The Brothers Karamazov

Chapter 5: A Sudden Catastrophe

I will note that he had already been called once, ahead of Alyosha. But the marshal had reported to the presiding judge that, owing to sudden illness or an attack of some kind, the witness could not appear at that moment, but that as soon as he felt better he would be ready to give his testimony whenever they wanted. Somehow, by the way, no one heard this, and it became known only afterwards. His appearance at first went almost unnoticed: the main witnesses, especially the two rival women, had already been questioned; curiosity, for the time being, was satisfied. One could even sense some weariness in the public. They faced the prospect of listening to several more witnesses, who probably had nothing special to say in view of all that had already been said. And time was passing. Ivan Fyodorovich somehow approached remarkably slowly, not looking at anyone and even with his head bowed, as though gloomily pondering something. He was dressed impeccably, but his face produced a morbid impression, at least on me: there was in his face something, as it were, touched with clay, something resembling the face of a dying man. His eyes were dull; he raised them and looked slowly around the courtroom. Alyosha suddenly jumped up from his chair and groaned: aah! I remember it. But not many people caught that either.

The presiding judge began by saying that he was not under oath, that he could give evidence or withhold it, but that, of course, all testimony should be given in good conscience, etc., etc. Ivan Fyodorovich listened and looked at him dully; but suddenly his face began slowly spreading into a grin, and as soon as the judge, who looked at him in surprise, finished speaking, he suddenly burst into laughter.

“Well, anything else?” he asked loudly.

A hush came over the courtroom; something was sensed, as it were. The judge became uneasy.

“You ... are perhaps still a bit unwell?” he said, looking around for the marshal.

“Don’t worry, Your Honor, I’m well enough, and I have something curious to tell you,” Ivan Fyodorovich suddenly replied, quite calmly and respectfully.

“You mean you have some specific information to present? “ the judge went on, still mistrustfully.

Ivan Fyodorovich looked down, hesitated for a few seconds, and, raising his head again, stammered, as it were, in reply:

“No ... I don’t. Nothing special.”

They began asking him questions. He replied somehow quite reluctantly, somehow with exaggerated brevity, even with a sort of repugnance, which increased more and more, though, by the way, his answers were still sensible. To many questions he pleaded ignorance. No, he did not know anything of his father’s accountings with Dmitri Fyodorovich. “Nor was I concerned with it,” he said. Yes, he had heard the defendant threaten to kill his father. Yes, he had heard about the money in the envelope from Smerdyakov . . .

“It’s all the same thing over and over,” he suddenly interrupted with a weary look. “I have nothing special to tell the court.”

“I can see that you are not well, and I understand your feelings ... ,”the judge began.

He turned to the two parties, the prosecutor and the defense attorney, inviting them to ask questions if they thought it necessary, when suddenly Ivan Fyodorovich said in an exhausted voice:

“Let me go, Your Honor, I am feeling very ill.”

And at that, without waiting for permission, he suddenly turned and started out of the courtroom. But having gone about four steps, he stopped as if suddenly pondering something, chuckled softly, and went back to his former place again.

“I’m like that peasant girl, Your Honor ... you know how it goes: ‘I’ll jump if I want, and I won’t if I don’t.’ They go after her with some sarafan or wedding skirt or whatever, asking her to jump up so they can tie it around her and take her to church to be married, and she says: ‘I’ll jump if I want, and I won’t if I don’t . . .’It’s some sort of folk custom . . .” “What do you mean to say by that?” the judge asked sternly.

“Here ... ,”Ivan Fyodorovich suddenly pulled out a wad of money, “here is the money ... the same money that was in that envelope,” he nodded towards the table with the material evidence, “and on account of which my father was murdered. Where shall I put it? Marshal, please hand it to him.”

The marshal took the entire wad and handed it to the judge.

“How could this money possibly end up in your possession ... if it is the same money?” the judge said in surprise.

“I got it from Smerdyakov, the murderer, yesterday. I visited him before he hanged himself. It was he who killed father, not my brother. He killed him, and killed him on my instructions ... Who doesn’t wish for his father’s death ... ?”

“Are you in your right mind?” inadvertently escaped from the judge.

“The thing is that I am precisely in my right mind ... my vile mind, the same as you, and all these ... m-mugs!” he suddenly turned to the public. “A murdered father, and they pretend to be frightened,” he growled with fierce contempt. “They pull faces to each other. Liars! Everyone wants his father dead. Viper devours viper ... If there were no parricide, they’d all get angry and go home in a foul temper ... Circuses! ‘Bread and circuses!”^[333] And me, I’m a good one! Is there some water? Give me a drink, for Christ’s sake!” he suddenly clutched his head.

The marshal at once approached him. Alyosha suddenly jumped up and shouted: “He’s sick, don’t believe him, he’s delirious!” Katerina Ivanovna rose impetuously from her chair and, motionless with horror, looked at Ivan Fyodorovich. Mitya stood up and, with a sort of wild, twisted smile, looked and listened greedily to his brother.

“Calm yourselves, I’m not mad, I’m simply a murderer!” Ivan began again. “One really cannot expect eloquence from a murderer ... ,” he suddenly added for some reason, with a twisted laugh.

The prosecutor, visibly perturbed, leaned over to the presiding judge. The members of the court fidgeted and whispered among themselves. Fetyukovich pricked up his ears, listening attentively. The courtroom was frozen in expectation. The judge suddenly came to his senses, as it were.

“Witness, your words are incomprehensible and impossible in this place. Calm yourself if you can, and tell us ... if you really have anything to tell. How can you confirm such a confession ... if in fact you are not raving?”

“That’s the trouble, I have no witnesses. That dog Smerdyakov won’t send you evidence from the other world ... in an envelope. You keep asking for envelopes, as if one wasn’t enough. I have no witnesses ... except one, perhaps,” he smiled pensively. “Who is your witness?”

“He’s got a tail, Your Honor, you’d find him inadmissible! Le diable n’existe point!^[334] Pay no mind to him, he’s a wretched, paltry devil,” he added, confidentially, as it were, and suddenly stopped laughing. “He’s sure to be here somewhere, there, under the table with the material evidence, where else would he be sitting? You see, listen to me: I told him I would not keep silent, and he started telling me about the geological cataclysm ... what rot! Well, set the monster free ... he’s begun his hymn, because he finds it all so easy. The same as if some drunken lout started bawling that ‘Vanka’s gone to Petersburg,’ but I’d give a quadrillion quadrillion for two seconds of joy. You don’t know me! Oh, how stupid this all is! Well, take me instead of him! I must have come for some reason ... Why, why is everything in the world so stupid...!”

And again, slowly, pensively, as it were, he began looking around the courtroom. But by then all was astir. Alyosha rushed to him from his place, but the marshal had already seized Ivan Fyodorovich by the arm.

“What is the meaning of this?” Ivan Fyodorovich exclaimed, staring straight into the marshal’s face, and suddenly, seizing him by the shoulders, he flung him violently to the floor. But the guards were already there, he was seized, and then he cried out with a frenzied cry.^[335] And all the while he was being taken away, he kept shouting and crying out something incoherent.

Turmoil ensued. I do not remember everything in order, I was excited myself and could not follow. I know only that afterwards, when everything had quieted down, and everyone realized what had happened, the marshal got a telling off, though he thoroughly explained to the authorities that the witness had been well all along, that the doctor had examined him an hour ago when he felt slightly ill, but that before entering the courtroom he had spoken coherently, so that it was impossible to foresee anything; that he himself, on the contrary, had demanded and absolutely wanted to testify. But right after this scene, before everyone had at least somewhat calmed down and recovered, yet another scene broke out: Katerina Ivanovna had hysterics. She began sobbing, with loud shrieks, but would not leave, struggled and begged not to be taken away, and suddenly cried out to the judge:

“I have one more piece of evidence to give, at once ... at once . . .! Here is a paper, a letter ... take it, read it quickly, quickly! It’s a letter from that monster, that one, that one!” she was pointing at Mitya. “He killed his father, you’ll see now, he writes to me how he’s going to kill his father! And the other one is ill, ill, he’s delirious! I’ve seen for three days that he’s delirious!”

So she cried out, beside herself. The marshal took the paper she was holding out to the judge, and she, collapsing on her chair and covering her face, began sobbing convulsively and soundlessly, shaking all over and suppressing the slightest moan for fear of being put out of the courtroom. The paper she handed over was that same letter Mitya had written from the “Metropolis” tavern, which Ivan Fyodorovich referred to as a document of “mathematical” importance. Alas, it was acknowledged precisely as mathematical, and had it not been for this letter, Mitya would perhaps not have perished, or at least not have perished so terribly! I repeat, it was difficult to follow all the details. Even now I picture it as so much turmoil. The presiding judge must at once have communicated the new document to the court, the prosecutor, the defense attorney, the jury. I remember only how they began questioning the witness. To the question of whether she had calmed down, which the judge gently addressed to her, Katerina Ivanovna exclaimed impetuously:

“I am ready, ready! I am quite capable of answering you,” she added, apparently still terribly afraid that for some reason she would not be listened to. She was asked to explain in more detail what this letter was and under what circumstances she had received it.

“I received it on the eve of the crime itself, but he wrote it the day before, in the tavern, which means two days before his crime—look, it’s written on some sort of bill!” she cried breathlessly. “He hated me then, because he himself had done a base thing, going after that creature ... and also because he owed me that three thousand ... Oh, he felt bad about that three thousand because of his own baseness! The three thousand happened like this—I ask you, I beg you to listen to me: three weeks before he killed his father, he came to me in the morning. I knew he needed money, and knew what he needed it for—precisely, precisely to seduce that creature and take her away. I knew that he had already betrayed me, and wanted to abandon me, and I, I myself, handed him the money then, I myself offered it to him, supposedly to be sent to my sister in Moscow—and as I was handing it to him, I looked him in the face and said he could send it whenever he chose, ‘even in a month.’ How, how could he not understand that I was telling him right to his face: ‘You need money to betray me with your creature, here is the money, I’m giving it to you myself, take it, if you’re dishonorable enough to take it...! ‘ I wanted to catch him out, and what then? He took it, he took it and went off and spent it with that creature there, in one night ... But he saw, he saw that I knew everything, I assure you, he also saw that I was just testing him by giving him the money: would he be so dishonorable as to take it from me, or not? I looked into his eyes, and he looked into my eyes and saw everything, everything, and he took it, he took my money and went off with it!”

“True, Katya!” Mitya suddenly yelled. “I looked in your eyes, knowing that you were dishonoring me, and yet I took your money! Despise the scoundrel, all of you, despise me, I deserve it!”

“Defendant,” cried the judge, “one more word and I’ll order you to be removed.”

“That money tormented him,” Katya continued, hurrying convulsively, “he wanted to give it back to me, he wanted to, it’s true, but he also needed money for that creature. So he killed his father, but he still did not give me back the money, but went with her to that village where he was seized. There he again squandered the money he had stolen from his father, whom he had killed. And the day before he killed his father, he wrote me that letter, he was drunk when he wrote it, I saw that at once, he wrote it out of spite, and knowing, knowing for certain that I wouldn’t show the letter to anyone, even if he did kill him. Otherwise he wouldn’t have written it. He knew I would not want to revenge myself and ruin him! But read it, read it closely, please, read it more closely and you’ll see that he described everything in the letter, everything beforehand: how he would kill his father, and where he kept his money. Look, please don’t miss this one phrase there: ‘I will kill him, if only Ivan goes away.’ So he thought it all out beforehand, how he was going to kill him,” Katerina Ivanovna went on, gloatingly, and insidiously prompting the court. Oh, one could see that she had thoroughly examined this fatal letter and studied every little detail of it. “If he hadn’t been drunk, he would never have written to me, but see how everything is described beforehand, everything exactly as he killed him afterwards, the whole program!”

So she went on exclaiming, beside herself, and, of course, heedless of all consequences for herself, though she had certainly foreseen them, perhaps as much as a month before, because even then, perhaps, shuddering with malice, she had imagined: “Why don’t I read it in court?” And now it was as if she had thrown herself off the mountain. I seem to recall the clerk reading the letter aloud precisely at that moment, and it made a tremendous impression. Mitya was asked if he acknowledged the letter.

“It’s mine, mine!” cried Mitya. “If I hadn’t been drunk, I’d never have written it...! We hated each other for many things, Katya, but I swear, I swear I loved you even as I hated you, and you—didn’t!”

He sank back on his seat, wringing his hands in despair. The prosecutor and the defense attorney began cross-examining her, mainly in one sense: “What prompted you to withhold such a document till now and to testify previously in a completely different spirit and tone?”

“Yes, yes, I was lying before, it was all lies, against my honor and conscience, but then I wanted to save him, because he hated me so, and despised me so,” Katya exclaimed wildly. “Oh, he despised me terribly, he despised me always, and you know, you know—he despised me from the very moment when I bowed at his feet for that money. I saw it ... I felt it right then, at once, but for a long time I didn’t believe myself. How many times I’ve read it in his eyes: ‘Still, it was you who came to me that time.’ Oh, he didn’t understand, he didn’t understand at all why I came running then, he can only imagine the basest reasons! He measured me by his own measure, he thought everyone was like him,” Katya snarled fiercely, now in an utter frenzy. “And he wanted to marry me only because of the inheritance I received, that’s why, that’s why, I’ve always suspected that was why! Oh, he’s a beast! He was sure I would go on trembling before him all my life out of shame for having come to him that time, and that he could despise me eternally and so hold himself above me— that’s why he wanted to marry me! It’s true, it’s true! I tried to win him over with my love, love without end, I was even willing to endure his betrayal, but he understood nothing, nothing! And how could he understand anything! He’s a monster! That letter I received only the next day, in the evening, they brought it to me from the tavern, and still that morning, still in the morning of that same day, I was willing to forgive him everything, everything, even his betrayal!”

The judge and the prosecutor tried, of course, to calm her down. I am sure that they were all, perhaps, ashamed to be taking advantage in such a way of her frenzy, and to be listening to such confessions. I remember hearing them say to her: “We understand how difficult it is for you, believe us. we are not unfeeling,” and so on, and so on—and yet they did extract evidence from the raving, hysterical woman. She finally described with extraordinary clarity, which often shines through briefly even in moments of such an overwrought condition, how for those two whole months Ivan Fyodorovich had been driving himself nearly out of his mind over saving “the monster and murderer,” his brother.

“He tormented himself,” she exclaimed, “he kept trying to minimize his brother’s guilt, confessing to me that he had not loved his father either, and perhaps had wished for his death himself. Oh, he has a deep, deep conscience! He tormented himself with his conscience! He revealed everything to me, everything, he would come to see me and talk with me every day as with his only friend. I have the honor of being his only friend!” she exclaimed suddenly, as if with some sort of defiance, and her eyes flashed. “Twice he went to see Smerdyakov. Once he came to me and said: ‘If it wasn’t my brother who killed him, but Smerdyakov’ (because everyone here had been spreading this fable that Smerdyakov killed him), ‘then perhaps I am guilty, too, because Smerdyakov knew that I did not like my father, and perhaps thought I wished for my father’s death.’ Then I took out that letter and showed it to him, and he was totally convinced that his brother was the killer, and it totally overwhelmed him. He could not bear it that his own brother was a parricide! Already a week ago I saw that he had become ill from it. In the past few days, sitting with me, he was raving. I saw that he was losing his mind. He went about raving, he was seen like that in the streets. The visiting doctor, at my request, examined him the day before yesterday and told me that he was close to brain fever—all because of him, all because of the monster! And yesterday he learned that Smerdyakov had died—he was so struck by it that he’s lost his mind ... and all because of the monster, all to save the monster!”

Oh, to be sure, one can speak thus and confess thus only once in one’s life—in the moment before death, for instance, mounting the scaffold. But it was precisely Katya’s character and Katya’s moment. It was the same impetuous Katya who had once rushed to a young libertine in order to save her father; the very same Katya who, proud and chaste, had just sacrificed herself and her maiden’s honor before the whole public by telling of “Mitya’s noble conduct,” in order to soften at least somewhat the fate in store for him. So now, in just the same way, she again sacrificed herself, this time for another man, and perhaps only now, only that minute, did she feel and realize fully how dear this other man was to her! She sacrificed herself in fear for him, imagining suddenly that he had ruined himself with his testimony that he, and not his brother, was the killer, sacrificed herself in order to save him, his good name, his reputation! And yet a terrible thought flashed through one’s mind: was she lying about Mitya in describing her former relations with him?—that was the question. No, no, she was not slandering him deliberately when she cried out that Mitya despised her for bowing to him! She believed it herself, she was deeply convinced, and had been perhaps from the moment of the bow itself, that the guileless Mitya, who adored her even then, was laughing at her and despised her. And only out of pride had she then attached herself to him with a hysterical and strained love, love out of wounded pride, a love that resembled not love but revenge. Oh, perhaps this strained love would have grown into real love, perhaps Katya wished for nothing else, but Mitya insulted her to the depths of her soul with his betrayal, and her soul did not forgive. The moment of revenge came unexpectedly, and everything that had been long and painfully accumulating in the offended woman’s breast burst out all at once and, again, unexpectedly. She betrayed Mitya, but she betrayed herself as well! And, naturally, as soon as she had spoken it out, the tension broke, and shame overwhelmed her. Hysterics began again, she collapsed, sobbing and screaming. She was taken away. The moment she was taken out, Grushenka rushed to Mitya with a cry, so that there was no time to hold her back.

“Mitya!” she cried out, “your serpent has destroyed you! See, she’s shown you what she is!” she shouted to the court, shaking with anger. At a sign from the judge, they seized her and attempted to remove her from the courtroom. She would not give in, fought and strained to reach Mitya. Mitya cried out and also strained to reach her. He was seized.

Yes, I suppose our lady spectators were left satisfied: the spectacle had been a rich one. Then I remember how the visiting Moscow doctor appeared. It seems that the presiding judge had sent the marshal out earlier with orders to render assistance to Ivan Fyodorovich. The doctor reported to the court that the sick man was suffering from a most dangerous attack of brain fever, and that he ought to be taken away at once. Questioned by the prosecutor and the defense attorney, he confirmed that the patient had come to him two days earlier, and that he had warned him then that brain fever was imminent, but that he had not wished to be treated. “And he was definitely not in a good state of mind, he confessed to me himself that he saw visions while awake, met various persons in the street who were already dead, and that Satan visited him every evening,” the doctor concluded. Having given his testimony, the famous doctor withdrew. The letter produced by Katerina Ivanovna was added to the material evidence. After conferring, the court ruled that the investigation be continued and that both unexpected testimonies (Katerina Ivanovna’s and Ivan Fyodorovich’s) be entered into the record.

But I will not describe the rest of the examination. In any case, the testimony of the remaining witnesses was merely a repetition and confirmation of the previous testimony, though each with its characteristic peculiarities. But, I repeat, everything will be drawn together in the speech of the prosecutor, which I shall come to presently. Everyone was excited, everyone was electrified by the latest catastrophe and only waited with burning impatience for a quick denouement, the speeches of both sides and the verdict. Fetyukovich was visibly shaken by Katerina Ivanovna’s evidence. But the prosecutor was triumphant. When the examination was over, an intermission in the proceedings was announced, which lasted for nearly an hour. Finally the presiding judge called for the closing debate. I believe it was precisely eight o’clock in the evening when our prosecutor, Ippolit Kirillovich, began his statement for the prosecution.

