Alyosha showed no particular emotion at the sight of his mother’s grave. He only listened to Grigory’s minute and solemn account of the erection of the tomb; he stood with bowed head and walked away without uttering a word. It was perhaps a year before he visited the cemetery again.
But this little episode was not without an influence upon Fyodor Pavlovitch—and a very original one.
He suddenly took a thousand roubles to our monastery to pay for requiems for the soul of his wife; but not for the second, Alyosha’s mother, the “crazy woman,” but for the first, Adelaïda Ivanovna, who used to thrash him.
In the evening of the same day he got drunk and abused the monks to Alyosha. He himself was far from being religious; he had probably never put a penny candle before the image of a saint.
Strange impulses of sudden feeling and sudden thought are common in such types.
I have mentioned already that he looked