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- Herausgeber: e-artnow Collections
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Tales of Russian Existentialism – 4 Classic Spiritual Fiction Novels encapsulates the profound explorations of the human condition by titans of Russian literature. This anthology traverses themes of existential dread, spiritual awakening, and moral questioning that resonate with timeless relevance. The included works present a tapestry of richly layered stories that move seamlessly from the profound introspection of being to the intricate dynamics of ethics and faith. With each piece offering a distinct literary style, readers encounter narratives that range from the philosophical to the deeply personal, capturing the spiritual essence pivotal to Russian existential thought. The anthology is a testament to the literary prowess of authors like Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who have indelibly influenced existential and spiritual fiction. Through examining societal norms and personal turmoil, these authors illuminate the struggles inherent in the journey of self-discovery. Aligning with the existentialist movement that questions human purpose and morality, their collective body of work draws from personal experiences and historical contexts, offering readers a window into the profound introspections of Russian philosophy and literature. Recommended for those eager to explore complexities of the human spirit, this anthology promises an enriching journey through diverse philosophical landscapes. It is a primer for understanding the depth of Russian existentialism, inviting readers to engage with a multitude of insights from luminary authors. It offers an unparalleled opportunity to traverse with legendary literary figures through narratives that challenge and expand perceptions of identity, belief, and existence. The dialogue fostered within these pages will undoubtedly inspire contemplation and intellectual discourse.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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Tales of Russian Existentialism – 4 Classic Spiritual Fiction Novels
Table of Contents
Introduction
Curatorial Vision
This collection unites four works that approach spiritual trial through dramatically different narrative instruments. The Brothers Karamazov examines freedom, responsibility, and belief amid intense familial and social pressures. The Grand Inquisitor distills these questions into a stark confrontation over authority and conscience. The Death of Ivan Ilych brings them into the privacy of illness and mortality. The Idiot tests compassion and innocence against worldly calculation. Together they map a spectrum of existential inquiry: communal, dialogic, domestic, and personal. Each work presses toward the same horizon—meaning under suffering—while staging it through distinctive voices and ethical predicaments.
The through-line is a confrontation with freedom: the capacity to choose love or domination when certainty is unavailable. In Dostoyevsky’s two texts, argument becomes a dramatic force, shaping characters who wrestle with the seductions of power and the demands of conscience. Tolstoy’s novella narrows the lens to one life, showing how ordinary habits meet ultimate questions. In The Idiot, Fiódor Dostoyevski explores holiness as vulnerability. Across the volume, suffering exposes motives, and speech alternates with silence as a test of truth. These works together foreground ethical risk as the living core of spiritual experience.
The aim in presenting these works together is to let readers witness a sequence of intensities. Philosophical disputation receives its most compressed form in The Grand Inquisitor, its widest canvas in The Brothers Karamazov, its intimate reckoning in The Death of Ivan Ilych, and its paradoxical innocence in The Idiot. The collection traces how the same questions alter when expressed as parable, family conflict, sickroom meditation, or social satire. By arranging these modes in conversation, it highlights recurring motifs—guilt, mercy, freedom—while preserving their distinct timbres and moral stakes. Such juxtaposition invites renewed attention to psychological nuance and ethical consequence.
This gathering differs from encountering the works separately by emphasizing their counterpoint and cumulative resonance. Read together, the dialogue about authority in The Grand Inquisitor reframes dilemmas in The Brothers Karamazov, while Tolstoy’s mortal perspective sharpens the urgency of both. The Idiot offers a contrasting ethic of openness that tests their conclusions. Instead of isolated achievements, the volume becomes a network of questions about faith, judgment, and compassion. The design is thematic rather than chronological, encouraging patterns to surface that might remain less visible when the works are approached in isolation.
Thematic & Aesthetic Interplay
The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot frame a dialogue on innocence and culpability, presenting characters whose sincerity becomes a social provocation. In Dostoyevsky’s work, confession is performative and contested, creating moral theater in which truth depends on courage under scrutiny. Tolstoy replies by relocating judgment to the interior, where pain strips away justifications. The Grand Inquisitor stands between, pressing the question of whether humanity prefers security to freedom. Across the four, silence competes with eloquence, prayer contends with irony, and the pressure of time exposes the soul’s evasions. Compassion emerges as both revelation and risk.
Tone varies sharply, shaping the philosophical charge. The Brothers Karamazov orchestrates cacophony—pleas, accusations, and visions—so that meaning arises from conflict itself. The Grand Inquisitor is severe and symmetrical, a parable whose poise heightens its provocation. The Death of Ivan Ilych offers spare realism, its clarity acting like moral light. The Idiot moves with tenderness and volatility, alternating wonder with social cruelty. These tonal differences create a counterpoint in which one work’s restraint answers another’s tumult, suggesting that spiritual insight can be argued, narrated, or simply endured, and that each form changes what counts as knowledge.
