THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV
About this ebook
by Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky
translated by Constance Garnett
PART I
Book I
The History of a Family
Chapter 1
Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov
ALEXEY Fyodorovitch Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor
Pavlovitch Karamazov, a landowner well known in our district in his
own day, and still remembered among us owing to his gloomy and
tragic death, which happened thirteen years ago, and which I shall
describe in its proper place. For the present I will only say that
this "landowner"- for so we used to call him, although he hardly spent
a day of his life on his own estate- was a strange type, yet one
pretty frequently to be met with, a type abject and vicious and at the
same time senseless. But he was one of those senseless persons who are
very well capable of looking after their worldly affairs, and,
apparently, after nothing else. Fyodor Pavlovitch, for instance, began
with next to nothing; his estate was of the smallest; he ran to dine
at other men's tables, and fastened on them as a toady, yet at his
death it appeared that he had a hundred thousand roubles in hard cash.
At the same time, he was all his life one of the most senseless,
fantastical fellows in the whole district. I repeat, it was not
stupidity- the majority of these fantastical fellows are shrewd and
intelligent enough- but just senselessness, and a peculiar national
form of it.
He was married twice, and had three sons, the eldest, Dmitri, by
his first wife, and two, Ivan and Alexey, by his second. Fyodor
Pavlovitch's first wife, Adelaida Ivanovna, belonged to a fairly
rich and distinguished noble family, also landowners in our
district, the Miusovs. How it came to pass that an heiress, who was
also a beauty, and moreover one of those vigorous intelligent girls,
so common in this generation, but sometimes also to be found in the
last, could have married such a worthless, puny weakling, as we all
called him, I won't attempt to explain. I knew a young lady of the
last "romantic" generation who after some years of an enigmatic
passion for a gentleman, whom she might quite easily have married at
any moment, invented insuperable obstacles to their union, and ended
by throwing herself one stormy night into a rather deep and rapid
river from a high bank, almost a precipice, and so perished,
entirely to satisfy her own caprice, and to be like Shakespeare's
Ophelia. Indeed, if this precipice, a chosen and favourite spot of
hers, had been less picturesque, if there had been a prosaic flat bank
in its place, most likely the suicide would never have taken place.
This is a fact, and probably there have been not a few similar
instances in the last two or three generations. Adelaida Ivanovna
Miusov's action was similarly, no doubt, an echo of other people's
ideas, and was due to the irritation caused by lack of mental freedom.
She wanted, perhaps, to show her feminine independence, to override
class distinctions and the despotism of her family. And a pliable
imagination persuaded her, we must suppose, for a brief moment, that
Fyodor Pavlovitch, in spite of his parasitic position, was one of
the bold and ironical spirits of that progressive epoch, though he
was, in fact, an ill-natured buffoon and nothing more. What gave the
marriage piquancy was that it was preceded by an elopement, and this
greatly captivated Adelaida Ivanovna's fancy. Fyodor Pavlovitch's
position at the time made him specially eager for any such enterprise,
for he was passionately anxious to make a career in one way or
another. To attach himself to a good family and obtain a dowry was
an alluring prospect. As for mutual love it did not exist
apparently, either in the bride or in him, in spite of Adelaida
Ivanovna's beauty. This was, perhaps, a unique case of the kind in the
life of Fyodor Pavlovitch, who was always of a voluptuous temper,
and ready to run after any petticoat on the slightest encouragement.
She seems to have been the only woman who made no particular appeal to his senses.
