6
PROSECUTOR’S SPEECH. CHARACTER SKETCH
IPPOLIT KYRILLOVICH began his prosecutor’s address shaking nervously all over, a cold feverish sweat breaking out on his brow, and hot and cold shivers running up and down his spine. He mentioned this himself later. He regarded this speech as his chef d’œuvre, the crowning achievement of his professional career, his swansong. Indeed, nine months later he was dead from galloping consumption, so if he had foreseen his own end he really could have compared himself to a swan, singing its last song. Our poor Ippolit Kyrillovich put his whole heart and soul and every last vestige of his talent into that speech, and demonstrated, quite unexpectedly, that he had both a sense of civic duty and an awareness of the eternal issues, that is, in so far as he was able to grasp them. It is as well to remember that what gave his speech its strength was its sincerity: he did in all sincerity believe in the guilt of the accused; his address was not that of a hired hack going through the motions; in calling for ‘retribution’ he really was imbued with a desire to ‘save society’. Even our ladies in the audience, who by and large were hostile to Ippolit Kyrillovich, had to admit, however, that he created an extraordinary impression. His voice was strained and faltering at first, but he soon got into his stride and for the rest of the speech his voice reverberated throughout the hall. When he came to the peroration, he nearly fainted.
‘Gentlemen of the jury,’ began the counsel for the prosecution, ‘the present case has become notorious throughout the whole of Russia. But what, one may ask, is so surprising about it, what is so horrifying? For us, especially for us. After all, we have become fairly inured to such things! What is horrifying is that such dreadful crimes have ceased to shock us! What should horrify us is not that a certain individual commits this or that atrocity, but that we take these atrocities for granted. Wherein lies the reason for our indifference, for our barely disguised indifference to such matters, to such manifestations of the times, which augurs a most unenviable future for us? Does it lie in our cynicism or in the premature atrophy of mental faculties and imagination in our society, still so immature and yet already so decadent? Does it lie in the total degeneration of our moral principles, or even in the fact that, when it comes down to it, perhaps we don’t have any moral principles at all? I cannot resolve these issues, but they are nevertheless agonizing, and every citizen not only should, but in all conscience must, take them to heart. Our press, though still in its formative stages, has already rendered certain services to society; without it, we would never have obtained anything remotely like a complete picture of all the atrocities of unbridled will-power and depraved morality that it constantly proclaims on its pages for the edification of us all—and not only for those who attend the recently reformed public courts with which we have been blessed in the present reign. And what is it that we read almost daily? We constantly read of things compared to which even the present case pales into insignificance and appears as something almost commonplace. But what is really significant is that the majority of our domestic criminal cases reveal something universal, some common malaise which has become endemic and which, being commonplace, is difficult to combat. Take the case of the brilliant young officer from the best circles, on the threshold of his adulthood and career, who, without the least compunction, stealthily and treacherously goes and slits the throat of a petty clerk—in some respects, his erstwhile benefactor—and that of the latter’s maidservant, in order to get his hands on a promissory note, not to mention the rest of the victim’s money: “It’ll come in handy to support the lifestyle my position demands and for my future career.” Having knifed them both, he puts a pillow under the head of each body, and leaves. Or take the young hero, decorated for bravery, who murders the mother of his commanding officer and benefactor when he waylays and robs her on the highway, having previously convinced his accomplices that she loved him like a son and would follow his every advice and not be solicitous for her safety. So, he is a monster, but in our day and age I would not go so far as to say that he is an isolated case. Another, while not actually committing murder, may well think about it and imagine it, and in the depths of his soul is just as dishonourable as the other. In moments of privacy and silent reflection he may well ask himself: “What is honour, and is not the condemnation of bloodshed mere prejudice?” Perhaps people will protest and say that I am sick, hysterical, grossly unfair, that I am out of my mind, that I exaggerate. Let them, let them—oh God, I’d be only too happy to be wrong! You don’t have to believe me, you may think I’m mad, but nevertheless mark my words: if only a tenth, only a twentieth part of what I say is true, that is still reason enough for horror! Look, gentlemen, look at the number of young people who blow their own brains out—and without any of Hamlet’s rhetoric concerning what awaits us in the hereafter, without even a suggestion of such questions, as though this thesis regarding our soul