Recurring images bind the works: bread and hunger as figures of dependence; light and shadow as moral weather; a compassionate glance as disruptive grace. Dostoyevsky’s two texts echo each other through charged confrontations that test freedom against protection, while The Idiot extends the experiment by placing radical gentleness within ordinary society. Tolstoy’s narrative, though quieter, answers with a final seriousness about truth that rhetoric cannot soften. Together they ask whether consolation is earned by reason, bestowed by mercy, or discovered in suffering. The conversation is cumulative, each work deepening the others’ unanswered questions.
The Grand Inquisitor converses most directly with The Brothers Karamazov, compressing the latter’s turbulent inquiries into a single, austere confrontation. Its challenge to miracle and authority reverberates through Dostoyevsky’s wider panoramas of doubt and desire. The Idiot revisits the possibility of redemptive innocence posed by that confrontation, testing whether compassion can survive public exposure. Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych reframes these pressures by removing spectacle and setting the argument inside pain and time. Across the collection, a question raised in one work becomes a test case in another, forming a chain of responses rather than repetitions.
Enduring Impact & Critical Reception
The collection remains vital because it refuses easy consolations while insisting on human dignity under extreme pressure. Contemporary discourse still circles around freedom, authority, and the meaning of suffering, and these works dramatize those issues without system or slogan. The Brothers Karamazov offers a capacious arena for competing moral visions; The Grand Inquisitor compels a sober reckoning with security and conscience; The Death of Ivan Ilych clarifies mortality’s demand for honesty; The Idiot proposes a fragile ethic of mercy. Together they supply imaginative tests that continue to inform debates about law, care, responsibility, and hope.
These works have long been recognized as landmarks of psychological and spiritual fiction, provoking sustained discussion across philosophy, theology, and the arts. The Brothers Karamazov is often cited as a profound novel of ideas; The Grand Inquisitor has circulated widely as a freestanding meditation. The Death of Ivan Ilych is frequently described as a classic portrayal of dying, and The Idiot as a daring portrait of goodness under strain. Their reputations have endured through repeated readings, classroom debates, and creative reinterpretations, reaffirming their capacity to unsettle assumptions and to animate inquiries that outlast the circumstances of composition.
Their cultural afterlives are extensive, spanning theater, cinema, and public argument. The Brothers Karamazov has served as a touchstone for controversies about guilt and forgiveness; The Grand Inquisitor is quoted whenever freedom and control are weighed. The Death of Ivan Ilych informs discussions of medical ethics and end‑of‑life care; The Idiot inspires portraits of innocence confronting humiliation. Scholars return to them for examples of narrative thought, while artists adopt their figures and dilemmas. That breadth of reference signals a rare durability: questions posed in these pages continue to organize conversations well beyond literary study.
What unites the reception of these works is a sense that philosophical problems are inseparable from the forms that bear them. Arguments about faith and freedom become dramatic, domestic, and intimate, and the resulting plurality resists final answers. The Brothers Karamazov, The Grand Inquisitor, The Death of Ivan Ilych, and The Idiot keep opening new vantage points on responsibility, compassion, and the dignity of the person. Read together, they cultivate interpretive patience and ethical humility, offering a demanding companionship for those who continue to examine life under pressure and to honor truth without simplification.
Historical Context
Socio-Political Landscape
Mid-nineteenth-century Russia was governed by an autocratic tsar, supported by a stratified nobility, a censored press, and an Orthodox establishment that sanctified state authority. The Crimean War’s humiliation exposed institutional weakness and provoked debates about national purpose. Within this atmosphere, questions of personal freedom, guilt, and redemption acquired political resonance. The works collected here grow out of that tension: the moral stakes of private choice collide with systems claiming universal obedience. Courts, churches, and bureaucracies appear not as neutral backdrops but as forces shaping conscience. The authors probe whether spiritual liberty survives amid institutions that promise order while often generating spiritual torpor.
The Emancipation of the Serfs in 1861 and judicial reforms of 1864 transformed social life, unsettling landholding patterns, household hierarchies, and the moral economy. Former serfs faced redemption payments and precarious mobility; impoverished gentry confronted new irrelevance. Local self-government widened participation yet generated fresh conflicts between community norms and codified law. These changes saturate the social worlds of The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot, where provincial towns weigh custom against procedure, and money circulates with corrosive power. The instability of status—who is respectable, who is suspect—drives characters to test spiritual commitments against the temptations and humiliations of a society learning to live after bondage.
