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author happened to be a native of our part of the country and “a son of  that  Fyodor Karamazov.” Then, in the midst of it all, the author himself suddenly appeared in our town.
    Why did Ivan choose to come to our town just then? I remember the uneasiness that question stirred in me at the time. This fateful visit of his, which was to trigger off a whole chain of events, remained unclear to me almost to the end. In general, it was strange that such a cultured, proud, and apparently prudent young man as Ivan should come to that scandalous house to join a father who had ignored him all his life, who didn’t know him, indeed, hardly remembered that he existed, a father who would most certainly have refused to give him money under any circumstances and who lived in constant dread lest either of his younger sons, Ivan or Alexei, should one day come and ask him for help. Yet the young man came and installed himself in his father’s house. He spent one month there, then another, and the two of them seemed to live in perfect agreement. I was not the only one who was surprised; many others wondered about it too. Peter Miusov, the cousin of Karamazov’s first wife whom I mentioned earlier, happened to have returned just then from Paris, where he had settled for good, and was staying on his estate just outside our town. I remember that he was the most puzzled of all, once he had made the acquaintance of the young man, who interested him a great deal and with whom he used to exchange sophisticated barbs, although his feelings were often secretly hurt when he was bested in these confrontations.
    “He is proud,” he said of Ivan then. “A man like that will always find money to live on. Why, even now he has enough to go abroad. So what can be his motive for coming here? He certainly didn’t come in the hope of getting money out of his father, for it is obvious that nothing in the world would make his father give him any. Nor does he go in for wine and debauchery, and yet old Karamazov seems unable to take a step without him. In fact, I’ve never seen two men get along so famously!”
    And they did. Moreover, the young man exercised an obvious influence on his father, who sometimes almost seemed as if he would heed his advice. Although he was often his nasty, unbridled self still, his behavior began to improve slightly. It was only later that we learned that Ivan had come, at least partly, at the request of his older brother Dmitry, whom he also met and got to know for the first time during this visit to our town. The two brothers had been corresponding before on an important matter that concerned Dmitry more than Ivan. What it was the reader will learn at great length in good time. However, even when I learned about that matter, Ivan Karamazov remained a mystery to me and I still did not understand why he had come.
    Let me add that Ivan seemed to act as a mediator between his father and his brother Dmitry, who by then had completely broken off relations, Dmitry even instituting legal proceedings against the old man.
    I must emphasize here that this was the very first meeting of the Karamazovs, the first time that some members of that strange family had set eyes on each other. Now, Karamazov’s youngest son, Alexei, had been living among us for the past year and we had met him before his brothers. It is of this brother, Alexei, that I find it the most difficult to speak in this introductory part of my narrative, although it is indispensable to do so before I bring him out onto the stage of my novel. I must write an introductory piece about him too, if only to explain a point that may strike my readers as very strange, namely, that my future hero will have to wear the cassock of a novice at his very first appearance. Yes, he had been living at our monastery for a year or so and, indeed, it looked as if he were preparing to spend the rest of his life within its walls.
    Chapter 4: The Third Son—Alyosha
    HE WAS then only twenty