and everything that awaits us beyond the grave has long been cast out from their consciousness and buried beneath the sands. Finally, look at the depravity that surrounds us, look at the libertines in our society. Compared to some of them, Fyodor Pavlovich, the unfortunate victim in this case, is but an innocent babe. And yet we all knew him, “he lived amongst us…”* Yes, the psychology of the Russian criminal will one day, perhaps, be analysed by the foremost minds both in this country and abroad, for the subject is worthy of such study. But this analysis will be made later, in happier times, when all the tragic bedlam of today has become history and it will be possible to make it in a more rational and balanced manner than I, for instance, could ever hope to. Now, however, we are either horrified or we pretend to be horrified, but one way or another, in our quest for easy excitement and cheap thrills, we savour the spectacle that titillates our cynically idle complacency, or again, like small children, we wave our hands to ward off frightening spectres and bury our heads in the pillow while the frightening vision passes, only to forget about it immediately in fun and games. But there will come a time when we too shall have to make a sober and sensible reassessment of our lives, when we too shall have to look at ourselves as a society, for it is incumbent upon us to grapple with certain issues in our public affairs, or at the very least to make a start in that direction. At the end of one of his greatest works, a great writer in earlier times likened Russia to a jaunty troika rushing headlong towards an unknown destination.* “Oh troika, winged troika, who was it that invented you!” he exclaims, and then adds, in ecstatic pride, that all nations should make way respectfully for the troika rushing along on its course. Fine, gentlemen, let them, let them make way, respectfully or otherwise, but in my fallible opinion the great author ended either in a flourish of childishly naïve exaltation or simply in fear of the censor. For if his troika were hitched up to his own heroes, the Sobakeviches, the Nozdryovs, or the Chichikovs,* then you wouldn’t get very far at all with that lot, whoever was the driver! And that’s with the horses of yesteryear, never mind the present lot, the present lot are really beyond the pale!…’
At this point Ippolit Kyrillovich’s speech was interrupted by applause; the liberal light in which the Russian troika was depicted had struck a chord. True, only two or three people clapped, so the president did not even deem it necessary to threaten to clear the courtroom, and merely cast a stern look at the interrupters. But Ippolit Kyrillovich felt heartened; never before in his life had he been applauded! For years no one had wanted to listen to the man, and suddenly here was an opportunity to address the whole of Russia!
‘But let’s face it,’ he continued, ‘what is it about the Karamazov family that has led to such notoriety throughout the whole land? Perhaps I exaggerate, but it seems to me that in this neat little family scene, one can detect, as it were, traces of the basic elements of our modern educated society—by no means all the elements, and then only the merest scintilla, “as the sun in a droplet of water”,* nevertheless something is reflected, something can be deduced. Let us consider this hapless, dissolute, depraved old man, this paterfa
milias who has met with such an unfortunate end. A gentleman by birth, he starts out as an impecunious hanger-on; by virtue of an unexpected and fortuitous marriage he manages to lay his hands on a tidy little sum, which, with his innate acumen—not inconsiderable, I may add—enables him to come into his own as a moneylender; the petty rogue and obsequious buffoon is now well set up. With the passage of years and as he amasses his wealth, he becomes more and more self-assured. Gone are his submissiveness and sycophancy, what remains is a sarcastic and malicious cynic, a libertine. All spiritual values have been expunged, yet the lust for life is undiminished. He comes to a point where nothing is left in life but sensual gratification, and that is the attitude he imparts to his children. As regards parental and spiritual responsibilities, there is not a trace. He ridicules such notions, he leaves the upbringing of his small children to the servants, and is overjoyed when he is no longer responsible for them. He even forgets about them altogether. The whole of his moral code is reduced to aprés moi le déluge.* What we see here is everything that is contrary to the concept of a responsible citizen, we see a total, even hostile, alienation from society: “As long as I’m all right, let the whole world go to blazes.” And he is all right, he is satisfied, he yearns to carry on like that for another twenty, no, thirty years. He swindles his own son, he refuses to hand his maternal inheritance over to him, and instead uses his son’s own money to entice his mistress away. No, I do not want to leave the defence of the accused solely to my illustrious learned colleague from St Petersburg. I shall take it upon myself to tell the truth, I can understand perfectly well all the indignation he engendered in his son’s heart. But enough, enough said about that miserable old man, he has got his just deserts. Let us simply remember that