HE was only twenty, his brother Ivan was in his twenty-fourth
year at the time, while their elder brother Dmitri was
twenty-seven. First of all, I must explain that this young man,
Alyosha, was not a fanatic, and, in my opinion at least, was not
even a mystic. I may as well give my full opinion from the
beginning. He was simply an early lover of humanity, and that he
adopted the monastic life was simply because at that time it struck
him, so to say, as the ideal escape for his soul struggling from
the darkness of worldly wickedness to the light of love. And the
reason this life struck him in this way was that he found in it at
that time, as he thought an extrordinary being, our celebrated
elder, Zossima, to whom he became attached with all the warm first
love of his ardent heart. But I do not dispute that he was very
strange even at that time, and had been so indeed from his cradle.
I have mentioned already, by the way, that though he lost his
mother in his fourth year he remembered her all his life her face,
her caresses, "as though she stood living before me." Such memories
may persist, as everyone knows, from an even earlier age, even from
two years old, but scarcely standing out through a whole lifetime
like spots of light out of darkness, like a corner torn out of a
huge picture, which has all faded and disappeared except that
fragment. That is how it was with him. He remembered one still
summer evening, an open window, the slanting rays of the setting
sun (that he recalled most vividly of all); in a corner of the room
the holy image, before it a lighted lamp, and on her knees before
the image his mother, sobbing hysterically with cries and moans,
snatching him up in both arms, squeezing him close till it hurt,
and praying for him to the Mother of God, holding him out in both
arms to the image as though to put him under the Mother's
protection… and suddenly a nurse runs in and snatches him from her
in terror. That was the picture! And Alyosha remembered his
mother's face at that minute. He used to say that it was frenzied
but beautiful as he remembered. But he rarely cared to speak of
this memory to anyone. In his childhood and youth he was by no
means expansive, and talked little indeed, but not from shyness or
a sullen unsociability; quite the contrary, from something
different, from a sort of inner preoccupation entirely personal and
unconcerned with other people, but so important to him that he
seemed, as it were, to forget others on account of it. But he was
fond of people: he seemed throughout his life to put implicit trust
in people: yet no one ever looked on him as a simpleton or naive
person. There was something about him which made one feel at once
(and it was so all his life afterwards) that he did not care to be
a judge of others that he would never take it upon himself to
criticise and would never condemn anyone for anything. He seemed,
indeed, to accept everything without the least condemnation though
often grieving bitterly: and this was so much so that no one could
surprise or frighten him even in his earliest youth. Coming at
twenty to his father's house, which was a very sink of filthy
debauchery, he, chaste and pure as he was, simply withdrew in
silence when to look on was unbearable, but without the slightest
sign of contempt or condemnation. His father, who had once been in
a dependent position, and so was sensitive 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 was well satisfied with it. He used particularly to
point to his nose, which was not very large, but very delicate and
conspicuously aquiline. "A regular Roman nose," he used to say,
"with my goitre I've quite the countenance of an ancient Roman
patrician of the decadent period." He seemed proud of it.
Not long after visiting his mother's grave Alyosha suddenly
announced that he wanted to enter the monastery, and that the monks
were willing to receive him as a novice. He explained that this was
his strong desire, and that he was solemnly asking his consent as
his father. The old man knew that the elder Zossima, who was living
in the monastery hermitage, had made a special impression upon his
"gentle boy."
"That is the most honest monk among them, of course," he
observed, after listening in thoughtful silence to Alyosha, and
seeming scarcely surprised at his request. "H'm!… So that's where
you want to be, my gentle boy?"
He was half drunk, and suddenly he grinned his slow half-drunken
grin, which was not without a certain cunning and tipsy slyness.
"H'm!… I had a presentiment that you would end in something like
this. Would you believe it? You were making straight for it. Well,
to be sure you have your own two thousand. That's a dowry for you.
And I'll never desert you, my angel. And I'll pay what's wanted for
you there, if they ask for it. But, of course, if they don't ask,
why should we worry them? What do you say? You know, you spend
money like a canary, two grains a week. H'm!… Do you know that near
one monastery there's a place outside the town where every baby
knows there are none but 'the monks' wives' living, as they are
called. Thirty women, I believe. I have been there myself. You
know, it's interesting in its way, of course, as a variety. The
worst of it is it's awfully Russian. There are no French women
there. Of course, they could get them fast enough, they have plenty
of money. If they get to hear of it they'll come along. Well,
there's nothing of that sort here, no 'monks' wives,' and two
hundred monks. They're honest. They keep the fasts. I admit it… .
H'm… . So you want to be a monk? And do you know I'm sorry to lose
you, Alyosha; would you believe it, I've really grown fond of you?
Well, it's a good opportunity. You'll pray for us sinners; we have
sinned too much here. I've always been thinking who would pray for
me, and whether there's anyone in the world to do it. My dear boy,
I'm awfully stupid about that. You wouldn't believe it. Awfully.
You see, however stupid I am about it, I keep thinking, I keep
thinking- from time to time, of course, not all the while. It's
impossible, I think, for the devils to forget to drag me down to
hell with their hooks when I die. 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? The monks in the monastery
probably believe that there's a ceiling in hell, for instance. Now
I'm ready to believe in hell, but without a ceiling. It makes it
more refined, more enlightened, more Lutheran that is. And, after
all, what does it matter whether it has a ceiling or hasn't? But,
do you know, there's a damnable question involved in it? 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,[1] those hooks, on purpose for me alone,
for, if you only knew, Alyosha, what a black-guard I am." "But
there are no hooks there," said Alyosha, looking gently and
seriously at his father. "Yes, yes, only the shadows of hooks. I
know, I know. That's how a Frenchman described hell: 'J'ai vu
l'ombre d'un cocher qui avec l'ombre d'une brosse frottait l'ombre
d'une carrosse.'[2] How do you know there are no hooks,
darling? When you've lived with the monks you'll sing a different
tune. But go and get at the truth there, and then come and tell me.
Anyway it's easier going to the other world if one knows what there
is there. Besides, it will be more seemly for you with the monks
than here with me, with a drunken old man and young harlots… though
you're like an angel, nothing touches you. And I dare say nothing
will touch you there. That's why I let you go, because I hope for
that. You've got all your wits about you. You will burn and you
will burn out; you will be healed and come back again. And I will
wait for you. I feel that you're the only creature in the world who
has not condemned me. My dear boy, I feel it, you know. I can't
help feeling it." And he even began blubbering. He was sentimental.
He was wicked and sentimental.