Chapter 6: The Prosecutor’s Speech. Characterizations

Ippolit Kirillovich began his statement for the prosecution all nervously atremble, with a cold, sickly sweat on his forehead and temples, feeling alternately chilled and feverish all over. He said so afterwards himself. He considered this speech his chef d’oeuvre, the chef d’oeuvre of his whole life, his swan song. True, he died nine months later of acute consumption, so that indeed, as it turned out, he would have been right to compare himself to a swan singing its last song, had he anticipated his end beforehand. Into this speech he put his whole heart and all the intelligence he possessed, and unexpectedly proved that in him were hidden both civic feeling and the “accursed” questions,^[336] insofar at least as our poor Ippolit Kirillovich could contain them in himself. Above all, his speech went over because it was sincere: he sincerely believed in the defendant’s guilt; his accusation was not made to order, it was not merely dutiful, and, in calling for “revenge,” he really was trembling with the desire to “save society.” Even our ladies, ultimately hostile to Ippolit Kirillovich, nonetheless admitted the greatness of the impression made. He began in a cracked, faltering voice, but very soon his voice grew stronger and rang through the whole courtroom, and so to the end of his speech. But as soon as he finished it, he nearly fainted.

“Gentlemen of the jury,” the prosecutor began, “the present case has resounded throughout all Russia. But what, one might think, is so surprising, what is so especially horrifying about it? For us, for us especially? We’re so used to all that! And here is the real horror, that such dark affairs have almost ceased to horrify us! It is this, and not the isolated crime of one individual or another, that should horrify us: that we are so used to it. Where lie the reasons for our indifference, our lukewarm attitude towards such affairs, such signs of the times, which prophesy for us an unenviable future? In our cynicism, in an early exhaustion of mind and imagination in our society, so young and yet so prematurely decrepit? In our moral principles, shattered to their foundations, or, finally, in the fact that we, perhaps, are not even possessed of such moral principles at all? I do not mean to resolve these questions; nevertheless they are painful, and every citizen not only ought, but is even obliged, to suffer over them. Our budding, still timid press has all the same rendered some service to society, for without it we should never have learned, in any measure of fullness, of those horrors of unbridled will and moral degradation that it ceaselessly reports in its pages, to everyone, not merely to those who attend the sessions of the new open courts granted us by the present reign.^[337] And what do we read almost daily? Oh, hourly we read of things before which the present case pales and seems almost something ordinary. But what is most important is that a great number of our Russian, our national, criminal cases bear witness precisely to something universal, to some general malaise that has taken root among us, and with which, as with universal evil, it is already very difficult to contend. Here we have a brilliant young officer of high society, just setting out on his life and career, who basely, stealthily, without any remorse, puts a knife into a petty official, in part his former benefactor, and his serving-woman, in order to steal his own promissory document, and the rest of the official’s cash along with it: ‘It will come in handy for my social pleasures and my future career.’ Having stabbed them both to death, he leaves, putting pillows under the heads of the two corpses. Or again we have a young hero, all hung with medals for valor, who, like a robber on the highway, kills the mother of his chief and benefactor and, to urge his comrades on, assures them that ‘she loves him like her own son, and will therefore follow all his advice and take no precautions.’ Granted he is a monster, but now, in our time, I no longer dare say he is just an isolated monster. Another man may not kill, perhaps, but he will think and feel exactly the same way, in his heart he is just as dishonest as the first. In silence, alone with his conscience, perhaps he asks himself: ‘What is honor, after all, and why this prejudice against shedding blood?’ Perhaps people will cry out against me, and say of me that I am a morbid man, a hysterical man, that I am raving, exaggerating, slandering monstrously. Let them, let them—and, God, how I would be the first to rejoice! Oh, do not believe me, consider me a sick man, but still remember my words: for if only a tenth, only a twentieth part of what I say is true, even then it is terrible! Look, gentlemen, look at how our young men are shooting themselves—oh, without the least Hamletian question of ‘what lies beyond,’^[338] without a trace of such questions, as if this matter of our spirit, and all that awaits us beyond the grave, had been scrapped long ago in them, buried and covered with dust. Look, finally, at our depravity, at our sensualists. Fyodor Pavlovich, the unfortunate victim in the current trial, is almost an innocent babe next to some of them. And we all knew him, ‘he lived among us’ . . .^[339] Yes, perhaps some day the foremost minds both here and in Europe will consider the psychology of Russian crime, for the subject is worthy of it. But this study will be taken up later on, at leisure, and when the whole tragic topsy-turveydom of our present moment has moved more into the background so that it will be possible to examine it more intelligently and more impartially than people like myself, for example, can do. For now we are either horrified or pretend that we are horrified, while, on the contrary, relishing the spectacle, like lovers of strong, eccentric sensations that stir our cynical and lazy idleness, or, finally, like little children waving the frightening ghosts away, and hiding our heads under the pillow until the frightening vision is gone, so as to forget it immediately afterwards in games and merriment. But should not we, too, some day begin to live soberly and thoughtfully; should not we, too, take a look at ourselves as a society; should not we, too, understand at least something of our social duty, or at least begin to understand? A great writer of the previous epoch, in the finale of the greatest of his works, personifying all of Russia as a bold Russian troika galloping towards an unknown goal, exclaims: ‘Ah, troika, bird-troika, who invented you!’—and in proud rapture adds that all nations respectfully stand aside for this troika galloping by at breakneck speed. Let it be so, gentlemen, let them stand aside, respectfully or not, but in my sinful judgment the artistic genius ended like that either in a fit of innocently infantile sunnymindedness, or simply from fear of contemporary censorship. For if his troika were to be drawn by none but his own heroes, the Sobakeviches, Nozdryovs, and Chichikovs, then no matter who is sitting in the coachman’s box, it would be impossible to arrive at anything sensible with such horses! And those were still former horses, a far cry from our own, ours are no comparison . . .”^[340]

Here Ippolit Kirillovich’s speech was interrupted by applause. They liked the liberalism of his depiction of the Russian troika. True, only two or three claps broke out, so that the presiding judge did not even find it necessary to address the public with a threat to “clear the court” and merely gave the clappers a stern look. But Ippolit Kirillovich was encouraged: never had he been applauded before! For so many years no one had wanted to listen to the man, and suddenly there came an opportunity to speak out for all Russia to hear!

“Indeed,” he went on, “what is this Karamazov family that has suddenly gained such sad notoriety all over Russia? Perhaps I am greatly exaggerating, but it seems to me that certain basic, general elements of our modern-day educated society shine through, as it were, in the picture of this nice little family—oh, not all the elements, and they shine only microscopically, like to the sun in a small water-drop,’^[341] yet something has been reflected, something has betrayed itself. Look at this wretched, unbridled, and depraved old man, this ‘paterfamilias,’ who has so sadly ended his existence. A nobleman by birth, starting out his career as a poor little sponger, who through an accidental and unexpected marriage grabs a small capital as a dowry, at first a petty cheat and flattering buffoon with a germ of mental capacity, a far from weak one, by the way, and above all a usurer. As the years go by—that is, as his capital grows— he gets bolder. Self-deprecation and fawning disappear, only a jeering and wicked cynic and sensualist remains. The whole spiritual side has been scrapped, but there is an extraordinary thirst for life. In the end he sees nothing in life apart from sensual pleasure, and thus he teaches his children. Of the spiritual sort of fatherly duties—none at all. He laughs at them, he brings his little children up in the backyard and is glad when they are taken away from him. He even forgets about them altogether. The old man’s whole moral rule is—après moi le déluge.^[342] Everything contrary to the idea of a citizen, a complete, even hostile separation from society: ‘Let the whole world burn, so long as I am all right. ‘ And he is all right, he is perfectly content, he wants to live like that for another twenty or thirty years. He cheats his own son, and with the son’s money, his maternal inheritance, which he does not want to give him, he takes his own son’s mistress away. No, I have no intention of handing over the defense of the accused to the highly talented attorney from Petersburg. I myself can speak the truth, I myself understand the sum total of indignation he has stored up in his son’s heart. But enough, enough of that unfortunate old man, he has his reward. Let us recall, however, that he is a father, and one of our modern-day fathers. Shall I offend society if I say that he is even one of many modern-day fathers? Alas, so many modern-day fathers simply do not speak their minds as cynically as this one did, for they are better bred, better educated, but essentially they are of almost the same philosophy as he. But allow that I am a pessimist, allow that I am. You will forgive me: that was our arrangement. Let us settle it beforehand: do not believe me, do not believe me, I shall speak, but do not believe me. But still let me speak my mind, still you may remember a little something of what I say. Now, however, we come to the children of this old man, this paterfamilias: one of them stands before us in the dock, we shall have much to say of him later; the others I shall mention only in passing. The elder of the two is one of our modern young men, brilliantly educated, with quite a powerful mind, who, however, no longer believes in anything, who has already scrapped and rejected much, too much in life, exactly as his father had done. We have all heard him, he was received amicably in our society. He did not conceal his opinions, even the opposite, quite the opposite, which now emboldens me to speak of him somewhat frankly, not as a private person, of course, but only as a member of the Karamazov family. Yesterday a certain sick idiot died here, on the outskirts of our town, by suicide; a person much involved in the present case, the former servant and, perhaps, illegitimate son of Fyodor Pavlovich, Smerdyakov. In the preliminary investigation he told me, with hysterical tears, how this young Karamazov, Ivan Fyodorovich, had horrified him with his spiritual unrestraint. ‘Everything, according to him, is permitted, whatever there is in the world, and from now on nothing should be forbidden—that’s what he kept teaching me about.’ It seems that this thesis, which he was taught, ultimately caused the idiot to lose his mind, though, of course, his mental disorder was also affected by his falling sickness, and by this whole terrible catastrophe that had broken out in their house. But this idiot let drop one very, very curious remark, which would do honor even to a more intelligent observer, and that is why I am mentioning it now: ‘If,’ he said to me, ‘any one of the sons most resembles Fyodor Pavlovich in character, it is him, Ivan Fyodorovich!’ At this remark I shall interrupt the characterization I have begun, considering it indelicate to continue further. Oh, I do not want to draw any further conclusions and, like the raven, only croak ruin over a young fate. We have just seen, here in this hall, that the direct force of the truth still lives in his young heart, that the feeling of family loyalty has not yet been stifled in him by unbelief and moral cynicism, acquired more as an inheritance than through real mental suffering. Now the other son—oh, still a youth, pious and humble, who, in contrast to the dark, corrupting world view of his brother, seeks to cling to ‘popular foundations,’ so to speak, or to what goes by that clever name among us in certain theoretical corners of our thinking intelligentsia. He clung to the monastery, you see; he all but became a monk himself. In him, it seems to me, unconsciously, as it were, and so early on, there betrayed itself that timid despair that leads so many in our poor society, fearing its cynicism and depravity, and mistakenly ascribing all evil to European enlightenment, to throw themselves, as they put it, to the ‘native soil,’ so to speak, into the motherly embrace of the native earth, like children frightened by ghosts, who even at the dried-up breast of a paralyzed mother wish only to fall peacefully asleep and even to sleep for the rest of their lives, simply not to see the horrors that frighten them. For my part, I wish the good and gifted young man all the best, I hope that his youthful brightheartedness and yearning for popular foundations will not turn later, as so often happens, into dark mysticism on the moral side, and witless chauvinism on the civic side^[343]—two qualities that perhaps threaten more evil for the nation than even the premature corruption owing to a falsely understood and gratuitously acquired European enlightenment from which his elder brother suffers.”

Mysticism and chauvinism again drew two or three claps. And of course Ippolit Kirillovich had gotten carried away, and all this scarcely suited the present case, to say nothing of its being rather vague, but this consumptive and embittered man had too great a desire to speak his whole mind at least once in his life. It was said afterwards that in characterizing Ivan Fyodorovich, he had even been prompted by an indelicate feeling, because the young man had publicly snubbed him once or twice in argument, and Ippolit Kirillovich, remembering it, now desired to have his revenge. But I do not know that it is possible to draw such a conclusion. In any event, all this was merely a preamble, and further on the speech became more direct and to the point. “But now we have the third son of this father of a modern-day family,” Ippolit Kirillovich continued. “He is in the dock, he stands before us. Before us also stand his deeds, his life and acts: the hour has come, and everything has been unfolded, everything has been revealed. In contrast to the ‘Europeanism’ and the ‘popular foundations’ of his brothers, he seems to represent ingenuous Russia—oh, not all, not all, and God forbid it should be all! Yet she is here, our dear mother Russia, we can smell her, we can hear her. Oh, we are ingenuous, we are an amazing mixture of good and evil, we are lovers of enlightenment and Schiller, and at the same time we rage in taverns and tear out the beards of little drunkards, our tavern mates. Oh, we can also be good and beautiful, but only when we are feeling good and beautiful ourselves. We are, on the contrary, even possessed—precisely possessed—by the noblest ideals, but only on condition that they be attained by themselves, that they fall on our plate from the sky, and, above all, gratuitously, gratuitously, so that we need pay nothing for them. We like very much to get things, but terribly dislike having to pay for them, and so it is with everything. Oh, give us, give us all possible good things in life (precisely all, we won’t settle for less) and, more particularly, do not obstruct our character in any way, and then we, too, will prove that we can be good and beautiful. We are not greedy, no, but give us money, more and more money, as much money as possible, and then you will see how generously, with what scorn for filthy lucre, we can throw it away in one night of unrestrained carousing. And if we are not given any money, we will show how we manage to get it anyway when we want it badly enough. But of that later—let us take things in order. First of all, we see a poor, neglected boy, ‘in the backyard, without any shoes,’ as it was just put by our venerable and respected citizen—alas, of foreign origin! Once more I repeat, I yield to no one in defending the accused. I am prosecutor, but also defender. Yes, we, too, are human and are able to weigh the influence on a man’s character of the earliest impressions of childhood and the parental nest. But then the boy becomes a youth, a young man, an officer; for riotous conduct, for a challenge to a duel, he is exiled to one of the remote frontier towns of our bounteous Russia. There he serves, there he carouses, and of course a big ship needs a big sea. We need money, money above all, and so, after a long dispute, he and his father agree on a final six thousand, which is sent to him. Note that he signed this document, that this letter exists in which he all but renounces everything, and on payment of this six thousand ends his dispute with his father over the inheritance. Here occurs his encounter with a young girl of lofty character and development. Oh, I dare not repeat the details, you have only just heard them: here is honor, here is selflessness, I shall say no more. The image of a young man, thoughtless and depraved, who nonetheless bows to true nobility, to a lofty idea, flashed before us extremely sympathetically. But suddenly, after that, in this same courtroom, the other side of the coin followed quite unexpectedly. Again I dare not venture to guess, and will refrain from analyzing, why it followed thus. And yet there were reasons why it followed thus. This same person, all in tears from her long-concealed indignation, declares to us that he, he himself, was the first to despise her for her perhaps imprudent and impetuous, but all the same lofty and magnanimous impulse. It was in him, in this girl’s fiancé, before anyone else, that this derisive smile flashed, which from him alone she could not endure. Knowing that he had already betrayed her (betrayed her in the prior conviction that now she must bear with him in everything, even in his betrayal), knowing this, she deliberately offers him three thousand roubles, and clearly, all too clearly, lets him understand that she is offering him money to betray her: ‘Well, will you take it or not, will you be so cynical?’ she says to him silently with her probing and accusing eyes. He looks at her, he understands her thoughts perfectly (he himself confessed here before you that he understood everything), and without reservation he appropriates the three thousand and squanders it in two days with his new sweetheart! What are we to believe, then? The first legend—the impulse of a lofty nobility giving its last worldly means and bowing down before virtue, or the other side of the coin, which is so repugnant? It is usually so in life that when there are two opposites one must look for truth in the middle; in the present case it is literally not so. Most likely in the first instance he was sincerely noble, and in the second just as sincerely base. Why? Precisely because we are of a broad, Karamazovian nature—and this is what I am driving at—capable of containing all possible opposites and of contemplating both abysses at once, the abyss above us, an abyss of lofty ideals, and the abyss beneath us, an abyss of the lowest and foulest degradation. Recall the brilliant thought expressed earlier by a young observer who has profoundly and closely contemplated the whole Karamazov family, Mr. Rakitin: ‘A sense of the lowness of degradation is as necessary for these unbridled, unrestrained natures as the sense of the loftiest nobility’— and it is true: they precisely need this unnatural mixture, constantly and ceaselessly. Two abysses, two abysses, gentlemen, in one and the same moment—without that we are wretched and dissatisfied, our existence is incomplete. We are broad, broad as our whole mother Russia, we will embrace everything and get along with everything! Incidentally, gentlemen of the jury, we have now touched on these three thousand roubles, and I shall take the liberty of getting somewhat ahead of myself. Simply imagine him, this broad nature, having obtained this money—in such a way, through such shame, such disgrace, such uttermost humiliation—simply imagine him supposedly being capable that same day of setting aside half of it, of sewing it into an amulet, and being firm enough after that to carry it around his neck for a whole month, despite all temptations and extreme needs! Not while drinking riotously in the taverns, not when flying out of town to get, God knows from whom, the money he so badly needed to save his sweetheart from seduction by his rival, his own father—would he venture to touch this amulet. But if only precisely not to leave her to the seduction of the old man of whom he was so jealous, he ought to have opened his amulet and stayed home to keep relentless watch over his sweetheart, waiting for the moment when she would finally say to him: ‘I am yours,’ and he would fly off with her somewhere far away from the present fatal situation. But no, he would not touch his talisman, and on what pretext? The original pretext was, we have said, precisely so that when he was told: ‘I am yours, take me wherever you like,’ he would have the wherewithal to take her. But this first pretext, according to the defendant’s own words, paled beside the second one. As long as I carry this money on myself, he said, ‘I am a scoundrel, but not a thief,’ for I can always go to my insulted fiancée and, laying before her this half of the whole sum I fraudulently appropriated, I can always say to her: ‘You see, I squandered half of your money, and proved thereby that I am a weak and immoral man, a scoundrel if you like’ (I am using the defendant’s own language), ‘but even if I am a scoundrel, I am still not a thief, for if I were a thief, I would not have brought you this remaining half of the money, but would have appropriated it as I did the first half.’ An astonishing explanation of the fact! This most violent but weak man, who was unable to resist the temptation of accepting the three thousand roubles along with such disgrace—this same man suddenly finds in himself such stoic firmness that he can carry thousands of roubles around his neck without venturing to touch them! Is this even slightly congruous with the character we are analyzing? No, and I shall permit myself to tell you how the real Dmitri Karamazov would have acted in such a case, even if he had indeed decided to sew his money into an amulet. At the very first temptation—say, again to provide some entertainment for this same new sweetheart with whom he had already squandered the first half of the money—he would undo his amulet and take out, well, maybe just a hundred roubles to begin with, for why should he need to return exactly half, that is, fifteen hundred—fourteen hundred will do, it comes to the same thing: ‘a scoundrel, but not a thief, because I’ve at least brought back fourteen hundred, and a thief would have taken it all and brought back nothing.’ Then in a little while he would undo the amulet again, and take out a second hundred, then a third, then a fourth, and by no later than the end of the month he would have taken out all but the last hundred: so I’ll bring back a hundred, it comes to the same thing: ‘a scoundrel, but not a thief. I squandered twenty-nine hundred, but I’ve brought back one at least, a thief would not have done that. ‘ And finally, having squandered all but the last hundred, he would look at that last hundred and say to himself: ‘But there’s really no point in giving a hundred back—why don’t I squander this, too!’ That is how the real Dmitri Karamazov, as we know him, would have acted. But as for the legend of this amulet— it is hard even to imagine anything more contrary to reality. One can suppose anything but that. But we shall come back to that later.”