here was a father, a thoroughly modern father. Would I be insulting society too much if I were to say that he was, perhaps, only one of many such modern fathers? Alas, the only reason that so many of our modern fathers refrain from expressing themselves as cynically as he did is that they’ve had a better upbringing, a better education; but in essence they share his philosophy. Granted, I am a pessimist—all right. We have already agreed that you are prepared to forgive me on that score. Let us agree further—don’t believe me if you don’t want to, don’t; I shall speak but you don’t have to believe me. But please let me have my say, please bear in mind just some of my points. And so we come to the children of this old man, this paterfamilias: one of them stands before us—I shall have plenty to say about him later—the other two I shall merely touch upon in passing. One of these, the elder, is a thoroughly modern young man, very well educated, with a not inconsiderable intellect, who, however, no longer believes in anything, having like the father rejected and discarded too much, far too much, in his lifetime. We all know his views, and he has been well received in our society. He has never concealed his opinions—just the opposite, in fact—and this emboldens me now to speak of him with some frankness, not, I hasten to say, as a private individual, but simply as a member of the Karamazov family. Yesterday, here in this town, a sickly halfwit killed himself—Smerdyakov, the late Fyodor Pavlovich’s servant and, perhaps, his illegitimate son, who is intimately involved in the present case. At the preliminary investigation, weeping hysterically, he told me how the young Karamazov, Ivan Fyodorovich, had shocked him by his lack of moral sense. “Everything’s permitted, according to him, everything in the world, and nothing should be prohibited from now on—that’s what he taught me.” I suggest that it was this doctrine to which the halfwit had been exposed that finally caused him to go mad, although of course his epilepsy and the whole of the terrible tragedy that occurred in their household must also have contributed to his mental derangement. But this halfwit happened to make one highly curious observation which would have been a credit even to a cleverer observer than he, which is precisely why I have mentioned the point. “If there is”, he told me, “one among Fyodor Pavlovich’s sons who most closely resembles him in character, it is certainly Ivan Fyodorovich!” I shall end my character sketch with this remark, as I consider it would be indelicate to pursue it further. I have no wish to draw further conclusions, like a raven’s cry foretelling nothing but doom for the young man. We saw today in this hall that truth is still alive in his young heart, and that his feelings of kinship have not yet been stifled by his moral cynicism and lack of faith, caused more by parental example than by true mental suffering. Now, the other son—oh, he’s still a youth, devout and humble, and far from espousing his brother’s gloomy, degenerate outlook on life, he has sought to follow, so to speak, “populist principles”—or that which masquerades under that somewhat pretentious title in certain of the pseudo-intellectual circles of our intelligentsia. He actually adopted the monastic life; he even thought of taking the tonsure. Unconsciously and prematurely he has come, it seems to me, to represent that timid despair with which so many people in our impoverished society, frightened of its cynicism and corruption and mistakenly attributing all evil to European enlightenment, rush towards “the soil of their birth”, into the maternal embrace, as it were, of their native land, like children frightened by ghosts, their only desire being to slumber peacefully in the shrivelled bosom of their exhausted mother, or even perhaps to spend their whole life sleeping there, merely to escape the sight of the fearsome visions. For my part, I wish this gentle and gifted young man all the best, hoping that his splendid youthful idealism and his attempt to identify with the people will not, as so often happens, become dreary mysticism at the psychological level, and mindless chauvinism at the civic level—both ills which represent, perhaps, an even greater danger to our nation than the premature degradation which, due to misinter preted and all too easily acquired European enlightenment, afflicts his elder brother.’
The references to chauvinism and mysticism again drew one or two tentative outbreaks of approval. It goes without saying that Ippolit Kyrillovich had been carried away by his enthusiasm, and that none of his digressions had much to do with the matter in hand—not to mention the fact that they had turned out to be rather lacking in clarity—but the urge to unburden himself, be it only once in a lifetime, had proved altogether too strong for this consumptive, embittered man. They said in the town later that in his description of Ivan Fyodorovich, Ippolit Kyrillovich had been motivated by basically improper considerations; having been worsted once or twice by Ivan Fyodorovich during arguments in public, he was still smarting and wanted to take revenge. But I don’t know whether one should draw such conclusions. In any case, all this was merely an introduction; after that his address became more relevant and to the point.
