The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky; Andrew R. MacAndrew Read Free Book Online Page A

Very shortly after losing her husband, the inconsolable widow took all her daughters (they had no sons) on a long trip to Italy, sending Alyosha to live with two ladies who were distant relatives of Mr. Polenov’s. Alyosha, who had never seen them before, did not know what the financial arrangements were. This was another trait that was very characteristic of him—he never cared whose money he lived on. In this respect, he was a striking contrast to his brother Ivan, who worked hard to support himself during his first two years at the university rather than ask for help, and who had been painfully aware, ever since his childhood, of living on the charity of strangers. I do not think Alyosha should be judged too severely on this account, however, for he was quite obviously one of those child-like, saintly creatures, who, if he were suddenly to come into a large fortune, would think nothing of giving it all away to some good cause, or simply to the first clever rascal who asked for it. In general, he did not seem to know the value of money. I do not mean that literally of course, but when he was given pocket money (for which he never asked), he either kept it for weeks on end without knowing what to do with it, or spent it at once on anything. After observing Alyosha for some time, Peter Miusov, who set great store by bourgeois respectability and was very punctilious in money matters, passed the following somewhat paradoxical judgment on him:
    “Alyosha,” Miusov declared, “may be the only man in the world who, if left all by himself in the middle of a strange city inhabited by a million unknown people, would never suffer from cold or hunger. For he would immediately be offered food and shelter; and if no one offered him anything, he would find everything he needed right away himself, and it would cost him no effort, nor make him feel in the least humiliated, nor, for that matter, would he be imposing himself on others; just the contrary, they would all be only too happy to do things for him.”
    Alyosha did not finish school. When he was still a year away from graduation he told the ladies he lived with that he had to go and see his father to discuss an idea that had occurred to him. The two ladies, who were sorry to lose him, tried in vain to persuade him to stay. Since it was not an expensive journey, he planned to pay for it by pawning his watch, a parting gift from Mrs. Polenov, but the two ladies wouldn’t hear of it. They gave him a goodly sum of money and, in addition, bought him a complete wardrobe. Alyosha, however, returned half the money, assuring them that he preferred to travel third class.
    When he first arrived in our town, his father questioned him suspiciously, trying to find out just what had brought him here before he had finished school. Instead of answering, Alyosha plunged into his private thoughts, as he so often did. It soon became clear that he was seeking his mother’s grave, and he himself practically confirmed that this had been his real reason for coming. But it can hardly have been the only reason. Most likely, at that time he did not really know himself why he had come, not being quite sure what it was that was driving him: a peculiar yearning had arisen in his heart, drawing him irresistibly into a new, unknown, but by then inevitable course.
    Mr. Karamazov was unable to show his son where he had buried his second wife for, once the coffin had been lowered into the earth, he had never returned to visit her grave and, since that had been many years before, he had entirely forgotten where the grave was. Moreover, Mr. Karamazov had been away from our town for a long time. Three or four years after his second wife’s death, he had gone to the south of Russia, ending up in Odessa where he stayed for several years. There he came across “lots of Yids of all shapes and sizes,” as he put it, and even got to know “not only Yids but respectable Jews as well.” It was probably during this