The Brothers Karamazov

The Brothers Karamazov
by Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky
1879
translated by Constance Garnett
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PART I
Book I
The History of a Family

Chapter 1
Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov
ALEXEY Fyodorovitch Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor
Pavlovitch Karamazov, a landowner well known in our district in his
own day, and still remembered among us owing to his gloomy and
tragic death, which happened thirteen years ago, and which I shall
describe in its proper place. For the present I will only say that this
"landowner"- for so we used to call him, although he hardly spent a day
of his life on his own estate- was a strange type, yet one pretty
frequently to be met with, a type abject and vicious and at the same
time senseless. But he was one of those senseless persons who are very
well capable of looking after their worldly affairs, and, apparently, after
nothing else. Fyodor Pavlovitch, for instance, began with next to

nothing; his estate was of the smallest; he ran to dine at other men's
tables, and fastened on them as a toady, yet at his death it appeared that
he had a hundred thousand roubles in hard cash. At the same time, he
was all his life one of the most senseless, fantastical fellows in the
whole district. I repeat, it was not stupidity- the majority of these
fantastical fellows are shrewd and intelligent enough- but just
senselessness, and a peculiar national form of it.
He was married twice, and had three sons, the eldest, Dmitri, by his
first wife, and two, Ivan and Alexey, by his second. Fyodor
Pavlovitch's first wife, Adelaida Ivanovna, belonged to a fairly rich and
distinguished noble family, also landowners in our district, the Miusovs.
How it came to pass that an heiress, who was also a beauty, and
moreover one of those vigorous intelligent girls, so common in this
generation, but sometimes also to be found in the last, could have
married such a worthless, puny weakling, as we all called him, I won't
attempt to explain. I knew a young lady of the last "romantic"
generation who after some years of an enigmatic passion for a
gentleman, whom she might quite easily have married at any moment,
invented insuperable obstacles to their union, and ended by throwing
herself one stormy night into a rather deep and rapid river from a high
bank, almost a precipice, and so perished, entirely to satisfy her own
caprice, and to be like Shakespeare's Ophelia. Indeed, if this precipice,
a chosen and favourite spot of hers, had been less picturesque, if there
had been a prosaic flat bank in its place, most likely the suicide would
never have taken place. This is a fact, and probably there have been not
a few similar instances in the last two or three generations. Adelaida
Ivanovna Miusov's action was similarly, no doubt, an echo of other
people's ideas, and was due to the irritation caused by lack of mental
freedom. She wanted, perhaps, to show her feminine independence, to
override class distinctions and the despotism of her family. And a
pliable imagination persuaded her, we must suppose, for a brief
moment, that Fyodor Pavlovitch, in spite of his parasitic position, was
one of the bold and ironical spirits of that progressive epoch, though he
was, in fact, an ill-natured buffoon and nothing more. What gave the
marriage piquancy was that it was preceded by an elopement, and this
greatly captivated Adelaida Ivanovna's fancy. Fyodor Pavlovitch's

position at the time made him specially eager for any such enterprise,
for he was passionately anxious to make a career in one way or another.
To attach himself to a good family and obtain a dowry was an alluring
prospect. As for mutual love it did not exist apparently, either in the
bride or in him, in spite of Adelaida Ivanovna's beauty. This was,
perhaps, a unique case of the kind in the life of Fyodor Pavlovitch, who
was always of a voluptuous temper, and ready to run after any petticoat
on the slightest encouragement. She seems to have been the only
woman who made no particular appeal to his senses.
Immediatley after the elopement Adelaida Ivanovna discerned in a
flash that she had no feeling for her husband but contempt. The
marriage accordingly showed itself in its true colours with
extraordinary rapidity. Although the family accepted the event pretty
quickly and apportioned the runaway bride her dowry, the husband and
wife began to lead a most disorderly life, and there were everlasting
scenes between them. It was said that the young wife showed
incomparably more generosity and dignity than Fyodor Pavlovitch,
who, as is now known, got hold of all her money up to twenty five
thousand roubles as soon as she