The Karamazov Brothers

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  ‘The old bag.’

  ‘No, she’s quite sexy really.’

  ‘That little blonde two seats away from her… she’s more like it.’

  ‘That was good, how they nabbed him at Mokroye, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Not bad. He had to tell us all over again. You’d think he’d bragged enough about it already all over the town.’

  ‘Couldn’t resist one more time. Sheer vanity.’

  ‘He’s got a chip on his shoulder, he-he!’

  ‘And he’s touchy. Full of rhetoric, too. Did you notice the length of his sentences?’

  ‘And he was scaremongering, you know, scaremongering. Remember about the troika? “Others have their Hamlets; so far we Russians only have our Karamazovs!” Not bad.’

  ‘He was having a dig at the Liberals. He’s scared.’

  ‘He’s scared of the other lawyer, too.’

  ‘Yes, I wonder what old Fetyukovich will say.’

  ‘Well, whatever he says, he won’t be able to pull the wool over the eyes of our peasants.’

  ‘You think not?’

  And from a fourth group:

  ‘And that was a good point he made about the troika, and that bit about other nations.’

  ‘Well, it’s true, what he said about people not waiting.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Yes, in the British parliament* last week, one member stood up and put a question to the minister about the nihilists, saying wasn’t it time we took on that barbarian country and taught them a lesson? That’s what Ippolit was talking about, I know it was. He was talking about it only last week.’

  ‘They haven’t got a snowball’s…’

  ‘What do you mean, “a snowball’s”?’

  ‘We’ll just close Kronstadt to them and cut off their supply of grain.* Where will they get it from?’

  ‘From America. They’ll get it from America.’

  ‘Rubbish.’

  The bell rang and everyone rushed back to their seats. Fetyukovich stood up to speak.

  10

  DEFENCE COUNSEL’S SPEECH. ALL THINGS TO ALL MEN

  A DEATHLY hush fell as the famous advocate’s initial words rang out in the hall. Everyone’s eyes were riveted upon him. He began very directly, simply, and with conviction, without a trace of arrogance, and with no attempt at eloquence, pathos, or false sentimentality. This was a man speaking to an intimate circle of well-disposed people. His voice was pleasant, sonorous, and persuasive; he sounded sincere and genuine. Nevertheless, everyone was aware from the outset that the orator might, at any moment, rise to real passion and ‘strike the hearts with unsuspected power’.* He spoke less formally than Ippolit Kyrillovich perhaps, avoiding long sentences and keeping more to the point. There was one thing about him that the ladies did not like much: he kept arching his back, especially at the beginning of his speech—not bowing, but as though preparing to launch himself upon his audience, seeming as it were to contort the upper half of his long, narrow torso, which appeared to be articulated in the middle, thereby enabling him to bend it almost at right angles. To start with he spoke desultorily, apparently without any fixed plan, choosing facts at random, but it all merged into a unified whole in the end. His speech could be divided into two halves: the first half—refuting the accusation and challenging the case for the prosecution—was vicious and sarcastic by turn. But he suddenly appeared to change his tone, even his approach, in the second half, and to soar to elevated emotional heights, which was just what the audience seemed to have been waiting for, and a wave of expectation swept through the hall. He went straight to the heart of the matter, and began by saying that, though his practice was in St Petersburg, this was not the first time he had travelled elsewhere in Russia as defence counsel, but that he did so only in cases where he was at least reasonably convinced of the innocence of the accused. ‘This is just such a case,’ he explained. ‘Even in the initial newspaper reports one thing caught my attention and swayed me decidedly in favour of the defendant. In a word, I was attracted first and foremost by a certain point of law which, though it occurs often enough in legal practice, has in my previous experience never appeared quite so starkly or with such typical characteristics as in the present instance. By rights, I should deal with the matter only at the culmination of my speech, during my summing-up. However, because of my—people might say—disconcerting tendency to come straight to the point and not to be economical with the truth, I shall outline my argument at the very beginning. This may not be altogether politic of me, but it is sincere for all that. My point, my premise, is as follows: the evidence as a whole is not in favour of the defendant, yet at the same time there is not a single fact which, taken in isolation and on its own merits, could stand up to scrutiny! I became increasingly convinced of this as I followed the case through hearsay and newspaper reports, and then I suddenly received an invitation from the relatives of the defendant to act for the defence. I immediately hurried here and, since my arrival, have become totally convinced of his innocence. It is precisely in order to demolish the apparently overwhelming incriminating evidence and to prove the untenability of each accusation individually that I have agreed to take on this case.’

