You can easily imagine what a
father such a man could be and how he would bring up his children.
His behaviour as a father was exactly what might be expected. He
completely abandoned the child of his marriage with Adela?da
Ivanovna, not from malice, nor because of his matrimonial
grievances, but simply because he forgot him. While he was wearying
every one with his tears and complaints, and turning his house into
a sink of debauchery, a faithful servant of the family, Grigory,
took the three-year-old Mitya into his care. If he hadn't looked
after him there would have been no one even to change the baby's
little shirt.
It happened moreover that the child's relations on his mother's
side forgot him too at first. His grandfather was no longer living,
his widow, Mitya's grandmother, had moved to Moscow, and was
seriously ill, while his daughters were married, so that Mitya
remained for almost a whole year in old Grigory's charge and lived
with him in the servant's cottage. But if his father had remembered
him (he could not, indeed, have been altogether unaware of his
existence) he would have sent him back to the cottage, as the child
would only have been in the way of his debaucheries. But a cousin
of Mitya's mother, Pyotr Alexandrovitch Miüsov, happened to return
from Paris. He lived for many years afterwards abroad, but was at
that time quite a young man, and distinguished among the Miüsovs as
a man of enlightened ideas and of European culture, who had been in
the capitals and abroad. Towards the end of his life he became a
Liberal of the type common in the forties and fifties. In the
course of his career he had come into contact with many of the most
Liberal men of his epoch, both in Russia and abroad. He had known
Proudhon and Bakunin personally, and in his declining years was
very fond of describing the three days of the Paris Revolution of
February 1848, hinting that he himself had almost taken part in the
fighting on the barricades. This was one of the most grateful
recollections of his youth. He had an independent property of about
a thousand souls, to reckon in the old style. His splendid estate
lay on the outskirts of our little town and bordered on the lands
of our famous monastery, with which Pyotr Alexandrovitch began an
endless lawsuit, almost as soon as he came into the estate,
concerning the rights of fishing in the river or wood-cutting in
the forest, I don't know exactly which. He regarded it as his duty
as a citizen and a man of culture to open an attack upon the
"clericals." Hearing all about Adela?da Ivanovna, whom he, of
course, remembered, and in whom he had at one time been interested,
and learning of the existence of Mitya, he intervened, in spite of
all his youthful indignation and contempt for Fyodor Pavlovitch. He
made the latter's acquaintance for the first time, and told him
directly that he wished to undertake the child's education. He used
long afterwards to tell as a characteristic touch, that when he
began to speak of Mitya, Fyodor Pavlovitch looked for some time as
though he did not understand what child he was talking about, and
even as though he was surprised to hear that he had a little son in
the house. The story may have been exaggerated, yet it must have
been something like the truth.
Fyodor Pavlovitch was all his life fond of acting, of suddenly
playing an unexpected part, sometimes without any motive for doing
so, and even to his own direct disadvantage, as, for instance, in
the present case. This habit, however, is characteristic of a very
great number of people, some of them very clever ones, not like
Fyodor Pavlovitch. Pyotr Alexandrovitch carried the business
through vigorously, and was appointed, with Fyodor Pavlovitch,
joint guardian of the child, who had a small property, a house and
land, left him by his mother. Mitya did, in fact, pass into this
cousin's keeping, but as the latter had no family of his own, and
after securing the revenues of his estates was in haste to return
at once to Paris, he left the boy in charge of one of his cousins,
a lady living in Moscow. It came to pass that, settling permanently
in Paris he, too, forgot the child, especially when the Revolution
of February broke out, making an impression on his mind that he
remembered all the rest of his life. The Moscow lady died, and
Mitya passed into the care of one of her married daughters. I
believe he changed his home a fourth time later on. I won't enlarge
upon that now, as I shall have much to tell later of Fyodor
Pavlovitch's firstborn, and must confine myself now to the most
essential facts about him, without which I could not begin my
story.
In the first place, this Mitya, or rather Dmitri Fyodorovitch,
was the only one of Fyodor Pavlovitch's three sons who grew up in
the belief that he had property, and that he would be independent
on coming of age. He spent an irregular boyhood and youth. He did
not finish his studies at the gymnasium, he got into a military
school, then went to the Caucasus, was promoted, fought a duel, and
was degraded to the ranks, earned promotion again, led a wild life,
and spent a good deal of money. He did not begin to receive any
income from Fyodor Pavlovitch until he came of age, and until then
got into debt. He saw and knew his father, Fyodor Pavlovitch, for
the first time on coming of age, when he visited our neighbourhood
on purpose to settle with him about his property. He seems not to
have liked his father. He did not stay long with him, and made
haste to get away, having only succeeded in obtaining a sum of
money, and entering into an agreement for future payments from the
estate, of the revenues and value of which he was unable (a fact
worthy of note), upon this occasion, to get a statement from his
father. Fyodor Pavlovitch remarked for the first time then (this,
too, should be noted) that Mitya had a vague and exaggerated idea
of his property. Fyodor Pavlovitch was very well satisfied with
this, as it fell in with his own designs. He gathered only that the
young man was frivolous, unruly, of violent passions, impatient,
and dissipated, and that if he could only obtain ready money he
would be satisfied, although only, of course, for a short time. So
Fyodor Pavlovitch began to take advantage of this fact, sending him
from time to time small doles, instalments. In the end, when four
years later, Mitya, losing patience, came a second time to our
little town to settle up once for all with his father, it turned
out to his amazement that he had nothing, that it was difficult to
get an account even, that he had received the whole value of his
property in sums of money from Fyodor Pavlovitch, and was perhaps
even in debt to him, that by various agreements into which he had,
of his own desire, entered at various previous dates, he had no
right to expect anything more, and so on, and so on. The young man
was overwhelmed, suspected deceit and cheating, and was almost
beside himself. And, indeed, this circumstance led to the
catastrophe, the account of which forms the subject of my first
introductory story, or rather the external side of it. But before I
pass to that story I must say a little of Fyodor Pavlovitch's other
two sons, and of their origin.
