The Brothers Karamazov (4 page)

And they did. Moreover, the young man exercised an obvious influence on his father, who sometimes almost seemed as if he would heed his advice. Although he was often his nasty, unbridled self still, his behavior began to improve slightly. It was only later that we learned that Ivan had come, at least partly, at the request of his older brother Dmitry, whom he also met and got to know for the first time during this visit to our town. The two brothers had been corresponding before on an important matter that concerned Dmitry more than Ivan. What it was the reader will learn at great length in good time. However, even when I learned about that matter, Ivan Karamazov remained a mystery to me and I still did not understand why he had come.

Let me add that Ivan seemed to act as a mediator between his father and his brother Dmitry, who by then had completely broken off relations, Dmitry even instituting legal proceedings against the old man.

I must emphasize here that this was the very first meeting of the Karamazovs, the first time that some members of that strange family had set eyes on each other. Now, Karamazov’s youngest son, Alexei, had been living among us for the past year and we had met him before his brothers. It is of this brother, Alexei, that I find it the most difficult to speak in this introductory part of my narrative, although it is indispensable to do so before I bring him out onto the stage of my novel. I must write an introductory piece about him too, if only to explain a point that may strike my readers as very strange, namely, that my future hero will have to wear the cassock of a novice at his very first appearance. Yes, he had been living at our monastery for a year or so and, indeed, it looked as if he were preparing to spend the rest of his life within its walls.

Chapter 4: The Third Son—Alyosha

HE WAS then only twenty (his brother Ivan was twenty-three and their older brother, Dmitry, twenty-seven). First, I want to make it clear that young Alyosha was in no sense a fanatic. In my opinion at least, he was not even a mystic. Let me tell you my opinion of him right from the start: he was just a boy who very early in life had come to love his fellow men and if he chose to enter a monastery, it was simply because at one point that course had caught his imagination and he had become convinced that it was the ideal way to escape from the darkness of the wicked world, a way that would lead him toward light and love. This particular way had caught his attention only because he had happened to meet a man who made an overwhelming impression on him—the famous Zosima, the elder of our monastery, to whom he had become attached with all the ardor of the first love kindled in his insatiable heart. I will not deny, however, that he was already rather strange even then, because he had been strange from the cradle. As I have already mentioned, he was just three when he lost his mother, yet he always remembered how she looked and how she caressed him—“just as if she were standing alive before me,” he would say. Such memories can be preserved (as everyone knows) from an even earlier age, even in a two-year-old, but they are like bright spots standing out in the darkness, a tiny lighted fragment of a huge canvas, while the rest of the painting remains faded and dark. So it was with Alyosha. He remembered a certain evening—a quiet, summer evening, an open window, the slanting rays of the setting sun (the slanting rays were the clearest part of his recollection), an icon with a lighted lamp in a corner of the room, and, kneeling before the icon, his mother, sobbing hysterically, screaming and shrieking, clutching him with both hands so tightly that it hurt, praying to the Mother of God for him, then holding him away from her toward the icon, as if putting him under the protection of the Mother of God . . . Then, all of a sudden a nanny rushes into the room and snatches him away from his mother in alarm. Ah, that picture! Alyosha always remembered the way his mother’s face had looked at that second; he described it as both frenzied and beautiful. But he rarely confided this recollection, and to very few people. As a child and as a boy, Alyosha was rather reserved, one might even say uncommunicative. He was not distrustful, however, or shy and unsociable, just the opposite, in fact. His apparently distant behavior was due to a constant inner preoccupation with something strictly personal, something which had nothing to do with other people, but which was so supremely important to him that it made him forget the rest of the world. But he certainly loved people: throughout his life he seemed to believe in people and trust them, and yet no one ever thought him simple-minded or naive. There was something in him (and it stayed with him all his life) that made people realize that he refused to sit in judgment on others, that he felt he had no right to, and that, whatever happened, he would never condemn anyone. He gave the impression that he could witness anything without feeling in the least outraged, although he might be deeply saddened. Indeed, even when he was still very young, he reached a point where nothing either shocked or horrified him. So when, at the age of nineteen, chaste and pure, he was faced with the shocking debauchery in his father’s house, he would walk away in silence when things became too revolting, but never show the slightest sign of scorn or condemnation.

