Night. Pounding of the printing presses.
KARAKOZOV is nailing flyers to the walls and gates of houses.
STUDENT/S: [off] All our resources—all our energy—must be directed towards increasing—intensifying—the miseries that people suffer.
And we will go on doing so.
Until their patience is exhausted.
Until the people are driven to rise against their oppressors.
The pounding of the printing press fades, bleeding into the next scene.
SCENE TWENTY-ONE
FEDYA’s flat. FEDYA is sleeping, notes and work scattered around him. A single bang that might be the sound of a gunshot wakes him. A second banging sound (it could be a gunshot; it could be the broomstick).
LANDLADY: [off] Fyodor Mikhailovich!
The pounding of the LANDLADY’s broomstick.
The Magistrate from the fourth district. The one who put that revolutionary away. Shot in his carriage.
Do you hear me, Fyodor Mikhailovich?! Who among us will be spared?
Low sound of a roulette wheel slowly spinning.
It spins faster. Louder.
SCENE TWENTY-TWO
FEDYA’s flat. ANNA waiting. Eventually, FEDYA arrives bearing pastries etc. He empties the pockets of his coat as he takes it off, throws handfuls of coins on the table. There is something almost manic about him.
FEDYA: What time did you get here?
ANNA: An hour ago.
FEDYA: You were due at 10.
ANNA: The roads were barricaded. The cab needed to find another way.
FEDYA: You were due at 10.
ANNA: We’re working today then, are we?
FEDYA: There. Pastries. From the bakery on Kremensky. Nothing cheers a woman more than stuffing her face with something sweet. [Going to the door; yelling to the LANDLADY downstairs] What chance is there of some tea, Agafya Pavlovich?
LANDLADY: [off] For you? None.
FEDYA: [to ANNA] Go downstairs and get some tea from her.
LANDLADY: [off] I’m still waiting on last month’s rent.
FEDYA: [gesturing to the money on the table] And take her a handful of that to shut her up.
ANNA: I’m not here to make your tea. Nor to pay your rent.
FEDYA: Where are the pages from yesterday?
ANNA retrieves them and hands them over.
You can go.
ANNA doesn’t move.
You can go!
ANNA: You have a contract—
FEDYA: It bleeds me dry—
ANNA: Stellovsky will own you—
FEDYA: Do you think I care?
I have this. [Gesturing to his notebook] This is all I need. All I am.
ANNA: One week and it’s done. You’re free. We both are.
FEDYA: Do you understand the ocean of debt I’m drowning in—?
ANNA: Then meet your contract—
FEDYA: That only last week my crazed sister-in-law was back here demanding I buy her son out of the military/ because it no longer suits him?
ANNA: And there it is. Today’s great woe—
FEDYA: You think I don’t want to clear my debts? Be a free man again—?
ANNA: Any excuse. Any distraction. And you chase it like a dog after its tail. This novel won’t be written while you’re forever searching for the next thing to suffer over.
I don’t understand it. This misery you cling to.
FEDYA: It’s my lucky charm. It keeps me alive.
ANNA: It’s a vanity.
FEDYA: Do you know where I’ve been?
ANNA: Gambling.
FEDYA: Gambling, yes. With my life. With the future…
I see it now, Anna. Where to place my money. Where I’d been so fearful of placing it. They are right. The students. To a point, they are right. What must be done…What it is our right, our duty…
A slow tapping sound, building. A slow pounding.
FEDYA stares into the middle-distance, the almost trance-like state that precedes a fit.
ANNA realises something is wrong.
ANNA: Fyodor Mikhailovich—
The lights dim.
Fyodor Mikhailovich—
The room is in shadows.
Reality gives way to FEDYA’s imagination.
FEDYA and ALYOSHA are lit by an incredibly white light.
ALYOSHA is on his knees.
FEDYA: Off your knees.
You’ve no need to mourn.
ALYOSHA: He’s dead.
FEDYA: I know.
ALYOSHA: My teacher.
FEDYA: Another will come.
ALYOSHA: I want no other.
