1 The Brothers Karamazov
not only that he would not object, but that this was what he
desired, and, if opportunity arose, that he would be ready to
help. From some rumour, or perhaps from some stray word
of Grushenka’s, he had gathered further that the old man
would perhaps prefer him to Fyodor Pavlovitch for Grush-
enka.
Possibly many of the readers of my novel will feel that in
reckoning on such assistance, and being ready to take his
bride, so to speak, from the hands of her protector, Dmitri
showed great coarseness and want of delicacy. I will only
observe that Mitya looked upon Grushenka’s past as some-
thing completely over. He looked on that past with infinite
pity and resolved with all the fervour of his passion that
when once Grushenka told him she loved him and would
marry him, it would mean the beginning of a new Grush-
enka and a new Dmitri, free from every vice. They would
forgive one another and would begin their lives afresh. As
for Kuzma Samsonov, Dmitri looked upon him as a man
who had exercised a fateful influence in that remote past of
Grushenka’s, though she had never loved him, and who was
now himself a thing of the past, completely done with, and,
so to say, non-existent. Besides, Mitya hardly looked upon
him as a man at all, for it was known to everyone in the
town that he was only a shattered wreck, whose relations
with Grushenka had changed their character and were now
simply paternal, and that this had been so for a long time.
In any case there was much simplicity on Mitya’s part
in all this, for in spite of all his vices, he was a very sim-
ple-hearted man. It was an instance of this simplicity that