Bab Bab 4 · The Third Son, Alyosha

. The Third Son, Alyosha

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 extraordinary 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

every one 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 any

one. 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 naïve 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 criticize and would never condemn any one 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 offense, 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 any one

before.

Every one, 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 favorite

all the while he was at school. He was rarely playful or merry, but any

one 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 any one, 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 offense 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 he 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, be criticized too severely, for at the

slightest acquaintance with him any one 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 Miüsov, 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 center 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 simply what 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, Adelaïda 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 goiter, 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 goiter 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 own 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

any one 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_, those hooks, on purpose for me

alone, for, if you only knew, Alyosha, what a blackguard 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._’ 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.