After mentioning in order everything the investigation had disclosed about the property dispute and the family relations between father and son, and having again and again drawn the conclusion that, from the facts available, there was not the slightest possibility of determining who had outdone whom or who had been done out of what in this question of the property division, Ippolit Kirillovich brought up the medical opinions concerning the three thousand roubles stuck as a fixed idea in Mitya’s mind.

Chapter 7: A Historical Survey

“The medical experts strove to prove to us that the defendant is out of his mind and a maniac. I insist that he is precisely in his right mind, and so much the worse for him: had it not been his mind, he might have turned out to be much more intelligent. As for his being a maniac, I am prepared to agree, but precisely on one point only— that same point the experts indicated, precisely the defendant’s view of the three thousand roubles supposedly left owing to him by his father. Nevertheless, it may be possible to find an incomparably closer point of view than his inclination to madness to explain the defendant’s constant frenzy with regard to this money. For my part, I agree completely with the opinion of the young doctor who found that the defendant is and was in full and normal possession of his mental faculties, but has simply been exasperated and embittered. And that is just it: the object of the defendant’s constant and frenzied bitterness consisted not in the three thousand, not in the sum itself, but in the fact that there was a special reason that provoked his wrath. That reason was—jealousy!”

Here Ippolit Kirillovich unfolded at length the whole picture of the defendant’s fatal passion for Grushenka. He began from the very moment when the defendant went to “the young person” in order “to give her a beating”—in his own words, Ippolit Kirillovich commented—”but instead of beating her, he stays there at her feet—that is the beginning of this love. At the same time the old man, the defendant’s father, also sets his eye on the same person—a coincidence both surprising and fatal, for both hearts caught fire suddenly, simultaneously, though they had met and known this person before—and both hearts caught fire with the most unrestrained, the most Karamazovian passion. Here we have her own confession: ‘I laughed,’ she says, ‘at both of them.’ Yes, she suddenly wanted to laugh at the two of them; she had not wanted to before, but now suddenly this intention flew into her mind—and the end of it was that they both fell conquered before her. The old man, who worshipped money as if it were God, at once prepared three thousand roubles if she would only just visit his abode, but was soon driven to the point where he would have considered it happiness to lay his name and all his property at her feet if only she would consent to become his lawful wife. For this we have firm evidence. As for the defendant, his tragedy is obvious, it stands before us. But such was this young person’s ‘game.’ The seductress did not even give any hope to the unfortunate young man, for hope, real hope, was given him only at the very last moment, when he, kneeling before his tormentress, stretched out to her his hands already stained with the blood of his father and rival: precisely in that position he was arrested. ‘Send me, send me to hard labor with him, I drove him to it, I am the guiltiest of all!’—this woman herself exclaimed, in sincere repentance, at the moment of his arrest. The talented young man who has taken it upon himself to write about the present case— the same Mr. Rakitin whom I have already mentioned—defines this heroine’s character in a few concise and characteristic phrases: ‘Early disappointment, early deception and fall, the treachery of a fiancé-seducer who abandoned her, then poverty, the curses of a respectable family, and, finally, the patronage of a rich old man, whom she herself incidentally regards even now as her benefactor. Anger was buried far too early in a young heart, which perhaps contained much good. What formed was a calculating, money-hoarding character. What formed was a derisive and vengeful attitude towards society.’ After such a characterization one can understand how she might laugh at the two of them simply as a game, a vicious game. And so, during this month of hopeless love, of moral degradation, of betrayal of his fiancée, of appropriation of another person’s money, which was entrusted to his honor—the defendant, on top of that, was driven almost to frenzy, almost to fury, by continual jealousy, and of whom—of his own father! Worst of all, the crazy old man was luring and seducing the object of his passion with the very three thousand that he regarded as his family money, his maternal inheritance, for which he reproached his father. Yes, I agree, this was hard to bear! Here even a mania might appear. The point was not the money, but that by means of this very money his happiness was being shattered with such loathsome cynicism!”

Ippolit Kirillovich then went on to tell how the thought of killing his father gradually emerged in the defendant, and traced it fact by fact.

“At first we only shout in the taverns—shout all that month. Oh, we love to live among people and to inform these people at once of everything, even our most infernal and dangerous ideas; we like sharing with people, and, who knows why, we demand immediately, on the spot, that these people respond to us at once with the fullest sympathy, enter into all our cares and concerns, nod in agreement with us, and never cross our humor. Otherwise we will get angry and wreck the whole tavern.” (There followed the anecdote about Captain Snegiryov.) “Those who saw and heard the defendant during this month felt finally that these were not mere shouts and threats against his father, but that, considering the frenzied state he was in, the threats might become reality.” (Here the prosecutor described the family meeting in the monastery, the conversations with Alyosha, and the ugly scene of violence in his father’s house when the defendant burst in after dinner.) “I do not mean to assert emphatically,” Ippolit Kirillovich continued, “that before this scene the defendant had already determined deliberately and premeditatedly to do away with his father by murdering him. Nevertheless the idea had already presented itself to him several times, and he deliberately contemplated it—for that we have facts, witnesses, and his own confession. I must admit, gentlemen of the jury,” Ippolit Kirillovich added, “that even until today I was hesitant whether to ascribe to the defendant complete and conscious premeditation of the crime that was suggesting itself to him. I was firmly convinced that his soul had already contemplated many times the fatal moment ahead, but merely contemplated it, imagined it only as a possibility, without settling either on the time or the circumstances of its accomplishment. But I was hesitant only until today, until this fatal document was presented to the court today by Miss Verkhovtsev. You heard her exclamation yourselves, gentlemen: ‘This is the plan, this is the program of the murder! ‘—thus she defined the unfortunate ‘drunken’ letter of the unfortunate defendant. And indeed this letter bears all the significance of a program and of premeditation. It was written two days before the crime, and thus we now know firmly that two days before accomplishing his horrible design, the defendant declared with an oath that if he did not get the money the next day, he would kill his father, so as to take the money from under his pillow, ‘in the envelope with the red ribbon, if only Ivan goes away.’ Do you hear: ‘if only Ivan goes away’—so everything had been thought out, the circumstances had been weighed—and what then? It was all accomplished as written! Premeditation and deliberateness are beyond doubt, the crime was to be carried out for the purpose of robbery, that is stated directly, it is written and signed. The defendant does not deny his signature. I shall be told: it was written by a drunk man. But that diminishes nothing, it makes it all the more important: he wrote when drunk what he had planned when sober. Had he not planned it when sober, he would not have written about it when drunk. I shall perhaps be asked: why was he shouting about his intentions in the taverns? If a man determines to do such a thing with premeditation, he is silent and keeps it to himself. True, but he shouted when there was no plan or premeditation as yet, when just the desire alone was present, a yearning that was ripening. Later on he did not shout so much about it. On the evening when this letter was written, having gotten drunk in the ‘Metropolis’ tavern, he was silent, contrary to his custom, did not play billiards, sat apart, spoke to no one, and only chased a local shop clerk from his seat, but this he did almost unconsciously, from a habit of quarreling, which he could not do without anytime he entered a tavern. True, along with his final determination, the fear must have occurred to the defendant that he had shouted around town too much beforehand and that it would go a long way towards exposing and accusing him once he had carried out his plan. But there was no help for it, the fact of publication had been accomplished, it could not be taken back, and, after all, things had always worked out before, so they would work out now as well. We set our hopes on our lucky star, gentlemen! I must admit, furthermore, that he did a lot to get around the fatal moment, that he exerted much effort to avoid the bloody outcome. ‘Tomorrow I’ll ask all people for the three thousand,’ as he writes in his peculiar language, ‘and if I don’t get it from people, blood will be shed.’ Again it was written in a drunken state, and again in a sober state it was accomplished as written!”

Here Ippolit Kirillovich embarked on a detailed description of all Mitya’s efforts to obtain the money, in order to avoid the crime. He described his adventures with Samsonov, his journey to Lyagavy—all of it documented. “Worn out, ridiculed, hungry, having sold his watch for the journey (but still keeping the fifteen hundred roubles on him—supposedly, oh, supposedly! ), tortured by jealousy over the object of his love, whom he had left in town, suspeering that without him she would go to Fyodor Pavlovich, he finally returns to town. Thank God, she has not been with Fyodor Pavlovich! He himself takes her to her patron Samsonov. (Strangely, we are not jealous of Samsonov, and this is a rather typical psychological peculiarity of this case! ) Then he races to his observation post ‘in the backyard’ and there—and there discovers that Smerdyakov is down with a falling fit, that the other servant is sick—the field is clear, and the ‘signals’ are in his hands—what a temptation! Nevertheless he still resists; he goes to Madame Khokhlakov, a temporary local resident greatly respected by us all. Having long felt compassion for his fate, this lady offers him the most reasonable advice: to drop all this carousing, this outrageous love affair, this idling in taverns, the fruitless waste of his young strength, and go to Siberia, to the gold mines: ‘There is an outlet for your stormy strength, your romantic character yearning for adventure.’” Having described the outcome of that conversation, and the moment when the defendant suddenly received word that Grushenka had not stayed at Samsonov’s at all, having described the instantaneous frenzy of the unfortunate, jealous, overwrought man at the thought that she had precisely deceived him and was now there, with Fyodor Pavlovich, Ippolit Kirillovich concluded by drawing attention to the fatal significance of chance: “If the maid had managed to tell him that his sweetheart was in Mokroye with the ‘former’ and ‘indisputable’ one—nothing would have happened. But she was overcome with fright, began vowing and swearing, and if the defendant did not kill her right then, it was only because he rushed headlong after his traitoress. But observe: beside himself as he may have been, he did take the brass pestle with him. Why precisely the pestle, why not some other weapon? But since we have been contemplating this picture for a whole month and preparing for it, the moment anything resembling a weapon flashes before us, we grab it as a weapon. And that some such object might serve as a weapon—this we have already been imagining for a whole month. That is why we recognized it so instantly and unquestionably as a weapon! Therefore it was by no means unconsciously, by no means inadvertently that he grabbed this fatal pestle. And now he is in his father’s garden—the field is clear, no witnesses, the dead of night, darkness, and jealousy. The suspicion that she is there, with his rival, in his arms, and perhaps is laughing at him that very minute—takes his breath away. And not merely the suspicion—why talk of suspicion, when the deception is evident, obvious: she is there, in that room, where the light is coming from, she is with him behind the screen—and so the unfortunate man steals up to the window, respectfully peeks in, virtuously resigns himself, and sensibly departs, hastening to put trouble behind him, lest something dangerous and immoral happen—and we are asked to believe this, we who know the defendant’s character, who understand what state of mind he was in, a state we know from the facts, and, above all, that he was in possession of the signals with which he could open the house at once and go in!” Here, apropos the “signals,” Ippolit Kirillovich left off his accusatory speech for a time, finding it necessary to expatiate on Smerdyakov, so as to exhaust completely this whole parenthetic episode to do with suspecting Smerdyakov of the murder, and have done with the idea once and for all. He did so quite thoroughly, and everyone understood that, despite the contempt he showed for this suggestion, he still considered it very important.

Chapter 8: A Treatise on Smerdyakov

“First of all, where did the possibility of such a suspicion come from?” was the question with which Ippolit Kirillovich began. “The first one to cry out against Smerdyakov as the murderer was the defendant himself at the moment of his arrest, and yet, from that very first cry down to this very moment of the trial, he has failed to present even one fact to confirm his accusation— and not only no fact, but not even the ghost of a fact to any degree congruous with human reason. Then, the accusation is confirmed by only three persons: the defendant’s two brothers and Miss Svetlov. Yet the defendant’s older brother announced his suspicion only today, when he was ill, in a fit of unquestionable delirium and fever, while previously, for the whole two months, as is positively known to us, he fully shared the conviction of his brother’s guilt and did not even attempt to object to the idea. But we shall go into that more particularly later on. Then, the defendant’s younger brother announces to us today that he has no facts, not even the slightest, to support his notion of Smerdyakov’s guilt, and that his conclusion is based only on the words of the defendant himself and ‘the look on his face’—yes, this colossal proof was uttered twice today by his brother. And Miss Svetlov expressed herself perhaps even more colossally: ‘Whatever the defendant tells you, you must believe, he’s not the sort of man to lie.’ That is the sum total of factual evidence against Smerdyakov produced by these three persons, who are only too interested in the defendant’s fate. Nevertheless the accusation against Smerdyakov made its way and held out, and is still holding out—can you believe it, can you imagine it?” Here Ippolit Kirillovich found it necessary to sketch briefly the character of the late Smerdyakov, “who put an end to his life in a fit of morbid delirium and madness.” He portrayed him as a feebleminded man with the rudiments of some vague education, who was confused by philosophical ideas that were too much for his mind, and frightened by certain modern-day teachings on duty and obligation, extensively offered him in practice by the devil-may-care life of his late master, and perhaps also father, Fyodor Pavlovich, and in theory by various strange philosophical conversations with the master’s elder son, Ivan Fyodorovich, who readily allowed himself this diversion—most likely out of boredom or a need for mockery that could find no better application. “He himself described to me the state of his soul during the last days of his life in his master’s house,” Ippolit Kirillovich explained, “but others, too, have given the same testimony: the defendant himself, his brother, even the servant Grigory, all those, that is, who must have known him quite well. Being oppressed, moreover, by the falling sickness, Smerdyakov was ‘cowardly as a chicken.’ ‘He used to fall at my feet and kiss them,’ the defendant told us at a time when he had not yet realized that such information was hardly beneficial to him. ‘It’s a chicken with falling sickness,’ as he put it in his characteristic language. And it is him that the defendant (he testifies to it himself) chooses as his confidant, and bullies into agreeing to serve him as a spy and informer. In this capacity of domestic rat, he betrays his master, he tells the defendant both about the existence of the envelope with the money and about the signals that would enable one to get into the master’s house—and how could he not tell! ‘He’d kill me, sir, I just saw that he’d kill me, sir,’ he kept saying in the interrogation, shaking and trembling even before us, notwithstanding that the tormentor who bullied him was then already under arrest and could no longer come and punish him. ‘He suspected me every minute, sir; in fear and trembling, just to satisfy his wrath, I hastened to tell him about every secret, sir, just so he could see my innocence before him, sir, and let me go in peace with my life, sir.’ These are his own words, I wrote them down and remembered them: ‘He’d start yelling at me, and I’d just fall on my knees before him.’ Being a highly honest young man by nature, and having thereby gained the trust of his master, who recognized this honesty in him when he returned the lost money, the unfortunate Smerdyakov was, one can only think, terribly tormented by remorse at his betrayal of his master, whom he loved as his benefactor. People severely afflicted with the falling sickness, according to the findings of the profoundest psychiatrists, are always inclined to constant and, of course, morbid self-accusation. They suffer from their ‘guilt’ for something and before someone, are tormented by pangs of conscience; often, even without any grounds, they exaggerate and even invent various guilts and crimes for themselves. And now one such individual, from fear and bullying, becomes guilty and criminal in reality. Moreover, he strongly anticipated that something bad might come of the circumstances taking shape before his eyes. When the elder son of Fyodor Pavlovich, Ivan Fyodorovich, was leaving for Moscow, just before the catastrophe, Smerdyakov begged him to stay, although, following his cowardly custom, he did not dare voice all his apprehensions clearly and categorically. He contented himself merely with hints, but these hints were not understood. It should be noted that he saw in Ivan Fyodorovich his protection, as it were, his guarantee, as it were, that as long as he stayed at home, no disaster would occur. Recall the phrase in the ‘drunken’ letter of Dmitri Karamazov: ‘I’ll kill the old man, if only Ivan goes away’; meaning that the presence of Ivan Fyodorovich seemed to everyone a guarantee of peace and order in the house, as it were. But then he leaves, and at once, scarcely an hour after the young master’s departure, Smerdyakov comes down with a falling fit. That is perfectly understandable. It should be mentioned here that Smerdyakov, oppressed by fears and despair of a sort, during those last days especially felt in himself the possibility of an impending attack of the falling sickness, which before, too, had always come upon him in moments of moral tension and shock. It is, of course, impossible to foresee the day and hour of such an attack, but every epileptic can feel in himself beforehand a disposition towards an attack. This medical science tells us. And so, as soon as Ivan Fyodorovich quits the place, Smerdyakov, under the impression of his, so to speak, orphaned and defenseless state, goes to the cellar on a household errand, thinking as he starts down the stairs: ‘Will I have a fit or not, and what if it comes now?’ And so, precisely because of this mood, this insecurity, these questions, the spasm in the throat, which always precedes a falling fit, seizes him, and he topples headlong, unconscious, into the bottom of the cellar. And people manage to see something suspicious in this perfectly natural accident, some sort of clue, some sort of hint that he was deliberately pretending to be sick! But if it was deliberate, the question immediately arises: what for? Out of what calculation, with what aim? I am not speaking of medicine now; science lies, they say, science makes mistakes, the doctors were unable to distinguish truth from pretense— maybe so, maybe so, but all the same answer my question: why would he pretend? Could it be that, having planned the murder, he wanted in advance and at once to attract attention to himself in the house by having a fit? You see, gentlemen of the jury, there were five people in and around Fyodor Pavlovich’s house on the night of the crime: first, Fyodor Pavlovich himself, but he could not have killed himself, that is clear; second, his servant Grigory, but he himself was almost killed; third, Grigory’s wife, the serving-woman Marfa Ignatieva, but it is simply shameful to imagine her as her master’s murderer. Thus two people are left in view: the defendant, and Smerdyakov. But the defendant insists it was not he who killed his father, so Smerdyakov must have killed him, there is no other solution, for there is no one else to be found, there is no way to pick another murderer. Here, here then is the source of this ‘cunning’ and colossal accusation against the unfortunate idiot who yesterday took his own life! Precisely for the simple reason that there is no one else to pick! Were there at least a shadow, at least a suspicion of someone else, some sixth person, I am sure that in that case even the defendant himself would be ashamed to point to Smerdyakov, and would point to this sixth person instead, for to accuse Smerdyakov of this murder is utterly absurd.

