say, looking at Alyosha, “that you

are like her, ‘the crazy woman’”- that was what he used to call his

dead wife, Alyosha’s mother. Grigory it was who pointed out the “crazy

woman’s” grave to Alyosha. He took him to our town cemetery and showed

him in a remote corner a cast-iron tombstone, cheap but decently kept,

on which were inscribed the name and age of the deceased and the

date of her death, and below a four-lined verse, such as are

commonly used on old-fashioned middle-class tombs. To Alyosha’s

amazement this tomb turned out to be Grigory’s doing. He had put it up

on the poor “crazy woman’s” grave at his own expense, after Fyodor

Pavlovitch, whom he had often pestered about the grave, had gone to

Odessa, abandoning the grave and all his memories. Alyosha showed no

particular emotion at the sight of his mother’s grave. He only

listened to Grigory’s minute and solemn account of the erection of the

tomb; he stood with bowed head and walked away without uttering a

word. It was perhaps a year before he visited the cemetery again.

But this little episode was not without an influence upon Fyodor

Pavlovitch-and a very original one. He suddenly took a thousand

roubles to our monastery to pay for requiems for the soul of his wife;

but not for the second, Alyosha’s mother, the “crazy woman,” but for

the first, Adelaida Ivanovna, who used to thrash him. In the evening

of the same day he got drunk and abused the monks to Alyosha. He

himself was far from being religious; he had probably never put a

penny candle before the image of a saint. Strange impulses of sudden

feeling and sudden thought are common in such types.

 

I have mentioned already that he looked bloated. His countenance

at this time bore traces of something that testified unmistakably to

the life he had led. Besides the long fleshy bags under his little,

always insolent, suspicious, and ironical eyes; besides the

multitude of deep wrinkles in his little fat face, the Adam’s apple

hung below his sharp chin like a great, fleshy goitre, which gave

him a peculiar, repulsive, sensual appearance; add to that a long

rapacious mouth with full lips, between which could be seen little

stumps of black decayed teeth. He slobbered every time he began to

speak. He was fond indeed of making fun of his own face, though, I

believe, he