Indeed, everyone loved this young man wherever he appeared, and it was so even in his earliest childhood. When he came to live in the house of his benefactor and guardian, Yefim Petrovich Polenov, he attached everyone in the family to himself so much that they decidedly considered him, as it were, their own child. Yet he entered the house at such an early age that one could hardly expect in a child any calculated cunning, or pushiness, or skill in ingratiating himself, or knowledge of how to please and how to make himself loved. Thus he possessed in himself, in his very nature, so to speak, artlessly and directly, the gift of awakening a special love for himself. It was the same with him at school, too, and yet it would seem that he was exactly the kind of child who awakens mistrust, sometimes mockery, and perhaps also hatred, in his schoolmates. He used, for instance, to lapse into revery and, as it were, set himself apart. Even as a child, he liked to go into a corner and read books, and yet his schoolmates, too, loved him so much that he could decidedly be called everyone’s favorite all the while he was at school. He was seldom playful, seldom even merry, but anyone could see at once, at a glance, that this was not from any kind of sullenness, that, on the contrary, he was serene and even-tempered. He never wanted to show off in front of his peers. Maybe for that very reason he was never afraid of anyone, and yet the boys realized at once that he was not at all proud of his fearlessness, but looked as if he did not realize that he was brave and fearless. He never remembered an offense. Sometimes an hour after the offense he would speak to the offender or answer some question with as trustful and serene an expression as though nothing had happened between them at all. And he did not look as if he had accidentally forgotten or intentionally forgiven the offense; he simply did not consider it an offense, and this decidedly captivated the boys and conquered them. There was only one trait in him that in all the grades of his school from the lowest even to the highest awakened in his schoolmates a constant desire to tease him, not out of malicious mockery but simply because they found it funny. This trait was a wild, frantic modesty and chastity. He could not bear to hear certain words and certain conversations about women. These “certain” words and conversations, unfortunately, are ineradicable in schools. Boys, while still almost children, pure in mind and heart, very often like to talk in classes among themselves and even aloud about such things, pictures and images, as even soldiers would not speak of; moreover, many things that soldiers themselves do not know or understand are already familiar to still quite young children of our educated and higher society. There is, perhaps, no moral depravity yet, and no cynicism either of a real, depraved, inner sort, but there is external cynicism, and this is not infrequently regarded among them as something refined, subtle, daring, and worthy of emulation. Seeing that “Alyoshka Karamazov” quickly put his fingers in his ears when they talked “about that,” they would sometimes purposely crowd around him, pull his hands away by force, and shout foul things into both his ears, while he struggled, slipped to the floor, lay down, covered his head, all without saying a word to them, without any abuse, silently enduring the offense. In the end, however, they left him alone and no longer teased him with being “a little girl”; moreover, they looked upon him, in this respect, with compassion. Incidentally, he was always among the best of his class in his studies, but was never the first.

After Yefim Petrovich died, Alyosha spent two more years at the local secondary school. Yefim Petrovich’s inconsolable spouse left almost immediately after his death for a long visit to Italy with her whole family, which consisted entirely of persons of the female sex, while Alyosha wound up in the house of two ladies he had never even seen before, some distant relations of Yefim Petrovich’s, but on what terms he himself did not know. It was characteristic, even highly characteristic of him, that he never worried about who was supporting him. In this he was the complete opposite of his older brother, Ivan Fyodorovich, who lived in poverty for his first two years at the university, supporting himself by his own labor, and who even as a child was bitterly aware that he was eating his benefactor’s bread. But it was not possible, it seems, to judge this strange trait in Alexei’s character very harshly, for anyone who got to know him a little would immediately be convinced, if the question arose, that Alexei must be one of those youths, like holy fools,^[9] as it were, who, if they were to chance upon even a large fortune, would have no trouble giving it away for a good deed to the first asker, or maybe even to some clever swindler who approached them. Generally speaking, he seemed not to know the value of money at all—not, of course, in the literal sense. When he was given pocket money, which he himself never asked for, he either did not know what to do with it for weeks on end, or was so terribly careless with it that it disappeared in a moment. Later, after getting used to Alyosha, Pyotr Alexandrovich Miusov, who was rather ticklish on the subjects of money and bourgeois honesty, once pronounced the following aphorism: “Here, perhaps, is the only man in the world who, were you to leave him alone and without money on the square of some unknown city with a population of a million, would not perish, would not die of cold and hunger, for he would immediately be fed and immediately be taken care of, and if no one else took care of him, he would immediately take care of himself, and it would cost him no effort, and no humiliation, and he would be no burden to those who took care of him, who perhaps, on the contrary, would consider it a pleasure.”

