Fyodor Pavlovich, having packed off the four-year-old Mitya, very soon married for a second time. This second marriage lasted about eight years. He took his second wife, Sofia Ivanovna, also a very young person, from another province, where he happened to have gone for a bit of contracting business in the company of some little Jew. Fyodor Pavlovich, though he led a wild, drunken, and debauched life, still never stopped investing his capital, and always managed his deals successfully, though of course almost always somewhat shabbily. Sofia Ivanovna was one of our “little orphans,” left without relations in early childhood, the daughter of some obscure deacon, who grew up in the rich house of her benefactress, mistress, and tormentress, an aristocratic old lady, the widow of General Vorokhov. I do not know the details but have only heard that, it seems, the ward, who was a meek, gentle, uncomplaining girl, was once taken out of a noose that she had hung from a nail in the closet—so hard was it for her to endure the willfulness and eternal nagging of the old woman, who was apparently not wicked but had become a most insufferable crank from sheer idleness. Fyodor Pavlovich offered his hand, inquiries were made, and he was turned away; and then once again, as with his first marriage, he suggested elopement to the little orphan. Most likely she would not have married him for anything if she had learned more about him in time. But she lived in another province, and what could a sixteen-year-old girl understand except that she would rather drown herself than stay with her benefactress. So the poor girl traded a benefactress for a benefactor. Fyodor Pavlovich did not get a penny this time, because the general’s widow was furious, refused to give anything, and, moreover, cursed them both; yet this time he did not even count on getting anything, but was tempted only by the innocent girl’s remarkable beauty, and above all by her innocent look, which struck the sensualist who until then had been a depraved admirer only of the coarser kind of feminine beauty. “Those innocent eyes cut my soul like a razor,” he used to say afterwards with his disgusting little snigger. However, in a depraved man this, too, might be only a sensual attraction. As he had gotten 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 practically “saved her from the noose,” taking advantage, besides that, of her phenomenal humility and meekness, he even trampled with both feet on the ordinary decencies of marriage. Loose women would gather in the house right in front of his wife, and orgies took place. I should report, as a characteristic feature, that the servant Grigory, a gloomy, stupid, and obstinate pedant, who had hated his former mistress, Adelaide Ivanovna, this time took the side of the new mistress, defended her, and abused Fyodor Pavlovich because of her in a manner hardly befitting a servant; and on one occasion even broke up the orgy and drove all the scandalous women out of the house. Later this unhappy young woman, who had been terrorized since childhood, came down with something like a kind of feminine nervous disorder, most often found among simple village women, who are known as shriekers because of it. From this disorder, accompanied by terrible hysterical fits, the sick woman would sometimes even lose her reason. Nevertheless she bore Fyodor Pavlovich two sons, Ivan and Alexei, the first in the first year of marriage, the second three years later. When she died, the boy Alexei was in his fourth year, and, though it is strange, I know that he remembered his mother all his life—as if through sleep, of course. After her death, almost exactly the same thing happened with both boys as had happened with the first one, Mitya: they were totally forgotten and forsaken by their father and wound up in the same cottage with the same servant, Grigory. It was in this cottage that they were found by that old crank, the general’s widow, their mother’s mistress and benefactress. She was still alive, and in all that time, for all those eight years, had not forgotten the injury done her. For all those eight years, she had been receiving under-handedly the most exact information about “her Sofia’s” life, and, hearing how ill she was and in what outrageous surroundings, she said aloud two or three times to her lady companions: “It serves her right. God has sent it to her for her ingratitude.”

Exactly three months after Sofia Ivanovna’s death, the general’s widow suddenly appeared in person in our town, right at Fyodor Pavlovich’s house. She spent only about half an hour in our little town, but she accomplished a great deal. It was evening. Fyodor Pavlovich, whom she had not seen for all those eight years, was tipsy when he came out to her. They say that the moment she saw him, without any explanations, she at once delivered him two good, resounding slaps and jerked him three times by his forelock; then, without adding a word, she made straight for the cottage and the two boys. Seeing at a glance that they were unwashed and in dirty shirts, she gave one more slap to Grigory himself and announced to him that she was taking both children home with her, then carried them outside just as they were, wrapped them in a plaid, put them in the carriage, and took them to her own town. Grigory bore his slap like a devoted slave, without a word of abuse, and while helping the old lady to her carriage, he bowed low and said imposingly that “God would reward her for the orphans.” “And you are a lout all the same!” the general’s widow shouted as she drove away. Fyodor Pavlovich, thinking the whole thing over, found that it was a good thing, and in a formal agreement regarding his children’s education by the general’s widow did not afterwards object to any point. As for the slaps he had gotten, he drove all over town telling the story himself.

