in a dreamlike fashion – a little lamp always burning before an old-fashioned icon in a dark corner of the room; then being knocked down in the street by a horse, after which I am told I lay ill for three months; then, too, times during that illness when I would wake up in the night, lying beside my mother in her bed and frightened by morbid dreams, by the stillness of the night and by the mice scratching in the corner, and all the time trembling with fear, huddling terrified under the bedclothes but never daring to wake her up – from which I concluded that my fear of her was the greatest
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This is similar to alyosha's recounting of his early childhood memory of his mother. Dostoyevsky, from 1840, writes about the suffering of children lacking a father, and how children go about this world and suffer themselves.
This image of an illuminated icon in a niggardly room appearing in a dream-like memory with the characters' mothers present, will prove to be one of Dostoyevsky’s favourite images.