He did not complete his studies at school; he had one more year to go when he suddenly announced to his ladies that he had to see his father about a certain matter that had come into his head. They were sorry for him and did not want to let him go. The trip was very inexpensive, and the ladies would not allow him to pawn his watch—a gift from his benefactor’s family before they went abroad—but luxuriously provided him with means, and even with new clothes and linen. He, however, returned half the money, announcing that he definitely intended to travel third class. On his arrival in our town, he made no direct reply to the first question of his parent: “And precisely why this visit before you’ve finished your studies?” but he was, they say, more than usually thoughtful. It soon became clear that he was looking for his mother’s grave. He even as much as confessed himself, then, that that was the sole purpose of his coming. But this hardly exhausted the reasons for his visit. Most likely he himself did not know and would not at all have been able to explain what it was precisely that suddenly rose up in his soul and irresistibly drew him onto some sort of new, unknown, but already inevitable path. Fyodor Pavlovich could not show him where he had buried his second wife, because he had never visited her grave after her coffin was covered with earth, and it was all so long ago that he just could not recall where they had buried her . . .

By the way, about Fyodor Pavlovich. For a long time before then, he had not been living in our town. Three or four years after his second wife’s death, he set off for the south of Russia and finally wound up in Odessa, where he lived for several years in a row. First, he made the acquaintance, in his own words, of “a lot of Yids, big Yids, little Yids, baby Yids,” but he ended up later being received “not just by Yids but by Jews, too.” We may assume it was during this period of his life that he developed his special skill at knocking money together, and at knocking it out of other people. He came back to our town again, finally, only three years before Alyosha’s arrival. Former acquaintances found him terribly aged, though he was by no means such an old man. He behaved, shall we say, not with more dignity but somehow with more effrontery. There appeared in this old buffoon, for example, an insolent need to make others into buffoons. He now loved to be outrageous with the female sex, not simply as before, but even, somehow, in a more repulsive way. He soon became the founder of a number of new taverns throughout the district. It was apparent that he had maybe as much as a hundred thousand, or perhaps only a little less. Many inhabitants of our town and district immediately got into debt with him, naturally on the best securities. Lately he had somehow become bloated; he began somehow to be erratic, lost his self-control, and even fell into a sort of lightheadedness; he would start one thing and end up with another; he somehow became scattered; and he got drunk more and more often. If it hadn’t been for the very same servant Grigory, who by then had also aged considerably, and who looked after him sometimes almost like a tutor, Fyodor Pavlovich would not have gotten away without serious trouble. Alyosha’s arrival seemed to affect him even on the moral side, as if something woke up in this untimely old man, something that had long been stifled in his soul. “Do you know,” he now often said to Alyosha, studying him intently, “you resemble her, the ‘shrieker?” That was how he referred to his dead wife, Alyosha’s mother. The “shrieker’s” grave was finally pointed out to Alyosha by the servant Grigory. He took him to our town cemetery, and there, in a remote corner, showed him a cast-iron marker, inexpensive but well tended, on which there was an inscription giving the name, social position, age, and date of death of the deceased woman, and below that even some sort of four-line verse chosen from the old cemetery lore commonly used on middle-class tombs. Surprisingly, this marker turned out to be Grigory’s doing. He himself had erected it over the grave of the poor “shrieker” at his own expense, after Fyodor Pavlovich, whom he had already pestered with numberless reminders about the grave, finally went off to Odessa, brushing aside not only graves but all his memories. Alyosha did not show any particular emotion at his mother’s grave; he simply listened to a solemn and sensible account of the construction of the marker, stood for a while looking downcast, and walked away without saying a word. After that, perhaps even for a whole year, he did not visit the cemetery. But this little episode also had an effect on Fyodor Pavlovich—and a very original one. He suddenly took a thousand roubles and brought them to our monastery to have memorial services said for the soul of his wife, but not of his second wife, Alyosha’s mother, the “shrieker,” but of the first, Adelaida Ivanovna, who used to thrash him. In the evening of that day, he got drunk and berated monks to Alyosha. He was far from religious; the man probably had never put a five-kopek candle in front of an icon. Strange fits of sudden feelings and sudden thoughts come over such individuals.