Russia’s expanding bureaucracy offered careers to the educated classes, refining a meritocratic ideal that often curdled into routinized self-interest. The Death of Ivan Ilych scrutinizes this milieu from within, exposing how administrative rationality and polite sociability can conceal moral vacancy. Its protagonist’s climb through ranks mirrors the promise of reform-era institutions, while his illness reveals how those same institutions evade the ultimate human question. The work thus maps a political achievement—the professionalization of service—onto a spiritual crisis, suggesting that procedural efficiency and social correctness may intensify, rather than soothe, the dread of meaninglessness in a culture that equates propriety with virtue.
Urbanization and the circulation of capital reconfigured Russian life after mid-century. Petersburg and Moscow concentrated courts, ministries, banks, and a voracious press eager for scandal. Legal spectacles enthralled readers, and high-profile trials shaped public opinion about guilt and responsibility. The Brothers Karamazov stages this fascination through its climactic courtroom sequence, where testimony, rhetoric, and rumor struggle with conscience and truth. The urban sphere promises transparency—record-keeping, forensic detail, reportage—yet also multiplies interpretation and noise. The legal framework appears simultaneously as progress and theater, a place where spiritual drama can be mistaken for entertainment and where the fate of a soul becomes a public event.
State surveillance intensified as radical circles spread underground in the 1860s and 1870s, culminating in spectacular violence and the assassination of Alexander II in 1881. Fear of ideological contagion encouraged paternalist claims that people desired bread and security more than freedom. The Grand Inquisitor, circulating independently as well as within its parent novel, distilled this struggle into a parable of authority promising happiness in exchange for conscience. Though set beyond Russia, readers recognized a Russian quarrel about whether suffering individuals can bear freedom’s burden. The parable probes the political temptation to manage salvation, replacing risky love with organized benevolence enforced from above.
Punishment and spiritual rebirth dominated public discourse, not least because penal exile and forced labor were integral to imperial governance. Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s experience of arrest and Siberian confinement gave visceral weight to the anthology’s carceral sensibility: binding, interrogation, confession, reprieve. The Karamazov investigation and the moral scrutiny surrounding The Idiot’s compassionate outsider unfold against cultures of surveillance and shame. These settings illuminate a broader sociopolitical lesson: institutions that claim to reform the soul often misunderstand it. The resulting tension, between spiritual conscience and disciplinary power, guides characters toward choices that expose the limits of coercion as a path to redemption.
Family law, inheritance disputes, and the patriarch’s authority formed a microcosm of the state’s hierarchical logic. Property regimes and the new courts placed kinship under public judgment, drawing private quarrels into communal forums. The Brothers Karamazov explores the explosive blend of money, desire, and filial resentment that reforms could not pacify. The Idiot’s salons stage gentility as a precarious performance maintained by credit and gossip. The Death of Ivan Ilych reveals how illness exposes legalistic comforts as fragile. Medicine’s growing authority intersects with religious ritual, yet neither bureaucracy nor etiquette secures a good death, compelling a reckoning with ultimate sovereignty.
Intellectual & Aesthetic Currents
The great debate between Westernizers and Slavophiles animated the period, opposing rationalist modernization to a vision of organic community anchored in Orthodoxy. These works wrestle with whether salvation lies in social engineering or in inward conversion. Dostoyevsky subjects philosophical systems to narrative trial, testing promises of collective harmony against the price paid by singular souls. Tolstoy interrogates conventional morality, seeking authenticity beyond polite veneers. The Grand Inquisitor crystallizes the quarrel: is human freedom a gift too heavy to carry without miracle and authority, or is it the only terrain where love becomes real? The anthology treats philosophy as a lived, risky wager.
Positivism and the new sciences of mind, physiology, and statistics promised to domesticate chance and banish metaphysical uncertainty. Utilitarian ideals of the greatest good, popular in educated circles, valorized calculable outcomes. The Idiot counters with a figure whose goodness resists arithmetic, proposing mercy as an epistemology. The Death of Ivan Ilych exposes medical language as a shield against existential dread, dramatizing how procedural knowledge falters at the threshold of death. In The Brothers Karamazov, psychological motives are meticulously itemized, yet the narrative refuses reduction to neurological or economic causation, insisting on irreducible moral freedom even within material constraints.
Realism supplied the dominant literary method, yet these books stretch it toward metaphysical inquiry. The Brothers Karamazov builds a polyphonic architecture in which competing voices—skeptic, believer, sensualist, ascetic—argue without authorial decree. The Grand Inquisitor functions as a dramatic monologue embedded in prose epic, a theatrical crystallization of theological conflict. The Idiot adopts social novel conventions while importing hagiographic motifs. The Death of Ivan Ilych compresses realist detail into a parable of dying, its economy of scenes serving spiritual shock. Together they demonstrate a realism capacious enough to stage invisible battles of conscience alongside the documentary surfaces of everyday life.
