The Brothers Karamazov

by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

  "No, I swear I didn't!" shouted Ivan, grinding his teeth.

  "You didn't? Then you ought, as your father's son, to have had me taken to the lock-up and thrashed at once for my words then ... or at least, to have given me a punch in the face on the spot, but you were not a bit angry, if you please, and at once in a friendly way acted on my foolish word and went away, which was utterly absurd, for you ought to have stayed to save your parent's life. How could I help drawing my conclusions?"

  Ivan sat scowling, both his fists convulsively pressed on his knees.

  "Yes, I am sorry I didn't punch you in the face," he said with a bitter smile. "I couldn't have taken you to the lock-up just then. Who would have believed me and what charge could I bring against you? But the punch in the face ... oh, I'm sorry I didn't think of it. Though blows are forbidden, I should have pounded your ugly face to a jelly."

  Smerdyakov looked at him almost with relish.

  "In the ordinary occasions of life," he said in the same complacent and sententious tone in which he had taunted Grigory and argued with him about religion at Fyodor Pavlovitch's table, "in the ordinary occasions of life, blows on the face are forbidden nowadays by law, and people have given them up, but in exceptional occasions of life people still fly to blows, not only among us but all over the world, be it even the fullest Republic of France, just as in the time of Adam and Eve, and they never will leave off, but you, even in an exceptional case, did not dare."

  [pg 697] "What are you learning French words for?" Ivan nodded towards the exercise-book lying on the table.

  "Why shouldn't I learn them so as to improve my education, supposing that I may myself chance to go some day to those happy parts of Europe?"

  "Listen, monster." Ivan's eyes flashed and he trembled all over. "I am not afraid of your accusations; you can say what you like about me, and if I don't beat you to death, it's simply because I suspect you of that crime and I'll drag you to justice. I'll unmask you."

  "To my thinking, you'd better keep quiet, for what can you accuse me of, considering my absolute innocence? and who would believe you? Only if you begin, I shall tell everything, too, for I must defend myself."

  "Do you think I am afraid of you now?"

  "If the court doesn't believe all I've said to you just now, the public will, and you will be ashamed."

  "That's as much as to say, 'It's always worth while speaking to a sensible man,' eh?" snarled Ivan.

  "You hit the mark, indeed. And you'd better be sensible."

  Ivan got up, shaking all over with indignation, put on his coat, and without replying further to Smerdyakov, without even looking at him, walked quickly out of the cottage. The cool evening air refreshed him. There was a bright moon in the sky. A nightmare of ideas and sensations filled his soul. "Shall I go at once and give information against Smerdyakov? But what information can I give? He is not guilty, anyway. On the contrary, he'll accuse me. And in fact, why did I set off for Tchermashnya then? What for? What for?" Ivan asked himself. "Yes, of course, I was expecting something and he is right...." And he remembered for the hundredth time how, on the last night in his father's house, he had listened on the stairs. But he remembered it now with such anguish that he stood still on the spot as though he had been stabbed. "Yes, I expected it then, that's true! I wanted the murder, I did want the murder! Did I want the murder? Did I want it? I must kill Smerdyakov! If I don't dare kill Smerdyakov now, life is not worth living!"

  Ivan did not go home, but went straight to Katerina Ivanovna [pg 698] and alarmed her by his appearance. He was like a madman. He repeated all his conversation with Smerdyakov, every syllable of it. He couldn't be calmed, however much she tried to soothe him: he kept walking about the room, speaking strangely, disconnectedly. At last he sat down, put his elbows on the table, leaned his head on his hands and pronounced this strange sentence: "If it's not Dmitri, but Smerdyakov who's the murderer, I share his guilt, for I put him up to it. Whether I did, I don't know yet. But if he is the murderer, and not Dmitri, then, of course, I am the murderer, too."