FEDYA: This is not your path.
ALYOSHA: His body’s fallen to dust.
FEDYA: As any man’s.
ALYOSHA: I believed him more than a man.
FEDYA: You must abandon him.
ALYOSHA: It has hardened me—
FEDYA: Yes.
ALYOSHA: Hardened my faith.
FEDYA: No, no, the miracle didn’t come.
ALYOSHA: That I am on my knees. That I have seen my way. Is that not miracle enough?
FEDYA: There’s no truth to be found here. Not in abject service to prayer and ritual. To venal laws. That’s what you will come to understand.
ALYOSHA: I understand all I need to understand. Have seen here—on my knees—all I need to see.
That there is only one doorway to perfection and that is death.
That demand all you want your heaven here on earth, you can never have it.
That you, brother—you’re just as scared as the rest of us.
A shift in the light. ALYOSHA recedes into the shadows as FEDYA suffers a fit.
ANNA can do nothing but watch.
SCENE TWENTY-THREE
FEDYA’s flat. ELENA sits reading through the pages of a manuscript. KOLYA enters.
KOLYA: How is he?
ELENA: He’s sleeping.
KOLYA: Anna said it was bad.
ELENA: No worse, I expect, than usual.
KOLYA: Were you here?
ELENA: Anna hasn’t already told you?
KOLYA: Would I be asking if she had?
ELENA: The landlady’s girl fetched me.
KOLYA: You know what’s brought it on.
ELENA: Do I?
KOLYA: Letters defending the students?
He’ll not be your propagandist.
ELENA: You think the money you keep feeding him will one day make him yours?
KOLYA: He has friends who’ll ensure he travels no further down that road than he already has.
ELENA: He’s not forgotten, Nikolai Ivanovich—he’s been betrayed before, when he believed himself among friends.
FEDYA emerges. He is weak.
FEDYA: Here we all are. Together again.
He sits at his work table, stares at it as though he wants to do something, but lacks the wherewithal to begin.
FEDYA: But you were talking. Don’t let me stop you.
An argument. About my future. My intentions.
KOLYA: It’s all moved too fast, Fedya. The risks now far outweigh any good you can do—
ELENA: Better to do nothing then—to stand up bravely for the status quo—
During the following ANNA enters. Her arrival is barely acknowledged.
KOLYA: Support the students and you give your name to every madness they enact. You might as well hold the gun yourself.
ELENA: It’s a risk worth taking—
KOLYA: Easy to say when it’s not your liberty at stake—
ELENA: It’s precisely my liberty at stake—
ANNA: Do you hear yourselves?
Can you not understand what you’re doing to him?
ELENA: Get out. Both of you.
FEDYA: You say you want a book from me, Kolya?
KOLYA: Your first contract after Stellovsky’s is done.
FEDYA: How about this? A man at a crossroads. Three possible ways before him. Pilgrim. Revolutionary. Or husband. Which does he choose? Which woul
d you have him choose? What’ll get me the most money?
KOLYA: You cater your writing to the buyer now?
FEDYA: It’s what I’m known as, isn’t it? A hack?
KOLYA: I thought Crime and Punishment changed all that.
FEDYA: Yet here I am, still expected to churn out novels under the threat of a stick.
KOLYA: They all come with their own risk. It’d depend on what he intends to wager, this hero of yours.
FEDYA: Not on how much he might win?
KOLYA: Is he likely to win?
FEDYA: What do you say, Anna? Which road is my hero’s way to happiness?
A beat.
FEDYA: Which road?
ANNA: Husband.
FEDYA: No doubt?
ANNA: None. If those are his choices…
FEDYA: Should he seek then an intelligent companion, or merely a kind one?
ANNA: [deferring to ELENA] An intelligent one.
FEDYA: I think he should choose a kind one. So she’ll take pity on him and love him.
ELENA: Have you done with your love play, Fedya? Shame on you, to turn a young girl’s head so cruelly. You know which road you must take. You know where/ you should be—
FEDYA: They’ve offered me a fine choice, Anna. The terror of revolution or the terror of the state—our lives balanced on whether we set our bet on the red or the black.