The figure of the “holy fool” informs The Idiot, drawing on Orthodox reverence for sanctity that appears as weakness or madness to worldly eyes. Such sanctity is performative and paradoxical: vulnerability reveals strength; humiliation purifies perception. This aesthetic complicates the era’s admiration for efficiency by valuing patience, meekness, and kenotic self-emptying. It also reframes social failure as discernment, unsettling readers trained to equate prudence with virtue. In this tradition, beauty is not decoration but witness: a radiance glimpsed precisely where decorum fails. The novel thus asks whether a society organized around calculation can recognize a form of wisdom allergic to transaction.
Confession, testimony, and legal rhetoric shape the narrative textures of the collection. The Brothers Karamazov orchestrates depositions, letters, tavern talk, and sermon into competing claims on truth. The Grand Inquisitor’s concentrated oration resembles a homily turned inside out, illuminating the seductions of eloquence. Tolstoy’s spare, pared style in The Death of Ivan Ilych strips away ornament to expose ethical nerve, while its satirical edge indicts polite conversation as a technology of evasion. Across the anthology, style is ethics by other means: syntax enacts freedom or coercion, and narrative pacing mimics the soul’s oscillation between self-justification and hard-won clarity.
Technological and media changes altered perception and narrative possibility. Railways compressed distance, accelerating chance encounters and the volatility of fortune. Telegraphy and a burgeoning press created publics hungry for sensation, trials, and moral exempla. Open court procedures invited spectatorship, while advances in medicine promised control over pain and time. The works register both exhilaration and fatigue before this tempo. The courtroom in The Brothers Karamazov becomes a stage for competing expertises; the sickroom in The Death of Ivan Ilych exposes the hollow comfort of professional jargon. Speed and publicity promise mastery, yet the texts redirect attention to patience, silence, and inward accountability.
Legacy & Reassessment Across Time
Initial reception unfolded under late-imperial censorship and the polarized press. Admirers praised the psychological daring of The Brothers Karamazov and the spiritual intensity of The Idiot, while detractors saw reaction or fanaticism. The Grand Inquisitor, excerpted and circulated, drew fire as an anti-authoritarian attack and as a critique of specific ecclesial structures, depending on the reader. The Death of Ivan Ilych was recognized for its unflinching serenity before death, though some lamented its severity. Even then, debates turned on politics as much as craft: were these books diagnosing social maladies or resisting necessary modernization?
After 1917, revolutionary priorities reframed the canon. Ideological suspicion shadowed the anthology’s religious commitments, yet the psychological acuity and social critique remained indispensable to educators and readers. Some emphasized the exposure of hypocrisy in The Death of Ivan Ilych and the corrosions of money in The Brothers Karamazov; others criticized the theological horizons of The Grand Inquisitor and the impractical idealism of The Idiot. Publication policies shifted, but the works survived by virtue of their diagnostic power: they chart inner contradictions—between collective salvation and personal freedom—that refused to be conscripted wholly by any official narrative of progress.
Global dissemination in the twentieth century multiplied interpretive frames. Translations foregrounded existential trials recognizable across cultures marked by war, displacement, and ideological fatigue. The Grand Inquisitor often stood alone on stage and radio as a compact drama about liberty and beneficence. The Death of Ivan Ilych entered medical and ethical curricula, where its unsparing gaze aided reflection on care, truth-telling, and the good death. The Idiot invited performances of tenderness amid modern cynicism. The Brothers Karamazov became a touchstone for debates on law and conscience. Across media, readers found not answers but disciplined perplexity suited to an age of catastrophe.
Contemporary scholarship reassesses the anthology through theology, law-and-literature, disability studies, and ethics of care. Attention to trauma and affect highlights how bodies register history’s pressures, from epilepsy and illness to exhaustion under bureaucratic time. Digital methods trace networks of speech and silence, correlating narrative authority with moral responsibility. Post-imperial perspectives scrutinize center-periphery dynamics within Russian modernization and the politics of sanctity. The Grand Inquisitor continues to provoke arguments about paternalism in welfare states; The Death of Ivan Ilych animates debates on palliative care; The Idiot challenges ableist norms; The Brothers Karamazov tests the possibilities of justice without spiritual amnesia.
