Brothers -- Fiction; Didactic fiction; Fathers and sons -- Fiction; Russia -- Social life and customs -- 1533-1917 -- Fiction
Alyosha described all that had happened from the moment he went in to
Katerina Ivanovna’s. He was ten minutes telling his story. He can’t be
said to have told it fluently and consecutively, but he seemed to make
it clear, not omitting any word or action of significance, and vividly
describing, often in one word, his own sensations. Dmitri listened in
silence, gazing at him with a terrible fixed stare, but it was clear to
Alyosha that he understood it all, and had grasped every point. But as
the story went on, his face became not merely gloomy, but menacing. He
scowled, he clenched his teeth, and his fixed stare became still more
rigid, more concentrated, more terrible, when suddenly, with incredible
rapidity, his wrathful, savage face changed, his tightly compressed
lips parted, and Dmitri Fyodorovitch broke into uncontrolled,
spontaneous laughter. He literally shook with laughter. For a long time
he could not speak.
“So she wouldn’t kiss her hand! So she didn’t kiss it; so she ran
away!” he kept exclaiming with hysterical delight; insolent delight it
might have been called, if it had not been so spontaneous. “So the
other one called her tigress! And a tigress she is! So she ought to be
flogged on a scaffold? Yes, yes, so she ought. That’s just what I
think; she ought to have been long ago. It’s like this, brother, let
her be punished, but I must get better first. I understand the queen of
impudence. That’s her all over! You saw her all over in that
hand-kissing, the she-devil! She’s magnificent in her own line! So she
ran home? I’ll go—ah—I’ll run to her! Alyosha, don’t blame me, I agree
that hanging is too good for her.”
“But Katerina Ivanovna!” exclaimed Alyosha sorrowfully.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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