The Brothers Karamazov Read Online Free PDF

usually quite successful.
    Sofia was the daughter of an obscure deacon. She lost her parents in early childhood and, having no other relatives, was brought up by a wealthy old lady, the widow of General Vorokhov. The old woman was her benefactress and her tormentor. I don’t know the details, but I heard that one day the meek and uncomplaining creature had to be cut down from a rope she had tied to a nail in the storeroom. This shows how hard it was for her to submit to the whims and the constant nagging of the old woman who, although not really wicked, had been made tyrannical and eccentric by sheer idleness.
    When Fyodor Karamazov asked for Sofia’s hand, Mrs. Vorokhov made inquiries about him and, consequently, when he reappeared, had him thrown out. So, as with his first marriage, he asked the girl to elope with him. Had Sofia known a bit more about his past, she might have turned him down, even in her situation; but everything had taken place in another province and, besides, what judgment could a sixteen-year-old girl make, when all she felt was that she would rather jump in the river than stay with her benefactress? This is how the poor thing came to exchange a benefactress for a benefactor.
    This time, Fyodor Karamazov didn’t get any dowry. The general’s widow was outraged and refused to give her charge a single kopek, laying a curse on them both instead. But then, on this occasion, collecting a dowry had not been Karamazov’s main motive. Although up till then he had been aroused exclusively by the coarser types of feminine good looks, the lecher’s imagination was caught now by the striking beauty of this innocent creature and, indeed, by her child-like innocence itself. As he used to say himself later, with a nasty snicker: “Those innocent eyes of hers slit my soul open like a razor.”
    In a lecher like Fyodor Karamazov, of course, it only added new spice to his sensual desires. He felt that, since he had accepted this wife without dowry, he had every right to treat her without any consideration whatever—she was, he said, “indebted” to him since he had “practically cut her down from a rope.” He took advantage of her phenomenal humility to trample underfoot the most ordinary decencies of marriage, even to the point of bringing loose women into the house and holding orgies in her presence. To indicate how far he went, I will mention that Gregory, the dour, stupid, argumentative old servant, who had hated his former mistress Adelaida, now took Sofia’s side, stood up for her, and swore back at his master in a manner that was quite intolerable from a servant; once he even broke up a party and drove the guests and the women out of the house.
    After a while the wretched girl, who had been terrorized since early childhood, broke down, afflicted with a nervous disorder sometimes found in peasant women, who are then called “shriekers.” Her sickness brought on attacks of hysteria so violent that at times she completely lost her reason. But this did not prevent her from bearing Fyodor Karamazov two sons—Ivan, in the first year of marriage, and Alexei, three years later. When she died Alexei was only just over three, but I know for sure that he remembered his mother all his life, though, of course, as in a dream.
    After their mother’s death, the fate of the two little boys was a repetition of their older brother Mitya’s. Their father seemed to forget them immediately and they were so completely neglected that, like Mitya before them, they ended up in Gregory’s cottage. And it was in the servants’ quarters that the boys were found by the rich and eccentric widow of General Vorokhov, their mother’s former benefactress. For the entire eight years of the marriage, she had seethed under the insult she had received, but she had kept herself constantly informed about Sofia and knew all about her sad plight, her sickness, and the outrageous situation in which she was caught. When she heard these