  When Katerina Ivanovna heard that, she got up from her seat without a word, went to her writing-table, opened a box standing on it, took out a sheet of paper and laid it before Ivan. This was the document of which Ivan spoke to Alyosha later on as a "conclusive proof" that Dmitri had killed his father. It was the letter written by Mitya to Katerina Ivanovna when he was drunk, on the very evening he met Alyosha at the crossroads on the way to the monastery, after the scene at Katerina Ivanovna's, when Grushenka had insulted her. Then, parting from Alyosha, Mitya had rushed to Grushenka. I don't know whether he saw her, but in the evening he was at the "Metropolis," where he got thoroughly drunk. Then he asked for pen and paper and wrote a document of weighty consequences to himself. It was a wordy, disconnected, frantic letter, a drunken letter in fact. It was like the talk of a drunken man, who, on his return home, begins with extraordinary heat telling his wife or one of his household how he has just been insulted, what a rascal had just insulted him, what a fine fellow he is on the other hand, and how he will pay that scoundrel out; and all that at great length, with great excitement and incoherence, with drunken tears and blows on the table. The letter was written on a dirty piece of ordinary paper of the cheapest kind. It had been provided by the tavern and there were figures scrawled on the back of it. There was evidently not space enough for his drunken verbosity and Mitya not only filled the margins but had written the last line right across the rest. The letter ran as follows:

  Fatal Katya: To-morrow I will get the money and repay your three thousand and farewell, woman of great wrath, but farewell, too, my love! Let us make an end! To-morrow I shall try and get it from every one, and if I can't borrow it, I give you my word of [pg 699] honor I shall go to my father and break his skull and take the money from under the pillow, if only Ivan has gone. If I have to go to Siberia for it, I'll give you back your three thousand. And farewell. I bow down to the ground before you, for I've been a scoundrel to you. Forgive me! No, better not forgive me, you'll be happier and so shall I! Better Siberia than your love, for I love another woman and you got to know her too well to-day, so how can you forgive? I will murder the man who's robbed me! I'll leave you all and go to the East so as to see no one again. Not her either, for you are not my only tormentress; she is too. Farewell!

  P.S.--I write my curse, but I adore you! I hear it in my heart. One string is left, and it vibrates. Better tear my heart in two! I shall kill myself, but first of all that cur. I shall tear three thousand from him and fling it to you. Though I've been a scoundrel to you, I am not a thief! You can expect three thousand. The cur keeps it under his mattress, in pink ribbon. I am not a thief, but I'll murder my thief. Katya, don't look disdainful. Dmitri is not a thief! but a murderer! He has murdered his father and ruined himself to hold his ground, rather than endure your pride. And he doesn't love you.

  P.P.S.--I kiss your feet, farewell! P.P.P.S.--Katya, pray to God that some one'll give me the money. Then I shall not be steeped in gore, and if no one does--I shall! Kill me!

  Your slave and enemy,

  D. Karamazov.

  When Ivan read this "document" he was convinced. So then it was his brother, not Smerdyakov. And if not Smerdyakov, then not he, Ivan. This letter at once assumed in his eyes the aspect of a logical proof. There could be no longer the slightest doubt of Mitya's guilt. The suspicion never occurred to Ivan, by the way, that Mitya might have committed the murder in conjunction with Smerdyakov, and, indeed, such a theory did not fit in with the facts. Ivan was completely reassured. The next morning he only thought of Smerdyakov and his gibes with contempt. A few days later he positively wondered how he could have been so horribly distressed at his suspicions. He resolved to dismiss him with contempt and forget him. So passed a month. He made no further inquiry about Smerdyakov, but twice he happened to hear that he was very ill and out of his mind.

  [pg 700] "He'll end in madness," the young doctor Varvinsky observed about him,
and Ivan remembered this. During the last week of that month Ivan himself began to feel very ill. He went to consult the Moscow doctor who had been sent for by Katerina Ivanovna just before the trial. And just at that time his relations with Katerina Ivanovna became acutely strained. They were like two enemies in love with one another. Katerina Ivanovna's "returns" to Mitya, that is, her brief but violent revulsions of feeling in his favor, drove Ivan to perfect frenzy. Strange to say, until that last scene described above, when Alyosha came from Mitya to Katerina Ivanovna, Ivan had never once, during that month, heard her express a doubt of Mitya's guilt, in spite of those "returns" that were so hateful to him. It is remarkable, too, that while he felt that he hated Mitya more and more every day, he realized that it was not on account of Katya's "returns" that he hated him, but just because he was the murderer of his father. He was conscious of this and fully recognized it to himself.