What is it? Tell me. That one thing that will push a man full over the edge. Not teetering at its brink, but…
ELENA: You should rest now, Fedya.
FEDYA: We have work to do. Anna and I.
ELENA: Leave it for another day.
KOLYA: She’s right,/ Fedya.
FEDYA: You want me to work. Let me work.
A beat.
KOLYA leaves.
ELENA waits.
FEDYA makes it clear he expects her to go also.
A beat.
ELENA exits.
ANNA readies herself for work. FEDYA struggles for something to say.
FEDYA: It’s still dark…
There’s a place I go, Anna—before the fit overtakes me—a place of such transparency… I’d give my whole life to stay there for one moment longer…
A beat.
I have in my mind such a tale. A story that is everything I need to say. Of a parricide.
ANNA: You’ve told me.
FEDYA: I have?
ANNA: A little.
FEDYA: A mystery. Which of the father’s two sons was it who killed him? But they refuse to do my bidding. The sons. Refuse to act as I would have them act.
ANNA: Perhaps they know best.
FEDYA: Know more than me? Yes. Yes, perhaps they do. Only…
There seems to me now to be a third son—it becomes clearer and clearer to me—but I don’t know who he is—not yet. I don’t understand him—but he won’t let go of me—
My mind is filled day and night with nothing else—and whenever I seem on the verge of understanding, this piece of nothing I’m writing for Stellovsky pushes itself into my brain…
Minutes ago, when I walked into this room, it seemed to me to be teeming with life. Now it seems like nothing so much as a tomb—and all I want to do is run from it.
ANNA: Finish the little of Stellovsky’s book that is left to finish, then there’ll be nothing to do but write your parricide.
FEDYA: Will you help me? Will you stay?
ANNA: One book at a time, Fyodor Mikhailovich.
FEDYA: How many pages have we done?
ANNA: One hundred and sixteen.
FEDYA: Thirty-four to go.
ANNA: You write your books by the page?
FEDYA: If it’s what I’m paid by.
ANNA: You stop when you’ve reached the required number?
FEDYA: I see it looming and wrap things up as quickly as I can.
ANNA: I was beginning to wonder if you knew how to smile.
FEDYA: I even know how to laugh.
A beat.
FEDYA: Have you ever been in love?
ANNA: Is this another effort to laugh? Asking me about my love life?
FEDYA: Here’s something would make anyone laugh. I proposed to three women. After my wife died. None of whom, I see now, I actually loved. And all of whom said, No.
ANNA: What does it say about you, Fyodor Mikhailovich? Endless contracts and marriage proposals. Determined to lock yourself into one or the other.
FEDYA: I don’t know. What does it say about me?
ANNA: Sign no more contracts—and find yourself a woman who’ll love you—else you’ll do no more with your great book than flirt at its edges.
FEDYA: Have you ever been in love?
ANNA: I’m not sure that’s any of your/ business—
FEDYA: Have you ever been in love?
ANNA: When I was sixteen I was in love with the hero of a novel. Will that do you?
FEDYA: The hero of a novel? Well… what mortal man could hope to compete.
A long beat.
FEDYA: Some days, Anna—some days I feel I am the blackest of rebels…
I’ve had meetings with the students—
ANNA: Don’t,/ Fyodor Mikhailovich—
FEDYA: Have read their treatises and felt so sharp a desire…
There is something that was never known—never discovered…
Years ago. Before my arrest. I was involved in another group. A more secret group—
ANNA: Don’t—
FEDYA: Our sole aim was to provoke revolution—absolute revolution—in order to see the serfs freed. We’d have stopped at nothing. So dark was our anger. Had it been discovered then, I’d have been shot. Not a question asked. Even now, were it ever/ discovered—
ANNA: Please, Fyodor Mikhailovich. No more.
You should rest. You should rest.
I’ll go downstairs.
I’ll get you tea.
ANNA hurries away.