Tales of Russian Existentialism – 4 Classic Spiritual Fiction Novels
Faith, Doubt, and the Search for Transcendence
Mortality, Conscience, and Redemption through Suffering
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Brothers Karamazov
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 received it, so that those thousands were lost to her forever. The little village and the rather fine town house which formed part of her dowry he did his utmost for a long time to transfer to his name, by means of some deed of conveyance. He would probably have succeeded, merely from her moral fatigue and desire to get rid of him, and from the contempt and loathing he aroused by his persistent and shameless importunity. But, fortunately, Adelaida Ivanovna’s family intervened and circumvented his greediness. It is known for a fact that frequent fights took place between the husband and wife, but rumour had it that Fyodor Pavlovitch did not beat his wife but was beaten by her, for she was a hot-tempered, bold, dark-browed, impatient woman, possessed of remarkable physical strength. Finally, she left the house and ran away from Fyodor Pavlovitch with a destitute divinity student, leaving Mitya, a child of three years old, in her husband’s hands. Immediately Fyodor Pavlovitch introduced a regular harem into the house, and abandoned himself to orgies of drunkenness. In the intervals he used to drive all over the province, complaining tearfully to each and all of Adelaida Ivanovna’s having left him, going into details too disgraceful for a husband to mention in regard to his own married life. What seemed to gratify him and flatter his self-love most was to play the ridiculous part of the injured husband, and to parade his woes with embellishments.
“One would think that you’d got a promotion, Fyodor Pavlovitch, you seem so pleased in spite of your sorrow,” scoffers said to him. Many even added that he was glad of a new comic part in which to play the buffoon, and that it was simply to make it funnier that he pretended to be unaware of his ludicrous position. But, who knows, it may have been simplicity. At last he succeeded in getting on the track of his runaway wife. The poor woman turned out to be in Petersburg, where she had gone with her divinity student, and where she had thrown herself into a life of complete emancipation. Fyodor Pavlovitch at once began bustling about, making preparations to go to Petersburg, with what object he could not himself have said. He would perhaps have really gone; but having determined to do so he felt at once entitled to fortify himself for the journey by another bout of reckless drinking. And just at that time his wife’s family received the news of her death in Petersburg. She had died quite suddenly in a garret, according to one story, of typhus, or as another version had it, of starvation. Fyodor Pavlovitch was drunk when he heard of his wife’s death, and the story is that he ran out into the street and began shouting with joy, raising his hands to Heaven: “Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace,” but others say he wept without restraint like a little child, so much so that people were sorry for him, in spite of the repulsion he inspired. It is quite possible that both versions were true, that he rejoiced at his release, and at the same time wept for her who released him. As a general rule, people, even the wicked, are much more naive and simple-hearted than we suppose. And we ourselves are, too.
Chapter 2
He Gets Rid of His Eldest Son
YOU can easily imagine what a father such a man could be and how he would bring up his children. His behaviour as a father was exactly what might be expected. He completely abandoned the child of his marriage with Adelaida Ivanovna, not from malice, nor because of his matrimonial grievances, but simply because he forgot him. While he was wearying everyone with his tears and complaints, and turning his house into a sink of debauchery, a faithful servant of the family, Grigory, took the three-year old Mitya into his care. If he hadn’t looked after him there would have been no one even to change the baby’s little shirt.
It happened moreover that the child’s relations on his mother’s side forgot him too at first. His grandfather was no longer living, his widow, Mitya’s grandmother, had moved to Moscow, and was seriously ill, while his daughters were married, so that Mitya remained for almost a whole year in old Grigory’s charge and lived with him in the servant’s cottage. But if his father had remembered him (he could not, indeed, have been altogether unaware of his existence) he would have sent him back to the cottage, as the child would only have been in the way of his debaucheries. But a cousin of Mitya’s mother, Pyotr Alexandrovitch Miusov, happened to return from Paris. He lived for many years afterwards abroad, but was at that time quite a young .man, and distinguished among the Miusovs as a man of enlightened ideas and of European culture, who had been in the capitals and abroad. Towards the end of his life he became a Liberal of the type common in the forties and fifties. In the course of his career he had come into contact with many of the most Liberal men of his epoch, both in Russia and abroad. He had known Proudhon and Bakunin personally, and in his declining years was very fond of describing the three days of the Paris Revolution of February, 1848, hinting that he himself had almost taken part in the fighting on the barricades. This was one of the most grateful recollections of his youth. He had an independent property of about a thousand souls, to reckon in the old style. His splendid estate lay on the outskirts of our little town and bordered on the lands of our famous monastery, with which Pyotr Alexandrovitch began an endless lawsuit, almost as soon as he came into the estate, concerning the rights of fishing in the river or wood-cutting in the forest, I don’t know exactly which. He regarded it as his duty as a citizen and a man of culture to open an attack upon the “clericals.” Hearing all about Adelaida Ivanovna, whom he, of course, remembered, and in whom he had at one time been interested, and learning of the existence of Mitya, he intervened, in spite of all his youthful indignation and contempt for Fyodor Pavlovitch. He made the latter’s acquaintance for the first time, and told him directly that he wished to undertake the child’s education. He used long afterwards to tell as a characteristic touch, that when he began to speak of Mitya, Fyodor Pavlovitch looked for some time as though he did not understand what child he was talking about, and even as though he was surprised to hear that he had a little son in the house. The story may have been exaggerated, yet it must have been something like the truth.