  Nevertheless, he went to see Mitya ten days before the trial and proposed to him a plan of escape--a plan he had obviously thought over a long time. He was partly impelled to do this by a sore place still left in his heart from a phrase of Smerdyakov's, that it was to his, Ivan's, advantage that his brother should be convicted, as that would increase his inheritance and Alyosha's from forty to sixty thousand roubles. He determined to sacrifice thirty thousand on arranging Mitya's escape. On his return from seeing him, he was very mournful and dispirited; he suddenly began to feel that he was anxious for Mitya's escape, not only to heal that sore place by sacrificing thirty thousand, but for another reason. "Is it because I am as much a murderer at heart?" he asked himself. Something very deep down seemed burning and rankling in his soul. His pride above all suffered cruelly all that month. But of that later....

  When, after his conversation with Alyosha, Ivan suddenly decided with his hand on the bell of his lodging to go to Smerdyakov, he obeyed a sudden and peculiar impulse of indignation. He suddenly remembered how Katerina Ivanovna had only just cried out to him in Alyosha's presence: "It was you, you, persuaded me of his" (that is, Mitya's) "guilt!" Ivan was thunderstruck when he recalled it. He had never once tried to persuade her that Mitya was [pg 701] the murderer; on the contrary, he had suspected himself in her presence, that time when he came back from Smerdyakov. It was she, she, who had produced that "document" and proved his brother's guilt. And now she suddenly exclaimed: "I've been at Smerdyakov's myself!" When had she been there? Ivan had known nothing of it. So she was not at all so sure of Mitya's guilt! And what could Smerdyakov have told her? What, what, had he said to her? His heart burned with violent anger. He could not understand how he could, half an hour before, have let those words pass and not have cried out at the moment. He let go of the bell and rushed off to Smerdyakov. "I shall kill him, perhaps, this time," he thought on the way.

  Chapter VIII. The Third And Last Interview With Smerdyakov

  When he was half-way there, the keen dry wind that had been blowing early that morning rose again, and a fine dry snow began falling thickly. It did not lie on the ground, but was whirled about by the wind, and soon there was a regular snowstorm. There were scarcely any lamp-posts in the part of the town where Smerdyakov lived. Ivan strode alone in the darkness, unconscious of the storm, instinctively picking out his way. His head ached and there was a painful throbbing in his temples. He felt that his hands were twitching convulsively. Not far from Marya Kondratyevna's cottage, Ivan suddenly came upon a solitary drunken little peasant. He was wearing a coarse and patched coat, and was walking in zigzags, grumbling and swearing to himself. Then suddenly he would begin singing in a husky drunken voice:

  "Ach, Vanka's gone to Petersburg;

  I won't wait till he comes back."

  But he broke off every time at the second line and began swearing again; then he would begin the same song again. Ivan felt an intense hatred for him before he had thought about him at all. Suddenly he realized his presence and felt an irresistible impulse to [pg 702] knock him down. At that moment they met, and the peasant with a violent lurch fell full tilt against Ivan, who pushed him back furiously. The peasant went flying backwards and fell like a log on the frozen ground. He uttered one plaintive "O--oh!" and then was silent. Ivan stepped up to him. He was lying on his back, without movement or consciousness. "He will be frozen," thought Ivan, and he went on his way to Smerdyakov's.

  In the passage, Marya Kondratyevna, who ran out to open the door with a candle in her hand, whispered that Smerdyakov was very ill, "It's not that he's laid up, but he seems not himself, and he even told us to take the tea away; he wouldn't have any."

  "Why, does he make a row?" asked Ivan coarsely.

  "Oh, dear, no, quite the contrary, he's very quiet. Only please don't talk to him too long," Marya Kondratyevna begged him. Ivan opened the door and stepped into the room.

  It was overheated as before, but there were changes in the room. One of the benches at the side had been removed, and in its place had been put a large old mahogany leather sofa, on which a bed had been made up, with fairly clean white pillows. Smerdyakov was sitting on the sofa, wearing the same dressing-gown. The table had been brought out in front of the sofa, so that there was hardly room to move. On the table lay a thick book in yellow cover, but Smerdyakov was not reading it. He seemed to be sitting doing nothing. He met Ivan with a slow silent gaze, and was apparently not at all surprised at his coming. There was a great change in his face; he was much thinner and sallower. His eyes were sunken and there were blue marks under them.

