The Brothers Karamazov | Page 7

wonder to many others as
well as to me. Pyotr Alexandrovitch Miusov, of whom we have spoken
already, the cousin of Fyodor Pavlovitch's first wife, happened to be in
the neighbourhood again on a visit to his estate. He had come from
Paris, which was his permanent home. I remember that he was more
surprised than anyone when he made the acquaintance of the young
man, who interested him extremely, and with whom he sometimes
argued and not without inner pang compared himself in acquirements.
"He is proud," he used to say, "he will never be in want of pence; he
has got money enough to go abroad now. What does he want here?
Everyone can see that he hasn't come for money, for his father would
never give him any. He has no taste for drink and dissipation, and yet
his father can't do without him. They get on so well together!"
That was the truth; the young man had an unmistakable influence over
his father, who positively appeared to be behaving more decently and
even seemed at times ready to obey his son, though often extremely
and even spitefully perverse.
It was only later that we learned that Ivan had come partly at the
request of, and in the interests of, his elder brother, Dmitri, whom he
saw for the first time on this very visit, though he had before leaving
Moscow been in correspondence with him about an important matter of
more concern to Dmitri than himself. What that business was the reader
will learn fully in due time. Yet even when I did know of this special
circumstance I still felt Ivan Fyodorovitch to be an enigmatic figure,
and thought his visit rather mysterious.
I may add that Ivan appeared at the time in the light of a mediator
between his father and his elder brother Dmitri, who was in open
quarrel with his father and even planning to bring an action against
him.
The family, I repeat, was now united for the first time, and some of its

members met for the first time in their lives. The younger brother,
Alexey, had been a year already among us, having been the first of the
three to arrive. It is of that brother Alexey I find it most difficult to
speak in this introduction. Yet I must give some preliminary account of
him, if only to explain one queer fact, which is that I have to introduce
my hero to the reader wearing the cassock of a novice. Yes, he had
been for the last year in our monastery, and seemed willing to be
cloistered there for the rest of his life.

Chapter 4
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 extrordinary 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 everyone 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