"Dostoevsky, Fyodor - The Brothers Karamazov" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dostoevsky Fyodor)

death it appeared that he had a hundred thousand roubles in hard cash.

At the same time, he was all his life one of the most senseless,

fantastical fellows in the whole district. I repeat, it was not

stupidity- the majority of these fantastical fellows are shrewd and

intelligent enough- but just senselessness, and a peculiar national

form of it.

He was married twice, and had three sons, the eldest, Dmitri, by

his first wife, and two, Ivan and Alexey, by his second. Fyodor

Pavlovitch's first wife, Adelaida Ivanovna, belonged to a fairly

rich and distinguished noble family, also landowners in our

district, the Miusovs. How it came to pass that an heiress, who was

also a beauty, and moreover one of those vigorous intelligent girls,

so common in this generation, but sometimes also to be found in the

last, could have married such a worthless, puny weakling, as we all

called him, I won't attempt to explain. I knew a young lady of the

last "romantic" generation who after some years of an enigmatic

passion for a gentleman, whom she might quite easily have married at

any moment, invented insuperable obstacles to their union, and ended

by throwing herself one stormy night into a rather deep and rapid

river from a high bank, almost a precipice, and so perished,

entirely to satisfy her own caprice, and to be like Shakespeare's

Ophelia. Indeed, if this precipice, a chosen and favourite spot of

hers, had been less picturesque, if there had been a prosaic flat bank

in its place, most likely the suicide would never have taken place.

This is a fact, and probably there have been not a few similar