IV. Третий сын Алёша

First of all, I declare that this youth, Alyosha, was not in the least a fanatic, and—at least to my mind—not even a mystic at all.

Let me give my full opinion in advance: he was simply an early lover of mankind, and if he set out upon the monastery road, it was only because at that time it alone struck him and held up for him, so to speak, the ideal of a way out for his soul, which was straining out of the darkness of worldly malice toward the light of love.

And this road struck him only because along it he met, just then, a being who was in his eyes extraordinary—our celebrated monastery elder Zosima, to whom he attached himself with all the ardent first love of his insatiable heart.

I will not dispute, however, that even then he was already very strange—and had been so from the cradle on.

By the way, I have already mentioned of him that, having lost his mother when he was barely in his fourth year, he remembered her ever afterward for the whole of his life—her face, her caresses—"exactly as if she were standing before me alive."

Such memories can be retained (and everyone knows this) even from a still earlier age, even from the age of two, but only as if surfacing throughout one's whole life like points of light out of the darkness, like a corner torn from an enormous picture that has all faded and vanished save for this one little corner alone.

So it was precisely with him: he remembered one evening, a summer one, quiet, an open window, the slanting rays of the setting sun (it was the slanting rays above all that stayed with him), an icon in the corner of the room, a lamp lit before it, and before the icon, on her knees, his mother, sobbing as if in hysterics, with shrieks and cries, who had snatched him up in both arms, hugging him so hard it hurt, and praying for him to the Mother of God, holding him out of her embrace with both hands toward the icon as if to place him under the protection of the Mother of God… when suddenly the nurse runs in and tears him away from her in fright.

There's a picture for you!

Alyosha remembered his mother's face too at that instant: he said it had been frenzied, but beautiful, so far as he was able to recall.

But he rarely cared to entrust this memory to anyone.

In childhood and youth he was not very effusive, and even not very talkative—not out of distrust, not out of shyness or sullen unsociability, indeed quite the opposite, but out of something else, some sort of inner preoccupation, properly his own and personal, of no concern to others, yet so important to him that on account of it he would as it were forget others.

But people he did love: he seemed to live his whole life trusting people utterly, and yet no one ever took him for a simpleton or a naive man.

There was something in him that said and persuaded (and did so all his life afterward) that he did not wish to be a judge of people, that he would not take condemnation upon himself, and that he would not condemn for anything in the world.

It even seemed that he admitted everything, condemning nothing in the least, though often grieving very bitterly.

More than that, in this respect he reached such a point that no one could either astonish him or frighten him, and this even in his very earliest youth.

Arriving in his twentieth year at his father's—into what was positively a den of filthy debauchery—he, chaste and pure, would merely withdraw in silence when it became unbearable to look on, yet without the slightest air of scorn or condemnation toward anyone whatever.

His father, on the other hand—once a hanger-on himself, and therefore a man keen and sensitive to any slight—who had at first met him distrustfully and sullenly ("he keeps silent a great deal, the fellow, and reasons a great deal to himself"), soon ended, however, by taking to embracing and kissing him terribly often, no later than within some two weeks, with drunken tears, it is true, in a maudlin tenderness, but plainly having come to love him sincerely and deeply, and in a way that of course someone like him had never managed to love anyone before…

And indeed everyone loved this youth, wherever he appeared, and this from his very earliest childhood years.

Finding himself in the house of his benefactor and guardian, Yefim Petrovich Polenov, he so endeared himself to everyone in that family that they decidedly regarded him there as a child of their own.

And yet he had entered that house while still at such an infant age, at which one can hardly expect in a child any calculating cunning, any wiliness or art of ingratiating oneself and being liked, any knack of making oneself loved.

So that the gift of arousing a particular love for himself he carried within him, so to speak, in his very nature, artlessly and immediately.

It was the same with him at school too, and yet one would think he was precisely the kind of child who arouses in his comrades distrust, sometimes mockery, and perhaps even hatred.

He would, for instance, fall into thought and, as it were, set himself apart.

From his very childhood he liked to go off into a corner and read his books, and yet even his comrades grew so fond of him that one could decidedly call him the universal favorite throughout the whole time of his stay at school.

He was seldom boisterous, even seldom merry, but everyone, glancing at him, saw at once that this came not from any gloominess in him, that, on the contrary, he was even-tempered and serene.

Among his peers he never wished to put himself forward.

Perhaps for this very reason he was never afraid of anyone, and yet the boys understood at once that he was not at all proud of his fearlessness, but looked as though he did not even realize that he was brave and unafraid.

An offense he never remembered.

It would happen that an hour after the offense he would answer the offender, or strike up a conversation with him himself, with such a trusting and serene look as though nothing whatever had passed between them.

And it was not as if he had the air, in doing so, of having forgotten the offense by chance or pardoned it on purpose; he simply did not count it as an offense, and this decidedly captivated and won over the children.

There was in him just one trait that, in every form of the high school, from the lowest right up to the highest, aroused in his comrades a constant urge to tease him—yet not out of spiteful mockery, but because it amused them.

This trait in him was a wild, frenzied bashfulness and chastity.

He could not bear to hear certain words and certain conversations about women.

These "certain" words and conversations are, unhappily, ineradicable in schools.

Boys pure in soul and heart, still almost children, very often love to talk in class among themselves, and even aloud, about such things, pictures, and images as not even soldiers would always speak of; more than that, there is much in this line that soldiers neither know nor understand which is already familiar to the very young children of our educated and upper society.

Moral depravity is perhaps not yet present here, nor real cynicism—the depraved, inward kind—but there is the outward kind, and among them it is often reckoned something even refined, subtle, dashing, and worthy of imitation.

Seeing that "Alyoshka Karamazov," the moment they began talking "about that," quickly stopped up his ears with his fingers, they would sometimes plant themselves around him on purpose in a crowd and, prying his hands forcibly from his ears, shout filth into both his ears, while he struggled, slid down to the floor, lay there, covered himself up—and all this without saying a word to them, without scolding, silently bearing the offense.

Toward the end, however, they left him in peace and no longer teased him as a "little girl"; what is more, in this respect they looked upon him with pity.

Incidentally, in his classes he always stood among the best in his studies, but was never marked as the first.

When Yefim Petrovich died, Alyosha spent two more years at the provincial high school.

The inconsolable widow of Yefim Petrovich, almost immediately after his death, set off for a long stay in Italy with her whole family, which consisted entirely of persons of the female sex, while Alyosha ended up in the house of two ladies he had never even seen before, some distant relatives of Yefim Petrovich's, though on what terms he himself did not know.

It was a characteristic trait of his too—and very much so—that he never troubled himself about whose means he was living on.

In this he was the perfect opposite of his elder brother, Ivan Fyodorovich, who had struggled through his first two years at the university supporting himself by his own labor, and who had from his very childhood felt bitterly that he was living on the bread of a benefactor.