Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky

The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky

Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov, a landowner well known in our district in his own day, and still remembered among us owing tohis gloomy and tragic death, which happened thirteen years ago, and which I shall describein its proper place. For the present I will only say that this "landowner"-for so we used tocall him, although he hardly spent a day of his life on his own estate-was a strange type, yet one pretty frequently to be met with, a type abject and vicious and at the same timesenseless. But he was one of those senseless persons who are very well capable of lookingafter their worldly affairs, and, apparently, after nothing else. Fyodor Pavlovitch, forinstance, began with next to nothing; his estate was of the smallest; he ran to dine at othermen's tables, and fastened on them as a toady, yet at his death it appeared that he had ahundred thousand roubles in hard cash. At the same time, he was all his life one of the mostsenseless, fantastical fellows in the whole district. I repeat, it was not stupidity-themajority of these fantastical fellows are shrewd and intelligent enough-but justsenselessness, and a peculiar national form of it