The Karamazov Brothers

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  ‘But let me continue. One of the witnesses has shown the court three thousand roubles. “The actual money”, he told us, “that was contained in that envelope.” (You see it before you, gentlemen, on the table where the material exhibits are.) “I got it from Smerdyakov yesterday,” he informed us. But you, gentlemen of the jury, will remember the unseemly spectacle that took place here. No need for me to remind you of the details; however, let me draw your attention to just two or three points—choosing from among the more insignificant ones, precisely because they are insignificant and may therefore be overlooked and easily forgotten by most people. Firstly, we come back to the same situation: yesterday, stricken by conscience, Smerdyakov returned the money and hanged himself. (If it had not been for his pangs of conscience he would not have returned the money.) And, of course, it was only last night (on Ivan Karamazov’s own admission) that he first confessed his guilt to Ivan Karamazov, otherwise why would the latter have concealed it all this time? And so he confessed. But why, I repeat why, knowing that an innocent man was to face trial for murder the next day, did he not admit the whole truth to us in his suicide note? After all, the money alone is no proof. For instance, a week ago, quite by chance, I and two other people in this hall found out that Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov had sent off to the regional capital to redeem two five-thousand rouble five per cent interest bonds, having a total value of ten thousand roubles. I say this only because any of us may happen to keep money somewhere from time to time, and the fact that three thousand roubles are shown to the court does not actually prove that they necessarily came out of this or that box or envelope. And, as though this were not enough, Ivan Karamazov, having obtained such a vital piece of information from the actual murderer, does nothing about it. Why not pass it on immediately? Why did he delay doing anything till the morning? I think I may hazard a guess. The man has been in poor mental health for about a week now; he himself has admitted to the doctor that he sees apparitions, that he meets people who are already dead; being in the preliminary stages of a severe illness—he did in fact succumb to it today—and learning of Smerdyakov’s unexpected demise, he suddenly adopts the following line of reasoning: “The fellow’s dead, I might as well accuse him and thereby save my brother. I’ve got some money; why don’t I take a wad of notes and say that Smerdyakov gave them to me before he killed himself.” I hear you say: this is disgraceful; a man may be dead, but still one should not slander him, even to save one’s brother. All well and good, but supposing he thought that he was telling the truth, supposing, having become quite mentally unbalanced by the sudden death of the servant, he himself was convinced that that was how it had happened. After all, you saw the scene that took place here, you saw the state the man was in. He stood on his feet and spoke, but did he know what he was saying? The sick man’s statement was followed by the reading of the letter which the accused wrote to Miss Verkhovtseva two days before committing the crime, and in which he gave full details of his intended crime. So why look any further? The crime was committed exactly as described in that letter, and by none other than the writer of that letter. Yes, gentlemen of the jury, it was carried out point by point as he described it! And he most certainly did not run from his father’s window in embarrassment and trepidation, knowing full well that his sweetheart was in the room. No, this is incongruous and quite out of the question. I put it to you that he entered the room and finished off the job. He probably did it in a fit of temper, flying into a rage the moment he saw his hated rival, but, having killed him—which he evidently did with a single blow, a single swipe of the brass pestle he was clutching—and having made a thorough search and established that she was not there, he did not forget to put his hand under the pillow and pull out the envelope with the money—that same torn envelope which is lying here on the table among the material evidence. I am recounting this in order to draw your attention to one—in my view, highly significant—circumstance. Would an experienced criminal, especially one whose only motive was robbery, have left the envelope next to the body on the floor, where it was found later? Well, let us suppose for example that it was Smerdyakov who killed him, with robbery in mind; surely he would simply have taken the whole envelope with him, without bothering to tear it open as he stood over his victim’s body? He knew for certain that it contained money, because after all he had been present when the money was placed in the envelope and the latter was sealed. Now, had he taken the envelope and its contents without tearing it