You can easily imagine what a father such a man could be and how he would bring up his children.
His behavior as a father was exactly what might be expected.
He completely abandoned the child of his marriage with Adelaïda Ivanovna, not from malice,
nor because of his matrimonial grievances, but simply because he forgot him.
While he was wearying every one with his tears and complaints, and turning his house
into a sink of debauchery, a faithful servant of the family, Grigory, took the three-year-old
Mitya into his care. If he hadn't looked after him there would have been no one even
to change the baby's little shirt. It happened moreover that the child's relations
on his mother's side forgot him too at first. His grandfather was no longer living,
his widow, Mitya's grandmother, had moved to Moscow, and was seriously ill,
while his daughters were married, so that Mitya remained for almost a whole year
in old Grigory's charge and lived with him in the servant's cottage.
But if his father had remembered him (he could not, indeed, have been altogether
unaware of his existence) he would have sent him back to the cottage, as the child
would only have been in the way of his debaucheries. But a cousin of Mitya's mother,
Pyotr Alexandrovitch Miüsov, happened to return from Paris.
He lived for many years afterwards abroad, but was at that time quite a young man,
and distinguished among the Miüsovs as a man of enlightened ideas and of European culture,
who had been in the capitals and abroad. Towards the end of his life he became a Liberal
of the type common in the forties and fifties.
In the course of his career he had come into contact with many of the most Liberal men
of his epoch, both in Russia and abroad. He had known Proudhon and Bakunin personally,
and in his declining years was very fond
of describing the three days of the Paris Revolution of February 1848, hinting
that he himself had almost taken part in the fighting on the barricades.
This was one of the most grateful recollections of his youth.
He had an independent property of about a thousand souls, to reckon in the old style.
His splendid estate lay on the outskirts of our little town and bordered on the lands
of our famous monastery, with which Pyotr Alexandrovitch began an endless lawsuit,
almost as soon as he came into the estate, concerning the rights of fishing in the river
or wood-cutting in the forest, I don't know exactly which.