Fyodor Pavlovitch was all his life fond of acting, of suddenly playing an unexpected part, sometimes without any motive for doing so, and even to his own direct disadvantage, as, for instance, in the present case. This habit, however, is characteristic of a very great number of people, some of them very clever ones, not like Fyodor Pavlovitch. Pyotr Alexandrovitch carried the business through vigorously, and was appointed, with Fyodor Pavlovitch, joint guardian of the child, who had a small property, a house and land, left him by his mother. Mitya did, in fact, pass into this cousin’s keeping, but as the latter had no family of his own, and after securing the revenues of his estates was in haste to return at once to Paris, he left the boy in charge of one of his cousins, a lady living in Moscow. It came to pass that, settling permanently in Paris he, too, forgot the child, especially when the Revolution of February broke out, making an impression on his mind that he remembered all the rest of his life. The Moscow lady died, and Mitya passed into the care of one of her married daughters. I believe he changed his home a fourth time later on. I won’t enlarge upon that now, as I shall have much to tell later of Fyodor Pavlovitch’s firstborn, and must confine myself now to the most essential facts about him, without which I could not begin my story.
In the first place, this Mitya, or rather Dmitri Fyodorovitch, was the only one of Fyodor Pavlovitch’s three sons who grew up in the belief that he had property, and that he would be independent on coming of age. He spent an irregular boyhood and youth. He did not finish his studies at the gymnasium, he got into a military school, then went to the Caucasus, was promoted, fought a duel, and was degraded to the ranks, earned promotion again, led a wild life, and spent a good deal of money. He did not begin to receive any income from Fyodor Pavlovitch until he came of age, and until then got into debt. He saw and knew his father, Fyodor Pavlovitch, for the first time on coming of age, when he visited our neighbourhood on purpose to settle with him about his property. He seems not to have liked his father. He did not stay long with him, and made haste to get away, having only succeeded in obtaining a sum of money, and entering into an agreement for future payments from the estate, of the revenues and value of which he was unable (a fact worthy of note), upon this occasion, to get a statement from his father. Fyodor Pavlovitch remarked for the first time then (this, too, should be noted) that Mitya had a vague and exaggerated idea of his property. Fyodor Pavlovitch was very well satisfied with this, as it fell in with his own designs. He gathered only that the young man was frivolous, unruly, of violent passions, impatient, and dissipated, and that if he could only obtain ready money he would be satisfied, although only, of course, a short time. So Fyodor Pavlovitch began to take advantage of this fact, sending him from time to time small doles, instalments. In the end, when four years later, Mitya, losing patience, came a second time to our little town to settle up once for all with his father, it turned out to his amazement that he had nothing, that it was difficult to get an account even, that he had received the whole value of his property in sums of money from Fyodor Pavlovitch, and was perhaps even in debt to him, that by various agreements into which he had, of his own desire, entered at various previous dates, he had no right to expect anything more, and so on, and so on. The young man was overwhelmed, suspected deceit and cheating, and was almost beside himself. And, indeed, this circumstance led to the catastrophe, the account of which forms the subject of my first introductory story, or rather the external side of it. But before I pass to that story I must say a little of Fyodor Pavlovitch’s other two sons, and of their origin.
Chapter 3
The Second Marriage and the Second Family
VERY shortly after getting his four-year-old Mitya off his hands Fyodor Pavlovitch married a second time. His second marriage lasted eight years. He took this second wife, Sofya Ivanovna, also a very young girl, from another province, where he had gone upon some small piece of business in company with a Jew. Though Fyodor Pavlovitch was a drunkard and a vicious debauchee he never neglected investing his capital, and managed his business affairs very successfully, though, no doubt, not over-scrupulously. Sofya Ivanovna was the daughter of an obscure deacon, and was left from childhood an orphan without relations. She grew up in the house of a general’s widow, a wealthy old lady of good position, who was at once her benefactress and tormentor. I do not know the details, but I have only heard that the orphan girl, a meek and gentle creature, was once cut down from a halter in which she was hanging from a nail in the loft, so terrible were her sufferings from the caprice and everlasting nagging of this old woman, who was apparently not bad-hearted but had become an insufferable tyrant through idleness.
Fyodor Pavlovitch made her an offer; inquiries were made about him and he was refused. But again, as in his first marriage, he proposed an elopement to the orphan girl. There is very little doubt that she would not on any account have married him if she had known a little more about him in time. But she lived in another province; besides, what could a little girl of sixteen know about it, except that she would be better at the bottom of the river than remaining with her benefactress. So the poor child exchanged a benefactress for a benefactor. Fyodor Pavlovitch did not get a penny this time, for the general’s widow was furious. She gave them nothing and cursed them both. But he had not reckoned on a dowry; what allured him was the remarkable beauty of the innocent girl, above all her innocent appearance, which had a peculiar attraction for a vicious profligate, who had hitherto admired only the coarser types of feminine beauty.
