II. The First Son Packed Off

One can imagine, of course, what sort of educator and father such a man could be. As a father, what happened to him was exactly what was bound to happen, that is, he abandoned the child he had had with Adelaida Ivanovna utterly and completely, not out of malice toward him or out of any feelings of a wounded husband, but simply because he forgot about him completely. While he was wearying everyone with his tears and complaints and had turned his house into a den of debauchery, the three-year-old boy Mitya was taken into the care of Grigory, a faithful servant of the house, and had Grigory not looked after him then, there might perhaps have been no one to change the child’s little shirt. Besides, it so happened that the child’s relatives on his mother’s side also seemed to forget about him at first. His grandfather, that is, Mr. Miusov himself, Adelaida Ivanovna’s father, was no longer living by then; his widow, Mitya’s grandmother, who had moved to Moscow, had fallen too ill, and the sisters had all married, so that for almost a whole year Mitya had to stay with the servant Grigory and live with him in the servants’ cottage in the yard. However, even if his papa had remembered him (he could not really have been unaware of his existence), he would himself have packed him off back to the cottage, since the child would have been in the way of his debauchery all the same. But it so happened that the late Adelaida Ivanovna’s cousin, Pyotr Alexandrovich Miusov, returned from Paris; he later lived abroad for many years on end, and at that time was still a very young man, but a man who stood out among the Miusovs, enlightened, metropolitan, foreign, and, what is more, a European all his life, and toward the end of his life a liberal of the forties and fifties. In the course of his career he had connections with many of the most liberal people of his epoch, both in Russia and abroad, had known both Proudhon and Bakunin personally, and was especially fond of recalling and telling, toward the end of his wanderings, about the three days of the February revolution in Paris in forty-eight, hinting that he himself had very nearly taken part in it on the barricades. This was one of the most gratifying memories of his youth. He had an independent fortune, by the old reckoning about a thousand souls. His splendid estate lay just outside our little town and bordered on the land of our famous monastery, with which Pyotr Alexandrovich, while still very young, as soon as he came into his inheritance, at once began an endless lawsuit over the rights to some fishing in the river or woodcutting in the forest, I do not know exactly which, but he even considered it his civic and enlightened duty to start a lawsuit with the “clericals.” Hearing all about Adelaida Ivanovna, whom he remembered, of course, and had even once taken notice of, and learning that Mitya had been left behind, he took up the matter in spite of all his youthful indignation and contempt for Fyodor Pavlovich. That was when he first became acquainted with Fyodor Pavlovich. He declared to him straight out that he would like to take the child’s upbringing upon himself. Long afterward he used to tell, as a characteristic touch, that when he began talking to Fyodor Pavlovich about Mitya, the latter for some time looked as though he had no idea what child was meant, and even seemed surprised that he had a little son somewhere in the house. If there may have been exaggeration in Pyotr Alexandrovich’s story, there must still have been something resembling the truth. But Fyodor Pavlovich really did love all his life to put on an act, suddenly to play out some unexpected role before you, and above all sometimes with no need for it at all, even to his own direct harm, as, for instance, in the present case. This trait, however, is characteristic of a great many people, even very intelligent ones, let alone Fyodor Pavlovich. Pyotr Alexandrovich pursued the matter hotly and was even appointed the child’s guardian (jointly with Fyodor Pavlovich), because after all the mother had left a small property, a house and an estate. Mitya did indeed move to this cousin of his mother’s, but Miusov had no family of his own, and since he himself, as soon as he had arranged and secured the income from his estates, at once hurried off again to Paris for a long stay, he entrusted the child to one of his more distant aunts, a Moscow lady. It so happened that, once he had settled in Paris, he too forgot about the child, especially when that same February revolution broke out, which so struck his imagination and which he could never forget for the rest of his life. Then the Moscow lady died, and Mitya was handed on to one of her married daughters. It seems that later he changed nests a fourth time as well. I shall not enlarge on this now, all the more since a great deal will still have to be told about this firstborn of Fyodor Pavlovich’s, and for now I shall confine myself to the most necessary information about him, without which I cannot even begin the novel.

In the first place, this Dmitri Fyodorovich was the only one of Fyodor Pavlovich’s three sons who grew up in the conviction that he had some property after all and that when he came of age he would be independent. His boyhood and youth passed in disorder: he did not finish at the gymnasium, then got into a military school, then found himself in the Caucasus, was promoted, fought a duel, was broken to the ranks, was promoted again, went on many sprees, and got through a comparatively large amount of money. He did not begin to receive money from Fyodor Pavlovich until he came of age, and until then he ran up debts. He first came to know and to see Fyodor Pavlovich, his father, only after he came of age, when he arrived in our parts on purpose to have things out with him about his property. It seems that even then he did not like his parent; he stayed with him only a short time and left as soon as he could, having managed only to get a certain sum from him and to come to a certain arrangement with him about receiving the income from the estate in future, though (a remarkable fact) he did not manage on that occasion to get out of Fyodor Pavlovich either what the estate brought in or what it was worth. Fyodor Pavlovich noticed then, the first time (and this must be remembered), that Mitya had an exaggerated and inaccurate idea of his property. Fyodor Pavlovich was very pleased with this, having his own particular calculations in view. He concluded only that the young man was frivolous, unruly, passionate, impatient, a carouser, and that if only he could snatch a little something for the moment, he would calm down at once, if only for a short time, of course. And this is what Fyodor Pavlovich began to exploit, that is, he got rid of him with small handouts, with occasional remittances, and in the end it came about that when, some four years later, Mitya lost patience and appeared in our little town a second time, in order to settle his affairs with his parent once and for all, it suddenly turned out, to his greatest astonishment, that he now had precisely nothing, that it was even hard to reckon it all up, that he had already drawn in money the entire value of his property from Fyodor Pavlovich and might perhaps even owe him something himself; that by such and such agreements, which he himself had wished to enter into on such and such a date, he had no right to demand anything more, and so on and so forth. The young man was stunned, suspected untruth and deceit, nearly lost his temper altogether, and seemed to lose his mind. It was precisely this circumstance that led to the catastrophe whose account will make up the subject of my first, introductory novel, or rather its outward side. But before I go on to this novel, I must also tell about Fyodor Pavlovich’s other two sons, Mitya’s brothers, and explain where they came from.