open, no one would have known a robbery had been committed. I ask you, gentlemen of the jury, would Smerdyakov have done such a thing? Would he have left the envelope on the floor? No, that was the act of a desperate man, one whose judgement was already impaired, a murderer, not a thief, a man who had not stolen anything before in his life and who, even when he withdrew the money from under the pillow, was doing so not as a common thief, but as the rightful owner retrieving his property from a thief, for that is precisely how Dmitry Karamazov regarded the three thousand roubles with which he had become so obsessed. And so, having discovered the envelope, which he had never seen before, he tears it open to establish whether in fact there is any money in it. With the money in his pocket he then runs away without even stopping to think for a moment that he’s leaving behind, on the floor, a vital piece of evidence against himself in the shape of the torn envelope. In the heat of the moment Karamazov, not Smerdyakov, does not stop to think, does not realize the consequences! He takes to his heels. He hears a yell as the servant catches up with him, the servant grabs hold of him, stops him in his tracks, and then slumps to the ground, felled by the brass pestle. The accused jumps down out of pity. Imagine, we are expected to believe that he jumped down, just at that moment, out of pity, out of compassion, to see if he could help him. Was that really an appropriate occasion to demonstrate such compassion? No, I put it to you that he jumped down solely to find out whether the only witness to his evil deed was still alive. Any other feeling, any other motive would have been unnatural! Note, he is very solicitous over Grigory, he wipes his head with a handkerchief, and, having established that he is dead, rushes madly, covered in blood, back to the house of his beloved. How could it not occur to him that, in his bloodstained state, he would immediately be apprehended? But the accused assures us that he paid no attention to the fact that he was covered in blood; that may well be true, that is distinctly possible, criminals always behave like that in such circumstances—cunning and calculating in one respect, and totally lacking in common sense in another. He had only one thing on his mind at that moment: where was she? He needed to establish her whereabouts as soon as possible, and so he went running into her house, only to receive an unexpected and totally devastating piece of news: she had gone to Mokroye with her “former”, her “indisputable one”!’

  9

  PSYCHOLOGY LET LOOSE. GALLOPING TROIKA. THE PROSECUTOR’S SUMMING-UP

  HAVING come to this point in his speech, Ippolit Kyrillovich, who had evidently chosen to describe the events in a strict chronological order, which all highly strung speakers do when purposely seeking to contain their argument within strictly defined boundaries and prevent themselves being carried away by their own enthusiasm, now made a point of expounding upon ‘the former and indisputable one’, and put forward a number of rather amusing ideas regarding this subject. ‘Karamazov, having been insanely jealous of everyone, seems suddenly and totally to have capitulated and accepted the “former and indisputable one”. And this is all the more strange since he had not previously paid any attention at all to this new danger looming in the shape of an unexpected rival. But, since a Karamazov always lives just for the moment, he imagined that this danger was still remote. Probably he regarded him as a figment of his imagination. But then his love-torn heart realized that the reason why the woman had been deceiving him and concealing the existence of this new rival from him was perhaps that the newly emerged rival was anything but a fiction or a fantasy, and epitomized everything for her, all her aspirations in li
fe; no sooner had he understood this than he accepted the situation. Well, gentlemen of the jury, I cannot avoid this peculiar trait in the character of the accused, which is the last thing one would have expected of him. An insatiable desire for truth had arisen, a need to show respect for a woman, to recognize her spiritual rights, and precisely at a time when he had just stained his hands with his father’s blood! It is also true that the spilt blood was already, at that moment, crying out for retribution; having consigned his soul and the whole of his earthly fate to perdition, surely he could not avoid asking himself what he represented, what he could represent for that woman now, that being whom he loved more than his own soul, in contrast to her “former and indisputable one”, the man who had ruined her once, but who had now repented and returned to her with renewed love, with an honourable offer, with the promise of a new and happy life to come. “Whereas I, miserable wretch that I am, what can I give her now, what can I possibly offer her?” Karamazov understood all this, he understood that by his crime he had forfeited his whole future, and that, instead of being