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(his brother Ivan was twenty-three and their older brother, Dmitry, twenty-seven). First, I want to make it clear that young Alyosha was in no sense a fanatic. In my opinion at least, he was not even a mystic. Let me tell you my opinion of him right from the start: he was just a boy who very early in life had come to love his fellow men and if he chose to enter a monastery, it was simply because at one point that course had caught his imagination and he had become convinced that it was the ideal way to escape from the darkness of the wicked world, a way that would lead him toward light and love. This particular way had caught his attention only because he had happened to meet a man who made an overwhelming impression on him—the famous Zosima, the elder of our monastery, to whom he had become attached with all the ardor of the first love kindled in his insatiable heart. I will not deny, however, that he was already rather strange even then, because he had been strange from the cradle. As I have already mentioned, he was just three when he lost his mother, yet he always remembered how she looked and how she caressed him—“just as if she were standing alive before me,” he would say. Such memories can be preserved (as everyone knows) from an even earlier age, even in a two-year-old, but they are like bright spots standing out in the darkness, a tiny lighted fragment of a huge canvas, while the rest of the painting remains faded and dark. So it was with Alyosha. He remembered a certain evening—a quiet, summer evening, an open window, the slanting rays of the setting sun (the slanting rays were the clearest part of his recollection), an icon with a lighted lamp in a corner of the room, and, kneeling before the icon, his mother, sobbing hysterically, screaming and shrieking, clutching him with both hands so tightly that it hurt, praying to the Mother of God for him, then holding him away from her toward the icon, as if putting him under the protection of the Mother of God . . . Then, all of a sudden a nanny rushes into the room and snatches him away from his mother in alarm. Ah, that picture! Alyosha always remembered the way his mother’s face had looked at that second; he described it as both frenzied and beautiful. But he rarely confided this recollection, and to very few people. As a child and as a boy, Alyosha was rather reserved, one might even say uncommunicative. He was not distrustful, however, or shy and unsociable, just the opposite, in fact. His apparently distant behavior was due to a constant inner preoccupation with something strictly personal, something which had nothing to do with other people, but which was so supremely important to him that it made him forget the rest of the world. But he certainly loved people: throughout his life he seemed to believe in people and trust them, and yet no one ever thought him simple-minded or naive. There was something in him (and it stayed with him all his life) that made people realize that he refused to sit in judgment on others, that he felt he had no right to, and that, whatever happened, he would never condemn anyone. He gave the impression that he could witness anything without feeling in the least outraged, although he might be deeply saddened. Indeed, even when he was still very young, he reached a point where nothing either shocked or horrified him. So when, at the age of nineteen, chaste and pure, he was faced with the shocking debauchery in his father’s house, he would walk away in silence when things became too revolting, but never show the slightest sign of scorn or condemnation.
    His father, because earlier in life he had scrounged off other people, had developed a special sensitivity to people’s attitudes and was prepared to interpret anything as a personal slur. So at first he viewed Alyosha with gruff distrust (“The fellow doesn’t say much, but he is thinking all kinds of things underneath”). Within two weeks, however, he was constantly hugging