卡拉馬佐夫兄弟

〔费奥多尔·巴甫洛维奇·卡拉马佐夫，一个小地主、小丑兼淫棍，结过两次婚，把自己所有的儿子都撇下不管，听凭命运摆布。长子德米特里是前妻所生，由仆人格里戈里和母亲的亲戚抚养；伊凡和阿列克塞是后妻所生，在别人家的恩主身边长大。许多年过去，兄弟三人都回到了故乡的城里。〕

[Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, a petty landowner, a buffoon and a sensualist, was twice married and abandoned all his sons to the mercy of fate. The eldest, Dmitri, the son of his first wife, was brought up by the servant Grigory and by his mother’s relations; Ivan and Alexei, the sons of his second wife, grew up among strangers who took them in out of charity. Many years later all three come together in their native town.]

四 第三个儿子阿廖沙

IV. The Third Son, Alyosha

那时他总共才二十岁（他哥哥伊凡那时已二十四岁，他们的大哥德米特里则二十八岁）。首先我要声明，这个青年阿廖沙绝不是狂信者，而且照我看来，至少他甚至根本算不上神秘主义者。我先把我的意见和盘托出：他不过是个早熟的仁爱者，如果说他一头扎上了修道院这条路，那只是因为当时唯有这条路打动了他，向他呈现出一种理想，也就是他那颗急于从尘世恶意的黑暗中挣脱、奔向爱之光明的灵魂所需要的出路。而这条路之所以打动他，仅仅因为他在这条路上遇见了一个在他看来非同寻常的人物——我们那位著名的修道院长老佐西马，他以自己那颗永不餍足的心的全部初恋般的热烈情感依恋着他。不过，我并不否认，他那时就已经很古怪了，甚至可以说是从摇篮里就古怪起来的。顺便说一句，我已经提过，母亲去世时他才刚满三岁，可是此后他一辈子都记得她，记得她的脸、她的爱抚，“就仿佛她活生生地站在我面前”。这样的记忆（这是人人都知道的）甚至可以从更早的年纪留存下来，甚至从两岁起，只是它们一生都像黑暗中的一些明亮的光点那样浮现出来，像是从一幅巨大的画上撕下的一角，整幅画都已黯淡消失，只剩下这一小角。他的情形正是如此：他记得一个夏天的黄昏，静悄悄的，窗子开着，落日斜照（正是那斜斜的光线记得最牢），屋角里有一帧圣像，像前点着长明灯，而在圣像前，他母亲跪着，像犯了歇斯底里似的号啕大哭，尖声嘶叫，双手一把抓住他，紧紧搂得他生疼，向圣母为他祈祷，又从怀抱里伸出双臂把他举向圣像，仿佛要把他托付给圣母的庇护……忽然保姆跑了进来，惊慌失措地从她手里把他夺走。多么一幅画面啊！阿廖沙连那一刹那母亲的脸也记住了：他说，那张脸是疯狂的，却又是美丽的，就他所能回忆起来的而言。但他很少愿意把这段回忆讲给别人听。童年和少年时代他并不外露，甚至很少说话，然而这并非出于不信任，不是由于胆怯或阴郁孤僻，恰恰相反，而是出于别的什么缘故，出于某种内心的牵挂，纯属他个人的、与旁人无关的牵挂，可对他却重要到使他为此仿佛忘掉了别人。但他是爱人的：他似乎一生都完全信赖着人们而活着，可是从来没有任何人把他看作傻瓜或天真汉。他身上有一种东西在诉说、在暗示（而且以后一辈子都是如此）：他不愿做人们的裁判者，他不肯把定罪的事揽到自己身上，无论如何也不肯责备谁。甚至看上去他对什么都能容纳，丝毫不加谴责，尽管常常为此极其痛苦地悲伤。不仅如此，在这一点上他竟走得那么远，以至于谁也不能使他惊讶，也不能使他害怕，而且这在他最年轻的时候就已如此。 二十岁上他来到父亲这里，简直是来到一个肮脏淫乱的贼窝，然而他，一个贞洁而纯净的人，只是在实在看不下去的时候默默走开，脸上却丝毫没有鄙夷或谴责任何人的神色。至于父亲，这个从前当过食客、因而对屈辱格外敏感而精细的人，起初怀着疑心和阴沉的神情接待了他（据说是“这小子话太少，心里想得太多”），可是不出两个星期，结果却变成极其频繁地拥抱他、亲吻他，虽说带着醉汉的眼泪，带着酒后的多愁善感，但看得出来他是真诚而深切地爱上了他，而像他这样的人，当然从来不曾能够这样爱过任何人……