  Thus the counsel for the defence launched into his speech:

  ‘Gentlemen of the jury, I am new here. I have gained all my impressions impartially. The defendant, who is by nature unruly and dissolute, has never offended me personally, as he has offended perhaps a hundred or so people in this town, with the result that many are now prejudiced against him. Of course, I would readily admit that the moral outrage felt by local society is justified: the defendant has been violent and intractable. He was received in local society, however, and welcomed with open arms even by the family of my learned friend, the prosecutor.’ (I would add that these words caused one or two hurriedly suppressed outbursts of laughter in the audience, which no one failed to notice. It was common knowledge that the prosecutor, against his better judgement, had entertained Mitya solely because his wife for some reason found Mitya interesting—though a most charitable and respectable lady, she was at the same time wilful and unpredictable, and inclined at times to oppose her husband on certain matters, mostly of a trifling nature. Mitya, it must be owned, visited them rather infrequently.) ‘Nevertheless, I shall venture to suppose’, continued the counsel for the defence, ‘that even such a fair-minded and independent person as my learned friend could well not be entirely devoid of a certain unjustified prejudice against my unfortunate client. That of course is only to be expected; the unfortunate man certainly has no one but himself to blame if he encounters prejudice. Offended moral sensibilities and, even more so, aesthetic sensibilities can sometimes be implacable. Of course, in my learned friend’s brilliant speech we have all heard an uncompromising analysis of the defendant’s character and behaviour, we have observed his strictly impartial approach to the case—in particular his probing of such psychological depths, which he would never have undertaken had his attitude towards the defendant been in any way intentionally and inimically prejudiced. But, in such cases, some things are even worse, even more destructive than the most hostile and biased attitude to the case in question—for instance, if we get carried away by the exercise, by the need to find an outlet for our imagination and, so to speak, to create a fiction of our own, especially if God has generously endowed us with a gift for psychological insight. Before I left St Petersburg to come here I was warned—though I knew it myself, anyway—that I would do battle here with one of the subtlest and most gifted of psychologists, who had long ago earned for himself a certain, quite distinctive notoriety in that capacity in our still fledgling legal world. But psychology, gentlemen, remarkable science though it may be, can nevertheless be all things to all men’ (laughter in the audience). ‘I trust you will of course forgive my flippant observation—I have no aptitude for eloquence, but I shall give you an example all the same, the first that comes to mind from the prosecutor’s speech. Climbing over a f
ence while escaping from the garden at night, the defendant fells, with a brass pestle, the servant who has grabbed hold of his leg. Then he immediately jumps down into the garden again and, for a full five minutes, fusses over the injured man, trying to establish whether he has killed him or not. And the prosecutor refuses point-blank to believe that the defendant, as he claims, jumped down to attend to the old man Grigory out of compassion. “No,” we are told, “such compassion is not possible at such a moment. It is unnatural,” he tells us. “He jumped down solely in order to establish whether the only witness to his foul deed was still alive or not, and in doing so he proved that it was he who had committed the foul deed, because he could have had no other motive for jumping down into the garden, he could not have been prompted by any feelings of compassion.” That’s psychology for you; but if we take this psychology and apply it to the same case but from a diametrically opposite point of view, the result will be no less convincing. The murderer jumps down just as a precaution, to establish whether the witness is alive or dead, and yet, according to the prosecutor’s own words, he has just left behind him, in the room where he killed his father, a most damning piece of evidence in the shape of a torn envelope on which it was written that it contained three thousand roubles. “For if only he had taken the envelope with him, no one else in the whole world would have known that such an envelope existed, that there had been money in it, and, consequently, that this money had been stolen by the defendant.” Those are the words of the prosecutor himself. So, we are supposed to believe that, on the one hand, he was careless, that he lost his instinct for self-preservation, took fright, and ran away, leaving incriminating evidence behind on the floor, but that, barely two minutes later, having struck down yet another person, he was immediately possessed, if you please, of the most callous and calculating instinct for self-preservation. But all right, let us assume that that’s how it was: herein lies the subtlety of the psychology—under one set of circumstances I may be as bloodthirsty and sharp-eyed as a Caucasian eagle, and the very next moment as blind and helpless as a wretched mole. But if, having committed murder, I am so bloodthirsty and cruelly calculating as to jump down merely to see whether a witness is alive or not, why on earth should I then spend a full five minutes fussing over this new victim of mine, and perhaps end up with fresh witnesses against me? Why should I wipe the injured man’s head and stain my handkerchief with blood, if that handkerchief can be used later as evidence against me? Surely, if I am so calculating and cruel-hearted, would it not be better, having jumped down, simply to strike the injured servant across the head again and again with the same pestle and to finish him off, thereby eliminating a witness and taking a big load off my mind? And lastly, I jump down to check if the man is alive or not, and there on the path I leave behind another piece of evidence, that is the selfsame pestle which I took from the two women, who saw me take it and can always identify it as belonging to them. And it is not that I left it on the path by mistake, that I dropped it absent-mindedly, in a state of confusion. No, I threw away my weapon deliberately, because it was found about fifteen paces from where Grigory was struck down. The question arises: why did I do that? I did it precisely because I felt wretched at having killed a man, an old servant, and it was in a state of remorse, therefore, with a curse, that I flung away the pestle, because it was the instrument of murder—why else, what other reason could I have for throwing it away with such force? If I was able to feel pain and remorse for having killed a man, then it goes without saying that I did not kill my father; had I killed my father, I would not have jumped down to examine the injured man out of pity, I would have been guided by a different feeling, pity would have been the last thing to motivate me—more likely, self-preservation, that’s the fact of the matter. I repeat, far from fussing over him for a full five minutes, he would just have smashed his skull in once and for all. There was room for pity and kindness precisely because his conscience was clear to start with. That is an alternative psychological analysis. Gentlemen of the jury, I am deliberately resorting to psychology myself in order to demonstrate that one can make of it anything one wants. It all depends on who is using it. Psychology lures even the most serious people into realms of fantasy, and quite without their realizing it. I am talking about an excess of psychology, gentlemen of the jury, in effect, a kind of abuse of psychology.’ Here again, approving laughter at the prosecutor’s expense was heard from the audience. I shall not repeat the whole of the defence counsel’s speech in detail, I shall merely select a few instances, the most salient points.

