III. The Second Marriage and the Second Children

Fyodor Pavlovich, having packed four-year-old Mitya off his hands, very soon afterward married a second time. This second marriage lasted about eight years. He took this second wife of his, also a very young person, Sofya Ivanovna, from another province, where he had gone on a small contracting business in partnership with some little Yid. Though Fyodor Pavlovich caroused, and drank, and behaved outrageously, he never stopped seeing to the investment of his capital, and he always managed his little affairs successfully, though, of course, almost always rather meanly. Sofya Ivanovna was one of the “little orphans,” without family from childhood, the daughter of some obscure deacon, who had grown up in the rich house of her benefactress, her guardian and her tormentor, a distinguished old general’s widow, the widow of General Vorokhov. I do not know the details, but I have only heard that the ward, a meek, gentle, and uncomplaining girl, was once cut down from a noose that she had hung from a nail in the storeroom, so hard was it for her to bear the willfulness and the endless reproaches of this old woman, who was apparently not wicked, but was only a most insufferable petty tyrant out of idleness. Fyodor Pavlovich asked for her hand; inquiries were made about him, and he was sent packing; and then, just as in his first marriage, he suggested to the little orphan that they elope. Very, very possibly she would not have gone with him for anything had she learned more details about him in time. But this was in another province; and besides, what could a sixteen-year-old girl understand, except that it was better to jump in the river than to stay with her benefactress? And so the poor thing exchanged a benefactress for a benefactor. This time Fyodor Pavlovich did not get a kopeck, because the general’s widow was angry, gave nothing, and on top of that cursed them both; but this time he had not counted on getting anything; he had simply been captivated by the innocent girl’s remarkable beauty and, above all, by her innocent look, which had struck him, a sensualist who until then had been a depraved lover only of the coarser sort of female beauty. “Those innocent little eyes slashed through my soul like a razor that time,” he used to say afterward, giggling nastily in his own way. However, in a depraved man even this could have been only a sensual attraction. Having received no reward, Fyodor Pavlovich did not stand on ceremony with his wife, and taking advantage of the fact that she was, so to speak, “guilty” before him and that he had almost “cut her down from the noose,” and taking advantage, besides, of her phenomenal meekness and submissiveness, he even trampled underfoot the most ordinary marital decencies. Bad women came to the house, right there in his wife’s presence, and orgies were held. As a characteristic touch I will mention that the servant Grigory, a gloomy, stupid, and stubborn moralizer, who had hated his former mistress, Adelaida Ivanovna, this time took the side of the new mistress, defended her, and quarreled with Fyodor Pavlovich on her behalf in a manner almost impermissible for a servant, and once he even broke up an orgy and drove out all the disreputable women who had come, by force. Later the unhappy young woman, frightened from her very childhood, came down with a sort of nervous female illness, met with most often among the common people, in village women, who are called shriekers because of this illness. From this illness, with its terrible hysterical fits, the sufferer at times even lost her reason. Nevertheless she bore Fyodor Pavlovich two sons, Ivan and Alexei, the first in the first year of the marriage and the second three years later. When she died, the boy Alexei was in his fourth year, and strange as it is, I know that he remembered his mother all his life afterward—as if through a dream, of course. After her death almost exactly the same thing happened to both boys as had happened to the first, Mitya: they were completely forgotten and abandoned by their father and ended up with that same Grigory, also in his cottage. And there in the cottage they were found by the old petty tyrant, the general’s widow, their mother’s benefactress and guardian. She was still alive, and all that time, all eight years, she had not been able to forget the insult done to her. All eight years she had had the most exact information on the sly about the life and doings of her “Sofya,” and hearing how ill she was and what outrages surrounded her, she had said aloud two or three times to her female hangers-on: “It serves her right, God has sent it to her for her ingratitude.”

