VI. The Prosecutor’s Speech. Character Sketches

Ippolit Kirillovich began his speech for the prosecution trembling all over with a nervous shiver, with a cold, sickly sweat on his forehead and temples, feeling chill and fever by turns throughout his whole body. He related this himself afterward. He regarded this speech as his chef-d’œuvre (masterpiece), the chef-d’œuvre of his whole life, as his swan song. It is true that nine months later he did die of galloping consumption, so that, as it turned out, he really would have had the right to compare himself to a swan singing its last song, if he had foreseen his end beforehand. Into this speech he put all his heart and all the intelligence he had, and he unexpectedly proved that there lay hidden in him both civic feeling and the “accursed” questions, at least insofar as our poor Ippolit Kirillovich could find room for them in himself. Above all, his words carried the day because they were sincere: he sincerely believed in the defendant’s guilt; he accused him not to order, not merely by virtue of his office, and, calling for “retribution,” he really was shaking with the desire “to save society.” Even our lady public, hostile to Ippolit Kirillovich in the end, admitted, however, that it had carried away an extraordinary impression. He began in a cracked, breaking voice, but then very soon his voice grew stronger and rang through the whole hall, and so it went to the end of the speech. But the moment he finished it, he almost fainted.

“Gentlemen of the jury,” the prosecutor began, “the present case has resounded throughout all Russia. But what, one would think, is there to wonder at, what is there to be so especially horrified by? For us, for us especially? We are such people, after all, so accustomed to all this! Our horror lies precisely in the fact that such dark cases have almost ceased to be horrible to us! That is what we ought to be horrified by, our habit, and not the single villainy of this or that individual. Where, then, are the causes of our indifference, of our barely lukewarm attitude toward such cases, toward such signs of the times, which prophesy for us a future no one could envy? Is it in our cynicism, in the early exhaustion of mind and imagination of our society, still so young, yet grown so untimely decrepit? Is it in our moral principles, shaken to their foundations, or, finally, in the fact that we perhaps do not even have any such moral principles at all? I do not resolve these questions; nevertheless they are tormenting, and every citizen not merely should but is bound to suffer over them. Our press, just beginning, still timid, has nevertheless already rendered society some services, for without it we would never have learned, with any fullness at all, of those horrors of unbridled will and moral degradation which it conveys ceaselessly in its pages to everyone now, not only to those who attend the halls of the new public courts granted to us in the present reign. And what do we read almost every day? Oh, things at every minute beside which even the present case pales and appears almost as something ordinary. But most important of all is that a multitude of our Russian, our national criminal cases testify precisely to something universal, to some general calamity that has made itself at home among us and that is already hard to fight, as a universal evil. Here a brilliant young officer of high society, just beginning his life and career, basely, quietly, without the slightest pang of conscience, cuts the throat of a petty official, who had once been in part his benefactor, and of the official’s servant woman, in order to steal back his own promissory note and with it the rest of the official’s cash: ‘it will come in handy, you see, for my high-society pleasures and for my career ahead.’ Having cut the throats of both, he leaves, having put pillows under the heads of both corpses. There a young hero, hung with crosses for bravery, murders like a highwayman, on the high road, the mother of his commander and benefactor, and, talking his comrades into it, assures them that ‘she loves him like her own son, and so she will follow all his advice and will take no precautions.’ Granted, he is a monster, but I no longer dare to say now, in our time, that he is only an isolated monster. Another man may not cut a throat, but he thinks and feels exactly as that man did, he is in his soul just as dishonorable as that man. In silence, alone with his conscience, perhaps he asks himself: ‘What is honor, after all, and isn’t blood a prejudice?’ Perhaps they will cry out against me and say that I am a sick man, a hysterical man, that I slander monstrously, that I am raving, that I exaggerate. Let them, let them—and, God, how glad I would be of it, I first of all! Oh, do not believe me, consider me a sick man, but all the same remember my words: for if even a tenth, even a twentieth part of my words is true, why, even then it is terrible! Look, gentlemen, look how our young men shoot themselves: oh, without the slightest Hamlet-like questions about ‘What will be there?’, without a sign of such questions, as though this article concerning our spirit and all that awaits us beyond the grave had long since been crossed out in their nature, buried and covered over with sand. Look, finally, at our debauchery, at our sensualists. Fyodor Pavlovich, the unfortunate victim of the present trial, is almost an innocent babe beside some of them. And yet we all knew him, ‘he lived among us’… Yes, the psychology of the Russian crime will perhaps be studied someday by the foremost minds, both ours and European, for the subject is worth it. But this study will take place sometime later, at leisure, when the whole tragic disorderliness of our present moment has receded further into the background, so that it can be examined both more intelligently and more impartially than people like me, for example, are able to do. Now, however, we are either horrified or pretend to be horrified, while we ourselves, on the contrary, relish the spectacle, like lovers of strong, eccentric sensations that stir our cynically lazy idleness, or, finally, like little children, we wave away the terrible phantoms with our hands and hide our heads in the pillow until the terrible apparition passes, so as to forget it at once afterward in merriment and games. But someday we too must begin to live our life soberly and thoughtfully, we too must cast a glance at ourselves as a society, we too must make sense of at least something in our social affairs, or at least make a beginning of making sense of it. A great writer of the preceding epoch, in the finale of the greatest of his works, personifying all Russia in the form of a dashing Russian troika galloping toward an unknown goal, exclaims: ‘Ah, troika, bird-troika, who invented you!’—and adds in proud rapture that all the nations respectfully stand aside before the troika galloping headlong. So be it, gentlemen, let them, let them stand aside, respectfully or not, but in my sinful view the artist of genius ended so either in a fit of childishly innocent beautiful-mindedness, or simply fearing the censorship of his day. For if one were to harness to his troika only his own heroes, the Sobakeviches, Nozdryovs, and Chichikovs, then whoever you set up as coachman, you would never arrive anywhere worthwhile with such horses! And those are only the old horses, which are a far cry from the present ones; ours are a cut above…”