“Let us lay aside psychology, gentlemen, let us lay aside medicine, let us lay aside even logic itself, let us turn just to the facts, simply to the facts alone, and let us see what the facts will tell us. Smerdyakov killed him, but how? Alone or together with the defendant? Let us first consider the first alternative— that is, that Smerdyakov was working alone. Of course, if he did kill him, it was with some object, for some sort of profit. But, not having even the shadow of a motive for murder such as the defendant had—that is, hatred, jealousy, and so on and so forth—Smerdyakov would undoubtedly have killed only for the sake of money, in order to appropriate precisely the three thousand roubles he had seen his master put into the envelope. And so, having planned the murder, he informs another person beforehand—a highly interested person, moreover, namely, the defendant—of all the circumstances to do with the money and the signals: where the envelope lay, what exactly was written on it, how it was tied, and above all, above all, he tells him about these ‘signals’ by which one can get into his master’s house. Why does he do it? To betray himself straight off? Or so as to have a rival, who perhaps will want to get in and acquire the envelope himself? No, I shall be told, he did it out of fear. But how could that be? A man who did not shrink from planning such a fearless and beastly thing and then carrying it out, gives away information that he alone in the whole world knows, and that, if he had only kept silent about it, no one in the whole world would have found out? No, however cowardly the man might be, if he were planning such a thing, he would never tell anyone about the envelope and the signals, for that would mean giving himself away beforehand. He would deliberately invent something, some lie or other, if he absolutely had to give information, but he would be silent about that! On the contrary, I repeat, if he kept silent about the money at least, and then went and killed and appropriated the money for himself, no one in the whole world would in any case ever be able to accuse him of murder for the sake of robbery, because no one but he would have seen the money, no one else would have known it was there in the house. Even if he were accused, it would inevitably be thought that he had killed from some other motive. But since no one ever noticed any such motive in him before, and everyone saw, on the contrary, that he was loved by his master and honored with his trust, then of course he would be the last to be suspected, and the one to be suspected would be the one who had such motives, who himself shouted that he had such motives, who did not conceal them, who revealed them to everyone, in short, the one to be suspected would be the murdered man’s son, Dmitri Fyodorovich. Smerdyakov would have committed the murder and robbery, and the son would be accused of it—surely this would be advantageous for Smerdyakov, the murderer? Well, and it is this son Dmitri that Smerdyakov, having planned the murder, tells beforehand about the money, the envelope, and the signals—how clear, how logical it is!

“The day of the murder planned by Smerdyakov comes, and so he goes tumbling into the cellar, shamming an attack of the falling sickness—what for? But, of course, so that first of all the servant Grigory, who was planning his treatment, seeing that there was absolutely no one to watch the house, would perhaps postpone his treatment and stand guard himself. Second, naturally, so that the master himself, seeing that no one was on guard, and being terribly afraid of his son’s coming, which he did not conceal, would be twice as mistrustful and cautious. Finally, and above all, so that of course he, Smerdyakov, brought down by the fit, would at once be transferred from the kitchen, where he always slept apart from everyone and where he could come and go as he pleased, to the other end of the cottage, to Grigory’s little room, behind the partition, three steps away from their own bed, as had always been done from time immemorial whenever he was brought down by the sickness, on the orders of his master and the tenderhearted Marfa Ignatievna. Of course, lying there behind the partition, he would most likely start groaning, in order to show himself truly sick, thereby waking them up throughout the night (as he did, according to the evidence of Grigory and his wife)—and all that, all that to make it more convenient for himself to get up suddenly and then kill his master!

“But, I shall be told, perhaps he pretended to be sick precisely so that no one would suspect him, and informed the defendant about the money and the signals precisely to tempt him into coming and killing him himself, and, don’t you see, when he has killed him and leaves, taking the money with him, perhaps while doing so he will make some noise and clatter, awaking witnesses, and then, you see, Smerdyakov can also get up and go—well, what will he go and do? Why, he will precisely go and kill his master a second time, and a second time take the already-taken money. Do you laugh, gentlemen? Personally I am ashamed to make such suggestions, and yet, just imagine, this very thing is precisely what the defendant asserts: after me, he says, when I had already left the house, knocked Grigory down and raised the alarm, he got up, went in, killed, and robbed. I will not even ask how Smerdyakov could have calculated all this beforehand and foreknown it all as if on his fingers, I mean, that the furious and exasperated son would come with the sole purpose of peeking respectfully in the window, though he knew the signals, and then retreat, leaving him, Smerdyakov, with all the booty! Gentlemen, I put the question to you seriously: where is the moment when Smerdyakov committed his crime? Show me that moment, for without it there can be no accusation.

“But perhaps the falling fit was real. The sick man suddenly came to, heard a cry, went out—well, and what then? He looked around and said to himself: why don’t I go and kill the master? But how would he know what was going on, what was happening there, if he had been lying unconscious up to then? No, gentlemen, fantasy, too, must have its limits.

“‘Well, sir,’ subtle people will say, ‘and what if the two were accomplices, what if they murdered him together and divided the money—what then?’

“Yes, indeed, that is a weighty suspicion, and, to begin with, there is colossal evidence to confirm it: one kills and takes all the labor upon himself, and the other accomplice lies on his back pretending to have a falling fit, precisely with the aim of arousing suspicion in everyone ahead of time, of alarming the master, of alarming Grigory. With what motives, I wonder, could the two accomplices have thought up precisely such an insane plan? But perhaps it was not at all an active complicity on Smerdyakov’s part, but, so to speak, passive and suffering: perhaps the bullied Smerdyakov merely agreed not to resist the murder and, anticipating that he would be accused of allowing his master to be killed, of not shouting or resisting, negotiated with Dmitri Karamazov beforehand for permission to spend the time lying down as if in a falling fit, ‘and you can go and kill him any way you like, it’s none of my apples.’ But even so, since this falling fit, again, would be bound to cause a commotion in the house, Dmitri Karamazov, foreseeing that, would by no means agree to such an arrangement. But suppose he did agree: in that case it would still come out that Dmitri Karamazov was the murderer, the direct murderer and instigator, while Smerdyakov would only be a passive participant, and not even a participant, but merely a conniver out of fear and against his will, as the court would surely discern—and yet what do we see? No sooner is the defendant arrested than he at once shifts all the blame onto Smerdyakov alone and accuses him alone. He does not accuse him as his accomplice, but him alone: he alone did it, he says, he killed him and robbed him, it is his handiwork! But what sort of accomplices are they, if they immediately start denouncing each other—no, that never happens. And notice the risk for Karamazov: he is the chief murderer, the other is not the chief one, he is merely a conniver, he was lying down behind the partition, and now he shifts it all onto the one lying down. But he, the one lying down, might get angry, and just for reasons of self-preservation alone might hasten to proclaim the real truth: we both participated, only I didn’t kill him, I just went along and connived at it out of fear. For surely he, Smerdyakov, would be able to understand that the court would immediately perceive the degree of his guilt, and he could therefore reckon that if he were to be punished, it would be far less severely than the other one, the chief murderer, who wanted to shift it all onto him. Which means, then, that willy-nilly he would make a confession. This, however, we have not seen. Smerdyakov never so much as whispered about any complicity, despite the fact that the murderer firmly accused him, and kept pointing at him all along as the sole murderer. Moreover, it was Smerdyakov who revealed to the prosecution that he himself had informed the defendant of the envelope with the money and of the signals, and that without him he would never have known anything. If he was indeed an accomplice and guilty, would he inform the prosecution of it so lightly—that is, that he himself informed the defendant of all that? On the contrary, he would try to deny it, and would most certainly distort the facts and diminish them. But he did not distort and he did not diminish. Only an innocent man, who has no fear of being accused of complicity, would act that way. And so, yesterday, in a fit of morbid melancholy resulting from his falling sickness and the outbreak of this whole catastrophe, he hanged himself. And, hanging himself, he left a note, written in his own peculiar style: ‘I exterminate myself by my own will and liking, so as not to blame anybody.’ It would have cost him nothing to add: ‘I am the murderer, not Karamazov. ‘ But he did not add it: did he have enough conscience for the one thing, but not for the other?

“And now what? This afternoon money was brought into court, three thousand roubles—’the same,’ we were told, ‘that was here in this envelope, which is on the table with the material evidence; received yesterday from Smerdyakov,’ we were told. But you yourselves, gentlemen of the jury, cannot have forgotten that sad picture. I will not go back over the details, but all the same I shall allow myself to make two or three observations, choosing from the most insignificant of them—precisely because they are insignificant, and so will not have occurred to everyone and might be forgotten. First, once again, we have Smerdyakov, yesterday, returning the money in remorse and hanging himself. (For without remorse he would not have returned the money.) And of course it was only yesterday evening that he confessed his crime for the first time to Ivan Karamazov, as Ivan Karamazov himself declared, otherwise why would he have been silent about it up to now? He confessed, then; but, I repeat once more, why did he not proclaim the whole truth to us in his dying note, knowing that the innocent defendant was going to his last judgment the very next day? The money alone is no proof. I, for example, and two other persons in this room, became acquainted with a certain fact quite by chance a week ago—namely, that Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov sent two five-percent bank notes, for five thousand roubles each, that is, ten thousand in all, to the provincial capital to be cashed. All I mean to say is that anyone could happen to have money on a given day, and by producing three thousand one does not necessarily prove that it is the same money as lay precisely in some particular drawer or envelope. Finally, having received such important information from the real murderer yesterday, Ivan Karamazov kept still. Why did he not report it at once? Why did he put it off till the next morning? I suppose I have the right to guess why: his health had been unsettled for about a week, he himself confessed to the doctor and to those closest to him that he was having visions, meeting people who were already dead; on the verge of brain fever, which struck him precisely today, having learned unexpectedly of Smerdyakov’s demise, he suddenly forms the following argument: ‘The man is dead, he can be denounced, and I will save my brother. I have money: I’ll take a wad of bills and say that Smerdyakov gave it to me before he died.’ You will tell me it is dishonest; that even though the man is dead, it is still dishonest to lie, even to save a brother? Perhaps so, but what if he lied unconsciously, what if he himself imagined that it happened that way, his mind precisely being struck finally by the news of the lackey’s sudden death? You did see that scene today, you saw what state the man was in. He stood here and spoke, but where was his mind? Today’s testimony from a delirious man was followed by a document, the defendant’s letter to Miss Verkhovtsev, written by him two days before he committed the crime, containing beforehand a detailed program of the crime. Why, then, are we looking for the program and its authors? It was accomplished exactly following this program, and accomplished by none other than its author. Yes, gentlemen of the jury, ‘accomplished as written!’ And in no case, in no case did we run respectfully and timidly from our father’s window, being at the same time firmly convinced that our sweetheart was there with him. No, that is absurd and impossible. He went in and—finished the business. Very likely he killed him in exasperation, in anger, which flared up as soon as he looked at his foe and rival, but once he had killed him, which he probably did instantly, with one swing of the arm wielding the brass pestle, and made sure, after a thorough search, that she was not there, he still did not forget to slip his hand under the pillow and take the envelope with the money, the torn remains of which are lying here on the table with the material evidence. What I am getting at is that you should notice one circumstance, in my opinion a highly characteristic one. Were we dealing here with an experienced murderer, and precisely with a murderer whose sole purpose was robbery—well, would he have left the torn envelope on the floor, where it was found, next to the body? Were it Smerdyakov, for example, killing for the sake of robbery—why, he would simply have taken the whole envelope with him, without bothering in the least to open it over his victim’s body; because he knew for certain that the money was in the envelope—it had been put there and sealed in his presence—and if he had taken the envelope away altogether, would anyone even know there had been a robbery? I ask you, gentlemen of the jury, would Smerdyakov have acted this way? Would he have left the envelope on the floor? No, that is precisely how a frenzied murderer would act, one who is not thinking well, a murderer who is not a thief, who has never stolen anything before, and who even now snatches the money from under the bed not as a thief stealing, but as someone taking his own back from the thief who has stolen it—for that is precisely the idea Dmitri Karamazov had of those three thousand roubles, which had become almost a mania with him. And so, taking hold of this envelope, which he has never seen before, he tears it open to make sure the money is there, then runs away with the money in his pocket, forgetting even to think that he is leaving behind a colossal accusation against himself in the form of a torn envelope lying on the floor. All because it was Karamazov, not Smerdyakov; he did not think, he did not see, and how could he! He runs away, he hears the shout of the servant overtaking him, the servant seizes him, stops him, and falls, struck down by the brass pestle. The defendant jumps down to him ... out of pity. Imagine, he suddenly assures us that he jumped down to him then out of pity, out of compassion, in order to see if he could help him in some way. But was that any moment to be showing such compassion? No, he jumped down precisely in order to make sure that the only witness to his evil deed was no longer alive. Any other feeling, any other motive would be unnatural! Notice, he takes trouble over Grigory, he wipes his head with a handkerchief, and, convinced that he is dead, he runs, out of his senses, all covered with blood, there, to the house of his sweetheart—how did it not occur to him that he was covered with blood and would give himself away at once? But the defendant himself assures us that he never even noticed he was covered with blood; that is conceivable, that is very possible, that always happens with criminals in such moments. Devilish calculation in the one case, and in the other no discernment at all. But his only thought at that moment was of where she was. He had to find out quickly where she was, and so he runs to her place and learns some unexpected and colossal news: she has gone to Mokroye with her ‘former,’ ‘indisputable’ one!”

Chapter 9: Psychology at Full Steam. The Galloping Troika. The Finale of the Prosecutor’s Speech

Having come thus far in his speech, Ippolit Kirillovich, who had evidently chosen a strictly historical method of accounting, which is a favorite resort of all nervous orators who purposely seek a strict framework in order to restrain their own impatient zeal—Ippolit Kirillovich expanded particularly on the “former” and “indisputable” one, and on this topic expressed several rather amusing thoughts. “Karamazov, who was jealous of everyone to the point of frenzy, suddenly and instantly collapses and vanishes, as it were, before the ‘former’ and ‘indisputable’ one. And it is all the more strange in that previously he had paid almost no attention to this new threat to himself, coming in the person of this, for him, unexpected rival. But his notion had always been that it was all still very far off, and a Karamazov always lives in the present moment. Most likely he even considered him a fiction. But having understood at once in his sick heart that the woman had perhaps been concealing this new rival, that she had deceived him that same day, precisely because this newly emerged rival, so far from being a fantasy or a fiction, constituted all for her— all her hopes in life—having instantly understood this, he resigned himself. Indeed, gentlemen of the jury, I cannot pass over in silence this sudden streak in the soul of the defendant, who seemed to be totally incapable of manifesting it; there suddenly arose in him an inexorable need for truth, a respect for woman, an acknowledgement of the rights of her heart, and when?—at the very moment when, because of her, he had stained his hands with his father’s blood! It is also true that the spilt blood was at that moment already crying out for revenge, for he, having ruined his soul and all his earthly destiny, could not help feeling and asking himself at the same time: ‘What does he mean and what could he mean now to her, to this being whom he loved more than his own soul, compared with this “former” and “indisputable” one, who had repented and returned to the woman he had ruined once, with new love, with honest offers, with the promise of a restored and now happy life? And he, unfortunate man, what could he give her now, what could he offer her?’ Karamazov understood it all, he understood that all paths were closed to him by his crime, and that he was just a criminal under sentence and not a man with a life ahead of him! This thought crushed and destroyed him. And so he instantly fixes on a wild plan that, considering Karamazov’s character, could not but seem to him the only and fatal way out of his terrible situation. This way out was suicide. He runs for his pistols, which he had pawned to the official Perkhotin, and at the same time, as he runs, he pulls all his money out of his pocket, for which he had just spattered his hands with his father’s blood. Oh, money is what he needs most of all now: Karamazov dies, Karamazov shoots himself, this will be remembered! Not for nothing are we a poet, not for nothing have we been burning our life like a candle at both ends. ‘To her, to her—and there, there I will put on a feast, a feast such as the world has never seen, to be remembered and talked about long after. Amid wild shouts, mad gypsy singing and dancing, we will raise a cup and toast the new happiness of the woman we adore, and then—right there, at her feet, we will blow our brains out before her, and punish our life! Some day she will remember Mitya Karamazov, she will see how Mitya loved her, she will feel sorry for Mitya! ‘ There is a good deal of posturing here, of romantic frenzy, of wild Karamazovian unrestraint and sentimentality—yes, and also something else, gentlemen of the jury, something that cries out in the soul, that throbs incessantly in his mind, and poisons his heart unto death; this something is conscience, gentlemen of the jury, the judgment, the terrible pangs of conscience! But the pistol will reconcile everything, the pistol is the only way out, there is no other, and beyond—I do not know whether Karamazov thought at that moment of ‘what lies beyond’^[344] or whether a Karamazov could think, in Hamlet fashion, of what lies beyond. No, gentlemen of the jury, they have their Hamlets, but so far we have only Karamazovs!”

Here Ippolit Kirillovich unfolded a most detailed picture of Mitya’s preparations, the scene at Perkhotin’s, at the shop, with the coachmen. He cited a quantity of words, phrases, gestures—all confirmed by witnesses—and the picture terribly swayed his listeners’ convictions. What swayed them above all was the totality of the facts. The guilt of this frenzied, turbulent man, who no longer cared about himself, was set forth irrefutably. “There was no longer any reason for him to care about himself,” Ippolit Kirillovich went on. “Two or three times he was on the verge of confessing outright, almost hinted at it, and stopped just short of telling all.” (Here followed the testimony of the witnesses.) “He even shouted to the coachman on the way: ‘Do you know you’re driving a murderer!’ But still he could not tell all: he had first to get to the village of Mokroye, and there finish the poem. What awaits the unfortunate man, however? The thing is that almost from his first moments in Mokroye, he sees and finally perceives fully that his ‘indisputable’ rival is perhaps not so indisputable, and that no congratulations for new happiness and no raised cups would either be wanted or accepted from him. But you already know the facts, gentlemen of the jury, from the court’s investigation. Karamazov’s triumph over his rival turned out to be beyond dispute, and here—oh, here his soul entered quite a new phase, even the most terrible of all his soul has lived through and will yet live through! One can positively admit, gentlemen of the jury,” exclaimed Ippolit Kirillovich, “that outraged nature and the criminal heart revenge themselves more fully than any earthly justice! Moreover, justice and earthly punishment even alleviate the punishment of nature, are even necessary for the soul of the criminal in those moments as its salvation from despair, for I cannot even imagine the horror and the moral suffering of Karamazov when he discovered that she loved him, that for him she rejected her ‘former’ and ‘indisputable’ one, that she was calling him, him, ‘Mitya,’ to renewed life, promising him happiness, and all of that when? When everything was finished for him, and nothing was possible! Incidentally, I shall make one rather important observation in passing, to clarify the true essence of the defendant’s situation at that moment: this woman, this love of his, until the very last minute, even until the very instant of his arrest, remained inaccessible to him, passionately desired but unattainable. Why, why did he not shoot himself right then, why did he abandon his original intent and even forget where his pistol was? It was precisely this passionate thirst for love and the hope of satisfying it right then and there that held him back. In a daze of revelry he fastened himself to his beloved, who reveled with him, more lovely and alluring for him than ever—he would not leave her side, he admired her, he melted away before her. This passionate thirst even managed for a moment to suppress not only his fear of arrest, but the very pangs of his conscience! For a moment, oh, only for a moment! I picture to myself the state of the criminal’s soul at that time as an indisputable slavish submission to three elements that overwhelmed it completely: first, a state of drunkenness, daze and noise, feet pounding, singers wailing, and she, she, flushed with wine, singing and dancing, drunk and laughing to him! Second, the remote, encouraging dream that the fatal ending was still a long way off, was at least not near—perhaps only the next day, only in the morning, would they come and take him. Several hours, then—a long time, terribly long! One can think up a lot in several hours. He felt, as I picture it to myself, something similar to what a criminal feels on his way to execution, to the gallows: he still has to go down a long, long street, and at a slow pace, past thousands of people, then turn down another street, and only at the end of that other street—the terrible square! I precisely think that at the start of the procession the condemned man, sitting in the cart of shame, must feel precisely that there is still an endless life ahead of him. Now, however, the houses are going past, the cart is moving on—oh, that’s nothing, it’s still such a long way to the turn down the second street, and so he still looks cheerfully to right and left at those thousands of indifferently curious people whose eyes are fastened on him, and he still fancies he is the same sort of man as they are. But here comes the turn down the other street—oh, it’s nothing, nothing, still a whole street to go. And no matter how many houses pass by, he will keep thinking: ‘There are still a lot of houses left.’ And so on to the very end, to the very square. So it was then, as I picture it to myself, with Karamazov. ‘They haven’t had enough time yet,’ he thinks, ‘it’s still possible to find some way, oh, there’s still time to invent a plan of defense, to think up a response, but now, now—she’s so lovely now!’ His soul is full of darkness and dread, but even so he manages to set aside half his money and hide it somewhere—otherwise I cannot explain to myself the disappearance of one whole half of the three thousand he had just taken from under his father’s pillow. This was not his first time in Mokroye, he had once spent two days carousing there. He knew that big, old wooden house with all its sheds and porches. I precisely suppose that part of the money disappeared right then, and precisely in that house, not long before his arrest, into some crack, some crevice, under some floorboard, somewhere in a corner, under the roof—but why? You ask why? The catastrophe may come now, and of course we have not thought out how to meet it, we have had no time, and our head is throbbing, and we are drawn to her, but money?—money is necessary in all situations! A man with money is a man everywhere. Perhaps such calculation at such a moment appears unnatural to you? But does he not insist himself that a month earlier, also in a most anxious and fatal moment for him, he set apart half of the three thousand and sewed it into his amulet, and, of course, if that is not true, as we shall presently prove, still the idea is familiar to Karamazov, he did contemplate it. Moreover, when he later insisted to the investigator that he had set apart fifteen hundred in the amulet (which never existed), he perhaps invented this amulet that same instant, precisely because two hours earlier he had set apart half of his money and hidden it somewhere there in Mokroye, just in case, until morning, so as not to keep it with him, on a sudden inspiration. Two abysses, gentlemen of the jury, remember that Karamazov can contemplate two abysses, and both at the same time. We searched that house and found nothing. Perhaps the money is still there, or perhaps it disappeared the next day and is now with the defendant. In any case, he was arrested at her side, kneeling before her, she was lying on a bed, he was stretching out his hands to her, and was so oblivious of everything at that moment that he did not even hear the approach of those who arrested him. He had no time to prepare any response in his mind. Both he and his mind were caught unawares.