a man with a life ahead of him, he was merely a condemned criminal! This realization crushed and mortified him. And so Karamazov immediately conceived a desperate plan which, given his character, must have appeared to him as his only, his preordained way out of the dreadful situation in which he found himself. This way out was suicide. He ran to the clerk Perkhotin to redeem the pistols he had pawned, pulling out of his pocket as he ran all the money for which he had just stained his hands with his father’s blood. Money is what he needed most of all: Karamazov would die, Karamazov would shoot himself, and that would not be forgotten in a hurry! He’s not a poet for nothing! That’s what comes of living life to the full! “I’ll go to her, to her—and there, there I’ll throw a party to end all parties, a party that’ll be remembered by people for years to come. We’ll raise the roof, we’ll join the gypsies in their crazy singing and dancing, and raise our glasses to congratulate the adored woman on her new-found happiness, and then I’ll blow my brains out in expiation, there at her feet! One day she’ll remember Mitya Karamazov, she’ll realize how much Mitya loved her, she’ll spare a thought for Mitya!” A surfeit of histrionics, melodrama, typically wild Karamazovian abandon and sentimentality—well, and something else besides, gentlemen of the jury, something that cried out from the depths of his soul, that relentlessly assaulted his brain and fatally poisoned his heart; that something was his conscience, gentlemen of the jury, his conscience sitting in judgement upon him and meting out its dreadful punishment! But the pistol would reconcile everything, the pistol was the only way out and there was no other, and as for the rest, who knows whether, at that instant, Karamazov thought “what will be there?” In any case, is a Karamazov capable of Hamlet-like reflections as to what will be “there”? No, gentlemen of the jury, others have their Hamlets; so far, we Russians have only our Karamazovs!”’

  Here Ippolit Kyrillovich painted a detailed picture of Mitya’s efforts to deal with all the arrangements—at Perkhotin’s, in the shop, and with the drivers. He cited a multitude of words, expressions, and gestures attested by witnesses—and the effect upon the listeners was overwhelming. What made the strongest impression was the totality of the facts. The guilt of this man, careering about frantically without bothering to cover his tracks, seemed ever more incontrovertible. ‘He saw no point in being careful,’ said Ippolit Kyrillovich, ‘on one or two occasions he nearly confessed everything, he hinted at his guilt without actually admitting it in so many words’ (here followed the statements of witnesses). ‘He had even shouted to his driver on the way: “Do you realize, you’re talking to a murderer?” All the same, he could not bring himself to tell everything: he had to get to Mokroye first, and there put the finishing touches to the poem. But what awaited the unfortunate man in Mokroye? The fact was that, almost from his first moments in Mokroye, he finally realized that his “indisputable” rival was perhaps not as indisputable as all that after all, and that his congratulations on new-found wealth and his salute with the festive cup were neither appreciated nor welcome. But, gentlemen of the jury, you already know the facts as established at the judicial investigation. Karamazov’s triumph over his rival turned out to be beyond dispute, and at that point—yes, at that point, his soul entered a totally new phase, perhaps the most terrifying of all the phases his soul had yet gone through or would ever be likely to go through! One can positively assert, gentlemen of the jury,’ said Ippolit Kiryllovich emphatically, ‘that nature defiled and a heart steeped in crime can, in themselves, exact a greater degree of vengeance than any human justice! What is more, the sufferings inflicted by the latter even take the sting out of the punishment imposed by nature, so that the criminal may even yearn for them as a deliverance from despair; I cannot begin to imagine Karamazov’s torment and spiritual suffering on discovering that she loved him, that she was rejecting her “former and indisputable one” for his sake, and was beckoning him, Mitya, to a new life, a life filled with the promise of happiness. And what a moment to choose! When everything was already over for him, when he had reached the end of the line! By the way, allow me to make one rather important observation in passing in order to illustrate the true nature of the position in which the accused found himself at the time: until the very last moment, even until the very instant of his arrest, this woman, this beloved woman, remained unattainable for him, passionately desired, yet unattainable. But why, why did he not shoot himself there and then, why did he abandon the decision he had made, how could he even have forgotten where his pistol was? It was precisely his passionate thirst for love and the hope of being able to satisfy it on the spot that held him