The Brothers Karamazov

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 cannot begin to explain. But then, I once knew a young lady still of the last “romantic” generation who, after several years of enigmatic love for a certain gentleman, whom, by the way, she could have married quite easily at any moment, ended up, after inventing all sorts of insurmountable obstacles, by throwing herself on a stormy night into a rather deep and swift river from a high bank somewhat resembling a cliff, and perished there decidedly by her own caprice, only because she wanted to be like Shakespeare’s Ophelia. Even then, if the cliff, chosen and cherished from long ago, had not been so picturesque, if it had been merely a flat, prosaic bank, the suicide might not have taken place at all. This is a true fact, and one can assume that in our Russian life of the past two or three generations there have been not a few similar facts. In the same way, the action of Adelaida Ivanovna Miusov was doubtless an echo of foreign influences, the chafings of a mind imprisoned.^[1] Perhaps she wanted to assert her feminine independence, to go against social conventions, against the despotism of her relatives and family, and her obliging imagination convinced her, if only briefly, that Fyodor Pavlovich, despite his dignity as a sponger, was still one of the boldest and most sarcastic spirits of that transitional epoch—transitional to everything better—whereas he was simply an evil buffoon and nothing more. The affair gained piquancy from elopement, which strongly appealed to Adelaida Ivanovna. As for Fyodor Pavlovich, his social position at the time made him quite ready for any such venture, for he passionately desired to set himself up by whatever means. To squeeze into a good family and get a dowry was tempting indeed. As for mutual love, it seems there never was any either on the bride’s part or on his own, despite the beauty of Adelaida Ivanovna. This was, perhaps, the only case of its kind in Fyodor Pavlovich’s life, for he was a great sensualist all his days, always ready to hang onto any skirt that merely beckoned to him. This one woman alone, sensually speaking, made no particular impression on him.