  11

  THERE WAS NO MONEY. THERE WAS NO ROBBERY

  THERE was one point in the defence counsel’s speech which caused not a little consternation amongst the audience, namely, a complete denial of the existence of the fateful three thousand roubles and, consequently, of the possibility of their having been stolen.

  ‘Gentlemen of the jury,’ resumed the counsel for the defence, ‘one peculiar feature of this case cannot possibly escape an unbiased outsider, namely, the defendant is charged with robbery, but there is absolutely no proof of anything having actually been stolen. We are told that a specific sum of three thousand roubles was taken—but whether it actually existed, no one knows. Judge for yourselves: first, how did we learn that there was this three thousand roubles; and secondly, who saw the money? The one person who saw it and said that it was in the addressed envelope was the servant Smerdyakov. It was also he who communicated this information to the defendant and his brother Ivan Fyodorovich before the tragedy occurred. The information was also conveyed to Miss Svetlova. However, none of these three persons actually saw the money themselves; again, only Smerdyakov saw it, but then the question arises: if it is true that the money really did exist and that Smerdyakov saw it, when did he last see it? And what if, without telling him, his master had taken the money from under the mattress and had put it back in his safe box? Remember, according to Smerdyakov the money was under the bedding, under the mattress; the defendant would have had to pull it out from under the mattress, and yet the bedding was in no way rumpled, and this point is carefully noted in the report. How could the defendant have failed to rumple the bedding at all, and, what is more, with his bloodstained hands, not to have left any marks on the clean, fine bedlinen with which the bed had been specially made up that evening? You may ask: what about the envelope on the floor? It is worth dwelling on this envelope. I was not a little surprised when, just now, talking about this envelope, my learned colleague himself—note this well, gentlemen, the prosecutor himself—to demonstrate the incongruity of the supposition that Smerdyakov could have been the murderer, stated: “Had there not been that envelope, had it not been left behind on the floor as evidence, had the thief taken it away with him, then no one in the whole world would have known that it existed, that there had been money in it, and, consequently, that the accused had stolen the money.” And so, according to the prosecutor himself, it is only on the strength of this torn scrap of paper with the inscription on it that the defendant is being accused of theft: otherwise, he tells us, no one would have known that a theft had been committed, or perhaps that there had even been any money. But surely, the fact that a scrap of paper was lying on the floor cannot of itself be sufficient proof that there had been money in it and that this money had been stolen? “But,” you may say, “Smerdyakov saw the money in the envelope,” but when, when did he last see it? That’s what I want to know. I spoke to Smerdyakov and he told me that he saw it two days before the murder! But what is to prevent me from assuming that events took the following course: suppose old Fyodor Pavlovich, having locked himself in his house, had suddenly decided in a fit of hysterically impatient expectation and for want of anything better to do, to take out the envelope and open it. “If I just show her the envelope,” he might have argued, “she might not believe me, but if I show her a wad of three thousand roubles, all in hundred-rouble notes, that will have a greater effect and is bound to make her mouth water.” A
nd so he tears open the envelope, takes out the money, and, with the careless nonchalance of a rightful owner, throws the empty envelope on the floor, without worrying of course whether it might be used in evidence. Just consider, gentlemen of the jury, can there be a more likely explanation? Indeed not! You see, if something even remotely similar took place, the accusation of theft collapses as a matter of course: if there was no money, it follows that there was no theft. If the fact of the envelope being on the floor could be used as evidence that it had contained money, why could I not use it to prove the opposite, namely that the envelope was lying on the floor precisely because it did not contain any money, the money having been removed previously by the owner himself? Yes; but if it was indeed Fyodor Pavlovich who removed the money from the envelope, where did the money disappear to in that case, for none of it was found in the house during the search? Firstly, some money was found in his safe box, and secondly, he could have removed it that morning or even the night before, disposed of it in some way, given it to someone, posted it—or, indeed, he could have changed his mind and radically revised his whole plan of action, without ever considering it was necessary to inform Smerdyakov about it beforehand. And how, when there is even the remotest possibility of such an interpretation, can one insist with