‘And now to the third son of our modern paterfamilias,’ continued Ippolit Kyrillovich. ‘He stands before us in the dock. Before us, too, are his achievements, his life, and his deeds; his hour has struck, and everything is exposed, everything is revealed. In contrast to the “Europeanism” and the “populism” of his brothers, he represents Russia as she really is—admittedly, not the whole of it, not by any means, and God forbid that it should be the whole! And yet, here she is, Mother Russia; no mistaking her voice, her smell. We are an independent-minded lot, we are a curious amalgam of good and evil, we admire enlightenment and Schiller, yet at the same time we can raise merry hell in taverns and pull out the beards of pathetic drunkards, our drinking comrades. We can be kind and noble-natured, but only provided things are going our way. We can be enthused by—yes, that’s right, enthused—by the noblest of ideals, but only on condition that we don’t have to expend any effort, that we don’t have to make any sacrifices, and above all on condition that the ideals can be achieved free, gratis, that we needn’t pay anything. Paying is something we really resent; on the other hand, receiving, that’s really up our street, and that goes for everything. Let’s have every kind of blessing (nothing less will do, it must be every kind) and, whatever happens, let no one tell us what to do on any score, and then we too shall prove that we can be all sweetness and light. We’re not greedy—no, not in the least—h
owever, do keep doling out the money, more, more, the more the better, and you shall see how generously, with what contempt for this base metal, we fritter it away in a single night of unrestrained revelry. And if no one will give us the money, we will soon show that we can get hold of it ourselves if we want it badly enough. But of this, later—let us now return to the matter in hand. To begin with, we have before us a poor, neglected boy, “in the backyard without shoes”, as described just now by our honourable and respected fellow citizen, alas of foreign extraction! I repeat, I shall not let anyone else undertake the defence of the accused! I am here both to prosecute and to defend. Yes, gentlemen, we too are people, we too are human, we too are capable of assessing what influence the first impressions of childhood and the parental home can exert on character. Next we see the boy as a youth, he is already a young man, an officer; for disorderly conduct and for challenging someone to a duel he is exiled to a far-flung outpost of our bounteous motherland. There he continues his military service, there he sows his wild oats and, of course—eventually, the fish gets too big for the pond. He develops a need for money, gentlemen of the jury, money above all else, and so, after protracted arguments, he reaches a compromise with his father whereby he is to receive six thousand roubles, which are then dispatched to him. Observe that he wrote a receipt for the money, and a letter of his exists in which he more or less renounces all claim to the rest, and accepts the six thousand in final settlement of the dispute over the inheritance. At this point he makes the acquaintance of a high-minded and deeply cultured young lady. I do not wish to repeat the details, you heard them just now; we are dealing here with honour, with personal sacrifice, and I shall say no more. The picture of a young man, frivolous and dissolute, who nevertheless bows before true nobility, before a lofty ideal, made a deep and sympathetic impression on us. But after that, suddenly and quite unexpectedly, we were afforded in this same courtroom a glimpse of the reverse side of the coin. Again, I dare not jump to conclusions and I shall refrain from analysing the reasons. And yet, there must have been reasons. This same young lady, with tears of long-suppressed indignation streaming down her face, informed us that it was in fact he who, in the first place, despised her for her impulsive behaviour—rash and impetuous, perhaps—yet undeniably exalted and magnanimous. This man, her fiancé, would from the outset regard her with a mocking smile, which she would have found bearable from anyone else, but not from him. Knowing that he had already deceived her—deceived her in his conviction that she would excuse everything in advance, even his unfaithfulness—knowing all this, she purposely offered him the three thousand roubles nevertheless, making it clear to him at the same time, quite clear, that she was offering him the money to engineer her own betrayal: “Well now,” her reproachful, challenging gaze confronted him in silence, “will you accept it, or won’t you? Can you really be that cynical?” He looks at her, understands exactly what she is thinking (after all, he himself has admitted to us here that he understood everything), and in the event he goes ahead, pockets the three thousand, and blows it in the space of a couple of days with his new paramour! What are we to believe? The first version—the noble impulse to give up his remaining few resources in homage to virtue—or the opposite, the other side of the coin, the repugnant side? Usually in life, when one is faced with two opposites one must look for the truth somewhere in the middle; in the case at issue this is