  "Why, you really are ill?" Ivan stopped short. "I won't keep you long, I won't even take off my coat. Where can one sit down?"

  He went to the other end of the table, moved up a chair and sat down on it.

  "Why do you look at me without speaking? I've only come with one question, and I swear I won't go without an answer. Has the young lady, Katerina Ivanovna, been with you?"

  Smerdyakov still remained silent, looking quietly at Ivan as before. Suddenly, with a motion of his hand, he turned his face away.

  "What's the matter with you?" cried Ivan.

  "Nothing."

  [pg 703] "What do you mean by 'nothing'?"

  "Yes, she has. It's no matter to you. Let me alone."

  "No, I won't let you alone. Tell me, when was she here?"

  "Why, I'd quite forgotten about her," said Smerdyakov, with a scornful smile, and turning his face to Ivan again, he stared at him with a look of frenzied hatred, the same look that he had fixed on him at their last interview, a month before.

  "You seem very ill yourself, your face is sunken; you don't look like yourself," he said to Ivan.

  "Never mind my health, tell me what I ask you."

  "But why are your eyes so yellow? The whites are quite yellow. Are you so worried?" He smiled contemptuously and suddenly laughed outright.

  "Listen; I've told you I won't go away without an answer!" Ivan cried, intensely irritated.

  "Why do you keep pestering me? Why do you torment me?" said Smerdyakov, with a look of suffering.

  "Damn it! I've nothing to do with you. Just answer my question and I'll go away."

  "I've no answer to give you," said Smerdyakov, looking down again.

  "You may be sure I'll make you answer!"

  "Why are you so uneasy?" Smerdyakov stared at him, not simply with contempt, but almost with repulsion. "Is this because the trial begins to-morrow? Nothing will happen to you; can't you believe that at last? Go home, go to bed and sleep in peace, don't be afraid of anything."

  "I don't understand you.... What have I to be afraid of to-morrow?" Ivan articulated in astonishment, and suddenly a chill breath of fear did in fact pass over his soul. Smerdyakov measured him with his eyes.

  "You don't understand?" he drawled reproachfully. "It's a strange thing a sensible man should care to play such a farce!"

  Ivan looked at him speechless. The startling, incredibly supercilious tone of this man who had once been his valet, was extraordinary in itself. He had not taken such a tone even at t
heir last interview.

  "I tell you, you've nothing to be afraid of. I won't say anything [pg 704] about you; there's no proof against you. I say, how your hands are trembling! Why are your fingers moving like that? Go home, you did not murder him."

  Ivan started. He remembered Alyosha.

  "I know it was not I," he faltered.

  "Do you?" Smerdyakov caught him up again.

  Ivan jumped up and seized him by the shoulder.

  "Tell me everything, you viper! Tell me everything!"

  Smerdyakov was not in the least scared. He only riveted his eyes on Ivan with insane hatred.

  "Well, it was you who murdered him, if that's it," he whispered furiously.

  Ivan sank back on his chair, as though pondering something. He laughed malignantly.

  "You mean my going away. What you talked about last time?"

  "You stood before me last time and understood it all, and you understand it now."

  "All I understand is that you are mad."

  "Aren't you tired of it? Here we are face to face; what's the use of going on keeping up a farce to each other? Are you still trying to throw it all on me, to my face? You murdered him; you are the real murderer, I was only your instrument, your faithful servant, and it was following your words I did it."

  "Did it? Why, did you murder him?" Ivan turned cold.

  Something seemed to give way in his brain, and he shuddered all over with a cold shiver. Then Smerdyakov himself looked at him wonderingly; probably the genuineness of Ivan's horror struck him.

  "You don't mean to say you really did not know?" he faltered mistrustfully, looking with a forced smile into his eyes. Ivan still gazed at him, and seemed unable to speak.

  Ach, Vanka's gone to Petersburg;

  I won't wait till he comes back,

  suddenly echoed in his head.

  "Do you know, I am afraid that you are a dream, a phantom sitting before me," he muttered.

  "There's no phantom here, but only us two and one other. No doubt he is here, that third, between us."