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Being at a loss to resolve these questions, I am resolved to leave them without any resolution. To be sure, the keen-sighted reader will already have guessed long ago that that is what I’ve been getting at from the very begi
And now to business.
PART I
BOOK I: A NICE LITTLE FAMILY
Chapter 1: Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov
Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov was the third son of a landowner from our district, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, well known in his own day (and still remembered among us) because of his dark and tragic death, which happened exactly thirteen years ago and which I shall speak of in its proper place. For the moment I will only say of this “landowner” (as we used to call him, though for all his life he hardly ever lived on his estate) that he was a strange type, yet one rather frequently met with, precisely the type of man who is not only worthless and depraved but muddleheaded as well—one of those muddleheaded people who still handle their own little business deals quite skillfully, if nothing else. Fyodor Pavlovich, for instance, started with next to nothing, he was a very small landowner, he ran around having di
He was married twice and had three sons—the eldest, Dmitri Fyodorovich, by his first wife, and the other two, Ivan and Alexei, by his second. Fyodor Pavlovich’s first wife belonged to a rather wealthy aristocratic family, the Miusovs, also landowners in our district. Precisely how it happened that a girl with a dowry, a beautiful girl, too, and moreover one of those pert, intelligent girls not uncommon in this generation but sometimes also to be found in the last, could have married such a worthless “runt,” as everyone used to call him, I ca
They had no sooner eloped than it became clear to Adelaida Ivanovna that she felt only contempt for her husband and nothing more. Thus the consequences of their marriage revealed themselves extraordinarily quickly. And though her family even accepted the situation fairly soon and allotted the runaway bride her dowry, the married couple began leading a very disorderly life, full of eternal scenes. It was said that in the circumstances the young wife showed far more dignity and high-mindedness than did Fyodor Pavlovich, who, as is now known, filched all her cash from her, as much as twenty-five thousand roubles, the moment she got it, so that from then on as far as she was concerned all those thousands positively vanished, as it were, into thin air. As for the little village and the rather fine town house that came with her dowry, for a long time he tried very hard to have them transferred to his name by means of some appropriate deed, and he would probably have succeeded, merely because of the contempt and loathing, so to speak, that his shameless extortions and entreaties aroused in his wife, merely because of her emotional exhaustion—anything to be rid of him. Fortunately, Adelaida Ivanov-na’s family intervened and put a stop to his hogging. It is well known that there were frequent fights between husband and wife, but according to tradition it was not Fyodor Pavlovich who did the beating but Adelaida Ivanovna, a hot-tempered lady, bold, dark-ski