Why Ivan Fyodorovich came to us then is a question I even recall asking myself at the time, almost with a certain uneasiness. This so-fateful arrival, which was the start of so many consequences, long afterwards remained almost always unclear to me. Generally considered, it was strange that so learned, so proud, and seemingly so prudent a young man should suddenly appear in such a scandalous house, before such a father, who had ignored him allhis life, who did not know or remember him, and who, though if his son had asked, he would certainly not have given him any money for anything in the world or under any circumstances, nonetheless was afraid all his life that his sons Ivan and Alexei, too, would one day come and ask for money. And here the young man comes to live in the house of such a father, lives with him for one month, then for another, and they get along famously. This last fact especially astonished not only me but many others as well. Pyotr Alexandrovich Miusov, whom I have already mentioned, a distant relation of Fyodor Pavlovich’s through his first wife, happened to be in the neighborhood again at that time on his nearby estate, paying us a visit from Paris, where he had already settled permanently. I remember it was precisely he who marveled most of all when he got acquainted with the young man, who interested him greatly and with whom he used—not without inner pangs—to have occasional intellectual altercations. “He is proud,” he used to say to us about him, “he will always have something in his pocket, and even now he has enough money to go abroad—what does he want here? It’s clear to everyone that he did not come to his father for money, because in any case his father won’t give it to him. He doesn’t like drinking and debauchery, and yet the old man can’t do without him, they get along so well!” It was true: the young man even had a noticeable influence over the old man; the latter almost began to listen to him occasionally, though he was extremely and at times even spitefully willful; he even began sometimes to behave more decently.

Only later did we learn that Ivan Fyodorovich had come partly at the request and on the behalf of his elder brother, Dmitri Fyodorovich, whom he met and saw for the first time in his life on this visit, but with whom, however, he had entered into correspondence prior to his arrival from Moscow, on the occasion of a certain important matter of more concern to Dmitri Fyodorovich than to himself. What that matter was, the reader will learn fully and in detail in due time. Nevertheless, even when I already knew about this special circumstance, Ivan Fyodorovich still seemed to me a mysterious person, and his arrival among us still inexplicable.

I will add that Ivan Fyodorovich seemed at the time to be a mediator and conciliator between his father and his elder brother, Dmitri Fyodorovich, who had gotten into a great quarrel with his father and had even started formal proceedings against him.

This nice little family, I repeat, got together then for the first time and some of its members saw each other for the first time in their lives. Only the youngest brother, Alexei Fyodorovich, had been living in our parts already for about a year, and so had come to us before the rest of his brothers. It is about this very Alexei that it is most difficult for me to speak in my introductory story, before bringing him on stage in the novel. Still, I shall have to write an introduction for him as well, if only to give a preliminary explanation of one very strange point—namely, that I must present my future hero to the reader, from the first scene of his novel, dressed in the cassock of a novice. Yes, at that time he had been living for about a year in our monastery, and it seemed he was preparing to shut himself up in it for the rest of his life.

Chapter 4: The Third Son, Alyosha

He was then only twenty years old (his brother Ivan was in his twenty-fourth year, and their elder brother, Dmitri, was going on twenty-eight). First of all I announce that this young man, Alyosha, was not at all a fanatic, and, in my view at least, even not at all a mystic. I will give my full opinion beforehand: he was simply an early lover of mankind,^[8] and if he threw himself into the monastery path, it was only because it alone struck him at the time and presented him, so to speak, with an ideal way out for his soul struggling from the darkness of worldly wickedness towards the light of love. And this path struck him only because on it at that time he met a remarkable being, in his opinion, our famous monastery elder Zosima, to whom he became attached with all the ardent first love of his unquenchable heart. However, I do not deny that he was, at that time, already very strange, having been so even from the cradle. Incidentally, I have already mentioned that although he lost his mother in his fourth year, he remembered her afterwards all his life, her face, her caresses, “as if she were standing alive before me.” Such memories can be remembered (everyone knows this) even from an earlier age, even from the age of two, but they only emerge throughout one’s life as specks of light, as it were, against the darkness, as a corner torn from a huge picture, which has all faded and disappeared except for that little corner. That is exactly how it was with him: he remembered a quiet summer evening, an open window, the slanting rays of the setting sun (these slanting rays he remembered most of all), an icon in the corner of the room, a lighted oil-lamp in front of it, and before the icon, on her knees, his mother, sobbing as if in hysterics, with shrieks and cries, seizing him in her arms, hugging him so tightly that it hurt, and pleading for him to the Mother of God, holding him out from her embrace with both arms towards the icon, as if under the protection of the Mother of God ... and suddenly a nurse rushes in and snatches him from her in fear. What a picture! Alyosha remembered his mother’s face, too, at that moment: he used to say that it was frenzied, but beautiful, as far as he could remember. But he rarely cared to confide this memory to anyone. In his childhood and youth he was not very effusive, not even very talkative, not from mistrust, not from shyness or sullen unsociability, but even quite the contrary, from something different, from some inner preoccupation, as it were, strictly personal, of no concern to others, but so important for him that because of it he would, as it were, forget others. But he did love people; he lived all his life, it seemed, with complete faith in people, and yet no one ever considered him either naive or a simpleton. There was something in him that told one, that convinced one (and it was so all his life afterwards) that he did not want to be a judge of men, that he would not take judgment upon himself and would not condemn anyone for anything. It seemed, even, that he accepted everything without the least condemnation, though often with deep sadness. Moreover, in this sense he even went so far that no one could either surprise or frighten him, and this even in his very early youth. Coming to his father in his twentieth year, precisely into that den of dirty iniquity, he, chaste and pure, would simply retire quietly when it was unbearable to watch, yet without the least expression of contempt or condemnation of anyone at all. His father, a former sponger and therefore touchy and easily offended, and who met him at first with sullen suspicion (“He’s too quiet,” he said, “and he reasons in himself too much”), soon ended up, nonetheless, in no more than two weeks, by hugging and kissing him terribly often, with drunken tears and tipsy sentimentality, true, but apparently having come to love him sincerely and deeply, more than such a man had, of course, ever managed to love anyone else.