The Brothers Karamazov | Page 9

daring, and worthy of imitation. Seeing that Alyosha
Karamazov put his fingers in his ears when they talked of "that," they
used sometimes to crowd round him, pull his hands away, and shout

nastiness into both ears, while he struggled, slipped to the floor, tried to
hide himself without uttering one word of abuse, enduring their insults
in silence. But at last they left him alone and gave up taunting him with
being a "regular girl," and what's more they looked upon it with
compassion as a weakness. He was always one of the best in the class
but was never first.
At the time of Yefim Petrovitch's death Alyosha had two more years to
complete at the provincial gymnasium. The inconsolable widow went
almost immediately after his death for a long visit to Italy with her
whole family, which consisted only of women and girls. Alyosha went
to live in the house of two distant relations of Yefim Petrovitch, ladies
whom he had never seen before. On what terms she lived with them he
did not know himself. It was very characteristic of him, indeed, that he
never cared at whose expense he was living. In that respect he was a
striking contrast to his elder brother Ivan, who struggled with poverty
for his first two years in the university, maintained himself by his own
efforts, and had from childhood been bitterly conscious of living at the
expense of his benefactor. But this strange trait in Alyosha's character
must not, I think, criticised too severely, for at the slightest
acquaintance with him anyone would have perceived that Alyosha was
one of those youths, almost of the type of religious enthusiast, who, if
they were suddenly to come into possession of a large fortune, would
not hesitate to give it away for the asking, either for good works or
perhaps to a clever rogue. In general he seemed scarcely to know the
value of money, not, of course, in a literal sense. When he was given
pocket-money, which he never asked for, he was either terribly careless
of it so that it was gone in a moment, or he kept it for weeks together,
not knowing what to do with it.
In later years Pyotr Alexandrovitch Miusov, a man very sensitive on
the score of money and bourgeois honesty, pronounced the following
judgment, after getting to know Alyosha:
"Here is perhaps the one man in the world whom you might leave alone
without a penny, in the centre of an unknown town of a million
inhabitants, and he would not come to harm, he would not die of cold

and hunger, for he would be fed and sheltered at once; and if he were
not, he would find a shelter for himself, and it would cost him no effort
or humiliation. And to shelter him would be no burden, but, on the
contrary, would probably be looked on as a pleasure."
He did not finish his studies at the gymnasium. A year before the end
of the course he suddenly announced to the ladies that he was going to
see his father about a plan which had occurred to him. They were sorry
and unwilling to let him go. The journey was not an expensive one, and
the ladies would not let him pawn his watch, a parting present from his
benefactor's family. They provided him liberally with money and even
fitted him out with new clothes and linen. But he returned half the
money they gave him, saying that he intended to go third class. On his
arrival in the town he made no answer to his father's first inquiry why
he had come before completing his studies, and seemed, so they say,
unusually thoughtful. It soon became apparent that he was looking for
his mother's tomb. He practically acknowledged at the time that that
was the only object of his visit. But it can hardly have been the whole
reason of it. It is more probable that he himself did not understand and
could not explain what had suddenly arisen in his soul, and drawn him
irresistibly into a new, unknown, but inevitable path. Fyodor Pavlovitch
could not show him where his second wife was buried, for he had never
visited her grave since he had thrown earth upon her coffin, and in the
course of years had entirely forgotten where she was buried.
Fyodor Pavlovitch, by the way, had for some time previously not been
living in our town. Three or four years after his wife's death he had
gone to the south of Russia and finally turned up in Odessa, where he
spent several years. He made the acquaintance at first, in his own words,
"of a lot of low Jews, Jewesses, and Jewkins," and ended by being