He was only twenty at the time (his brother Ivan was then in his twenty-fourth year, and their eldest brother, Dmitri, in his twenty-eighth). First of all I declare that this youth, Alyosha, was by no means a fanatic, and, to my mind at least, not even in the least a mystic. I will state my full opinion beforehand: he was simply an early lover of mankind, and if he took to the monastic road, it was only because at that time it alone struck him and presented to him, so to speak, the ideal way out for his soul, which was straining out of the darkness of worldly malice towards the light of love. And that road struck him only because upon it he then met an extraordinary being, as he considered — our famous monastery elder Zosima, to whom he became attached with all the ardent first love of his unquenchable heart. Nevertheless, I do not dispute that he was even then already very strange, having been so from the very cradle. I have already mentioned of him, by the way, that, though he was left motherless in only his fourth year, he remembered her afterwards all his life, her face, her caresses, “exactly as though she were standing alive before me.” Such memories may be retained (as everyone knows) even from a still earlier age, even from the age of two, but they only emerge throughout one’s whole life like bright points out of the darkness, like a corner torn from an enormous picture which has all gone out and vanished, save for that one little corner. So it was precisely with him: he remembered one evening, a summer evening, still, the window open, the slanting rays of the setting sun (it was the slanting rays he remembered most of all), an ikon in the corner of the room, a lighted lamp before it, and before the ikon, on her knees, his mother, sobbing as though in hysterics, with shrieks and cries, who had seized him in both her arms, embracing him so tightly that it hurt, praying for him to the Mother of God and holding him out from her embrace with both hands towards the ikon, as though beneath the Mother of God’s protection… and suddenly the nurse runs in and snatches him from her in terror. What a picture! Alyosha remembered his mother’s face too at that moment: he used to say that it was frenzied, but beautiful, so far as he could recall it. But he rarely cared to confide this memory to anyone. In childhood and youth he was little given to expansiveness, and even little given to talk, yet not from mistrust, not from shyness or sullen unsociability — quite the contrary, indeed — but from something else, from a kind of inward preoccupation, strictly personal, which concerned no one else, but was so important to him that because of it he seemed to forget others. But he loved people: all his life, it seemed, he lived in complete faith in people, and yet no one ever thought him either a simpleton or a naïve man. There was something in him which told one, and impressed upon one (and did so all his life afterwards), that he did not wish to be a judge of men, that he would not take censure upon himself and would not condemn anyone for anything. It even seemed that he allowed everything, without condemning in the least, though often grieving very bitterly. More than that: in this respect he went so far that no one could either surprise him or frighten him, and this even in his earliest youth. Arriving in his twentieth year at his father’s, positively into a den of filthy debauchery, he, chaste and pure, would merely withdraw in silence when it was unbearable to look on, yet without the slightest air of contempt or condemnation towards anyone whatsoever. His father, who had once been a hanger-on and was therefore quick and delicate in sensing offence, at first met him mistrustfully and sullenly (“he is very silent, they say, and reasons a great deal to himself”), but soon ended, however, by embracing and kissing him terribly often, within no more than a couple of weeks — with drunken tears, it is true, and in maudlin sentimentality, but plainly having come to love him sincerely and deeply, and in a way such a man as he had, of course, never managed to love anyone…