back. In the intoxication of the merrymaking he clung to his beloved who, more seductive and attractive to him than ever before, was carousing with him there; he stayed at her side, drooled over her, became oblivious to everything else in her presence. For a brief moment this passion could have subdued not only the fear of arrest, but even the pangs of conscience! But only for a moment, only for a fleeting moment! I can well imagine the accused’s state of mind at the time, completely in the grip of several conflicting tensions: firstly, there was his state of inebriation, the carousing and the noise, the high jinks of the singers and dancers, and above all she was there, flushed with wine, singing and dancing for him, intoxicated and full of laughter for him! Then there was the faint but comforting hope that the fateful hour of reckoning was still a long way off—or at least not imminent—they wouldn’t come for him until the morning at the earliest. That meant that he still had several hours’ grace, and that was a long time, a very long time! Several hours should be enough to come to all kinds of solutions. I imagine his state of mind was not unlike that of a condemned criminal being taken to his execution, to the gallows: there is still a very long road ahead, which must be covered at walking pace, past a crowd of thousands, then there will be a turn into the next street, and only at the end of that second street will he reach the dreadful square! I really believe that at the start of the journey the condemned man, sitting in the tumbril, must feel that an infinite life still stretches ahead of him. However, the houses roll by one by one, the tumbril rumbles on—oh, that’s nothing, it’s still a long way to the turning into the next street, and he continues to look keenly to the left and the right at the thousands of indifferently curious people with their eyes riveted upon him, and he continues vaguely to imagine that, like all of them, he is still a human being. But here’s the turning into the next street! Never mind though, never mind, still a whole street to go. And no matter how many houses he passes, he still thinks: “There are still a lot of houses.” And so to the very end, right up until they reach the town square. I imagine that is just how Karamazov must have felt. “They haven’t found out yet,” he would argue. “I can still think of something, there’s still time to devise a plan of action, to think up some arguments, but now, right now—isn’t she simply delightful!” His heart must have been heavy and full of gloom, but in spite of tha
t he managed to take half the money he had on him and hide it somewhere—otherwise I cannot for the life of me explain how half the three thousand roubles he had just removed from under his father’s pillow could have gone missing. It was not his first visit to Mokroye, he had gone on the binge there once before, for two days. That huge old timber house, with all its outhouses and passageways, was familiar to him. I put it to you that part of the money vanished just then, in that very house, not long before his arrest—in some crack or cranny, or under a floorboard, or in some nook under the roof. What for? You want to know what for? Well, the catastrophe was liable to occur at any moment—he had not thought out how he would deal with it, of course, what with that throbbing in his head and the attraction she was exerting on him, there had been no time. So what about the money? One always needs money! Money is the very stuff of life. Perhaps such calculated deliberations at such a time may seem unnatural to you? But he assures us, after all, that a month before, at yet another extremely disturbing and critical moment for him, he had taken half the three thousand roubles which he had on him and stitched the money into a makeshift purse, so even if, as I shall soon prove, this was untrue, the idea was nevertheless familiar to Karamazov, for he had contemplated it. And, what is more, when he was subsequently assuring the investigator that he had taken half the three thousand roubles and put it in the purse (which had never even existed), it is quite likely that he invented the idea of the purse there and then, on the spur of the moment, precisely because he had divided the money in half on an impulse two hours previously, and hidden one half somewhere there in Mokroye—just in case, till the morning—simply in order not to keep it on him. Two extremes, gentlemen of the jury, remember that a Karamazov can encompass two extremes, and both at one and the same time! We searched the house, but found nothing. Perhaps the money is still there, or perhaps it disappeared the following day and the accused has it now. In any case, when we arrested him he was on his knees beside her; she was lying on the bed and he was stretching out his arms towards her, and he was so oblivious to everything at that moment that he did not even hear those who came to apprehend him approaching. Nor had he managed to think of anything to say for himself. He was taken totally unawares.