Exactly three months after Sofya Ivanovna died, the general’s widow suddenly turned up in our town in person, and went straight to Fyodor Pavlovich’s house, and she stayed in the town only about half an hour altogether, but she did a great deal. It was evening. Fyodor Pavlovich, whom she had not seen in all those eight years, came out to her a little drunk. It is told that instantly, without any explanations, the moment she saw him, she gave him two resounding slaps in the face, good ones, and three times pulled him by the forelock downward, and then, without adding a word, went straight to the cottage, to the two boys. Noticing at first glance that they were unwashed and in dirty linen, she at once gave another slap to Grigory himself and announced to him that she was taking both children away with her; then she led them out just as they were, wrapped them in a plaid, put them in her carriage, and took them away to her own town. Grigory bore this slap like a devoted slave, did not utter one rude word, and when he saw the old lady to her carriage, he bowed to her from the waist and said impressively that “God will repay you for the orphans.” “You are a blockhead all the same!” the general’s widow shouted to him as she drove off. Fyodor Pavlovich, having thought the whole thing over, found that it was a good thing, and afterward did not refuse his formal consent to the children’s upbringing by the general’s widow on a single point. As for the slaps he had received, he went all over town telling about them himself.

It so happened that the general’s widow too died soon after that, having, however, stipulated in her will a thousand rubles for each of the two little ones “for their education, and all this money is to be spent on them without fail, but so that it lasts until they come of age, because such a handout is more than enough for such children, and if anyone pleases, let him loosen his own purse strings,” and so on and so forth. I have not read the will myself, but I have heard that there was something strange of precisely this sort in it, and expressed much too peculiarly. The old woman’s principal heir, however, turned out to be an honest man, the marshal of nobility of that province, Yefim Petrovich Polenov. After exchanging letters with Fyodor Pavlovich and guessing instantly that you would never get money out of him for the upbringing of his own children (though he never refused outright, but in such cases always only dragged things out, sometimes even pouring himself out in sentimentalities), he took a personal interest in the orphans and became especially fond of the younger of them, Alexei, so that for a long time Alexei even grew up in his family. I ask the reader to note this from the very beginning. And if the young men were indebted to anyone for their upbringing and education for the rest of their lives, it was precisely to this Yefim Petrovich, a most noble and humane man, of a kind that is rarely met. He kept the little ones’ thousand apiece, left by the general’s widow, untouched, so that by the time they came of age it had grown with interest to two thousand each, and he brought them up at his own expense, and of course spent far more than a thousand on each of them. Again I shall not enter for now into a detailed account of their childhood and youth, but will indicate only the most important circumstances. About the elder, Ivan, however, I will report only that he grew up a sort of sullen boy, shut up in himself, by no means timid, but as though he had grasped as early as ten that they were growing up, after all, in someone else’s family and on someone else’s charity, and that their father was some sort of man it was shameful even to talk about, and so on and so forth. This boy very soon, almost in infancy (so it was said, at least), began to show some unusual and brilliant abilities for learning. I do not know exactly, but somehow it came about that he parted from Yefim Petrovich’s family when he was barely thirteen, moving to one of the Moscow gymnasiums and boarding with some experienced and, in those days, celebrated educator, a friend of Yefim Petrovich’s from childhood. Ivan himself used to say later that it had all come about, so to speak, from Yefim Petrovich’s “ardor for good works,” carried away as he was by the idea that a boy of genius should be educated by an educator of genius. However, neither Yefim Petrovich nor the educator of genius was still living when the young man finished the gymnasium and entered the university. Since Yefim Petrovich had managed things badly, and receiving the boys’ own money, bequeathed by the tyrannical general’s widow and grown with interest from one thousand to two, was delayed by various formalities and red tape quite unavoidable among us, the young man had a very hard time of it in his first two years at the university, since all that time he was forced to feed and keep himself and to study at the same time. It must be noted that he did not even wish to make an attempt at that time to write to his father—perhaps out of pride, out of contempt for him, or perhaps as a result of cold, sound reasoning, which told him that he would not get any even slightly serious support from his papa. Be that as it may, the young man did not lose his head in the least, and managed after all to find work, at first giving lessons at twenty kopecks, and then running around to newspaper offices and supplying little articles of ten lines about street incidents, signed “Eyewitness.” These little articles, they say, were always so interestingly and piquantly put together that they quickly caught on, and in this alone the young man showed all his practical and intellectual superiority over that numerous, eternally needy, and unhappy part of our student youth of both sexes who in the capitals, as a rule, wear out the doorsteps of various newspapers and magazines from morning till night, unable to think up anything better than endlessly repeating one and the same request for translations from the French or for copying. Having become acquainted with the editorial offices, Ivan Fyodorovich never broke off his connections with them afterward, and in his last years at the university he began publishing very talented reviews of books on various specialized subjects, so that he even became known in literary circles. However, only quite recently had he happened, by chance, suddenly to attract particular attention in a much wider circle of readers, so that a great many people took note of him and remembered him all at once. This was a rather curious incident. Having already left the university and preparing to go abroad on his two thousand, Ivan Fyodorovich suddenly published in one of the big newspapers a strange article, which attracted the attention even of non-specialists, and, above all, on a subject apparently quite unfamiliar to him, since he had taken his degree in the natural sciences. The article was written on the question of the ecclesiastical courts, which was being raised everywhere at the time. Examining certain opinions already put forward on this question, he also stated his own personal view. The main thing was in the tone and in the remarkable unexpectedness of the conclusion. And meanwhile many of the churchmen decidedly took the author for one of their own. And suddenly, alongside them, not only the secularists but even the atheists themselves began applauding as well, from their side. In the end some shrewd people decided that the whole article was nothing but an impudent farce and a mockery. I mention this incident especially because the article in due course also made its way into our famous monastery just outside town, where the question of the ecclesiastical courts that had arisen was of general interest; it made its way there and produced complete bewilderment. And learning the author’s name, they became interested also in the fact that he was a native of our town and the son of “that very same Fyodor Pavlovich.” And just then, at that very time, the author himself suddenly turned up among us.

