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 Adelaida Ivanovna, not from malice, nor because of

his matrimonial grievances, but simply because he forgot him. While he

was wearying everyone 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 Miusov, 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 Miusovs 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 Adelaida 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, 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.