I. Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov

The narrator, a voice from within the provincial town, opens by telling us that Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov is the novel's hero, then immediately turns to describe the hero's father. Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov is a landowner remembered chiefly for his grim and still-recent death. He is fifty-five or so, a sensualist and buffoon who has managed, through a combination of cunning and shamelessness, to hold on to his modest fortune while squandering every claim to dignity.

He married his first wife, Adelaïda Ivanovna, by elopement. She came from a decent family and had a small dowry; he spent the dowry and she came to despise him within months. She eventually ran away with a seminary student, leaving behind their young son Dmitri. When she died shortly after, Fyodor Pavlovitch played the grieving widower so enthusiastically at her memorial that the townspeople laughed, and he seemed delighted by the laughter. The narrator notes that this habit of playing comic parts even to one's own disadvantage is a recognizable human type.

The chapter ends with the essential structural fact that Fyodor Pavlovitch will father three sons across his two marriages—Dmitri by the first, Ivan and Alyosha by the second—and that each of these sons will become a figure through whom the novel examines a different way of being human. The father's character, established here in four short paragraphs, is the wound the entire novel runs back to: he is not a villain in any grand sense, but a man of appetites who found it easier to be a spectacle than a father.