The Karamazov Brothers

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Having outlined, in the correct sequence, everything that the court knew about the property disputes and relations between father and son, and having stressed again and again that, according to all the available evidence there was not the slightest possibility of determining who had defrauded whom in the question of the distribution of the inheritance, Ippolit Kyrillovich came to the three thousand roubles which had become such an obsession with Mitya, and he now referred to the medical opinion.

  7

  BACKGROUND HISTORY

  ‘THE doctors have tried to prove to us that the accused is not in his right mind, that he has an obsession. I suggest that he is very much in his right mind, which is to his disadvantage; had he not been in his right mind, he would have acted much more deviously perhaps. As regards his being obsessive, I would probably be willing to go along with this, but strictly with regard to one point only—the same point as was indicated by the doctors, namely the defendant’s obsession with the three thousand roubles of which his father had allegedly defrauded him. Nevertheless, when considering the defendant’s persistent frustration about that money, it would be possible to find a much easier explanation for this, perhaps, than a mental disorder. For my own part I quite agree with the young doctor, in whose opinion the accused was—and is—in possession of all his mental faculties and was merely manifesting anger and frustration. And that is the crux of the matter, not the three thousand; the defendant was obsessed with rage, not because of the money, but for another very specific reason. And that reason was jealousy!’

  At this juncture Ippolit Kyrillovich proceeded to unfold the whole picture of the defendant’s fateful passion for Grushenka. He started with the occasion when the defendant first set off to pay ‘the young lady’ a visit and give her ‘a thrashing’. ‘I’m using the defendant’s own words here,’ added Ippolit Kyrillovich. ‘But, instead of giving her a thrashing, he “fell at her feet”—that was the beginning of his infatuation. Meanwhile, the young lady had attracted the interest of the old man, the defendant’s father. This was a remarkable coincidence and a fateful one, because, although they must both surely have met her before, both men now fell prey to an infatuation of the most intractable, essentially Karamazovian kind. Here we have her own admission. “I”, she said, “was leading them both on.” Yes, she suddenly felt like having some fun with the pair of them; she hadn’t felt like it before, but suddenly it occurred to her to do so—and the end result was that both were smitten by her. The old man, who idolized money, immediately set a bait of three thousand roubles with the deliberate intent of luring her to his abode, but he was soon reduced to such a state that if only she would consent to become his lawful wife he would consider it a privilege to stake his good name and the whole of his estate on her acceptance. We have incontrovertible evidence of this. As for the accused, his tragedy is self-evident, as all of us can recognize. But, to return to the “game” the young lady was playing. The seductress did not even give the young man any hope—and indeed hope—nay, real hope—came only at the very last moment before his arrest, when he knelt in front of his tormentress, stretching out his hands stained with his father’s blood, the blood of his rival. When he was arrested, this woman, now genuinely contrite, shouted, “Send me to Siberia with him, I brought this upon him, I’m the really guilty one!” The intelligent young gentleman who took it upon himself to describe the events with which we are concerned—that selfsame Mr Rakitin to whom I have already drawn your attention—has defined the character of this brave lady in just a few characteristically succinct phrases: “Early disillusionment, early betrayal and fall, next abandonment by her perfidious seducer and fiancé, then her poverty, the curse laid on her by a decent family and, finally, the patronage of a certain wealthy old man, whom incidentally she still considers to be her benefactor. There was probably a great deal in her that was good, but her young heart harboured anger from an all too early age. The character which emerged was calculating and acquisitive. She developed a cynical, vengeful attitude towards society.” Knowing all this, it is easy to understand how she could have toyed with the pair of them just out of sheer malice. And so, in the course of that month of unrequited love, moral humiliation, unfaithfulness to his fiancée, and dishonest appropriation of another person’s money, the accused was finally reduced by unremitting jealousy to a state of frenzied fury—and against whom? Against his own father! And to crown it all, in order to lure the object of his passion, the crazy old man used the very three thousand which his son regarded as rightfully his, properly inherited from his mother, and for which he already bore a grudge against his father. Yes, I agree, it was difficult to accept! This could, in fact, have unbalanced him. It was not the money as such that mattered, but the fact that it was used in such a cynically despicable way to destroy his happiness!’

  Then Ippolit Kyrillovich went on to consider how the idea of killing his father had gradually taken hold of the mind of the accused, and he supported his argument by citing certain facts.

