The Brothers Karamazov

“Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov was the third son of FyodorPavlovitch Karamazov, a land owner well known in our districtin his own day, and still remembered among us owing to hisgloomy and tragic death, which happened thirteen years ago,and which I shall describe in its proper place. For the presentI will only say that this “landowner”—for so we used to call him,although he hardly spent a day of his life on his own estate—wasa strange type, yet one pretty frequently to be met with, a typeabject and vicious and at the same time senseless. But he was oneof those senseless persons who are very well capable of lookingafter their worldly affairs, and, apparently, after nothing else.Fyodor Pavlovitch, for instance, began with next to nothing; hisestate was of the smallest; he ran to dine at other men’s tables,and fastened on them as a toady, yet at his death it appeared thathe had a hundred thousand roubles in hard cash. At the same time,he was all his life one of the most senseless, fantastical fellowsin the whole district. I repeat, it was not stupidity—the majorityof these fantastical fellows are shrewd and intelligent enough—but just senselessness, and a peculiar national form of it.”