The shadows close in on FEDYA. He sees ALYOSHA.
As FEDYA speaks, ALYOSHA transtions into KARAKOZOV.
FEDYA: I must have retribution or I will destroy myself.
Why must it come only in some infinity of space and time? Why? I want to see it with my own eyes. The lion lie down with the lamb. The murdered man rise up to embrace his murderer. I want to be there when it’s finally revealed. What all the suffering has been for.
I don’t want to shake your faith. I don’t. I want you to shake mine. I beg you to…
A series of explosions.
The urgent banging of a broom-head from the floor below.
SCENE TWENTY-FOUR
KARAKOZOV’s room.
FEDYA and KARAKOZOV.
FEDYA: Who’s making these decisions?
KARAK: No-one.
FEDYA: Tell me. Let me speak/ to them.
KARAK: We have no leaders. We have no need of leaders. We’re equal—each of us finding our own way to bring the ideas/ to their proper conclusion.
FEDYA: Until you’ve destroyed everything. Then you’ll see how many leaders you have, all of them rushing over each other to step into the vacuum they’ve created.
KARAK: I don’t know who bombed the palace. I don’t.
I know it wasn’t me.
But if it had been?
If it had been my hand that lit the fuse?
Wouldn’t I have had just cause?
FEDYA: No—
KARAK: Wouldn’t you have had just cause, Fyodor Mikhailovich? Given what you suffered at the Tsar’s hands—?
FEDYA: It was a different Tsar. A different time—
KARAK: But the same system.
Men condemned to death. For saying what they think.
FEDYA: Everything will be lost.
KARAK: Then there was nothing worth keeping.
‘It’s the extraordinary man’s right—his duty—to allow his conscience to step over the obstacle of commonplace law in the execution of an idea. Moreso, if that idea involves the salvation of all mankind.’
Your Raskoln
ikov. In your Crime and Punishment. Taking up a hatchet and bludgeoning an old rogue to death. Determined to prove himself a man out of the ordinary.
Sitting in my freezing-cold room, despairing about what might be done? Your words struck me like a bolt of lightning.
FEDYA: Raskolnikov abandons that thinking.
KARAK: He abandons the idea he might be an extraordinary man—
FEDYA: You misread it—
KARAK: Not that an extraordinary man has the right to take the future in his own hands—
FEDYA: That’s not what I wrote—
KARAK: But if it’s what I read—?
FEDYA: Even the extraordinary man
KARAK: What we all read—
FEDYA: Must hold fast to the order of things
KARAK: Even if that order condemns us all—?
FEDYA: If Russia isn’t to collapse entirely—
KARAK: You don’t believe that—
FEDYA: With all my heart and soul.
KARAK: Be honest with yourself, Fyodor Mikhailovich. Why—truly—did your hero abandon his thinking?
Because you didn’t have the courage to see it through. Because you wrote your extraordinary man and you felt liberated by the power of him. But then you got scared. You got scared. You pulled back—wrote his demise—had him kowtow to God—to salve your guilt. But it’s the truth of his ideas that shine through—and will keep shining through—like fire through fog—no matter the end you contrived for him. And you’ll go on writing him, this hero, until your last breath, until you dare to acknowledge aloud the truth. That sometimes a great idea needs to be forced into being. That sometimes it’s the way the world is ordered that demands we strike against it. That demands we set aside God’s creation and build our own.
I learned that. I learned that at your knee as I read your work.
Surely there is here among us at least one extraordinary man.
SCENE TWENTY-FIVE
FEDYA at the roulette wheel. A restless MITYA troubles FEDYA’s imagination.
MITYA: Drip. Drip. Drip.
Just throw it all on and finish it.
FEDYA: It’s not how it’s done.
MITYA: How is it done?
FEDYA: Rigid calculation.
MITYA: Of what?
FEDYA: The past. The future.
Play coolly. Calmly. One reckoning at a time. And it’s impossible to lose.
FEDYA wins again—
FEDYA: See—
But with each win he loses a little more self-control.
The Parricide Page 4