His father, because earlier in life he had scrounged off other people, had developed a special sensitivity to people’s attitudes and was prepared to interpret anything as a personal slur. So at first he viewed Alyosha with gruff distrust (“The fellow doesn’t say much, but he is thinking all kinds of things underneath”). Within two weeks, however, he was constantly hugging and kissing his son. True, the tears that rolled down his cheeks at these times were drunken tears and the outpourings that punctuated his embraces were those of a besotted sentimentality. Yet it was obvious that the old man had come to love his son deeply and sincerely; in fact, his feelings for Alyosha were such as a man like him could never have expected to have for anyone.

But then, everybody liked the boy, wherever he went, from his early childhood on. When he found himself in the house of Mr. Polenov, his guardian and benefactor, the whole household became attached to him as if he were one of the family. And it must be remembered that when Alyosha was first brought there, he was very young and cannot have set out to gain their affection calculatingly, by trying to please or by cunning flattery. The gift of making people love him was inherent in him; he gained people’s affection directly and effortlessly; it was part of his nature. And it was the same at school, although one would have thought him the kind of boy to provoke distrust in his comrades, to become the target of their jokes and sometimes even of their hatred. For instance, he would often become absorbed in his thoughts and, as it were, withdraw from the world. Even as a very small boy, he would go off into a quiet corner and read a book. And yet his schoolfellows liked him so much that it can be said that he was the most popular boy in the school all the time he was there. He was seldom playful or, for that matter, even merry, but a look at him was sufficient to see that there was nothing sullen about him, that on the contrary he was a bright, good-tempered boy. And he never tried to show off to the other boys, perhaps because he was never afraid of anyone. Yet the boys felt right away that he was in no way proud of his fearlessness, that it never even occurred to him that he was fearless or bold. He also never held a grudge when someone offended him. An hour later, he would answer the offender or speak to him himself, with a trustful, friendly look, as if nothing had happened. And it wasn’t that he had forgotten or, having thought it over, had decided to forgive the insult; it was simply that he no longer felt offended. It was this trait that won all the boys over to him and made them love him. He had, however, one peculiarity that, throughout his school years, incited his comrades to tease him, not because they were mean but just because they found it funny: this was a fierce, frantic modesty and chastity. He could not bear to hear dirty words or a certain type of talk about women. Unfortunately, though, such words and such talk are inevitable at school. Boys pure at heart, mere children, often whisper in class or even say certain things aloud and describe certain scenes that even soldiers would hesitate to mention. For one thing, there is much that soldiers do not know or understand that is quite familiar to very young boys in our intellectual and upper classes. In this there can hardly be moral depravity or perverted inner cynicism as yet, but there is that outward cynicism which they consider truly refined and subtle, something daring and worthy of emulation. When the other boys realized that Alyosha Karamazov stopped up his ears as soon as they started talking about “those things,” they would crowd around him, tear his hands away, and scream obscenities into his ears, while Alyosha tried to break away, throwing himself onto the ground, trying desperately to cover his ears with his hands, struggling without a word, bearing it all in complete silence. In the end, however, they left him in peace and stopped calling him “little girl,” at most feeling a little sorry for him for being so peculiar in that respect.

I must mention, by the way, that although academically Alyosha was always among the top students, he was never actually the first in his class.