“And now he stands before his judges, before the arbiters of his fate. Gentlemen of the jury, there are moments when, in the exercise of our duty, we ourselves feel almost afraid before man, and afraid for man! These are the moments when one contemplates the animal terror of the criminal who already knows that all is lost but is still struggling, still intends to struggle with you. These are the moments when all the instincts of self-preservation rise up in him at once, and, trying to save himself, he looks at you with a piercing eye, questioning and suffering, he catches you and studies you, your face, your thoughts, waiting to see from which side you will strike, and instantly creates thousands of plans in his tremulous mind, but is still afraid to speak, afraid he will let something slip. These humiliating moments of the human soul, this journey through torments, this animal thirst for self-salvation, are terrible and sometimes evoke trepidation and commiseration even in an investigator! And so we then witnessed all that. At first he was stunned, and in his terror let drop a few words that gravely compromised him: ‘Blood! I’ve deserved it !’ But he quickly restrained himself. What to say, how to answer—none of this is prepared in him yet, but what is prepared in him is one unsubstantiated denial: ‘I am not guilty of my father’s death! ‘ That is our fence for the time being, and there, behind the fence, perhaps we can set up something, some sort of barricade. He hastens to explain his first compromising exclamations, forestalling our questions, by saying he considers himself guilty only of the death of the servant Grigory. ‘That blood I am guilty of, but who killed my father, gentlemen, who killed him? Who could have killed him if not IV Do you hear that? He asks us, us, who came to him with the very same question! Do you hear that little phrase—’if not I’—running ahead of itself, its animal cunning, its naivety, its Karamazovian impatience? It was not I who killed him, do not even think it was I: ‘I wanted to kill him, gentlemen, I wanted to kill him,’ he hastens to admit (he is in a hurry, he is in a terrible hurry! ), ‘and yet I am not guilty, it was not I who killed him! ‘ He concedes to us that he wanted to kill him, as if to say: you see how sincere I am, so you can all the sooner believe that I did not kill him. Oh, in such cases the criminal sometimes becomes incredibly careless and credulous. And here, quite inadvertently, as it were, the investigators suddenly asked him a most guileless question: ‘Could it be Smerdyakov who killed him?’ And the result was just as we expected: he became terribly angry that we had forestalled him and caught him unawares before he had time to prepare, to choose and catch the moment when it would be most plausible to bring up Smerdyakov. As is his nature, he at once rushed to the extreme and began assuring us with all his might that Smerdyakov could not have killed him, was incapable of killing him. But do not believe him, it was only a ruse: by no means, by no means was he giving up Smerdyakov; on the contrary, he still meant to bring him forward, because who else could he bring forward, but he would do it at some other moment, since for the time being the thing was spoiled. He would bring him forward only the next day, or even in a few days, picking the moment when he would cry out to us: ‘You see, I myself rejected Smerdyakov more than you did, you remember that yourselves, but now I, too, am convinced: it was he who killed him, it could not be anyone else!’ And with us, meanwhile, he falls into a gloomy and irritable denial, his anger and impatience prompting him, however, to a most inept and implausible explanation of how he looked into his father’s window and then respectfully went away from the window. The main thing being that he does not yet know the circumstances, the scope of the evidence given by the recovered Grigory. We proceed to the examination and search of his person. The examination angers him, but also encourages him: the full three thousand is not found, only fifteen hundred. And, of course, only in this moment of angry silence and denial does the idea of the amulet jump into his head for the first time in his life. He himself undoubtedly sensed the utter incredibility of his invention, and he was at pains, at terrible pains, to make it more credible, to spin a whole plausible novel out of it. In such cases the first thing, the chief task of the investigators is to keep the criminal from preparing himself, to take him by surprise so that he speaks out his cherished ideas in all their revealing ingenuousness, implausibility, and inconsistency. And it is possible to make the criminal speak only by unexpectedly, inadvertently, as it were, informing him of some new fact, some circumstance of the case that has colossal significance, but that he previously had no notion of and could in no way have foreseen. We had kept this fact in readiness, oh, long in readiness: it was the evidence of the recovered servant Grigory about the open door through which the defendant had fled. He had completely forgotten about this door, and it never occurred to him that Grigory could have seen it. The effect was colossal. He jumped up and suddenly shouted to us: ‘It was Smerdyakov who killed him, Smerdyakov!’—and thus revealed his cherished, his basic idea in its most implausible form, for Smerdyakov could have committed the murder only after he himself had struck Grigory down and run away. But when we told him that Grigory had seen the door open before he fell, and, on going out of his bedroom, had heard Smerdyakov groaning behind the partition—Karamazov was truly crushed. My collaborator, our esteemed and witty Nikolai Parfenovich, told me later that at that moment he pitied him to the point of tears. And this is the moment when, to make things better, he hastens to tell us about the notorious amulet: very well, I’ll tell you my story! Gentlemen of the jury, I have already made known to you why I consider all this invention about money sewn into an amulet a month earlier not only an absurdity, but also the most implausible contrivance that could have been hit upon in this situation. If one bet on whether anything more implausible could be said or imagined, even then it would be impossible to invent anything worse than that. Here, above all, the triumphant novelist can be brought up short and demolished by details, those very details in which reality is always so rich, and which are always neglected by such unfortunate and unwilling authors, as if they were utterly insignificant and unnecessary trifles, if indeed they even occur to them. Oh, they cannot be bothered with that at the moment, their mind creates only the grandiose whole—and then someone dares suggest such a trifle to them! But that is where they get caught! The defendant is asked the question: ‘Well, would you mind telling us where you got the cloth for your amulet, and who sewed it for you?’ ‘I sewed it myself.’ ‘And where did you get the cloth?’ The defendant is now offended, he considers it almost offensively trifling, and believe me, he is sincere, sincere! But they are all like that. ‘I tore it off my shirt.”Splendid, sir. That means that tomorrow we will find among your linen this shirt with a piece torn from it.’ And, understand, gentlemen of the jury, that if only we had actually found this shirt (and how could we not have found it in his suitcase or chest of drawers, if such a shirt indeed existed?)—it would be a fact, a tangible fact in favor of the truth of his testimony! But this he is unable to understand. ‘I don’t remember, maybe it wasn’t from my shirt, I sewed it up in my landlady’s bon-net.”What sort of bonnet?”I took it from her, it was lying about, an old calico rag.”And you remember that firmly?”No,notfirrnly . . .’And he is angry, angry, and yet just think: how could one help remembering? In a man’s most terrible moment, say, when he is being taken to his execution, it is precisely such trifles that stick in his memory. He will forget everything, but some green roof that flashes by on the way, or a jackdaw sitting on a cross—that he will remember. For he was hiding from the rest of the household while he sewed his amulet, he must remember the humiliation he suffered, needle in hand, for fear someone would come in and catch him; how at the first knock he would jump up and run behind the partition (there is a partition in his apartment) ... But, gentlemen of the jury, why am I telling you all this, all these details, these trifles!” Ippolit Kirillovich suddenly exclaimed. “Precisely because the defendant has stubbornly insisted on all this absurdity up to this very minute! In the two whole months since that fatal night, he has not explained anything, he has not added even one real, clarifying circumstance to his earlier fantastic testimony; as if to say, that is all just trifles, you must believe me on my honor! Oh, we are glad to believe, we are eager to believe, even on his honor! What are we, jackals, eager for human blood? Give us, point out to us at least one fact in the defendant’s favor, and we shall be glad—but a real, tangible fact, not his own brother’s conclusion based on the defendant’s facial expression, or pointing out that when he was beating himself on the chest, he must certainly have been pointing to the amulet, and in the dark no less. We shall be glad of this new fact, we shall be the first to renounce our accusation, we shall hasten to renounce it. But now justice cries out, and we insist, we cannot renounce anything.” Here Ippolit Kirillovich moved on to the finale. He was as if in a fever, crying out for the spilt blood, the blood of a father murdered by his son “with the base purpose of robbery.” He pointed firmly to the tragic and crying totality of the facts. “And whatever you are about to hear from the defendant’s renowned and talented attorney,” Ippolit Kirillovich could not refrain from saying, “whatever eloquent and moving words, aimed at your emotions, will resound here, remember still that at this moment you are in the sanctuary of our justice. Remember that you are the defenders of our truth, the defenders of our holy Russia, of her foundations, of her family, of all that is holy in her! Yes, here, at this moment, you represent Russia, and your verdict will resound not only in this courtroom but for all of Russia, and all of Russia will listen to you as to her defenders and judges, and will be either heartened or discouraged by your verdict. Then do not torment Russia and her expectations, our fateful troika is racing headlong, perhaps to its destruction. And all over Russia hands have long been held out and voices have been calling to halt its wild, impudent course. And if so far the other nations still stand aside for the troika galloping at breakneck speed, it is not at all, perhaps, out of respect, as the poet would have it, but simply from horror—mark that—from horror, and perhaps from loathing for her. And still it is good that they stand aside, but what if they should suddenly stop standing aside, and form into a solid wall before the speeding apparition, and themselves halt the mad course of our unbridledness, with a view to saving themselves, enlightenment, and civilization! We have already heard such anxious voices from Europe. They are already beginning to speak out. Do not tempt them, do not add to their ever-increasing hatred with a verdict justifying the murder of a father by his own son . . .!”

In a word, Ippolit Kirillovich, though very much carried away, still ended on a note of pathos—and, indeed, the impression he produced was extraordinary. He himself, having finished his speech, left hastily and, I repeat, nearly fainted in the next room. The courtroom did not applaud, but serious people were pleased. And if the ladies were not so pleased, they still admired such eloquence, the more so as they were notât all fearful of the consequences and waited for everything from Fetyukovich: “He will finally speak and, of course, overcome them all!” Everyone kept glancing at Mitya; he sat silently throughout the prosecutor’s speech, clenching his fists, gritting his teeth, looking down. Only from time to time did he raise his head and listen. Especially when there was mention of Grushenka. When the prosecutor quoted Rakitin’s opinion of her, a contemptuous and spiteful smile appeared on his face, and he said quite audibly: “Bernards!” When Ippolit Kirillovich told about interrogating him and tormenting him in Mokroye, Mitya raised his head and listened with terrible curiosity. At one point in the speech he even seemed about to jump up and shout something; he controlled himself, however, and merely shrugged his shoulders contemptuously. About this finale of the speech—namely, to do with the prosecutor’s feats in Mokroye during the interrogation of the criminal—there was talk later among our society, and Ippolit Kirillovich was made fun of: “The man couldn’t help boasting of his abilities,” they said. The session was interrupted, but for a very short time, a quarter of an hour, twenty minutes at the most. There were exchanges and exclamations among the public. I recall some of them:

“A serious speech!” a gentleman in one group observed, frowning.

“Too wrapped up in psychology,” another voice was heard.

“Yes, but all true, irrefutably true!”

“Yes, he’s a master of it.”

“Summed it all up.”

“Us, too, he summed us up, too,” a third voice joined in, “at the start of the speech, remember, that we’re all the same as Fyodor Pavlovich?”

“And at the end, too. But that was all rubbish.”

“There were some vague spots.”

“Got a bit carried away. “

“Unjust, unjust, sir.”

“No, but anyway it was clever. The man waited for a long time, and finally he said it, heh, heh!”

“What will the defense attorney say?”

In another group:

“It wasn’t very smart of him to prod the Petersburg fellow: ‘aimed at your emotions,’ remember?”

“Yes, that was awkward.”

“Much too hasty.”

“A nervous man, sir.”

“We may laugh, but how about the defendant?” “Yes, sir, how about Mitenka?”

“And what will the defense attorney say?”

In a third group:

“Which lady, the one with the lorgnette, the fat one, at the end?”

“Former wife of a general, a divorcée, I know her.”

“That’s the one, with the lorgnette.”

“Trash.”

“No, no, quite sprightly.”

“The little blonde two seats away from her is better.”

“Clever how they caught him at Mokroye, eh?”

“Yes, clever. And he had to tell it again. He’s already told it all over town.”

“And now he just couldn’t resist. Vanity.”

“An offended man, heh, heh!”

“Quick to take offense, too. And too much rhetoric, long phrases.”

“And browbeating, did you notice how he kept browbeating us? Remember the troika? ‘They have their Hamlets, but so far we have only Karamazovs!’ That was clever.”

“Courting liberalism. Afraid.”

“He’s also afraid of the defense attorney.”

“Yes, what will Mr. Fetyukovich say?”

“Well, whatever he says, he won’t get around our peasants.”

“You don’t think so?”

In a fourth group:

“But that was good about the troika, the part about the other nations.”

“And it’s true, remember, where he said the other nations won’t wait.”

“What do you mean?”

“In the English Parliament just last week one member stood up, to do with the nihilists, and asked the Ministry if it wasn’t time to intervene in a barbarous nation, in order to educate us. It was him Ippolit meant, I know it was him. He talked about it last week.”

“There’s many a slip.”

“What slip? Why many?”

“We’ll close Kronstadt and not give them any bread.^[345] Where will they get it?”

“And America? It’s America now.”

“Rubbish.”

But the bell rang, all rushed to their places. Fetyukovich mounted the rostrum.

Chapter 10: The Defense Attorney’s Speech. A Stick with Two Ends

All became hushed as the first words of the famous orator resounded. The whole room fixed their eyes on him. He began with extreme directness, simplicity, and conviction, but without the slightest presumption. Not the slightest attempt at eloquence, at notes of pathos, at words ringing with emotion. This was a man speaking within an intimate circle of sympathizers. His voice was beautiful, loud, and attractive, and even in this voice itself one seemed to hear something genuine and guileless. But everyone realized at once that the orator could suddenly rise to true pathos—and “strike the heart with an unutterable power.’”^[346] He spoke perhaps less correctly than Ippolit Kirillovich, but without long phrases, and even more precisely. There was one thing the ladies did not quite like: he somehow kept bending forward, especially at the beginning of his speech, not really bowing, but as if he were rushing or flying at his listeners, and this he did by bending precisely, as it were, with half of his long back, as if a hinge were located midway down that long and narrow back ‘ that enabled it to bend almost at a right angle. He spoke somehow scatteredly at the beginning, as if without any system, snatching up facts at random, but in the end it all fell together. His speech could be divided into two halves: the first half was a critique, a refutation of the charges, at times malicious and sarcastic. But in the second half of the speech he seemed to change his tone and even his method, and all at once rose into pathos, and the courtroom seemed to be waiting for it and all began trembling with rapture. He went straight to work, and began by saying that although his practice was in Petersburg, this was not the first time he had visited the towns of Russia to defend a case, though he did so only when he was convinced of the defendant’s innocence or anticipated it beforehand. “The same thing happened to me in the present case,” he explained. “Even in the initial newspaper reports alone, I caught a glimpse of something that struck me greatly in favor of the defendant. In a word, I was interested first of all in a certain juridical fact, which appears often enough in legal practice, though never, it seems to me, so fully or with such characteristic peculiarities as in the present case. This fact I ought to formulate only in the finale of my speech, when I have finished my statement; however, I shall express my thought at the very beginning as well, for I have a weakness for going straight to the point, not storing up effects or sparing impressions. This may be improvident on my part, yet it is sincere. This thought of mine—my formula—is as follows: the overwhelming totality of the facts is against the defendant, and at the same time there is not one fact that will stand up to criticism, if it is considered separately, on its own! Following along through rumors and the newspapers, I was becoming more and more firmly set in my thought, when suddenly I received an invitation from the defendant’s relatives to come and defend him. I hastened here at once, and here became finally convinced. It was in order to demolish this terrible totality of facts and show how undemonstrable and fantastic each separate accusing fact is, that I undertook the defense of this case.”