  ‘At first we see him merely blurting out his plans in taverns—this goes on for a whole month. Indeed, he obviously enjoys being in the public eye and keeping the public informed about everything, even about his most infernal and dangerous ideas; he likes to share them with other people, and, for some unknown reason, he demands that those people should respond immediately and unreservedly, become involved there and then in all his worries and anxieties, humour him and not thwart him in any way. Failing which, he would lose his temper and cause mayhem.’ (There followed the anecdote about Staff Captain Snegiryov.) ‘For the whole of that month, those who saw and heard the accused became convinced that his shouting and threats had become so serious that the threats could well turn into deeds.’ (Here the prosecutor described the family gathering at the monastery, the discussions with Alyosha, and the unseemly and violent scene when the accused burst into their father’s house after the meal.) ‘I would not go so far as to imply’, continued Ippolit Kyrillovich, ‘that before this scene the accused had already made a conscious decision to settle matters with his father by premeditated murder. Nevertheless, the idea had already occurred to him several times and he had consciously considered it—the evidence, witnesses, and his own admission prove this. I admit, gentlemen of the jury,’ added Ippolit Kyrillovich, ‘that even right up to this very day, I still hesitated to charge the defendant with complete and conscious premeditation of the crime of which he is accused. I was firmly convinced that, in his heart, although he had contemplated the fateful step several times, he had only considered it, imagined it merely as a possibility, and had determined neither the time nor the circumstances in which it would be accomplished. And it was only today, only when I saw the fateful document presented to the court by Miss Verkhovtseva, that I ceased to give him the benefit of the doubt. Gentlemen, you yourselves heard her exclaim: “This is the plan, the scheme for the murder!” That is how she herself defined the unfortunate “drunken” letter of the hapless defendant. And the letter does indeed set out the whole scheme and his intentions. It was written just two days before the crime, and we now know for certain, therefore, that two days before carrying out his dreadful plan the accused had sworn that if he could not lay his hands on the money the next day he would kill his father and take the money, which was in an envelope tied with a pink ribbon lying under his pillow, “provided that Ivan has left”. You hear that—“provided that Ivan has left”. Here, it would seem, everything has already been thought out, the circumstances weighed up—and, lo and behold!—the whole plan was subsequently executed just as it had been written down! Premeditation and meticulous planning are manifest; the crime was planned with robbery in mind—this was clearly stated, written down, and signed. The accused is not disputing his signature. It may be said that it was written when he was drunk. But that does not lessen its significance; on the contrary, when he was drunk he wrote what he had planned when sober. If he had not planned it when he was sober, he would not have written it when he was d
runk. Some may ask perhaps: why did he go around broadcasting his intentions in taverns? Anyone who is steeling himself to carry out premeditated murder will not say a word about it and will keep it a secret. True enough, but when he was shouting about it he still had no definite plans or intentions, only the wish, the craving. Subsequently he showed rather more reticence. On the night this letter was written, having got himself drunk in the Stolichny Gorod, his behaviour was, rather atypically, very reserved; he refused to play billiards, but sat alone instead and didn’t talk to anyone, and merely had a slight altercation with a local merchant’s clerk—this was probably an almost involuntary act, aggression having become second nature to him by now, so that he just could not resist picking a quarrel whenever he entered a tavern. True, having made the final decision, it must surely have occurred to the accused that he had blurted out too much in the town and that this could very well lead to his subsequent arrest and conviction. But what was to be done? He had let the cat out of the bag, and there was no way of replacing it; but, come to think of it, he had got out of tight corners before, and he could do so again. He pinned his hopes on his lucky star, gentlemen! I must admit, by the way, that he expended a great deal of effort in trying to avoid bloodshed, to avoid the inevitable. “Tomorrow I shall try to raise the money from everyone,” he writes in his own peculiar language, “and if I can’t… then blood will be spilt.” Written when he was drunk, but carried out to the letter when he was stone cold sober!’

  Here Ippolit Kyrillovich gave a detailed description of all Mitya’s efforts to avoid committing the crime. He described his visit to Samsonov, his trip to see Lurcher—everything based on documentary evidence. ‘Exhausted, ridiculed, hungry, having sold his watch to pay for the trip (yet having on his person the fifteen hundred roubles all the while—or so we are led to believe!), tortured by jealousy on account of his beloved, whom he had left behind in the town, and suspecting that in his absence she would go to Fyodor Pavlovich, he finally returns to the town. Thank God! She hasn’t run off to Fyodor Pavlovich. He then goes and accompanies her himself when she goes to visit her benefactor Samsonov. (Strangely enough, he is not at all jealous of Samsonov, a very telling psychological point this!) Then he hurries back to his vantage point behind the houses, and there—there he learns that Smerdyakov has had an epileptic fit, that the other servant is sick—the field is clear and he knows the signal—what a temptation! Nevertheless, he doesn’t act yet; he goes to that universally respected lady, temporarily resident in the town, Mrs Khokhlakova. This lady, who has long had a compassionate interest in his fate, offers him the most honourable of solutions—to turn his back on all this debauchery, this shameless love, this carousing in taverns, this squandering of his youthful energy, and to go prospecting for gold in Siberia: “There is the outlet for your tumultuous energies, your romantic nature, this craving for adventure.”’