The Brothers Karamazov

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 . . .