Thus the defense attorney began, and suddenly he raised his voice: “Gentlemen of the jury, I am a newcomer here. All impressions fell upon me without preconceived ideas. The defendant, a man of stormy and unbridled character, had not offended me to begin with, as he had perhaps a hundred persons in this town, which is why many are prejudiced against him beforehand. Of course, I also admit that the moral sense of local society has been justly aroused: the defendant is stormy and unbridled. Nonetheless he was received in local society; even in the family of the highly talented prosecutor he was warmly welcomed.” (Nota bene: At these words two or three chuckles came from the public, quickly suppressed, but noticed by all. We all knew that the prosecutor had admitted Mitya to his house against his will, solely because for some reason he interested the prosecutor’s wife—a highly virtuous and respectable, but fantastic and self-willed, lady, who in certain cases, for the most part trifling, loved to oppose her husband. Mitya, by the way, had visited their home rather infrequently.) “Nevertheless, I make so bold as to assume,” the defense attorney went on, “that even in such an independent mind and just character as my opponent’s, a somewhat erroneous prejudice against my unfortunate client might have formed. Oh, it’s quite natural: the unfortunate man deserved all too well to be treated with prejudice. And an offended moral and, even more so, aesthetic sense is sometimes implacable. Of course, in the highly talented speech for the prosecution, we have all heard a strict analysis of the defendant’s character and actions, a strictly critical attitude towards the case; and, above all, such psychological depths were demonstrated to explain the essence of the matter, that a penetration to those depths could by no means have taken place were there even the slightest amount of deliberate and malicious prejudice with regard to the person of the defendant. But there are things that are even worse, even more ruinous in such cases than the most malicious and preconceived attitude towards the matter. Namely, if we are, for example, possessed by a certain, so to speak, artistic game, by the need for artistic production, so to speak, the creation of a novel, especially seeing the wealth of psychological gifts with which God has endowed our abilities. While still in Petersburg, still only preparing to come here, I was warned—and I myself knew without any warning—that I would meet here as my opponent a profound and most subtle psychologist, who has long deserved special renown for this quality in our still young legal world. But psychology, gentlemen, though a profound thing, is still like a stick with two ends.” (A chuckle from the public.) “Oh, you will of course forgive the triviality of my comparison; I am not a master of eloquent speaking. Here, however, is an example—I take the first I happen upon in the prosecutor’s speech. The defendant, at night, in the garden, climbs the fence as he is fleeing, and strikes down with a brass pestle the servant who has seized him by the leg. Then he at once jumps back down into the garden and for a whole five minutes fusses over the fallen man, trying to see whether he has killed him or not. Now, not for anything will the prosecutor believe in the truthfulness of the defendant’s testimony that he jumped down to the old man Grigory out of pity. ‘No,’ he says, ‘how could there be such sensitivity at such a moment; this is unnatural; he jumped down precisely in order to make sure that the only witness to his evil deed was dead, and thereby testified that he had committed this evil deed, since he could not have jumped down into the garden for any other reason, inclination, or feeling.’ There you have psychology; but let us take the same psychology and apply it to this case, only from the other end, and the result will be no less plausible. The murderer jumps down as a precaution, to make sure if the witness is alive or not, and yet, according to the words of the prosecutor himself, he had just left in the study of his father, whom he had murdered, a colossal piece of evidence against himself in the form of a torn envelope on which it was written that it contained three thousand roubles. ‘Were he to have taken this envelope with him, no one in the whole world would have learned that the envelope existed, or the money inside it, and that the defendant had therefore robbed the money.’ These are the prosecutor’s own words. Well, so you see, on the one hand the man was not cautious enough, he lost his head, got frightened, and ran away leaving evidence on the floor, but when two minutes later he strikes and kills another man, then all at once the most heartless and calculating sense of caution comes to our service. But so, let it be so: it is, shall we say, the subtlety of psychology that under certain circumstances I instantly become bloodthirsty and sharp-eyed as a Caucasian eagle, and the next moment as blind and timid as a worthless mole. But if I am so bloodthirsty and cruelly calculating that, having killed, I jump down only to see if the witness against me is alive or not, do you think I would fuss over this new victim of mine for a whole five minutes, allowing, perhaps, for new witnesses? Why soak the handkerchief, wiping blood from the fallen man’s head, so that this handkerchief can later serve as evidence against me? No, if we really are so calculating and hard-hearted, would it not be better, having jumped down, simply to whack the fallen servant on the head again and again with the same pestle, so as to kill him finally, and, having eradicated the witness, to put all worry out of our mind? And, lastly, I jump down in order to see whether the witness against me is alive or dead, and right there on the path I leave another witness—namely, this very pestle that I took from the two women, both of whom can later recognize the pestle as theirs and testify that I took it from their house. And it’s not that I forgot it on the path, dropped it in distraction, in confusion: no, we precisely threw our weapon away, because it was found about fifteen paces from the spot where Grigory was struck down. The question is, why did we do that? But we did it precisely because we felt bitter at having killed a man, an old servant, and therefore in vexation, with a curse, we threw the pestle away as a murderous weapon, it could not be otherwise, or why throw it with such force? And if we could feel pain and pity at having killed a man, it is of course because we did not kill our father: if he had killed his father, he would not have jumped down to another fallen man out of pity, in that case there would be a different feeling, in that case we would not be bothered with pity but would think about self-salvation, that is certainly so. On the contrary, I repeat, we would have smashed his skull finally, and not fussed over him for five minutes. There was room for pity and kind feeling precisely because our conscience was clear to begin with. Here, then, is a different psychology. I myself, gentlemen of the jury, have resorted to psychology now, in order to demonstrate that one can draw whatever conclusions one likes from it. It all depends on whose hands it is in. Psychology prompts novels even from the most serious people, and quite unintentionally. I am speaking of excessive psychology, gentlemen of the jury, of a certain abuse of it.”

Here again approving chuckles came from the public, all directed at the prosecutor. I shall not give the entire speech of the defense attorney in detail, but shall only take some parts of it, some of its most salient points.

Chapter 11: There Was No Money. There Was No Robbery

There was one point that even struck everyone in the defense attorney’s speech—namely, his complete denial of the existence of the fatal three thousand roubles, and thus also of the possibility of their robbery.

“Gentlemen of the jury,” the defense attorney began, “one most characteristic peculiarity will strike any fresh and unprejudiced person in this case— namely, the charge of robbery, and at the same time the complete impossibility of pointing in fact to what precisely was robbed. Money, they say, was robbed—namely, three thousand roubles—but whether this money actually existed, nobody knows. Consider: first of all, how did we learn of the three thousand, and who actually saw it? The only one who saw it and pointed out that it was wrapped in the envelope with the inscription was the servant Smerdyakov. He told this information to the defendant and to his brother Ivan Fyodorovich still prior to the catastrophe. It was also made known to Miss Svetlov. Yet none of these three persons saw the money, again only Smerdyakov saw it, but here the question naturally arises: if the money really existed and Smerdyakov saw it, when was the last time he saw it? And what if his master took the money from under the bed and put it back in the box without telling him? Notice, according to Smerdyakov the money was under the bed, under the mattress; the defendant would have had to pull it from under the mattress, and yet the bed was not rumpled at all, that has been carefully noted in the record. How could the defendant leave the bed entirely unrumpled, and, moreover, not stain with his still bloody hands the fresh, fine bed linen that had just been put on it purposely for the occasion? But, you will say, what about the envelope on the floor? It is worth saying a few words about this envelope. I was even somewhat surprised just now: the highly talented prosecutor, when he began speaking of this envelope, suddenly declared of it himself—do you hear, gentlemen, himself—namely, in that part of his speech where he points out the absurdity of the suggestion that Smerdyakov was the murderer: ‘Were it not for this envelope, had it not been left on the floor as evidence, had the robber taken it with him, no one in the whole world would have learned that the envelope existed, or the money inside it, and that the defendant had therefore robbed the money.’ Thus it is solely because of this torn scrap of paper with the inscription on it, as even the prosecutor himself admits, that the defendant has been accused of robbery, ‘otherwise no one would know that there had been a robbery, nor perhaps that there had been any money either. ‘ But can the simple fact that this scrap of paper was lying on the floor possibly be proof that it once contained money and that this money had been robbed? ‘But,’ they will reply, ‘Smerdyakov did see it in the envelope,’ but when, when did he last see it?—that is my question. I spoke with Smerdyakov, and he told me that he had seen it two days before the catastrophe! But why can I not suppose at least some such circumstance, for example, as that old Fyodor Pavlovich, having locked himself in the house, in impatient, hysterical expectation of his beloved, might suddenly decide, having nothing better to do, to take the envelope and unseal it. ‘An envelope is just an envelope,’ he might think, ‘why should she believe me? If I show her a wad of hundred-rouble bills, that will really work, it will make her mouth water’— and so he tears open the envelope, takes out the money, and throws the envelope on the floor with the imperious gesture of an owner, and certainly not afraid of any evidence. Listen, gentlemen of the jury, could anything be more possible than such a speculation and such a fact? Why is it impossible? But if at least something of the sort could have taken place, then the charge of robbery is wiped out of itself: there was no money, therefore there was no robbery. If the envelope lying on the floor is evidence that there was once money in it, then why may I not assert the opposite—namely, that the envelope was lying on the floor precisely because it no longer contained any money, the money having been taken out of it previously by the owner himself? ‘Yes, but in that case where did the money go, if Fyodor Pavlovich took it out of the envelope himself; it was not found when his house was searched?’ First, part of the money was found in his box, and second, might he not have taken it out that morning, or even the day before, and made some other use of it, paid it out, sent it away, might he not, finally, have changed his thinking, the very basis of his plan of action, and that without finding it at all necessary to report first to Smerdyakov? And if even the mere possibility of such a speculation exists, then how can it be asserted so insistently and so firmly that the defendant committed the murder with the purpose of robbery, and indeed that the robbery existed? We thereby enter the realm of novels. If one asserts that such and such a thing was robbed, one must needs point to this thing, or at least prove indisputably that it existed. Yet no one even saw it. Not long ago in Petersburg a young man, hardly more than a boy, eighteen years old, a little peddler with a tray, went into a money changer’s shop in broad daylight with an axe, and with extraordinary, typical boldness killed the shopkeeper and carried off fifteen hundred roubles. About five hours later he was arrested, and except for fifteen roubles that he had already managed to spend, the entire fifteen hundred was found on him. Moreover, the shop clerk, who returned to the shop after the murder, informed the police not only of the amount stolen, but also of what sort of money it consisted—that is, so many hundred-rouble bills, so many fifties, so many tens, so many gold coins and precisely which ones—and then precisely the same bills and coins were found on the arrested murderer. On top of that there followed a full and frank confession from the murderer that he had killed the man and taken that very money. This, gentlemen of the jury, is what I call evidence! Here I know, I see, I touch the money, and I cannot say that it does not or never did exist. Is that so in the present case? And yet it is a matter of life and death, of a man’s fate. ‘So it is,’ they will say, ‘but that night he was carousing, throwing money away, he was found with fifteen hundred roubles—where did he get it?’ But precisely because only fifteen hundred was found, and the other half of the sum could not be located or discovered anywhere, precisely this fact proves that the money could be quite different, that it may never have been in any envelope at all. By the reckoning of time (quite strict here), it has been determined and demonstrated by the preliminary investigation that the defendant, when he ran from the serving-women to the official Perkhotin, did not stop at his place, and did not stop anywhere else, and afterwards was constantly in the presence of other people, and therefore could not have separated half of the three thousand and hidden it somewhere in town. Precisely this consideration caused the prosecutor to assume that the money was hidden somewhere in a crevice in the village of Mokroye. And why not in the dungeons of the castle of Udolpho,^[347]gentlemen? Is it not a fantastic, is it not a novelistic suggestion? And, notice, let just this one assumption—that is, that the money is hidden in Mokroye—be demolished, and the whole charge of robbery is blown sky-high, for where is it, what has become of this fifteen hundred? By what miracle did it disappear, if it has been proved that the defendant did not stop anywhere? And with such novels we are prepared to ruin a human life! They will say: ‘Still, he was unable to explain where he got the fifteen hundred that was found on him; moreover, everyone knew that before that night he had no money.’ But who, in fact, knew that? The defendant has given clear and firm testimony to where he got the money, and, if I may say so, gentlemen of the jury, if I may say so—there neither can nor ever could be anything more plausible than this testimony, nor more in keeping with the defendant’s character and soul. The prosecution liked its own novel: a man of weak will, who determined to take the three thousand so shamingly offered him by his fiancée, could not, they say, have separated half of it and sewn it into an amulet; on the contrary, even if he did, he would open it every two days and peel off a hundred, and thus run through it all in a month. Remember, this was all told here in a tone that would brook no objections. Well, and what if the thing went quite differently, what if you have created a novel around quite a different person? That’s just it, you have created a different person! It will perhaps be objected: ‘There are witnesses that the whole three thousand he took from Miss Verkhovtsev was squandered in the village of Mokroye a month before the catastrophe, at one go, to the last kopeck, so that he could not have set aside half of it.’ But who are these witnesses? The degree of trustworthiness of these witnesses has already displayed itself in court. Besides, a crust always looks bigger in another man’s hand. Lastly, not one of these witnesses counted the money himself, they merely judged by eye. Did not the witness Maximov testify that the defendant had twenty thousand in his hands? So, gentlemen of the jury, since psychology has two ends, allow me to apply the other end and let us see if it comes out the same.

“A month before the catastrophe, the defendant was entrusted by Miss Verkhovtsev with three thousand roubles to be sent by mail—but a question: is it true that it was entrusted to him in such shame and humiliation as was declared here today? In Miss Verkhovtsev’s first testimony on the same subject, it came out differently, quite differently; and in her second testimony all we heard were cries of anger, revenge, cries of long-concealed hatred. But this alone, that the witness testified incorrectly in her first testimony, gives us the right to conclude that her second testimony may also be incorrect. The prosecutor ‘does not wish, does not dare’ (in his own words) to touch on this romance. So be it, I shall not touch on it either, but will only allow myself to observe that if a pure and highly virtuous person such as the highly esteemed Miss Verkhovtsev undoubtedly is, if such a person, I say, allows herself suddenly, all at once, in court, to change her first testimony with the direct aim of ruining the defendant, then it is clear that she has also not given this testimony impartially, coolheadedly. Can we be deprived of the right to conclude that a vengeful woman may have exaggerated many things? Yes, precisely exaggerated the shame and disgrace in which she offered the money. On the contrary, it was offered precisely in such a way that it could still be accepted, especially by such a light-minded man as our defendant. Above all, he still had it in his head then that he would soon receive the three thousand he reckoned was owing to him from his father. This was light-minded, but precisely because of his light-mindedness he was firmly convinced that his father would give it to him, that he would get it, and therefore would always be able to mail the money entrusted to him by Miss Verkhovtsev and settle his debt. But the prosecutor will in no way allow that on that same day, the day of the accusation, he was capable of separating half of the money entrusted to him and sewing it into an amulet: ‘Such, ‘ he says, ‘is not his character, he could not have had such feelings.’ But you yourself were shouting that Karamazov is broad, you yourself were shouting about the two extreme abysses Karamazov can contemplate. Karamazov is precisely of such a nature, with two sides, two abysses, as can stop amid the most unrestrained need of carousing if something strikes him on the other side. And the other side is love, precisely this new love that flared up in him like powder, and for this love he needs money, he has more need of it, oh! much more need of it even than of carousing with this same beloved. If she were to say to him: ‘I am yours, I do not want Fyodor Pavlovich,’ and he were to snatch her and take her away—then he would have to have some means of taking her away. This is more important than carousing. Could Karamazov fail to understand that? This is precisely what he was sick over, this care—what, then, is so incredible in his separating this money and stashing it away just in case? But now, however, time is passing, and Fyodor Pavlovich does not give the defendant his three thousand; on the contrary, he hears that he has allotted it precisely to luring away his beloved. ‘If Fyodor Pavlovich does not give it back to me,’ he thinks, ‘I will come out as a thief before Katerina Ivanovna.’ But now the thought is born in him that he will take this same fifteen hundred, which he is still carrying on him in the amulet, lay it before Miss Verkhovtsev, and say to her: ‘I am a scoundrel, but not a thief.’ So now he has a double reason to hold on to this fifteen hundred like the apple of his eye, and on no account to unstitch the amulet and peel off a hundred at a time. Why should you deny the defendant a sense of honor? No, he has a sense of honor, let’s say a faulty one, let’s say very often a mistaken one, but he has it, has it to the point of passion, and he has proved it. Now, however, the situation gets more complicated, the torments of jealousy reach the highest pitch, and the same questions, the two old questions, etch themselves more and more tormentingly in the defendant’s fevered brain: ‘If I give it back to Katerina Ivanovna, with what means will I take Grushenka away?’ If he was raving so, getting drunk and storming in the taverns all that month, it is precisely, perhaps, because he felt bitter himself, it was more than he could bear. These two questions finally became so acute that they finally drove him to despair. He tried sending his younger brother to their father to ask one last time for the three thousand, but without waiting for an answer he burst in himself and ended by beating the old man in front of witnesses. After that, consequently, there is no one to get the money from, his beaten father will not give it. The evening of that same day he beats himself on the chest, precisely on the upper part of the chest, where the amulet was, and swears to his brother that he has the means not to be a scoundrel, but will still remain a scoundrel, because he foresees that he will not use this means, he will not have enough strength of soul, he will not have enough character. Why, why does the prosecution not believe the evidence of Alexei Karamazov, given so purely, so sincerely, so spontaneously and plausibly? Why, on the contrary, would they have me believe in money hidden in some crevice, in the dungeons of the castle of Udolpho? That same evening, after the conversation with his brother, the defendant writes this fatal letter, and now this letter is the most important, the most colossal evidence, convicting the defendant of robbery! ‘I will ask all people, and if I don’t get it from people, I will kill father and take it from under his mattress, in the envelope with the pink ribbon, if only Ivan goes away’—a complete program of the murder, they say; who else could it be? ‘It was accomplished as written! ‘ the prosecution exclaims. But, first of all, the letter is a drunken one, and written in terrible exasperation; second, about the envelope, again he is writing in Smerdyakov’s words, because he did not see the envelope himself; and, third, maybe he wrote it, but was it accomplished as written, is there any proof of that? Did the defendant take the envelope from under the pillow, did he find the money, did it even exist? And was it money that the defendant went running for—remember, remember? He went running headlong, not to rob, but only to find out where she was, this woman who had crushed him—so it was not according to the program, not as written, that he went running there, that is, not for a premeditated robbery; he ran suddenly, impulsively, in a jealous rage! ‘Yes,’ they will say, ‘but having come and killed him, he also took the money.’ But did he kill him, finally, or not? The accusation of robbery I reject with indignation: there can be no accusation of robbery if it is impossible to point exactly to what precisely has been robbed—that is an axiom! But did he kill him, without the robbery, did he kill him? Is this proved? Is this not also a novel?”