“Those innocent eyes slit my soul up like a razor,” he used to say afterwards, with his loathsome snigger. In a man so depraved this might, of course, mean no more than sensual attraction. As he had received no dowry with his wife, and had, so to speak, taken her “from the halter,” he did not stand on ceremony with her. Making her feel that she had “wronged” him, he took advantage of her phenomenal meekness and submissiveness to trample on the elementary decencies of marriage. He gathered loose women into his house, and carried on orgies of debauchery in his wife’s presence. To show what a pass things had come to, I may mention that Grigory, the gloomy, stupid, obstinate, argumentative servant, who had always hated his first mistress, Adelaida Ivanovna, took the side of his new mistress. He championed her cause, abusing Fyodor Pavlovitch in a manner little befitting a servant, and on one occasion broke up the revels and drove all the disorderly women out of the house. In the end this unhappy young woman, kept in terror from her childhood, fell into that kind of nervous disease which is most frequently found in peasant women who are said to be “possessed by devils.” At times after terrible fits of hysterics she even lost her reason. Yet she bore Fyodor Pavlovitch two sons, Ivan and Alexey, the eldest in the first year of marriage and the second three years later. When she died, little Alexey was in his fourth year, and, strange as it seems, I know that he remembered his mother all his life, like a dream, of course. At her death almost exactly the same thing happened to the two little boys as to their elder brother, Mitya. They were completely forgotten and abandoned by their father. They were looked after by the same Grigory and lived in his cottage, where they were found by the tyrannical old lady who had brought up their mother. She was still alive, and had not, all those eight years, forgotten the insult done her. All that time she was obtaining exact information as to her Sofya’s manner of life, and hearing of her illness and hideous surroundings she declared aloud two or three times to her retainers:
“It serves her right. God has punished her for her ingratitude.”
Exactly three months after Sofya Ivanovna’s death the general’s widow suddenly appeared in our town, and went straight to Fyodor Pavlovitch’s house. She spent only half an hour in the town but she did a great deal. It was evening. Fyodor Pavlovitch, whom she had not seen for those eight years, came in to her drunk. The story is that instantly upon seeing him, without any sort of explanation, she gave him two good, resounding slaps on the face, seized him by a tuft of hair, and shook him three times up and down. Then, without a word, she went straight to the cottage to the two boys. Seeing, at the first glance, that they were unwashed and in dirty linen, she promptly gave Grigory, too, a box on the ear, and announcing that she would carry off both the children she wrapped them just as they were in a rug, put them in the carriage, and drove off to her own town. Grigory accepted the blow like a devoted slave, without a word, and when he escorted the old lady to her carriage he made her a low bow and pronounced impressively that, “God would repay her for orphans.” “You are a blockhead all the same,” the old lady shouted to him as she drove away.
Fyodor Pavlovitch, thinking it over, decided that it was a good thing, and did not refuse the general’s widow his formal consent to any proposition in regard to his children’s education. As for the slaps she had given him, he drove all over the town telling the story.
It happened that the old lady died soon after this, but she left the boys in her will a thousand roubles each “for their instruction, and so that all be spent on them exclusively, with the condition that it be so portioned out as to last till they are twenty-one, for it is more than adequate provision for such children. If other people think fit to throw away their money, let them.” I have not read the will myself, but I heard there was something queer of the sort, very whimsically expressed. The principal heir, Yefim Petrovitch Polenov, the Marshal of Nobility of the province, turned out, however, to be an honest man. Writing to Fyodor Pavlovitch, and discerning at once that he could extract nothing from him for his children’s education (though the latter never directly refused but only procrastinated as he always did in such cases, and was, indeed, at times effusively sentimental), Yefim Petrovitch took a personal interest in the orphans. He became especially fond of the younger, Alexey, who lived for a long while as one of his family. I beg the reader to note this from the beginning. And to Yefim Petrovitch, a man of a generosity and humanity rarely to be met with, the young people were more indebted for their education and bringing up than to anyone. He kept the two thousand roubles left to them by the general’s widow intact, so that by the time they came of age their portions had been doubled by the accumulation of interest. He educated them both at his own expense, and certainly spent far more than a thousand roubles upon each of them. I won’t enter into a detailed account of their boyhood and youth, but will only mention a few of the most important events. Of the elder, Ivan, I will only say that he grew into a somewhat morose and reserved, though far from timid boy. At ten years old he had realised that they were living not in their own home but on other people’s charity, and that their father was a man of whom it was disgraceful to speak. This boy began very early, almost in his infancy (so they say at least), to show a brilliant and unusual aptitude for learning. I don’t know precisely why, but he left the family of Yefim Petrovitch when he was hardly thirteen, entering a Moscow gymnasium and boarding with an experienced and celebrated teacher, an old friend of Yefim Petrovitch. Ivan used to declare afterwards that this was all due to the “ardour for good