such certainty and persistence that the defendant committed the murder with theft as a motive, or even that any theft took place? That would surely be to enter the realm of fiction. If one is to insist that such-and-such a thing has been stolen, one ought to be able to describe it, or at least prove beyond all shadow of a doubt that it existed. But no one has even seen it. Recently in St Petersburg a young man* of about eighteen, hardly more than a youth, a market delivery boy, entered a bureau de change in broad daylight, axe in hand, and, bold as you please, murdered the owner of the bureau and fled with fifteen hundred roubles in cash. About five hours later he was arrested; he had the whole of the fifteen hundred on him, with the exception of fifteen roubles which he had managed to spend. Moreover, a clerk who had returned to the bureau after the murder informed the police not only that a sum of money had been stolen, but also the denomination of the notes, that is, how many multi-coloured notes, how many blue ones, how many red ones, and the number and value of the missing gold coins, and when the murderer was apprehended precisely those notes and coins were found on him. In addition to everything else, the murderer made a full and frank confession that it was he who had committed the murder and taken the said money. Gentlemen of the jury, that is what I call evidence! In that instance we know, we can see, we are aware of a sum of money, and we cannot say that it never existed. Is that true in the present case? And yet it is a matter of life and death; a man’s fate is at stake. All well and good, I hear you say, but wasn’t he living it up that same night, wasn’t he throwing his money about left, right and centre? He had fifteen hundred roubles to start with—where did they come from? Surely, the very fact that only fifteen hundred was accounted for, while the missing half was nowhere to be found, is ample proof that this was not the same money and that it had not come from that envelope. According to the most accurate time calculation made during the preliminary investigation it was demonstrated beyond all shadow of a doubt that, having left the two maidservants in order to go to Perkhotin, the accused did not stop off at his home—or anywhere else for that matter—but was always in the company of other people, and could not therefore have split up the three thousand and hidden one half somewhere in the town. And yet this is precisely the basis on which the prosecution has built its supposition that the money is hidden in some nook or cranny in Mokroye. But then why not in the vaults of Udolpho Castle,* gentlemen? What an improbable, totally fanciful proposition! And observe, one has only to destroy this particular proposition, namely that the money is hidden in Mokroye, for the whole of the accusation of robbery to fly clean out of the window, otherwise where can the fifteen hundred roubles be, where can it have got to? By what miracle did the money disappear, if it has been proven that the defendant did not stop off anywhere? Are we really prepared to destroy a man’s life on the basis of such fiction? It will be said that he still couldn’t explain how he came to be in possession of the fifteen hundred roubles which he had to start with, particularly since everyone knew that, before that night, he had no money. Who knew? The defendant has given a clear and confident explanation of where he got the money from and, if you ask me, gentlemen of the jury, if you ask me—nothing could possibly be more plausible than this explanation, nor more in keeping with the defendant’s character and inherent tendencies. The prosecutor has demonstrated a particular fondness for the figments of his own imagination: a weak-willed man who had consented to accept three thousand roubles offered to him under such ignominious circumstances would not, we are told, have divided the money and sewn one half into a makeshift purse, and even if he had done so he would have unsewn the purse every other day to help himself to a hundred at a time, and thus would have gone through the lot in a month. All this, remember, was stated in a tone that brooked no opposition. But what if the reality was quite different, what if we have been presented with a piece of fiction featuring a totally imaginary character? That’s the whole point, the character is imaginary. I hear an objection: there are witnesses who will testify that in Mokroye, a month before the murder, he spent the whole of the three thousand that he had received from Miss Verkhovtseva, every last kopeck of it, hence he couldn’t have divided it. But who are these witnesses? The court has already seen the reliance that can be placed on their credibility. Besides, we’re always liable to exaggerate what we see in another person’s hand. The point is, none of those witnesses actually counted the money personally, they merely made a guess. After all, the witness Maksimov testified that the defendant had twenty thousand in his hand. You see, gentlemen of the jury, since psychology is a two-edged sword, let me actually apply the other side of the blade and see whether I get the same results.