II. Первого сына спровадил

As a father, precisely what was bound to happen happened to him: that is, he abandoned the child he had begotten with Adelaida Ivanovna entirely and utterly — not out of malice toward the boy, nor from any wounded-husband feeling, but simply because he forgot all about him.

While he was wearying everyone with his tears and his complaints, and turning his own house into a den of debauchery, the three-year-old boy Mitya was taken into the care of Grigory, the faithful servant of that house; and had he not looked after him then, there might well have been no one to change the child's little shirt.

What is more, it so happened that the child's relatives on his mother's side also seemed, at first, to forget about him.

His grandfather — that is, old Mr. Miüsov himself, Adelaida Ivanovna's father — was by then no longer living; his widowed wife, Mitya's grandmother, had moved to Moscow and fallen gravely ill, while the sisters had all married off, so that for nearly a whole year Mitya had to stay with the servant Grigory and live with him in the cottage on the grounds.

In any case, even had his papa remembered him (he surely could not, after all, have been ignorant of his existence), he would himself have packed him back off to the cottage, since the child would only have gotten in the way of his carousing.

But it so happened that the late Adelaida Ivanovna's first cousin, Pyotr Alexandrovich Miüsov, returned from Paris — a man who afterward spent many successive years abroad, then still very young, but a man set apart among the Miüsovs: enlightened, cosmopolitan, foreign-bred, and a European all his life into the bargain, and toward the end of it a liberal of the forties and fifties.

In the course of his career he passed through acquaintance with many of the most liberal men of his age, both in Russia and abroad, knew Proudhon and Bakunin personally, and was especially fond — already toward the close of his wanderings — of recalling and recounting the three days of the February revolution in Paris in 'forty-eight, hinting that he himself had very nearly been a participant in it, there on the barricades.

This was one of the most cherished memories of his youth.

He had an independent fortune, by the old reckoning some thousand souls.

His splendid estate lay just at the edge of our little town and bordered on the land of our celebrated monastery, with which Pyotr Alexandrovich — while still in his very youngest years, the moment he came into his inheritance — at once began an interminable lawsuit over the right to some sort of fishing in the river or felling in the forest; I do not know precisely which, but he reckoned launching a suit against the "clericals" to be positively his civic and enlightened duty.

Having heard the whole story of Adelaida Ivanovna — whom, naturally, he remembered, and had even once taken note of — and having learned that Mitya was left behind, he, for all his youthful indignation and contempt for Fyodor Pavlovitch, got himself involved in the matter.

It was then, in fact, that he first made the acquaintance of Fyodor Pavlovitch.

He declared to him straight out that he would like to take the boy's upbringing upon himself.

He used to tell long afterward, as a characteristic touch, how when he first spoke to Fyodor Pavlovitch about Mitya, the man for some while wore the look of someone who utterly failed to grasp which child was even meant, and seemed even to be astonished that he had a little son somewhere in the house.

Even if there might have been some exaggeration in Pyotr Alexandrovich's account, there must all the same have been something in it close to the truth.

But in truth Fyodor Pavlovitch was fond, all his life, of striking a pose — of suddenly playing out before you some unexpected role — and, above all, sometimes with no need whatever for it, even to his own plain disadvantage, as in the present instance.

This trait, however, is shared by a great many people, even very clever ones, and not only by the likes of Fyodor Pavlovitch.

Pyotr Alexandrovich pressed the matter warmly, and was even appointed (jointly with Fyodor Pavlovitch) one of the child's guardians, since after all a little property did remain from the mother — a house and an estate.

Mitya did in fact move in with this cousin-uncle; but the latter had no family of his own, and since he himself, the moment he had settled and secured the money coming to him from his estates, hurried off again to Paris for a long stay, he entrusted the child to one of his cousin-aunts (his parents' female first cousins), a certain Moscow lady.

It so happened that, once settled into life in Paris, he too forgot about the child — especially when that very February revolution broke out, which so struck his imagination that he could not forget it for the rest of his life.

The Moscow lady died, and Mitya passed on to one of her married daughters.

It seems he later changed his nest yet a fourth time.

I shall not dwell on this now, the more so since there will be much yet to tell about this firstborn of Fyodor Pavlovitch, and for the moment I confine myself to the barest necessary particulars about him, without which I cannot even begin my novel.

In the first place, this Dmitri Fyodorovitch was the only one of Fyodor Pavlovitch's three sons who grew up in the conviction that he did, after all, possess some fortune, and that on coming of age he would be independent.

His boyhood and youth ran their course in disorder: he never finished at the gymnasium, then landed in a military school, then turned up in the Caucasus, rose in the service, fought a duel, was reduced to the ranks, rose again, caroused a great deal, and ran through a fair amount of money for his means.

He began to receive any of it from Fyodor Pavlovitch only on coming of age, and until then ran himself into debt.

He came to know and laid eyes on Fyodor Pavlovitch, his father, for the first time only after coming of age, when he deliberately arrived in our parts to have it out with him about his property.

It seems his parent did not take to him even then; he stayed with him only a short while and left again as quickly as he could, having managed merely to get a certain sum out of him and to enter with him into a certain arrangement regarding the future receipt of income from the estate — of which (a fact worth noting) he obtained from Fyodor Pavlovitch, that time, neither the yield nor the value.

Fyodor Pavlovitch noticed then, from the very first (and this is to be borne in mind), that Mitya held an exaggerated and false notion of his fortune.

Fyodor Pavlovitch was very well pleased by this, having his own particular calculations in view.

He merely concluded that the young man was frivolous, hot-headed, ruled by his passions, impatient, a carouser, who needed only to grab some money on the spur of the moment and would, for a little while at least, of course, be instantly pacified.

This, then, is what Fyodor Pavlovitch set about exploiting — fobbing him off, that is, with small handouts and occasional remittances; and in the end it came about that when, already some four years later, Mitya, having lost his patience, turned up in our little town a second time to finish his affairs with his parent once and for all, it suddenly emerged, to his utmost astonishment, that he had now exactly nothing left, that it was hard even to make the reckoning, that he had already drawn from Fyodor Pavlovitch in cash the whole value of his property — that he might, perhaps, even owe him still; that under such-and-such agreements, into which he himself had chosen to enter at this and that time, he had no right to demand anything further, and so on, and so on.

The young man was thunderstruck, suspected falsehood, deceit, nearly went out of his mind, and seemed to lose his reason altogether.

It was this very circumstance that led to the catastrophe, the account of which will form the subject of my first, introductory novel — or, better put, its outward side.

But before I pass on to that novel, I must still tell of Fyodor Pavlovitch's two other sons, Mitya's brothers, and explain where they sprang from.