A Nice Little Family (From the Author and Book One)

From the Author

Beginning the life story of my hero, Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov, I find myself in some perplexity. Although I call him my hero, I know myself that he is by no means a great man, and so I foresee inevitable questions: What is so remarkable about your Alexei Fyodorovich that you chose him as your hero? What has he done? Who knows of him, and for what? Why should I, the reader, spend time studying the facts of his life?

The last question is the most fatal, for I can only answer: perhaps you will see for yourself from the novel. But what if you read it and do not see it, and do not agree that my Alexei Fyodorovich is remarkable? I say this because, with sorrow, I foresee it. To me he is remarkable, but I doubt very much that I shall manage to prove it to the reader. The thing is that he is a doer, perhaps, but a vague and unexplained one. One thing, however, is fairly certain: he is a strange man, even an odd one. Yet strangeness and oddity harm rather than give a right to attention, especially when everyone is trying to unite the particulars and find some general sense in the general confusion. But an odd man is not always a particular and isolated case; on the contrary, it sometimes happens that he carries within him the very heart of the whole, while the rest of the men of his time have somehow been torn away from it for a while by some gust of wind.

The trouble is that while I have one biography, I have two novels. The main novel is the second — it is the activity of my hero in our own time, at the present very moment. The first novel took place thirteen years ago, and is hardly even a novel, but only a moment from my hero's early youth. I cannot do without this first novel, because much in the second would be unintelligible. Well, that is all the preface. I quite agree that it is unnecessary; but since it is written, let it stand.

Book One. A Nice Little Family

Alexey Fyodorovich Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovich 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.

Fyodor Pavlovich was a strange type, yet one pretty frequently to be met with: a type abject and vicious and at the same time senseless — but one of those senseless persons who are very well capable of looking after their worldly affairs, and, apparently, after nothing else. He began with next to nothing, a small landowner who ran to dine at other men's tables and fastened on them as a toady; yet at his death he was found to have a hundred thousand roubles in hard cash. And all his life he remained one of the most senseless fellows in the district. It was not stupidity; most of these fanatics are clever and cunning enough. It was a peculiar, national form of foolishness.

He was married twice and had three sons. His first wife, Adelaida Ivanovna, was of a rich and distinguished family; she ran away with him, out of romantic notions, and soon discovered that she despised him. There were scenes and fights; and finally she ran off with a poor divinity student, leaving Fyodor Pavlovich with a three-year-old son, Dmitri, and died soon after in a garret in Petersburg. Fyodor Pavlovich, on hearing of her death, ran through the streets shouting with joy — or, as some said, wept like a child; very likely both were true. As for the boy, his father forgot him entirely. He was taken care of by the faithful servant Grigory, and then by relatives, and grew up believing that he had property from his mother and that he would come into it when he was of age.

The second wife, Sofya Ivanovna, was a meek, sixteen-year-old orphan, brought up by a tyrannical old general's widow, from whom Fyodor Pavlovich carried her off. He did not take the trouble to restrain himself with her; he brought loose women into the house in her presence. She fell into a nervous disease, a kind of hysterical fits, and was called among the common people a "shrieker." She bore him two sons, Ivan and Alexei, and died when Alexei was four. Alexei always remembered her: a summer evening, the slanting rays of the setting sun, the holy image in the corner, a lighted lamp, and his mother on her knees before the image, sobbing hysterically and holding him out to the Mother of God, as though to put him under her protection.

The two boys too were forgotten by their father, and taken by the old general's widow, and then by a kind benefactor. Ivan grew up a gloomy, reserved, very clever boy, who studied brilliantly and supported himself at the university in Moscow by writing reviews, and became known for an article on the question of the ecclesiastical courts which pleased both churchmen and atheists, because each thought it was on his side. Now, at twenty-four, he had suddenly come to live in his father's house, and no one could understand why.

Alexei — Alyosha — was twenty, and was living in the monastery near the town, as a novice under the great elder Zosima. He was not a fanatic, and not even, in my opinion, a mystic. He was simply an early lover of humanity, and if he took the monastic path it was only because at that time it seemed to him the ideal way out for his soul, struggling from the darkness of worldly wickedness to the light of love. Everyone loved him; it was his gift. He never judged anyone. He would come into his father's house, among drunkenness and debauchery, and would listen in silence, and look at everything, and condemn no one; and even his father, who believed in nothing, came to love him with a sincere love, the first he had perhaps ever felt for any human being.

"I am convinced," Fyodor Pavlovich told him, "that the devils will forget to drag me down to hell with their hooks when I die. And then I wonder — hooks? Where would they get them? What of? Iron hooks? Where do they forge them? Have they a foundry there of some sort? If there's no ceiling, there can be no hooks; and if there are no hooks it all breaks down; which is unlikely again, for then there would be none to drag me down to hell, and if they don't drag me down, what justice is there in the world? Il faudrait les inventer, those hooks, on purpose for me alone."

The elders, the reader should know, were a kind of spiritual guide known in the Russian monasteries since ancient times: an elder is one who takes your soul, your will, into his soul and his will. Having chosen an elder, you renounce your own will and give it to him in complete submission, in complete self-renunciation. Father Zosima was sixty-five, and very ill, and much revered; people came to him from all over Russia. And Alyosha loved him, and believed that he held in his heart the secret of renewal for all.