I. Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov

Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov was the third son of a landowner of our district, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, so well known in his day (and still remembered among us even now) for his tragic and murky death, which befell him exactly thirteen years ago and which I shall report in its proper place. For now I will say of this “landowner” (as we used to call him here, though nearly all his life he hardly lived on his estate at all) only that he was a strange type, and yet one met with fairly often, precisely the type of man who is not only worthless and depraved but at the same time muddle-headed—but one of those muddle-headed people who know how to manage their little property affairs superbly, and that, it seems, is all they know how to manage. Fyodor Pavlovich, for instance, started out with next to nothing; he was the smallest of small landowners, ran around dining at other people’s tables, and angled to become a hanger-on, and yet at the moment of his death he turned out to have as much as a hundred thousand rubles in hard cash. And at the same time he went on all his life being one of the most muddle-headed madcaps in our whole district. I repeat: this is not stupidity; most of these madcaps are rather clever and cunning—but precisely muddle-headedness, and a peculiar, national muddle-headedness at that.

He married twice and had three sons: the eldest, Dmitri Fyodorovich, by his first wife, and the other two, Ivan and Alexei, by his second. Fyodor Pavlovich’s first wife came from the rather wealthy and distinguished noble family of the Miusovs, also landowners of our district. How exactly it happened that a girl with a dowry, a beauty besides, and on top of that one of those spirited, clever girls not uncommon among us in the present generation but already to be found in the past, could marry such a worthless “runt,” as everyone called him then, I shall not explain at any length. After all, I knew a young lady, still of the “romantic” generation before last, who after several years of mysterious love for a certain gentleman, whom, by the way, she could have married at any time in the most tranquil fashion, nonetheless ended by inventing insurmountable obstacles for herself, and on a stormy night threw herself from a high bank, rather like a cliff, into a fairly deep and swift river and perished in it, decidedly from her own caprice, solely in order to resemble Shakespeare’s Ophelia; so much so, even, that had this cliff, which she had picked out and grown fond of so long before, been less picturesque, had there been only a prosaic flat bank in its place, the suicide might perhaps never have happened at all. This is a true fact, and one must suppose that in our Russian life over the last two or three generations no small number of such facts, or facts of the same kind, have occurred. In the same way, Adelaida Ivanovna Miusova’s act was without doubt an echo of other people’s ideas, and likewise the irritation of a captive mind. She may have wanted to assert her independence as a woman, to go against social conventions, against the despotism of her relatives and family, and an obliging imagination persuaded her, let us suppose for only a moment, that Fyodor Pavlovich, in spite of his rank of hanger-on, was all the same one of the boldest and most sardonic men of that epoch of transition to everything better, whereas he was only a nasty buffoon and nothing more. The piquant thing was also that the affair was carried off by an elopement, and that greatly charmed Adelaida Ivanovna. As for Fyodor Pavlovich, even his social position at the time made him quite ready for any such escapade, since he passionately desired to make his way in the world by whatever means; and to worm his way into a good family and get a dowry was very tempting. As for mutual love, there seems to have been none at all, neither on the bride’s side nor on his, in spite even of Adelaida Ivanovna’s good looks. So this case was perhaps the only one of its kind in the life of Fyodor Pavlovich, a man who was the most sensual of men all his life long, ready in an instant to cling to any skirt whatever, if only it beckoned to him. And yet this one woman made no particular impression on him on the side of passion.

Immediately after the elopement Adelaida Ivanovna saw in a flash that she felt nothing for her husband but contempt. And so the consequences of the marriage showed themselves with extraordinary speed. Although the family was reconciled to the event even fairly soon and gave the runaway her dowry, the most disorderly life and endless scenes began between the spouses. It was said that the young wife showed incomparably more nobility and loftiness in all this than Fyodor Pavlovich, who, as is now known, filched from her then and there, at one stroke, all her money, up to twenty-five thousand, as soon as she received it, so that from then on those dear thousands decidedly sank without a trace as far as she was concerned. The little village and the rather good town house, which had also come to her as part of her dowry, he tried for a long time and with all his might to transfer to his own name by means of some suitable deed, and he would surely have succeeded, simply out of the contempt and disgust for himself, so to speak, which he aroused in his wife every minute with his shameless extortions and pleadings, simply out of her weariness of soul, just so that he would leave her alone. But fortunately Adelaida Ivanovna’s family stepped in and put a check on the grabber. It is positively known that fights between the spouses were not infrequent, but, according to tradition, it was not Fyodor Pavlovich who did the beating but Adelaida Ivanovna, a hot-tempered, bold, dark-skinned, impatient lady, endowed with remarkable physical strength. At last she abandoned the house and ran away from Fyodor Pavlovich with a seminarian schoolteacher who was perishing of poverty, leaving three-year-old Mitya on Fyodor Pavlovich’s hands. Fyodor Pavlovich at once set up a whole harem in the house and the most dissolute drinking, and in the intervals drove around almost the entire province, complaining tearfully to each and all about Adelaida Ivanovna, who had abandoned him, and in doing so he revealed such details as a husband ought to be far too ashamed to reveal about his married life. Above all, he seemed to find it pleasant, even flattering, to act out his ridiculous role of the injured husband in front of everyone, and even to paint the details of his injury with embellishments. “Anyone would think you’d been given a promotion, Fyodor Pavlovich, you’re so pleased, in spite of all your sorrow,” the scoffers would say to him. Many even added that he was glad to appear in a refurbished role of buffoon, and that he deliberately, to make the laughter louder, pretended not to notice his comic position. Who knows, however; perhaps it was naive in him. At last he managed to find the traces of his runaway. The poor thing turned out to be in Petersburg, where she had moved with her seminarian and where she had thrown herself headlong into the most complete emancipation. Fyodor Pavlovich at once began bustling about and getting ready to go to Petersburg—what for? He himself, of course, did not know. Really, perhaps he would have gone then; but having taken such a decision, he at once considered himself especially entitled, to keep his spirits up before the journey, to launch once more into the most boundless drinking. And it was precisely then that word reached his wife’s family that she had died in Petersburg. She had died rather suddenly, somehow, somewhere in a garret, according to some accounts of typhus, and according to others supposedly of hunger. Fyodor Pavlovich learned of his wife’s death while drunk; they say he ran out into the street and began to shout, lifting his hands to heaven for joy: “Now you let your servant depart!” and according to others he wept and sobbed like a little child, so much so that, they say, it was pitiful even to look at him, in spite of all the disgust one felt for him. It may very well be that there was both the one and the other, that is, that he rejoiced at his release and wept for his releaser, all at once. In most cases people, even villains, are much more naive and simple-hearted than we generally conclude. And so are we ourselves.