certainly not so. The most likely explanation is that on the one hand he was genuinely noble, while on the other hand he was—equally genuinely—base. Why? Precisely because those of the Karamazov ilk are possessed of natures with such a broad sweep—this is the point I am trying to make—capable of encompassing all manner of opposites, of contemplating both extremes at one and the same time—that which is above us, the extremity of the loftiest ideals, and that which is below us, the extremity of the most iniquitous degradation. Let me draw your attention to the brilliant observation made just now by Mr Rakitin, our up-and-coming journalist, who has made a deep and detailed study of the whole of the Karamazov clan. “The experience of ultimate degradation is as vital to such unruly, dissolute natures as the experience of sheer goodness,” he says, and this is very true; they have a constant, ceaseless need for this unnatural combination. Two extremes, two extremes, gentlemen, at one and the same time—without them, they are unhappy and dissatisfied, their life is incomplete. They are all-encompassing, as all-encompassing as Mother Russia herself, there is nothing they cannot accommodate, nothing to which they cannot reconcile themselves! Incidentally, members of the jury, we have touched upon the matter of the three thousand roubles, and I shall take the liberty now of anticipating somewhat. Just imagine that he, this individual, having obtained the money by such means, enduring such shame, such infamy, having reached the ultimate stages of humiliation—can you imagine him, that same day, being able to divide it and sew one half into a makeshift purse, and then, for a whole month thereafter, having the will-power to carry it round his neck despite all temptations and overwhelming needs! Neither in his besotted state as he caroused from tavern to tavern, nor when he had to rush back from town to seek, from God knows where, the money that he needed so badly in order to rescue his sweetheart from the enticements of his rival, his father—at no time did he touch the purse. If only so as not to abandon his sweetheart to the enticements of the old man, of whom he was so jealous, he should have opened the purse and stayed at home on constant guard over his sweetheart, awaiting the moment when she would say: “I’m yours!”, whereupon he could flee with her as far as possible from those dire straits. But no, he didn’t even touch his talisman, and why not? The first reason, as I have already pointed out, was that were she to say to him: “I’m yours, take me where you will”, he would need to have the means to do this. But this first reason, according to the accused himself, paled into insignificance before the second. “As long as I had that money on me, I was a scoundrel, but not a thief, because I could always go to my fiancée, whom I’d insulted, and, counting out half the money I had acquired from her on false pretences, I could always say to her: You see, I’ve blown half your money and have thereby proved that I’m a weak and feckless man—a scoundrel, if you like (I’m using the accused’s own language)—I may be a scoundrel but I’m not a thief, for if I were a thief, I wouldn’t have returned the remaining half of the money, I’d have spent it along with the first half.” An amazing feat of reasoning! This man, so violent and yet so weak, who despite the ignominy, could not resist the temptation of three thousand roubles—this same man now manifests such stoical resolve, and continues to carry thousands of roubles around his neck and does not dare to touch them! Is this in any way consistent with the character of the man whom we are considering now? No, and I shall take the liberty of describing how the real Dmitry Karamazov would have behaved, even if he had decided to sew the money into a purse. At the first temptation—if only to impress this new sweetheart of his, with whom he had already spent half the money carousing—he’d have unstitched the purse and taken, say, only a hundred roubles to start with, because why should he necessarily return half, that is fifteen hundred roubles, when fourteen hundred would do—after all, the end result would be the same: “I may be a scoundrel,” he’d have argued, “but I’m not a thief; at least I’ve returned fourteen hundred roubles, whereas a thief would have taken everything and returned nothing.” Then, a little later, he’d have unstitched it again, taken another hundred, then a third, then a fourth, and so on, till by the end of the month, he would have removed the last hundred but one. “Even if I only return a hundred the end result will be the same—a scoundrel, but not a thief. I’ve blown two thousand nine hundred, but I’ve still managed to return a hundred; a thief wouldn’t have returned even that much.” And at long last, having spent even the penultimate hundred, he’d have looked at the last remaining hundred and said to himself: “Let’s face it, it’s not really worth returning one hundred, is it—why don’t I blow that too?” That’s how the real Dmitry Karama
zov, as we know him, would have behaved! The story about the purse, on the other hand, is so removed from reality that it defies credulity. One might suppose anything but that. But we shall return to that later.’
The Karamazov Brothers Page 105