works” of Yefim Petrovitch, who was captivated by the idea that the boy’s genius should be trained by a teacher of genius. But neither Yefim Petrovitch nor this teacher was living when the young man finished at the gymnasium and entered the university. As Yefim Petrovitch had made no provision for the payment of the tyrannical old lady’s legacy, which had grown from one thousand to two, it was delayed, owing to formalities inevitable in Russia, and the young man was in great straits for the first two years at the university, as he was forced to keep himself all the time he was studying. It must be noted that he did not even attempt to communicate with his father, perhaps from pride, from contempt for him, or perhaps from his cool common sense, which told him that from such a father he would get no real assistance. However that may have been, the young man was by no means despondent and succeeded in getting work, at first giving sixpenny lessons and afterwards getting paragraphs on street incidents into the newspapers under the signature of “Eye-Witness.” These paragraphs, it was said, were so interesting and piquant that they were soon taken. This alone showed the young man’s practical and intellectual superiority over the masses of needy and unfortunate students of both sexes who hang about the offices of the newspapers and journals, unable to think of anything better than everlasting entreaties for copying and translations from the French. Having once got into touch with the editors Ivan Fyodorovitch always kept up his connection with them, and in his latter years at the university he published brilliant reviews of books upon various special subjects, so that he became well known in literary circles. But only in his last year he suddenly succeeded in attracting the attention of a far wider circle of readers, so that a great many people noticed and remembered him. It was rather a curious incident. When he had just left the university and was preparing to go abroad upon his two thousand roubles, Ivan Fyodorovitch published in one of the more important journals a strange article, which attracted general notice, on a subject of which he might have been supposed to know nothing, as he was a student of natural science. The article dealt with a subject which was being debated everywhere at the time — the position of the ecclesiastical courts. After discussing several opinions on the subject he went on to explain his own view. What was most striking about the article was its tone, and its unexpected conclusion. Many of the Church party regarded him unquestioningly as on their side. And yet not only the secularists but even atheists joined them in their applause. Finally some sagacious persons opined that the article was nothing but an impudent satirical burlesque. I mention this incident particularly because this article penetrated into the famous monastery in our neighbourhood, where the inmates, being particularly interested in question of the ecclesiastical courts, were completely bewildered by it. Learning the author’s name, they were interested in his being a native of the town and the son of “that Fyodor Pavlovitch.” And just then it was that the author himself made his appearance among us.
Why Ivan Fyodorovitch had come amongst us I remember asking myself at the time with a certain uneasiness. This fateful visit, which was the first step leading to so many consequences, I never fully explained to myself. It seemed strange on the face of it that a young man so learned, so proud, and apparently so cautious, should suddenly visit such an infamous house and a father who had ignored him all his life, hardly knew him, never thought of him, and would not under any circumstances have given him money, though he was always afraid that his sons Ivan and Alexey would also come to ask him for it. And here the young man was staying in the house of such a father, had been living with him for two months, and they were on the best possible terms. This last fact was a special cause of 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 under the Mother’s protection ... and suddenly a nurse runs in and snatches him from her in terror. That was the picture! And Alyosha remembered his mother’s face at that minute. He used to say that it was frenzied but beautiful as he remembered. But he rarely cared to speak of this memory to anyone. In his childhood and youth he was by no means expansive, and talked little indeed, but not from shyness or a sullen unsociability; quite the contrary, from something different, from a sort of inner preoccupation entirely personal and unconcerned with other people, but so important to him that he seemed, as it were, to forget others on account of it. But he was fond of people: he seemed throughout his life to put implicit trust in people: yet no one ever looked on him as a simpleton or naive person. There was something about him which made one feel at once (and it was so all his life afterwards) that he did not care to be a judge of others that he would never take it upon himself to criticise and would never condemn anyone for anything. He seemed, indeed, to accept everything without the least condemnation though often grieving bitterly: and this was so much so that no one could surprise or frighten him even in his earliest youth. Coming at twenty to his father’s house, which was a very sink of filthy debauchery, he, chaste and pure as he was, simply withdrew in silence when to look on was unbearable, but without the slightest sign of contempt or condemnation. His father, who had once been in a dependent position, and so was sensitive and ready to take offence, met him at first with distrust and sullenness. “He does not say much,” he used to say, “and thinks the more.” But soon, within a fortnight indeed, he took to embracing him and kissing him terribly often, with drunken tears, with sottish sentimentality, yet he evidently felt a real and deep affection for him, such as he had never been capable of feeling for anyone before.
