Meet the Karamazov Patriarch — The Brothers Karamazov

Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov started with almost nothing, sponged dinners as a toady, and still died with a hundred thousand roubles in cash while the district remembered him as its most senseless buffoon. The narrator names Alyosha as the third son, then goes back to the first marriage. Adelaïda Ivanovna, an intelligent heiress, eloped with him because she thought he was some bold progressive spirit. He wanted her dowry and a place beside her family.

The marriage collapses almost at once. She finds contempt where she expected rebellion. He takes twenty-five thousand roubles of her money and tries to deed her village and town house into his name until her family blocks him. Fights follow. Rumour says she beats him rather than the reverse. She runs off with a poor divinity student and leaves three-year-old Mitya behind. Fyodor fills the house with women, drinks recklessly, and tours the province as the wounded husband, telling strangers details a decent man would hide because the performance flatters him.

He follows her to Petersburg and finds her already dead, of typhus or of hunger in a garret. Drunk, he runs into the street shouting psalms of release, or he weeps like a child. The narrator will not choose between the two. He may have rejoiced at his release and wept for the woman who released him in the same hour. Mitya is still in the house, three years old, and already forgotten.