The Brothers Karamazov (3 page)

It was this confrontation between Karamazov and his eldest son that led to the catastrophe which is the subject (or at least the external plot) of my first, preliminary novel. But before I start on that narrative, I’ll have to say a few words about Karamazov’s other two sons and explain their origins.

Chapter 3: The Second Marriage And The Second Family

SHORTLY AFTER getting the four-year-old Mitya off his hands, Fyodor Karamazov married a second time. His second marriage lasted eight years. He brought back his second wife, Sofia, who was a very young girl, from another province, where he had gone to transact some small business affair with a Jew who was his partner in the deal. Drunkard and lecher though he was, Karamazov was constantly on the lookout for a profitable opportunity to invest some of his capital and, since he was unencumbered by scruples, these ventures were usually quite successful.

Sofia was the daughter of an obscure deacon. She lost her parents in early childhood and, having no other relatives, was brought up by a wealthy old lady, the widow of General Vorokhov. The old woman was her benefactress and her tormentor. I don’t know the details, but I heard that one day the meek and uncomplaining creature had to be cut down from a rope she had tied to a nail in the storeroom. This shows how hard it was for her to submit to the whims and the constant nagging of the old woman who, although not really wicked, had been made tyrannical and eccentric by sheer idleness.

When Fyodor Karamazov asked for Sofia’s hand, Mrs. Vorokhov made inquiries about him and, consequently, when he reappeared, had him thrown out. So, as with his first marriage, he asked the girl to elope with him. Had Sofia known a bit more about his past, she might have turned him down, even in her situation; but everything had taken place in another province and, besides, what judgment could a sixteen-year-old girl make, when all she felt was that she would rather jump in the river than stay with her benefactress? This is how the poor thing came to exchange a benefactress for a benefactor.

This time, Fyodor Karamazov didn’t get any dowry. The general’s widow was outraged and refused to give her charge a single kopek, laying a curse on them both instead. But then, on this occasion, collecting a dowry had not been Karamazov’s main motive. Although up till then he had been aroused exclusively by the coarser types of feminine good looks, the lecher’s imagination was caught now by the striking beauty of this innocent creature and, indeed, by her child-like innocence itself. As he used to say himself later, with a nasty snicker: “Those innocent eyes of hers slit my soul open like a razor.”

In a lecher like Fyodor Karamazov, of course, it only added new spice to his sensual desires. He felt that, since he had accepted this wife without dowry, he had every right to treat her without any consideration whatever—she was, he said, “indebted” to him since he had “practically cut her down from a rope.” He took advantage of her phenomenal humility to trample underfoot the most ordinary decencies of marriage, even to the point of bringing loose women into the house and holding orgies in her presence. To indicate how far he went, I will mention that Gregory, the dour, stupid, argumentative old servant, who had hated his former mistress Adelaida, now took Sofia’s side, stood up for her, and swore back at his master in a manner that was quite intolerable from a servant; once he even broke up a party and drove the guests and the women out of the house.

After a while the wretched girl, who had been terrorized since early childhood, broke down, afflicted with a nervous disorder sometimes found in peasant women, who are then called “shriekers.” Her sickness brought on attacks of hysteria so violent that at times she completely lost her reason. But this did not prevent her from bearing Fyodor Karamazov two sons—Ivan, in the first year of marriage, and Alexei, three years later. When she died Alexei was only just over three, but I know for sure that he remembered his mother all his life, though, of course, as in a dream.

After their mother’s death, the fate of the two little boys was a repetition of their older brother Mitya’s. Their father seemed to forget them immediately and they were so completely neglected that, like Mitya before them, they ended up in Gregory’s cottage. And it was in the servants’ quarters that the boys were found by the rich and eccentric widow of General Vorokhov, their mother’s former benefactress. For the entire eight years of the marriage, she had seethed under the insult she had received, but she had kept herself constantly informed about Sofia and knew all about her sad plight, her sickness, and the outrageous situation in which she was caught. When she heard these things, she would comment to her lady companions: “It serves her right. God is making her pay for her ingratitude.”

