From the Author

As I begin the life story of my hero, Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov, I find myself in some perplexity. Namely: although I call Alexei Fyodorovich my hero, I know myself that he is by no means a great man, and so I foresee inevitable questions of this sort: What is so remarkable about your Alexei Fyodorovich that you have chosen him for your hero? What has he done? Who has heard of him, and for what? Why should I, the reader, spend my time studying the facts of his life?

The last question is the most fatal, for to it I can only answer: “Perhaps you will see for yourself from the novel.” Well, and what if people read the novel and do not see it, and do not agree that my Alexei Fyodorovich is remarkable? I say this because I foresee it with regret. To me he is remarkable, but I have serious doubts whether I shall manage to prove it to the reader. The thing is that he is, perhaps, a man of action, but a man of action who is indefinite and has not yet become clear. However, it would be strange to demand clarity of people in times like ours. One thing, perhaps, is fairly certain: he is a strange man, even an eccentric. But strangeness and eccentricity do more harm than good when it comes to a claim on attention, especially when everyone is striving to bring the particulars together and to find at least some general sense in the general senselessness. And an eccentric, in most cases, is a particular, a thing apart. Is that not so?

Now, if you do not agree with this last thesis and answer, “It is not so,” or “It is not always so,” then I may, perhaps, take heart about the significance of my hero Alexei Fyodorovich. For not only is an eccentric “not always” a particular and a thing apart, but on the contrary, it sometimes happens that it is he, perhaps, who carries within himself the very heart of the whole, while the rest of the people of his epoch—all of them, by some wind that blew in from elsewhere, have for some reason been torn away from him for a time…

I would not, however, have launched into these very uninteresting and hazy explanations, and would have begun quite simply, without a preface: if they like it, they will read it anyway. But the trouble is that while I have one life story, I have two novels. The main novel is the second: it is the activity of my hero in our own time, precisely at our present, current moment. The first novel took place thirteen years ago, and it is hardly even a novel, only one moment from my hero’s early youth. I cannot do without this first novel, because much in the second would be incomprehensible. But this only complicates my original difficulty further: if I, that is, the biographer himself, find that even one novel would perhaps be too much for so modest and indefinite a hero, then how can I appear with two, and how am I to explain such presumption on my part?

Lost in the resolution of these questions, I resolve to bypass them without any resolution at all. Of course, the perceptive reader long ago guessed that this is what I was driving at from the very beginning, and has only been annoyed with me for wasting fruitless words and precious time. To this I will answer precisely: I wasted fruitless words and precious time, first, out of politeness, and second, out of cunning: after all, I can say, I gave some warning in advance. However, I am even glad that my novel broke up of its own accord into two stories “with an essential unity of the whole”: having become acquainted with the first story, the reader will decide for himself whether it is worth his while to take up the second. Of course, no one is bound by anything; one can drop the book after two pages of the first story and never open it again. But then there are scrupulous readers who will be sure to want to read to the end, so as not to err in their impartial judgment; such, for instance, are all Russian critics. Well, with readers like these my heart is lighter all the same: for all their thoroughness and conscientiousness, I am still giving them the most legitimate pretext for dropping the story at the novel’s first episode. Well, that is the whole preface. I quite agree that it is superfluous, but since it is already written, let it stay.

And now to business.