Chapter 12: And There Was No Murder Either

“Forgive me, gentlemen of the jury, but there is a human life here, and we must be more careful. We have heard the prosecution testify that until the very last day, until today, until the day of the trial, even they hesitated to accuse the defendant of full and complete premeditation of the murder, hesitated until this same fatal ‘drunken’ letter was produced today in court. ‘It was accomplished as written!’ But again I repeat: he ran to her, for her, only to find out where she was. This is an indisputable fact. Had she been at home, he would not have run anywhere, he would have stayed with her, and would not have done what he promised in the letter. He ran impulsively and suddenly, and perhaps had no recollection at all of his ‘drunken’ letter. ‘He took the pestle with him,’ they say—and you will remember how an entire psychology was derived for us from this pestle alone: why he had to take this pestle as a weapon, to snatch it up as a weapon, and so on and so forth. A most ordinary thought comes to my mind here: what if this pestle had not been lying in plain sight, had not been on the shelf from which the defendant snatched it, but had been put away in a cupboard?—then it wouldn’t have caught the defendant’s eye, and he would have run off without a weapon, empty-handed, and so perhaps would not have killed anyone. How, then, can I possibly arrive at the conclusion that the pestle is a proof of arming and premeditating? Yes, but he shouted in the taverns that he was going to murder his father, and two days before, on the evening when he wrote his drunken letter, he was quiet and quarreled only with a shop clerk, ‘because,’ they say, ‘Karamazov could not help quarreling.’ To which I reply that if he was contemplating such a murder, had planned it, moreover, and written it out, he surely would not have quarreled with a shop clerk, and perhaps would not have stopped at the tavern at all, because a soul that has conceived such a thing seeks silence and self-effacement, seeks disappearance, not to be seen, not to be heard: ‘Forget all about me if you can,’ and that not only from calculation, but from instinct. Gentlemen of the jury, psychology has two ends, and we, too, are able to understand psychology. As for all this shouting in taverns for the whole month, oftentimes children or drunken idlers, leaving a tavern or quarreling with each other, shout: ‘I’ll kill you,’ but they don’t kill anyone. And this fatal letter—is it not also drunken exasperation, the shout of a man coming out of a tavern: ‘I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you all! ‘ Why not, why could it not be so? What makes this letter a fatal one; why, on the contrary, is it not funny? Precisely because the corpse of the murdered father has been found, because a witness saw the defendant in the garden, armed and running away, and was himself struck down by him—therefore it was all accomplished as written, and therefore the letter is not funny but fatal. Thank God, we have gotten to the point: ‘Since he was in the garden, it means he also killed him.’ On these two words—since he was, it also inevitably means—everything, the entire accusation, rests: ‘He was, therefore it means.’ And what if it does not mean, even though he was? Oh, I agree that the totality of the facts and the coincidence of the facts are indeed rather eloquent. Consider all these facts separately, however, without being impressed by their totality: why, for instance, will the prosecution in no way accept the truth of the defendant’s testimony that he ran away from his father’s window? Remember the sarcasms the prosecution allows itself concerning the respectfulness and ‘pious’ feelings that suddenly took hold of the murderer. And what if there actually was something of the sort—that is, if not respectfulness of feeling, then piety of feeling? ‘My mother must have been praying for me at that moment,’ the defendant testified at the investigation, and so he ran away as soon as he was convinced that Miss Svetlov was not in his father’s house. ‘But he could not have been convinced by looking through the window,’ the prosecution objects to us. And why couldn’t he? After all, the window was opened when the defendant gave the signals. Fyodor Pavlovich might have uttered some one word then, some cry might have escaped him—and the defendant might suddenly have been convinced that Miss Svetlov was not there. Why must we assume what we imagine, or imagine what we have assumed? In reality a thousand things can flash by, which escape the observation of the subtlest novelist. ‘Yes, but Grigory saw the door open, therefore the defendant had certainly been in the house, and therefore he killed him.’ About that door, gentlemen of the jury ... You see, about that open door we have testimony from only one person, who was himself, however, in such a condition at the time ... But suppose it was so, suppose the door was open, suppose the defendant denied it, lied about it from a sense of self-protection, quite understandable in his position; suppose so, suppose he got into the house, was in the house—well, what of it, why is it so inevitable that if he was, he also killed him? He might have burst in, run through the rooms, might have pushed his father aside, might even have hit his father, and then, convinced that Miss Svetlov was not there, he might have run away rejoicing that she was not there and that he had run away without killing his father. Perhaps he jumped down from the fence a moment later to help Grigory, whom he had struck down in his excitement, precisely because he was capable of a pure feeling, a feeling of compassion and pity, because he had run away from the temptation to kill his father, because he felt in himself a pure heart and the joy that he had not killed his father. With horrifying eloquence, the prosecutor describes to us the terrible state the defendant was in when love opened to him again, in the village of Mokroye, calling him to new life, and when it was no longer possible for him to love, because behind him lay the bloodstained corpse of his father, and beyond that corpse—punishment. Yet the prosecutor still assumes there was love, and has explained it according to his psychology: ‘Drunkenness,’ he says ‘a criminal being taken to his execution, still a long time to wait,’ and so on and so forth. But, I ask you again, have you not created a different character, Mr. Prosecutor? Is the defendant so coarse, is he so heartless that he could still think at that moment about love and about hedging before the court, if indeed the blood of his father lay upon him? No, no, and no! As soon as it became clear to him that she loved him, was calling him to her, promised him new happiness—oh, I swear, he should then have felt a double, a triple need to kill himself, and he would certainly have killed himself if he had had his father’s corpse behind him! Oh, no, he would not have forgotten where his pistols lay! I know the defendant: the savage, stony heartlessness imputed to him by the prosecution is incompatible with his character. He would have killed himself, that is certain; he did not kill himself precisely because ‘his mother prayed for him,’ and his heart was guiltless of his father’s blood. That night in Mokroye he suffered, he grieved only for the stricken old man Grigory, and prayed to God within himself that the old man would rise and recover, that his blow would not be fatal and punishment would pass him by. Why should we not accept such an interpretation of events? What firm proof have we that the defendant is lying to us? But there is his father’s body, it will be pointed out to us again: he ran away, he did not kill him—then who did kill the old man?

“Here, I repeat, is the whole logic of the prosecution: who did kill him, if not he? There is no one to put in his place, they say. Is that so, gentlemen of the jury? Is it right, is it indeed so, that there is simply no one to put in his place? We heard the prosecution list on its fingers all those who were in or around the house that night. There were five of them. Three of the five, I agree, are completely irresponsible: these are the murdered man himself, old Grigory, and his wife. Thus the defendant and Smerdyakov are left, and so the prosecutor exclaims with pathos that the defendant is pointing to Smerdyakov because he has no one else to point to, because if there were some sixth person, even the ghost of some sixth person, the defendant would himself drop his charge against Smerdyakov, being ashamed of it, and point to this sixth person. But, gentlemen of the jury, what keeps me from drawing the opposite conclusion? We have two men: the defendant, and Smerdyakov—why can I not say that you accuse my client solely because you have no one else to accuse? And you have no one else only because, on an entirely preconceived notion, you began by excluding Smerdyakov from all suspicion. Yes, it’s true, only the defendant, his two brothers, and Miss Svetlov point to Smerdyakov, and that is all. Yet there are some others who in fact also point to him: there is a certain, though vague, ferment of some question in society, some suspicion, some vague rumor can be heard, some expectation is felt to exist. Finally, there is the evidence of a certain juxtaposition of facts, rather characteristic, though, I admit, also rather vague: first, this fit of the falling sickness precisely on the day of the catastrophe, a fit that the prosecutor for some reason was forced to defend and uphold so strenuously. Then the sudden suicide of Smerdyakov on the eve of the trial. Then the no-less-sudden testimony from the elder of the defendant’s brothers, today in court, who up to now believed in his brother’s guilt, and who suddenly brought in the money and also pronounced, again, the name of Smerdyakov as the murderer! Oh, I am fully convinced, along with the court and the prosecution, that Ivan Karamazov is sick and in fever, that his testimony may indeed be a desperate attempt, conceived, moreover, in delirium, to save his brother by shifting the blame onto the dead man. But, still, Smerdyakov’s name has been uttered, again there is the ring of something mysterious, as it were. Something seems to have been left unspoken here, gentlemen of the jury, and unfinished. Perhaps it will yet be spoken. But let us put that aside for now; that will come later. The court decided this afternoon to continue its session, but in the meantime, while waiting, I might incidentally make some remarks, for example, about the characterization of the late Smerdyakov, drawn with so much subtlety and so much talent by the prosecutor. For, astonished as I am by such talent, I cannot quite agree with the essence of the characterization. I visited Smerdyakov, I saw him and spoke with him, and on me he made an entirely different impression. His health was weak, it is true, but his character, his heart—oh, no, he was not at all such a weak man as the prosecution has made him out to be. I especially did not find any timidity in him, that timidity the prosecutor so characteristically described for us. As for guilelessness, there was nothing of the sort; on the contrary, I found a terrible mistrustfulness in him, behind a mask of naivety, and a mind capable of contemplating quite a lot. Oh! it was too guileless on the part of the prosecution to regard him as feebleminded. On me he made quite a definite impression: I left convinced that he was a decidedly spiteful being, enormously ambitious, vengeful, and burning with envy. I gathered some information: he hated his origin, was ashamed of it, and gnashed his teeth when he recalled that he was ‘descended from Stinking Lizaveta.’ He was irreverent towards the servant Grigory and his wife, who had been his childhood benefactors. He cursed Russia and laughed at her. He dreamed of going to France and remaking himself as a Frenchman. He used to talk about it often and said that he only lacked the means to do so. It seems to me that he loved no one but himself, and his respect for himself was peculiarly high. Enlightenment he regarded as good clothes, clean shirt fronts, and polished boots. Considering himself (and there are facts to support it) the illegitimate son of Fyodor Pavlovich, he might very well detest his position as compared with that of his master’s legitimate children: everything goes to them, you see, and nothing to him; to them all the rights, to them the inheritance, while he is just a cook. He disclosed to me that he himself had helped Fyodor Pavlovich put the money in the envelope. The purpose of this sum—a sum that could have made his career—was, naturally, hateful to him. Besides, he saw three thousand roubles in bright, iridescent bills (I deliberately asked him about it). Oh, never show a proud and envious man a great deal of money at once— and this was the first time he had seen such a sum in one hand. The impression of the iridescent bundle might have had a morbid effect on his imagination, though at the time without any consequences. The highly talented prosecutor outlined for us with remarkable subtlety all the pros and cons of the assumption that Smerdyakov might be accused of the murder, and asked particularly: why did he need to sham a falling fit? Yes, but he may not have been shamming at all, the fit may have happened quite naturally, it may also have passed quite naturally, and the sick man may have come round again. Let’s say, not that he recovered, but that at some point he came round and regained consciousness, as happens with the falling sickness. The prosecution asks: where is the moment when Smerdyakov committed the crime? But it is extremely easy to point out this moment. He could have come round, gotten up from a deep sleep (for he was just asleep: fits of the falling sickness are always followed by a deep sleep) precisely at the moment when old Grigory, having seized the fleeing defendant by the leg on the fence, shouted ‘Parricide!’ for the whole neighborhood to hear. It could have been this unusual cry, in the stillness, in the dark, that awakened Smerdyakov, who by that time might not have been sleeping very soundly: he might have begun to wake up naturally an hour earlier. Having gotten out of bed, he goes almost unconsciously and without any intention towards the shout, to see what it was. His head is in a sickly daze, his reason is still drowsy, but now he is in the garden, he goes up to the lighted window and hears the terrible news from his master, who, of course, was glad to see him. Reason at once lights up in his head. He finds out all the details from his frightened master. And now a thought gradually forms in his disordered and sick brain—terrible, but tempting and irresistibly logical: to kill him, take the three thousand, and afterwards shift it all onto his young master: who will be suspected now if not the young master, whom can they accuse if not the young master, so much evidence, and he was there? A terrible thirst for money, booty, might have taken his breath away, along with the notion of impunity. Oh, these unexpected and irresistible impulses so often come when a chance offers itself, and above all come unexpectedly to such murderers, who just a moment before had no idea they would want to kill! And so Smerdyakov could have gone into his master’s room and accomplished his plan—with what, what weapon?—why, with the first stone he picked up in the garden. And what for, with what purpose? But three thousand, it’s a whole career! Oh! I am not contradicting myself: the money may well have existed. And Smerdyakov may even have been the only one who knew where to find it, where exactly his master was keeping it. ‘Well, and the wrapping for the money, the torn envelope on the floor?’ Earlier, when the prosecutor was speaking about this envelope, and set forth his extremely subtle argument that only an unaccustomed thief would have left it on the floor—namely, a thief like Karamazov, and never one like Smerdyakov, who in no case would have left behind such evidence against himself— earlier, gentlemen of the jury, as I was listening, I suddenly felt I was hearing something extremely familiar. And just imagine, I did hear precisely the same argument, the same conjecture as to what Karamazov would have done with the envelope, just two days ago, from Smerdyakov himself. Moreover, he even struck me at the time: I precisely thought he was being falsely naive, heading me off, foisting this idea on me so that I would come up with the same argument myself, as if he were prompting me. Did he not prompt the prosecution, too, with this argument? Did he not foist it on to the highly talented prosecutor as well? They will say: what about the old woman, Grigory’s wife? She did hear the sick man groaning just beside her all night. Yes, she heard him, but this argument is extremely flimsy. I knew a lady who complained bitterly that some mutt kept waking her up all night and would not let her sleep. And yet, as it turned out, the poor little dog had yapped only two or three times during the whole night. It’s quite natural; a man is sleeping and suddenly hears a groan, he wakes up annoyed at being awakened, but immediately falls asleep again. Two hours later, another groan, he wakes up again and again falls asleep; finally, yet another groan, again in two hours, just three times during the night. In the morning the sleeping man gets up and complains that someone was groaning all night and constantly waking him up. But it must inevitably seem so to him; he slept, and does not remember the intervals of sleep, two hours each, but only the moments when he was awakened, and so it seems to him that he was being awakened all night. But why, why, the prosecution exclaims, did Smerdyakov not confess in his death note? ‘He had enough conscience for the one thing,’ they say, ‘why not for the other?’ Excuse me, but conscience implies repentance, and it may be that the suicide was not repentant but simply in despair. Despair and repentance are two totally different things. Despair can be malicious and implacable, and the suicide, as he was taking his life, may at that moment have felt twice as much hatred for those whom he had envied all his life. Gentlemen of the jury, beware of a judicial error! What, what is implausible in all that I have just presented and portrayed to you? Find the error in my account, find what is impossible, absurd. But if there is at least a shadow of possibility, a shadow of plausibility in my conjectures—withhold your sentence. And is there not more than a shadow here? I swear by all that’s holy, I believe completely in the explanation of the murder I have just presented to you. And above all, above all, I am disturbed and beside myself from the very thought that out of the whole mass of facts that the prosecution has heaped upon the defendant, there is not one that is at least somewhat exact and irrefutable, and that the unfortunate man will perish merely from the totality of these facts. Yes, this totality is horrible; this blood, this blood dripping from his fingers, the bloodstained shirt, the dark night echoing with the shout of ‘Parricide! ‘ and the one who shouted falling with his head smashed, and then this mass of phrases, testimonies, gestures, cries—it has so much influence, it can sway one’s convictions, but your convictions, gentlemen of the jury, can it sway your convictions? Remember, you are given an immense power, the power to bind and to loose.^[348]But the greater the power, the more terrible its application! I do not renounce one iota of what I have just said, but suppose I did, suppose for a moment that I, too, agreed with the prosecution that my unfortunate client stained his hands with his father’s blood. This is only a supposition, I repeat, I do not doubt his innocence for a moment, but let it be so, let me suppose that my defendant is guilty of parricide, yet, even allowing for such a supposition, hear what I say. I have it in my heart to speak out something more to you, for I also sense a great struggle in your hearts and minds ... Forgive my speaking of your hearts and minds, gentlemen of the jury, but I want to be truthful and sincere to the end. Let us all be sincere...”

At this point the defense attorney was interrupted by rather loud applause. Indeed, he uttered his last words with such a sincere-sounding note that everyone felt he perhaps really had something to say, and that what he would say now was most important of all. But the presiding judge, hearing the applause, loudly threatened to “clear” the court if “such an instance” occurred again. Everything became hushed, and Fetyukovich began in a sort of new, heartfelt voice, quite unlike the one in which he had been speaking so far.

Chapter 13: An Adulterer of Thought

“It is not only the totality of the facts that ruins my client, gentlemen of the jury,” he exclaimed, “no, my client is ruined, in reality, by just one fact: the corpse of his old father! Were it simply a homicide, you, too, would reject the accusation, in view of the insignificant, the unsubstantiated, the fantastic nature of the facts when they are each examined separately and not in their totality; at least you would hesitate to ruin a man’s destiny merely because of your prejudice against him, which, alas, he has so richly deserved! But here we have not simply a homicide, but a parricide! This is impressive, and to such a degree that the very insignificance and unsubstantiatedness of the incriminating facts become not so insignificant and unsubstantiated, and that even in the most unprejudiced mind. Now, how can such a defendant be acquitted? And what if he did kill him and goes unpunished—that is what everyone feels in his heart, almost unwittingly, instinctively. Yes, it is a horrible thing to shed a father’s blood—his blood who begot me, his blood who loved me, his life’s blood who did not spare himself for me, who from childhood ached with my aches, who all his life suffered for my happiness and lived only in my joys, my successes! Oh, to kill such a father—who could even dream of it! Gentlemen of the jury, what is a father, a real father, what does this great word mean, what terribly great idea is contained in this appellation? We have just indicated something of what a true father is and ought to be. In the present case, with which all of us are now so involved, for which our souls ache—in the present case the father, the late Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, in no way fitted the idea of a father that has just spoken to our hearts. That is a calamity. Yes, indeed, some fathers are like a calamity. Let us examine this calamity more closely—we must not be afraid of anything, gentlemen of the jury, in view of the importance of the impending decision. We more especially ought not to be afraid now, or, so to speak, to wave certain ideas away, like children or frightened women, as the highly talented prosecutor happily expressed it. Yet in his ardent speech my esteemed opponent (my opponent even before I uttered my first word) exclaimed several times: ‘No, I shall not turn over the defense of the accused to anyone, I shall not yield his defense to the defense attorney from Petersburg—I am both prosecutor and defender!’ So he exclaimed several times, and yet he forgot to mention that if this terrible defendant was, for all of twenty-three years, so grateful just for one pound of nuts given him as a child by the only man who was ever nice to him in his paternal home, then, conversely, such a man could not fail to remember, for all those twenty-three years, how his father had him running around barefoot ‘in the backyard, without any shoes, his little britches hanging by one button,’ as the philanthropic Dr. Herzenstube put it. Oh, gentlemen of the jury, why need we examine this ‘calamity’ more closely, why repeat what everyone already knows! What did my client meet when he came home to his father? And why, why portray my client as heartless, as an egoist, a monster? He is unbridled, he is wild and stormy, that is why we are trying him now, but who is responsible for his destiny, who is responsible that for all his good inclinations, his noble, sensitive heart, he received such an absurd upbringing? Did anyone teach him any sense at all, has he been enlightened by learning, did anyone give him at least a little love in his childhood? My client grew up in God’s keeping—that is, like a wild beast. Perhaps he longed to see his father after so many years of separation; perhaps a thousand times before then, recalling his childhood as if in sleep, he had driven away the loathsome ghosts of his childhood dreams, and longed with all his soul to vindicate his father and embrace him! And now what? He meets with nothing but cynical jeers, suspiciousness, and pettifoggery over the disputed money; all he hears daily, ‘over the cognac,’ are talk and worldly precepts that make him sick at heart; and, finally, he beholds his father stealing his mistress away from him, from his own son, and with the son’s own money—oh, gentlemen of the jury, this is loathsome and cruel! And this same old man complains to everyone about the irreverence and cruelty of his son, besmirches him in society, injures him, slanders him, buys up his promissory notes in order to put him in jail! Gentlemen of the jury, these souls, these people who seem hardhearted, stormy, and unrestrained, people like my client, sometimes, and indeed most often, are extremely tenderhearted, only they keep it hidden. Do not laugh, do not laugh at my idea! Earlier the talented prosecutor laughed mercilessly at my client, pointing to his love for Schiller, his love for ‘the beautiful and lofty.’ I should not laugh at that if I were him, if I were a prosecutor! Yes, these hearts—oh, let me defend these hearts, which are so rarely and so wrongly understood—these hearts quite often thirst for what is tender, for what is beautiful and righteous, precisely the contrary, as it were, of themselves, of their storminess, their cruelty—thirst for it unconsciously, precisely thirst for it. Outwardly passionate and cruel, they are capable, for instance, of loving a woman to the point of torment, and inevitably with a lofty and spiritual love. Again, do not laugh at me: it most often happens precisely so with such natures! Only they are unable to conceal their passion, at times very coarse— and that is what strikes everyone, that is what everyone notices, and no one sees the inner man. On the contrary, all such passions are quickly spent, but at the side of a noble, beautiful being this apparently coarse and cruel man seeks renewal, seeks the chance to reform, to become better, to become lofty and honest—’lofty and beautiful,’ much ridiculed though the phrase may be! I said earlier that I would not venture to touch on my client’s romance with Miss Verkhovtsev. Yet I may allow myself half a word: what we heard earlier was not testimony, but only the cry of a frenzied and vengeful woman, and it is not for her, no, it is not for her to reproach him with betrayal, because she herself has betrayed him! If she had had a little time to think better of it, she would not have given such testimony! Oh, do not believe her, no, my client is not a ‘monster,’ as she called him! The crucified lover of mankind, as he was going to his cross, said: ‘I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep, so that not one will be destroyed . . .’^[349] Let us, too, not destroy a human soul! What is a father, I was asking just now, and exclaimed that it is a great word, a precious appellation. But, gentlemen of the jury, one must treat words honestly, and I shall allow myself to name a thing by the proper word, the proper appellation: such a father as the murdered old Karamazov cannot and does not deserve to be called a father. Love for a father that is not justified by the father is an absurdity, an impossibility. Love cannot be created out of nothing: only God creates out of nothing. ‘Fathers, provoke not your children,’ writes the apostle,^[350] from a heart aflame with love. I quote these holy words now not for the sake of my client, but as a reminder to all fathers. Who has empowered me to teach fathers? No one. But as a man and a citizen I call out—vivos voco!^[351] We are not long on this earth, we do many evil deeds and say many evil words. And therefore let us all seize the favorable moment of our being together in order to say a good word to each other as well. And so I do; while I am in this place, I make the best of my moment. Not in vain is this tribune given us by a higher will—from here we can be heard by the whole of Russia. I speak not only to fathers here, but to all fathers I cry out: ‘Fathers, provoke not your children!’ Let us first fulfill Christ’s commandment ourselves, and only then let us expect the same of our children. Otherwise we are not fathers but enemies of our children, and they are not our children but our enemies, and we ourselves have made them our enemies! ‘With what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you’^[352]—it is not I who say this, it is the Gospel precept: measure with the same measure as it is measured to you. How can we blame our children if they measure to us with our own measure? Recently in Finland a girl, a servant, was suspected of secretly giving birth to a baby. They began watching her, and in the attic of the house, in a corner, behind some bricks, found her chest, which no one knew about, opened it, and took out of it the little body of a newborn baby that she had killed. In the same chest were found two skeletons of babies she had given birth to previously and killed at the moment of birth, as she confessed. Gentlemen of the jury, was she a mother to her children? Yes, she gave birth to them, but was she a mother to them? Would any one of us dare pronounce over her the sacred name of mother? Let us be brave, gentlemen of the jury, let us even be bold, it is even our duty to be so in the present moment and not to be afraid of certain words and ideas, like Moscow merchants’ wives who are afraid of ‘metal’ and ‘brimstone.’^[353] No, let us prove, on the contrary, that the progress of the past few years has touched our development as well, and let us say straight out: he who begets is not yet a father; a father is he who begets and proves worthy of it. Oh, of course, there is another meaning, another interpretation of the word ‘father,’ which insists that my father, though a monster, though a villain to his children, is still my father simply because he begot me. But this meaning is, so to speak, a mystical one, which I do not understand with my reason, but can only accept by faith, or, more precisely, on faith, like many other things that I do not understand, but that religion nonetheless tells me to believe. But in that case let it remain outside the sphere of real life. While within the sphere of real life, which not only has its rights, but itself imposes great obligations—within this sphere, if we wish to be humane, to be Christians finally, it is our duty and obligation to foster only those convictions that are justified by reason and experience, that have passed through the crucible of analysis, in a word, to act sensibly and not senselessly as in dreams or delirium, so as not to bring harm to a man, so as not to torment and ruin a man. Then, then it will be a real Christian deed, not only a mystical one, but a sensible and truly philanthropic deed ...”