Exactly three months after Sofia’s death, the General’s widow suddenly appeared in our town, going straight to Mr. Karamazov’s house. Altogether, she spent only half an hour in town, but the amount she accomplished in that short time was amazing. When she arrived late in the afternoon, Fyodor Karamazov, whom she had not seen for eight years, came out to meet her in a rather besotted state. Without a word of explanation, she stepped up to him and slapped him, landing two mighty, resounding smacks on his face; then she caught him by the forelock, pulling it hard three times. Then, still without explanation, she went to Gregory’s cottage where she found the two little boys. Noticing right away that they were unwashed and that their shirts were dirty, she turned on Gregory and slapped his face too. She announced that she was taking the boys away with her and, leading them out just as they were, in their dirty shirts, sat them in her carriage, wrapped them in carriage rugs, and drove away to her own town.

Gregory took the slap slavishly, without a word of recrimination, and as he saw the lady off to her carriage, he bowed deeply from the waist, solemnly pronouncing that the Lord would reward her for taking the orphans.

“And you’re a blockhead all the same,” the old lady shouted at him as the carriage drove off.

Later, after he had thought it over, Karamazov decided that it was all in his best interest and he made no difficulties when the General’s widow asked his formal consent to her taking charge of the boys’ education. As to the slaps he had received, he dashed all around the town, telling everyone about the incident himself.

When the General’s widow died not long after, she bequeathed a thousand rubles to each boy “to be spent exclusively on his education,” but sparingly, so that it should last until their coming of age. She added that this sum was “more than adequate for children of such a background,” but that if anyone felt it was not, “let him untie his own purse strings,” and so on and so forth. I didn’t read her will myself, but I understand that it was something along these lines, eccentric and very strangely worded. However, the old woman’s principal heir, the Marshal of Nobility of the province, Efim Petrovich Polenov, turned out to be an extremely honorable man. He informed Fyodor Karamazov of the will but realized immediately that such a man would never contribute a kopek to the education of his own children (although Karamazov never refused directly, he always found reasons for delaying his contribution, occasionally even spouting sentimentalities). So Polenov decided to take care of the abandoned boys himself, and he grew quite fond of them, particularly of the younger, Alexei, who lived for a long time in his house as one of the family. It must be noted right here that if the young Karamazovs were indebted to anyone for their upbringing and education, it was above all to this Mr. Polenov, one of the most generous and honorable men to be found. He kept intact the original thousand left to each boy by the General’s widow so that, when they came of age, each of them would receive two thousand rubles, thanks to the accumulated interest. Polenov paid for their upkeep and education out of his own pocket, spending, incidentally, considerably more than a thousand rubles on each boy. Again, I won’t give a lengthy account of their childhood and school years, but will only outline the most important facts.

Of the elder, Ivan, I will only say that he grew into a sullen and secretive boy, although by no means a timorous one. I gather that by the time he was ten or so he had become aware that he and his brother were not being brought up in their own home but were, in fact, living on other people’s charity, and that there was something about their father that made the very mention of his name a cause for embarrassment. Very early in life, almost in infancy (at least so some people claimed), the boy started to display an uncanny aptitude for learning. I don’t know exactly how it came to pass, but when he was barely thirteen he left Polenov’s family, being sent to a secondary school in Moscow, where he boarded at the house of a celebrated and experienced educator, a boyhood friend of Polenov’s. Later, Ivan Karamazov liked to say that he had been sent to Moscow thanks to “Mr. Polenov’s zeal for good works,” because Polenov had been carried away by the idea that a boy endowed with a genius for learning should be taught by a teacher of genius.