When Polenov died, Alyosha still had two years to go at the secondary school of our province. Very shortly after losing her husband, the inconsolable widow took all her daughters (they had no sons) on a long trip to Italy, sending Alyosha to live with two ladies who were distant relatives of Mr. Polenov’s. Alyosha, who had never seen them before, did not know what the financial arrangements were. This was another trait that was very characteristic of him—he never cared whose money he lived on. In this respect, he was a striking contrast to his brother Ivan, who worked hard to support himself during his first two years at the university rather than ask for help, and who had been painfully aware, ever since his childhood, of living on the charity of strangers. I do not think Alyosha should be judged too severely on this account, however, for he was quite obviously one of those child-like, saintly creatures, who, if he were suddenly to come into a large fortune, would think nothing of giving it all away to some good cause, or simply to the first clever rascal who asked for it. In general, he did not seem to know the value of money. I do not mean that literally of course, but when he was given pocket money (for which he never asked), he either kept it for weeks on end without knowing what to do with it, or spent it at once on anything. After observing Alyosha for some time, Peter Miusov, who set great store by bourgeois respectability and was very punctilious in money matters, passed the following somewhat paradoxical judgment on him:

“Alyosha,” Miusov declared, “may be the only man in the world who, if left all by himself in the middle of a strange city inhabited by a million unknown people, would never suffer from cold or hunger. For he would immediately be offered food and shelter; and if no one offered him anything, he would find everything he needed right away himself, and it would cost him no effort, nor make him feel in the least humiliated, nor, for that matter, would he be imposing himself on others; just the contrary, they would all be only too happy to do things for him.”

Alyosha did not finish school. When he was still a year away from graduation he told the ladies he lived with that he had to go and see his father to discuss an idea that had occurred to him. The two ladies, who were sorry to lose him, tried in vain to persuade him to stay. Since it was not an expensive journey, he planned to pay for it by pawning his watch, a parting gift from Mrs. Polenov, but the two ladies wouldn’t hear of it. They gave him a goodly sum of money and, in addition, bought him a complete wardrobe. Alyosha, however, returned half the money, assuring them that he preferred to travel third class.

When he first arrived in our town, his father questioned him suspiciously, trying to find out just what had brought him here before he had finished school. Instead of answering, Alyosha plunged into his private thoughts, as he so often did. It soon became clear that he was seeking his mother’s grave, and he himself practically confirmed that this had been his real reason for coming. But it can hardly have been the only reason. Most likely, at that time he did not really know himself why he had come, not being quite sure what it was that was driving him: a peculiar yearning had arisen in his heart, drawing him irresistibly into a new, unknown, but by then inevitable course.

Mr. Karamazov was unable to show his son where he had buried his second wife for, once the coffin had been lowered into the earth, he had never returned to visit her grave and, since that had been many years before, he had entirely forgotten where the grave was. Moreover, Mr. Karamazov had been away from our town for a long time. Three or four years after his second wife’s death, he had gone to the south of Russia, ending up in Odessa where he stayed for several years. There he came across “lots of Yids of all shapes and sizes,” as he put it, and even got to know “not only Yids but respectable Jews as well.” It was probably during this period of his life that he developed a special knack for making money and holding on to it. He had returned to our town to stay only about three years before Alyosha came. Those who had known him before found him terribly aged, although he was still by no means an old man. His behavior was somehow different, too: it wasn’t that he’d become more dignified, but he was more self-assured, even insolent. This former buffoon, for instance, now took an impudent delight in making buffoons of others. But his depravity with women was as bad as ever, if anything, worse. Within a short time he opened a number of new taverns in the district. It looked as if he was worth a hundred thousand rubles or close to it. Many people in town and throughout the district started borrowing money from him, on good security, of course. Of late, however, he had looked rather bloated and seemed to be losing his hold on himself. He had even slipped into a sort of light-headedness. He was unable to keep his mind on any one thing, but would skip off onto something else. He would become confused, and more and more often he drank himself into a stupor. If it hadn’t been for that same servant Gregory, who looked after him almost like a nanny, and who had also aged considerably, Karamazov might not even have survived. Alyosha’s arrival seemed to restore some of his mental vigor, and even to stir up a scrap of decency that had been buried somewhere in this prematurely aged man.