It so happened that the general’s widow, too, died soon after that. In her will, however, she set aside a thousand roubles for each of the little ones, “for their education, and so that the money will be spent only on them, but in a way that will make it last until their coming of age, for it is quite enough of a handout for such children, and if anyone else wants to, let him loosen his own purse-strings,” and so on and so forth. I did not read the will myself, but I’ve heard that there was indeed something strange of this sort in it, and rather peculiarly expressed. The old woman’s principal heir, however, turned out to be an honest man, the provincial marshal of nobility of that province,^[6] Yefim Petrovich Polenov. After an exchange of letters with Fyodor Pavlovich, he guessed at once that no one could drag any money out of him even for the education of his own children (though he never refused directly, but in such cases always simply delayed, sometimes even pouring out sentimentalities). He took a personal interest in the orphans, and came especially to love the younger one, Alexei, who for a long time even grew up in his family. I should like the reader to remember that from the very beginning. If there was anyone to whom the brothers were indebted for their upbringing and education for the rest of their lives, it was to this Yefim Petrovich, a most generous and humane man, of a kind rarely found. The thousands left to the little ones by the general’s widow he kept intact, so that by the time they came of age, each thousand with interest had grown to two thousand, and meanwhile he educated them at his own expense, certainly spending far more than a thousand on each boy. Again, for the time being, I will not go into a detailed account of their childhood and adolescence, but will note only the most important circumstances. However, of the elder, Ivan, I will only say that as he was growing up he was somehow gloomy and withdrawn, far from timid, but as if he had already perceived by the age of ten that they were indeed living in someone else’s family and on someone else’s charity, that their father was such that it was a shame to speak of him, and so on and so forth. The boy began very early, almost in infancy (so they say at least), to show some sort of unusual and brilliant aptitude for learning. I do not know exactly how, but it somehow happened that he parted from Yefim Petrovich’s family when he was barely thirteen, passing on to one of the Moscow secondary schools and boarding with a certain experienced and then-famous pedagogue, a childhood friend of Yefim Petrovich’s. Ivan himself used to say afterwards that it all happened, so to speak, because of the “ardor for good works” of Yefim Petrovich, who was carried away by the idea that a boy of genius must also be educated by an educator of genius. However, neither Yefim Petrovich nor the educator of genius was living when the young man, having finished school, entered university. Yefim Petrovich left his affairs in disarray, and owing to red tape and the various formalities quite unavoidable among us, there was a delay in obtaining the children’s own money, left to them by the cranky widow, which had grown from one thousand to two thousand with interest, so that for his first two years at the university the young man found himself in a pickle, since he was forced all the while both to feed and keep himself and to study at the same time. It must be noted that he did not even try at that time to communicate with his father—perhaps out of pride or contempt for him, perhaps because his cold common sense told him that he would not get even the smallest token of support from his papa. Be that as it may, the young man was not at all at a loss, and did succeed in finding work, at first giving lessons at twenty kopecks an hour, and then running around to newspaper publishers, plying them with ten-line articles on street incidents, signed “Eyewitness.” These little articles, they say, were always so curiously and quaintly written that they were soon in great demand; and even in this alone the young man demonstrated his practical and intellectual superiority over that eternally needy and miserable mass of our students of both sexes who, in our capitals, from morning till night, habitually haunt the doorways of various newspapers and magazines, unable to invent anything better than the eternal repetition of one and the same plea for copying work or translations from the French. Having made the acquaintance of the editors, Ivan Fyodorovich never broke his connection with them afterwards, and in his later years at the university began to publish rather talented reviews of books on various specific subjects, so that he even became known in some literary circles. However, it was only quite recently that he had succeeded by accident in suddenly attracting to himself the particular attention of a much wider circle of readers, so that a great many people at once noticed and remembered him. The incident was rather curious. Having already graduated from the university, and while preparing to go abroad on his two thousand roubles, Ivan Fyodorovich suddenly published in one of the big newspapers a strange article that attracted the attention even of non-experts, and above all on a subject apparently altogether foreign to him, since he had graduated in natural science. The article dealt with the issue of ecclesiastical courts, which was then being raised everywhere.^[7] While analyzing some already-existing opinions on the subject, he also expressed his own view. The main thing was the tone of the article and its remarkably unexpected conclusion. And yet many churchmen decidedly counted the author as one of their own. Suddenly, however, along with them, not only secularists but even atheists themselves began to applaud from their side. Finally some quick-witted people concluded that the whole article was just a brazen farce and mockery. I mention this incident particularly because the article in time also penetrated our famous neighboring monastery, where there was general interest in the newly emerged issue of ecclesiastical courts—penetrated and produced complete bewilderment. When they learned the author’s name, they became interested in the fact that he was a native of our town and a son of “that very same Fyodor Pavlovich.” And then suddenly, just at that time, the author himself appeared among us.