However, neither Mr. Polenov nor the brilliant educator was alive by the time Ivan entered the university. And since Polenov had somehow neglected to make the proper arrangements to cut through the usual Russian red tape and make the bequests (now worth more than two thousand rubles each) quickly available to the boys, Ivan could not get the money and had to earn his own living during his first two years at the university. It must be pointed out that, on this occasion, he made no attempt whatsoever to ask his father for assistance. It is uncertain whether he acted out of pride, out of contempt for his father, or simply because he reasoned in a cold and detached way that he would never get any substantial help from him anyway. In any case, the young man did not despair and quickly found work—first tutoring at a few kopeks an hour, then making the rounds of the editorial offices of newspapers, peddling ten-line news items on street incidents or the like that he signed “Eyewitness.” I gather that these items were so originally and strikingly presented that the newspapers were glad to run them. This in itself goes to show the young man’s superiority in practical and intellectual matters over the crowd of needy students of both sexes, who night and day swarm through the offices of the Moscow and Petersburg newspapers and magazines, unable to think up anything more original than to beg for translations from the French or for odd copying jobs. Once Ivan Karamazov got to know people on the editorial staffs, he kept in touch with them, so that during his last years at the university he was able to publish reviews of books on a variety of specialized subjects, in which he showed considerable talent; thus he gradually gained a good reputation in literary circles. However, it was not until quite recently that he succeeded in attracting the attention of a wider circle of readers, and it was one particular incident that made them notice and remember him—and a rather curious incident at that. Ivan Karamazov had been graduated from the university, had collected his two thousand rubles, and was planning to take a trip abroad, when one of the major newspapers carried a very strange article of his that caught the interest even of non-specialists. The most remarkable thing about it was that the topic seemed to be quite outside Ivan’s field, since he had specialized in the natural sciences. The article was devoted to a problem much discussed at the time—the ecclesiastical courts. After examining various opinions that had already been expressed on the subject, Ivan presented his own views. The impact was due mostly to the tone and to the unexpectedness of the conclusions. First, many clerics greeted the author as one of their camp. Then, not only secularists but even outright atheists joined in the applause. Finally, however, some perspicacious persons decided that the whole article was a hoax, an insolent joke he had played on them all.

I have mentioned this incident because the article and the argument it stirred up even reached our famous monastery, where the matter of the ecclesiastical courts elicited great interest. They were perplexed by it, and when they noticed the signature under it, their interest increased even further, since the author happened to be a native of our part of the country and “a son of 
that
 Fyodor Karamazov.” Then, in the midst of it all, the author himself suddenly appeared in our town.

Why did Ivan choose to come to our town just then? I remember the uneasiness that question stirred in me at the time. This fateful visit of his, which was to trigger off a whole chain of events, remained unclear to me almost to the end. In general, it was strange that such a cultured, proud, and apparently prudent young man as Ivan should come to that scandalous house to join a father who had ignored him all his life, who didn’t know him, indeed, hardly remembered that he existed, a father who would most certainly have refused to give him money under any circumstances and who lived in constant dread lest either of his younger sons, Ivan or Alexei, should one day come and ask him for help. Yet the young man came and installed himself in his father’s house. He spent one month there, then another, and the two of them seemed to live in perfect agreement. I was not the only one who was surprised; many others wondered about it too. Peter Miusov, the cousin of Karamazov’s first wife whom I mentioned earlier, happened to have returned just then from Paris, where he had settled for good, and was staying on his estate just outside our town. I remember that he was the most puzzled of all, once he had made the acquaintance of the young man, who interested him a great deal and with whom he used to exchange sophisticated barbs, although his feelings were often secretly hurt when he was bested in these confrontations.

“He is proud,” he said of Ivan then. “A man like that will always find money to live on. Why, even now he has enough to go abroad. So what can be his motive for coming here? He certainly didn’t come in the hope of getting money out of his father, for it is obvious that nothing in the world would make his father give him any. Nor does he go in for wine and debauchery, and yet old Karamazov seems unable to take a step without him. In fact, I’ve never seen two men get along so famously!”