Why Ivan Fyodorovich came to us then is a question, I remember, that I asked myself even at the time with something almost like uneasiness. This so fateful arrival, which was the beginning of so many consequences, long remained, almost always, an unclear matter for me. Generally speaking, it was strange that a young man so learned, so proud and cautious in appearance, should suddenly turn up in such an outrageous house, at the home of such a father, who had ignored him all his life, had not known him or remembered him, and who, though of course he would not have given him money for anything or under any circumstances had his son asked for it, had all the same been afraid all his life that his sons, Ivan and Alexei, would also come someday and ask for money. And now the young man settles in the house of such a father, lives with him one month and then another, and the two get along as well as could be. This last surprised not only me but many others especially. Pyotr Alexandrovich Miusov, of whom I have already spoken above, a distant relative of Fyodor Pavlovich’s through his first wife, happened to be among us again at that time, on his estate just outside town, having come from Paris, where he had now settled for good. I remember that he was precisely the one who wondered at it more than anyone, after getting to know the young man, who interested him extremely and with whom, not without an inward pang, he sometimes crossed swords in learning. “He is proud,” he used to say to us about him then, “he will always earn himself a kopeck, he has money for going abroad even now—so what does he want here? It’s clear to everyone that he hasn’t come to his father for money, because in any case his father won’t give him any. He doesn’t care for drinking wine and debauchery, and yet the old man can’t do without him, that’s how well they get along!” This was the truth; the young man even had a visible influence on the old man; the latter almost began at times to obey him, so it seemed, though he was extremely and even at times spitefully willful; he even began at times to behave more decently…

Only later did it come out that Ivan Fyodorovich had come partly at the request of, and on the business of, his elder brother, Dmitri Fyodorovich, whom he had also come to know and seen for the first time in his life at almost that same time, on this same visit, but with whom, however, he had entered into correspondence over an important matter that concerned Dmitri Fyodorovich more, even before he arrived from Moscow. What that matter was the reader will learn fully, in detail, in due course. Nevertheless, even when I already knew about this particular circumstance as well, Ivan Fyodorovich still seemed to me an enigma, and his arrival among us inexplicable all the same.

I will add, too, that Ivan Fyodorovich had at the time the look of a mediator and peacemaker between his father and his elder brother, Dmitri Fyodorovich, who had then started a great quarrel with his father and even a formal lawsuit against him.

This little family, I repeat, came together then, all of it, for the first time in their lives, and some of its members saw each other for the first time in their lives. Only the youngest son, Alexei Fyodorovich, had already been living among us for about a year before that, and so had come to us before any of his brothers. It is precisely about this Alexei that I find it hardest of all to speak in my present prefatory account, before bringing him on stage in the novel. But I shall have to write a preface about him as well, at least in order to explain beforehand one very strange point, namely: I am obliged to present my future hero to my readers, from the first scene of his novel, in a novice’s cassock. Yes, he had already been living in our monastery for about a year then, and, it seemed, was preparing to shut himself up in it for the rest of his life.