The Second Marriage's Dark Pattern — The Brothers Karamazov

Escaping one cage often means walking into another. Sixteen-year-old Sofya Ivanovna marries Fyodor after a benefactress torments her nearly to hanging; she would rather take a stranger than the loft rope. Fyodor wanted her innocence, not a dowry, and held orgies in her presence until hysteria wrecked her. She bore Ivan and Alexey, then died; Fyodor forgot the boys as he had Mitya.

Grigory kept them in his cottage until the general's widow arrived three months later, slapped drunk Fyodor, boxed Grigory's ear, and swept the unwashed boys away in a rug. Fyodor drove around town boasting of the slaps and waved through their education. The widow left each boy a thousand roubles in a crabbed will; Yefim Petrovitch Polenov actually raised them, preserved the money with interest, and favored Alyosha.

Ivan grew proud and self-supporting at university, writing as Eye-Witness and later a famous article on ecclesiastical courts that believers, secularists, and atheists all applauded until sharper readers called it satire. He has returned home on oddly good terms with the father who ignored him, partly to mediate Dmitri's lawsuit, while Alyosha has already spent a year in the monastery as a novice. For the first time the three brothers and their father are under one roof.