At this point loud applause broke out in many parts of the hall, but Fetyu-kovich even waved his hands, as if begging not to be interrupted and to be allowed to finish. Everything at once became hushed. The orator went on:

“Do you think, gentlemen of the jury, that such questions can pass our children by, let’s say, if they are now adolescents, let’s say, if they are now beginning to reason? No, they cannot, and let us not ask such impossible forbearance of them! The sight of an unworthy father, especially in comparison with other fathers, fathers worthy of their children, his own peers, involuntarily presents a young man with tormenting questions. To these questions he receives the conventional answer: ‘He begot you, you are of his blood, that is why you must love him.’ The young man involuntarily begins thinking: ‘But did he love me when he was begetting me,’ he asks, wondering more and more. ‘Did he beget me for my own sake? He did not know me, not even my sex at that moment, the moment of passion, probably heated up with wine, and probably all he did for me was pass on to me an inclination to drink—so much for his good deeds ... Why should I love him just because he begot me and then never loved me all my life?’ Oh, perhaps to you these questions appear coarse, cruel, but do not demand impossible forbearance from a young mind: ‘Drive nature out the door and it will fly back in the window’^[354]—and above all, above all, let us not be afraid of ‘metal’ and ‘brimstone,’ let us decide the question as reason and the love of man dictate, and not as dictated by mystical notions. How decide it, then? Here is how: let the son stand before his father and ask him reasonably: ‘Father, tell me, why should I love you? Father, prove to me that I should love you’—and if the father can, if he is able to answer and give him proof, then we have a real, normal family, established not just on mystical prejudice, but on reasonable, self-accountable, and strictly humane foundations. In the opposite case, if the father can give no proof— the family is finished then and there: he is not a father to his son, and the son is free and has the right henceforth to look upon his father as a stranger and even as his enemy. Our tribune, gentlemen of the jury, should be a school of truth and sensible ideas.”

Here the orator was interrupted by unrestrained, almost frenzied applause. Of course, the whole room did not applaud, but still about half the room applauded. Fathers and mothers applauded. From above, where the ladies were sitting, shrieks and cries could be heard. Handkerchiefs were waved. The presiding judge began ringing the bell as hard as he could. He was obviously annoyed with the behavior of the courtroom, but decidedly did not dare “clear” the court, as he had recently threatened to do: even the dignitaries, the old men with stars on their frock coats, who were sitting on special chairs behind the judges, were applauding and waving handkerchiefs to the orator, so that when the noise died down, the judge contented himself merely with repeating his strict promise to clear the court, and the triumphant and excited Fetyukovich began to go on with his speech.

“Gentlemen of the jury, you remember that terrible night of which so much has been said today, when the son climbed over the fence, got into his father’s house, and finally stood face to face with the enemy and offender who begot him. I insist as strongly as I can—he did not come running for money then: the accusation of robbery is an absurdity, as I have already explained before. And he did not break into his house in order to kill him, oh, no: if that had been his premeditated intention, he would at least have seen to the weapon beforehand, but he grabbed the brass pestle instinctively, not knowing why himself. Suppose he did deceive his father with the signals, suppose he did get in—I have already said that I do not for a moment believe this legend, but very well, let us suppose it for the moment! Gentlemen of the jury, I swear to you by all that’s holy, if it had not been his father but some other offender, then, having run through the rooms and made sure that the woman was not in the house, he would have run away as fast as he could, without doing his rival any harm; he might have hit him, pushed him aside, but that would be all, because he could not be bothered with that, he had no time, he had to find out where she was. But his father, his father—oh, it was all because of the sight of his father, his enemy, his offender, who had hated him from childhood, and now-—his monstrous rival! A feeling of hatred took hold of him involuntarily, unrestrainably; to reason was impossible: everything surged up in a moment! It was madness and insanity, a fit of passion, but a natural fit of passion, avenging its eternal laws unrestrainably and unconsciously, like all things in nature. But even then the killer did not kill—I assert it, I cry it aloud—no, he merely swung the pestle in disgusted indignation, not wishing to kill, not knowing that he would kill. Had it not been for that fatal pestle in his hand, he would perhaps only have beaten his father, and not killed him. He did not know as he ran away whether the old man he had struck down was killed or not. Such a murder is not a murder. Such a murder is not a parricide, either. No, the murder of such a father cannot be called parricide. Such a murder can be considered parricide only out of prejudice! But was there, was there indeed any murder—again and again I call out to you from the bottom of my soul! Gentlemen of the jury, we shall condemn him, and then he will say to himself: ‘These people did nothing for my destiny, my upbringing, my education, nothing to make me better, to make a man of me. These people did not give me to eat, they did not give me to drink, I lay naked in prison and they did not visit me,^[355] and now they have exiled me to penal servitude. I am quits, I owe them nothing now, and I owe nothing to anyone unto ages of ages. They are wicked, and I shall be wicked. They are cruel, and I shall be cruel.’ That is what he will say, gentlemen of the jury! And I swear: with your verdict you will only ease him, ease his conscience, he will curse the blood he has shed and not regret it. Along with that you will destroy the still-possible man in him, for he will remain wicked and blind for the rest of his life. No, if you want to punish him terribly, fearfully, with the most horrible punishment imaginable, but so as to save and restore his soul forever—then overwhelm him with your mercy! You will see, you will hear how his soul will tremble and be horrified: ‘Is it for me to endure this mercy, for me to be granted so much love, and am I worthy of it?’ he will exclaim! Oh, I know, I know that heart, it is a wild but noble heart, gentlemen of the jury. It will bow down before your deed, it thirsts for a great act of love, it will catch fire and resurrect forever. There are souls that in their narrowness blame the whole world. But overwhelm such a soul with mercy, give it love, and it will curse what it has done, for there are so many germs of good in it. The soul will expand and behold how merciful God is, and how beautiful and just people are. He will be horrified, he will be overwhelmed with repentance and the countless debt he must henceforth repay. And then he will not say, ‘I am quits,’ but will say, ‘I am guilty before all people and am the least worthy of all people.’ In tears of repentance and burning, suffering tenderness he will exclaim: ‘People are better than I, for they wished not to ruin but to save me! ‘ Oh, it is so easy for you to do it, this act of mercy, for in the absence of any evidence even slightly resembling the truth, it will be too difficult for you to say: ‘Yes, guilty.’ It is better to let ten who are guilty go, than to punish one who is innocent— do you hear, do you hear this majestic voice from the last century of our glorious history?^[356] Is it for me, insignificant as I am, to remind you that the Russian courts exist not only for punishment but also for the salvation of the ruined man! Let other nations have the letter and punishment, we have the spirit and meaning, the salvation and regeneration of the lost. And if so, if such indeed are Russia and her courts, then—onward, Russia! And do not frighten us, oh, do not frighten us with your mad troikas, which all nations stand aside from in disgust! Not a mad troika, but a majestic Russian chariot will arrive solemnly and peacefully at its goal. In your hands is the fate of my client, in your hands is also the fate of our Russian truth. You will save it, you will champion it, you will prove that there are some to preserve it, that it is in good hands!”

Chapter 14: Our Peasants Stood Up for Themselves

Thus Fetyukovich concluded, and the rapture that burst from his listeners this time was unrestrainable, like a storm. To restrain it now was unthinkable: women wept, many of the men also wept, even two of the dignitaries shed tears. The presiding judge submitted and even delayed ringing his bell: “To trespass upon such enthusiasm would amount to trespassing upon something sacred,” as our ladies cried afterwards. The orator himself was genuinely moved. And it was at such a moment that our Ippolit Kirillovich rose once more “to voice certain objections.” He was met with hateful stares: “How? What’s this? He still dares to object?” the ladies prattled. But even if all the ladies in the world, with the prosecutor’s own wife at their head, had begun prattling, it would have been impossible to restrain him at that moment. He was pale, shaking with emotion; the first words, the first phrases he uttered were even incomprehensible; he was breathless, inarticulate, confused. However, he quickly recovered. But I shall quote only a few phrases from his second speech.

“... We are reproached with having invented all sorts of novels. But what has the defense attorney offered if not novel upon novel? The only thing lacking is poetry. Fyodor Pavlovich, while waiting for his mistress, tears up the envelope and throws it on the floor. Even what he said on this remarkable occasion is quoted. Is this not a poem? And where is the proof that he took out the money, who heard what he was saying? The feebleminded idiot Smerdyakov, transformed into some sort of Byronic hero revenging himself upon society for his illegitimate birth—is this not a poem in the Byronic fashion? And the son bursting into his father’s house, killing him, and at the same time not killing him, this is not even a novel, not a poem, it is a sphinx posing riddles, which it, of course, will not solve itself. If he killed him, he killed him; how can it be that he killed him and yet did not kill him—who can understand that? Then it is announced to us that our tribune is the tribune of truth and sensible ideas, and so from this tribune of ‘sensible ideas’ an axiom resounds, accompanied by an oath, that to call the murder of a father parricide is simply a prejudice! But if parricide is a prejudice, and if every child ought to ask his father, ‘Father, why should I love you?’—what will become of us, what will become of the foundations of society, where will the family end up? Parricide—don’t you see, it’s just the ‘brimstone’ of some Moscow merchant’s wife? The most precious, the most sacred precepts concerning the purpose and future of the Russian courts are presented perversely and frivolously, only to achieve a certain end, to achieve the acquittal of that which cannot be acquitted. ‘Oh, overwhelm him with mercy,’ the defense attorney exclaims, and that is just what the criminal wants, and tomorrow everyone will see how overwhelmed he is! And is the defense attorney not being too modest in asking only for the defendant’s acquittal? Why does he not ask that a fund be established in the parricide’s name, in order to immortalize his deed for posterity and the younger generation? The Gospel and religion are corrected: it’s all mysticism, he says, and ours is the only true Christianity, tested by the analysis of reason and sensible ideas. And so a false image of Christ is held up to us! ‘With what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you,’ the defense attorney exclaims, and concludes then and there that Christ commanded us to measure with the same measure as it is measured to us—and that from the tribune of truth and sensible ideas! We glance into the Gospel only on the eve of our speeches, in order to make a brilliant display of our familiarity with what is, after all, a rather original work, which may prove useful and serve for a certain effect, in good measure, all in good measure! Yet Christ tells us precisely not to do so, to beware of doing so, because that is what the wicked world does, whereas we must forgive and turn our cheek, and not measure with the same measure as our offenders measure to us. This is what our God taught us, and not that it is a prejudice to forbid children to kill their own fathers. And let us not, from the rostrum of truth and sensible ideas, correct the Gospel of our God, whom the defense attorney deems worthy of being called merely the crucified lover of mankind,’ in opposition to the whole of Orthodox Russia, which calls out to him: ’For thou art our God . . .!’^[357]”

Here the presiding judge intervened and checked the carried-away speaker, asking him not to exaggerate, to stay within proper bounds, and so on and so forth, everything presiding judges usually say in such cases. And the courtroom was restless as well. The public was stirring, even calling out in indignation. Fetyukovich did not even object; he stepped up, putting his hands to his heart, only to pronounce in an offended voice a few words full of dignity. He touched again, lightly and mockingly, on “novels” and “psychology,” and at one point appropriately added: “Thou art angry, Jupiter, therefore thou art wrong,”^[358] drawing numerous and approving chuckles from the public, for Ippolit Kirillovich in no way resembled Jupiter. Then, to the charge that he supposedly gave the younger generation permission to kill their fathers, Fetyukovich observed with profound dignity that he saw no need to reply. With regard to the “false image of Christ,” and his not deeming Christ worthy to be called God, but calling him merely “the crucified lover of mankind,” which is “contrary to Orthodoxy and should not be spoken from the tribune of truth and sensible ideas”—Fetyukovich hinted at “sinister intent” and said that in preparing to come here he had trusted at least that this tribune would be secure from accusations “dangerous to my person as a citizen and a loyal subject . . .” But at these words the presiding judge checked him as well, and Fetyukovich, with a bow, finished his response, followed by a general murmur of approval from the courtroom. And Ippolit Kirillovich, in the opinion of our ladies, was “crushed forever.”

Then the defendant himself was given the opportunity to speak. Mitya stood up, but said little. He was terribly tired in body and in spirit. The look of strength and independence with which he had appeared in court that morning had all but vanished. He seemed to have experienced something that day for the rest of his life, which had taught and brought home to him something very important, something he had not understood before. His voice had grown weaker, he no longer shouted as earlier. Something new, resigned, defeated, and downcast could be heard in his words.

“What can I say, gentlemen of the jury! My judgment has come, I feel the right hand of God upon me. The end of the erring man! But I tell you as if I were confessing to God: ‘No, of my father’s blood I am not guilty! ‘ For the last time I repeat: ‘I did not kill him.’ I erred, but I loved the good. Every moment I longed to reform, yet I lived like a wild beast. My thanks to the prosecutor, he said much about me that I did not know, but it is not true that I killed my father, the prosecutor is mistaken! My thanks also to the defense attorney, I wept listening to him, but it is not true that I killed my father, there was no need even to suppose it! And don’t believe the doctors, I’m entirely in my right mind, only my soul is heavy. If you spare me, if you let me go—I will pray for you. I will become better, I give you my word, I give it before God. And if you condemn me—I will break the sword over my head myself, and kiss the broken pieces!^[359] But spare me, do not deprive me of my God, I know myself: I will murmur! My soul is heavy, gentlemen ... spare me!” He all but fell back in his seat, his voice broke, he barely managed to utter the last phrase. Then the court proceeded to pose the questions and asked for conclusions from both sides. But I omit the details here. At last the jury rose to retire for deliberation. The presiding judge was very tired, which is why his instructions to them were so weak: “Be impartial,” he said, “do not be impressed by the eloquent words of the defense, and yet weigh carefully, remember that a great obligation rests upon you,” and so on and so forth. The jury retired, and there came a break in the session. People could stand, move about, exchange their stored-up impressions, have a bite to eat at the buffet. It was very late, already about an hour past midnight, but no one wanted to leave. They were all so tense that rest was the last thing on their minds. They all waited with sinking hearts; though, incidentally, not everyone’s heart was sinking. The ladies were simply hysterically impatient, but their hearts were untroubled: “Acquittal is inevitable.” They were preparing themselves for the ‘ spectacular moment of general enthusiasm. I must admit that in the male half of the room, too, a great many were convinced of an inevitable acquittal. Some were glad, but others frowned, and still others simply hung their heads: they did not want acquittal! Fetyukovich, for his part, was firmly assured of success. He was surrounded, congratulated, fawned upon.

“There are,” he said to one group, as was reported afterwards, “there are these invisible threads that bind the defense attorney and the jury together. They begin and can already be sensed during the speech. I felt them, they exist. Don’t worry, the case is ours.”

“I wonder what our peasants are going to say?” said one sullen, fat, pockmarked gentleman, a neighboring landowner, approaching a group of gentlemen conversing.

“But they’re not all peasants. There are four officials among them.”

“Yes, officials,” a member of the district council said, joining them.

“And do you know Nazaryev, Prokhor Ivanovich, the merchant with the medal, the one on the jury?”

“What about him?”

“Palatial mind.”

“But he never says a word.”

“Never says a word, but so much the better. Your man from Petersburg has nothing to teach him; he could teach the whole of Petersburg himself. Twelve children, just think of it!”

“Good God, how can they possibly not acquit him?” cried one of our young officials in another group.

“He’s sure to be acquitted,” a resolute voice was heard.

“It would be a shame and a disgrace not to acquit him!” the official went on exclaiming. “Suppose he did kill him, but there are fathers and fathers! And, finally, he was in such a frenzy ... Maybe he really did just swing the pestle and the old man fell down. Only it’s too bad they dragged the lackey into it. That’s just a ridiculous episode. If I were the defense attorney, I’d have said straight out: he killed him, but he’s not guilty, and devil take you!”