Summary of the book
Book I is prehistory told by a chronicler of the town himself, who warns in the preface that he writes a single biography in two novels and needs the first, from thirteen years earlier, to make the second comprehensible. What he tells is the family: Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov marries twice, has three sons and raises none. Dmitri Fyodorovich Karamazov is forgotten in a servant's hut and then passed from hand to hand; Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov and Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov are taken in by a vengeful general's widow and then by an honorable benefactor; the father reappears in each one's life only as an adult, for money or out of boredom. The third son, the announced hero, chooses the monastery and a master, Elder Zosima, and the book closes on the eve of the meeting of everyone in his cell. The question that remains is what three boys, equal in their abandonment, do with it: one comes out wounded for having been wronged, another shut up in his own intelligence, the third wanting the whole of faith.
From the author
Chapter summary
The narrator opens the novel by asking leave, before telling anything. He is going to write the life of Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov and calls him a hero, but confesses that he is not a great man and anticipates the reader's questions: what makes him notable, what he did, who knows him, why spend time on the facts of his life. The last, he says, is the most fatal, and he can only answer that the reader may perhaps see for himself, by reading. He defines the hero as a strange type, an eccentric, and admits that strangeness usually works against anyone who asks for attention, because the eccentric, in most cases, is particularity and isolation. Then he turns the argument around:
Analysis
бывает так, что он-то, пожалуй, и носит в себе иной раз сердцевину целого, а остальные люди его эпохи — все, каким-нибудь наплывным ветром, на время почему-то от него оторвались…
, sometimes it happens that he, perhaps, carries within himself the core of the whole, while the other people of his age, all of them, by some passing wind, for some reason have broken away from him for a time…
The narrator defends the hero before showing him and doubts his own success: he fears that Alyosha's strangeness will be read as mere isolation, and so he reverses the idea, holding that the eccentric may keep the center that the age has lost. The text sustains two readings: sincere praise for a hero he loves, or the caution of a chronicler who promises little so as not to be proved wrong.
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Chapter I: The Landowner Fyodor Pavlovich
Chapter summary
The narrator introduces the hero's father, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, landowner of the district (or so they called him, though he almost never lived on the estate), known for the tragic and obscure death that occurred exactly thirteen years earlier and that he promises to tell in due course. For now he defines the type:
Analysis
Chapter II: Mitya Is Left with the Servants
Chapter summary
After Mitya's mother runs away and dies, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov does with the son what was expected of him: he abandons the boy, not out of hatred but because he forgets him completely. The servant Grigory raises him in the hut in the yard, the mother's family also forgets him, and the chapter follows the boy from hand to hand, from Miusov to a distant aunt in Moscow, and to other relatives, until he grows up without father or home and reaches the age to claim from his father what is due to him. The narrator gives the cause of the abandonment in one sentence:
Analysis
Chapter III: The Second Marriage and Two Sons
Chapter summary
Free of Mitya,Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov marries again within a short time, and the second marriage lasts about eight years. He chooses his wife, Sofya Ivanovna, in a province where he went on a small business: an "orphan" since childhood, daughter of an obscure deacon, raised in the rich house of her benefactress, educator and tormentor, the old general's widow Vorokhova. It was said that the docile girl, who never answered back, had been cut down from a rope she had tied to a nail in the back room, so heavy did the old woman's whims and reprimands weigh on her. Fyodor asks for her hand, they make inquiries about him and send him away, and then he proposes the abduction again, which the girl of sixteen accepts, because the river seemed better to her than staying with the benefactress: she exchanged one benefactress for a benefactor. The general's widow did not give a penny and cursed the two of them, but Fyodor, this time, did not want a dowry.
Analysis
Chapter IV: Alyosha Chooses the Monastery
Chapter summary
The narrator warns at the outset that Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov, twenty years old, is neither a fanatic nor a mystic: he is a precocious "friend of mankind," who went to the monastery because it was the only path that seemed to lead his soul from the darkness of worldly evil to the light of love, and because in it he found Elder Zosima. He had been odd from the cradle: from his mother, who died when he was nearly four, he kept a scene at sunset, the slanting ray of sun, the lamp before the icon, and his mother in tears, in hysterics, lifting him up to the Virgin, until the nurse ran in and snatched him from her. As a child and as a youth he spoke little, but he loved people and lived as one who believes in them, without anyone taking him for a simpleton, and he gave the impression that he did not want to be anyone's judge. At twenty he came to his father's house, a den of debauchery, and, being chaste, he merely withdrew in silence, showing no sign of contempt. The father, suspicious at first, in two weeks was embracing and kissing him, with drunken tears, but sincerely.
Analysis
Chapter V: Elder Zosima
Chapter summary
The narrator corrects anyone who might picture Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov as a pale, sickly dreamer: at nineteen he is slender and ruddy, with dark gray, widely set eyes, and for the narrator he is more of a realist than anyone else. He explains what he means by this:
Analysis
Reading of the book
Analysis