Here Ippolit Kirillovich’s speech was interrupted by applause. The liberalism of his depiction of the Russian troika was liked. True, only two or three claps broke out, so that the presiding judge did not even find it necessary to address the public with a threat to “clear the hall” and only looked sternly in the direction of the clappers. But Ippolit Kirillovich was encouraged: never until now had anyone applauded him! For so many years people had not wanted to listen to the man, and suddenly here was a chance to speak out before all Russia!

“In fact,” he went on, “what is this Karamazov family, which has suddenly earned such sad renown even throughout all Russia? Perhaps I exaggerate too much, but it seems to me that in the picture of this little family there glimmer, as it were, certain general basic elements of our modern educated society—oh, not all the elements, and it glimmered only in microscopic form, ‘like the sun in a small drop of water,’ but all the same something was reflected, all the same something made itself felt. Look at this unfortunate, unbridled, and depraved old man, this ‘father of a family,’ who ended his existence so sadly. A hereditary nobleman, who began his career as a poor little hanger-on, by a chance and unexpected marriage snatched a small capital as dowry, at first a petty rogue and a fawning buffoon, with the germ of mental abilities, rather far from weak, however, and above all a usurer. With the years, that is, with the growth of his little capital, he takes heart. The servility and ingratiation vanish; there remains only a mocking and spiteful cynic and sensualist. The spiritual side is entirely crossed out, while the thirst for life is extraordinary. It came down to this, that apart from sensual pleasures he sees nothing in life, and so he teaches his children too. Of any spiritual duties of a father—none whatever. He laughs at them, he brings up his little children in the backyard and is glad when they are taken away from him. He even forgets about them altogether. The old man’s whole moral code is après moi le déluge (after me, the flood). Everything that is the reverse of the notion of a citizen, the most complete, even hostile, separation from society: ‘Let the whole world go up in flames, so long as I alone am comfortable.’ And he is comfortable, he is quite content, he longs to live like this for another twenty or thirty years. He cheats his own son and, with that son’s money, with the inheritance from the son’s mother, which he will not give him, he steals the son’s mistress from him, from his own son. No, I do not want to yield the defense of the defendant to the highly talented defense counsel who has come from Petersburg. I too will speak the truth, I too understand the sum of indignation that he accumulated in his son’s heart. But enough, enough of this unfortunate old man, he has received his due. Let us remember, however, that he is a father, and one of the fathers of today. Will I offend society by saying that he is even one of many fathers of today? Alas, so many fathers of today merely do not express themselves as cynically as this one, for they are better brought up, better educated, but in essence they are of almost the same philosophy as he. But let me be a pessimist, so be it. We have already agreed that you forgive me. Let us agree beforehand: do not believe me, do not believe me, I will speak and you will not believe. But all the same let me have my say, all the same do not forget some of my words. But here, however, are the children of this old man, this father of a family: one is before us in the dock, the whole speech ahead is about him; of the others I will speak only in passing. Of these others, the elder is one of the young men of today, brilliantly educated, of a rather powerful mind, who, however, no longer believes in anything, who has rejected and crossed out a great deal, far too much, in life, exactly like his parent. We have all heard him, he was received amicably in our society. He did not conceal his opinions, even on the contrary, quite on the contrary, which gives me the boldness to speak of him now somewhat frankly, of course not as of a private person, but only as of a member of the Karamazov family. Yesterday there died here by suicide, on the edge of town, a sickly idiot, strongly implicated in the present case, Fyodor Pavlovich’s former servant and perhaps his illegitimate son, Smerdyakov. With hysterical tears he told me at the preliminary investigation how this young Karamazov, Ivan Fyodorovich, horrified him with his spiritual unrestraint. ‘Everything, according to him, is permitted, whatever there is in the world, and nothing from now on ought to be forbidden—that’s what he kept teaching me.’ It seems that the idiot went mad for good over this thesis, which he had been taught, though of course his falling sickness and the whole terrible catastrophe that broke out in their house also affected his mental disorder. But this idiot let fall one very, very curious remark, which would have done honor to an observer cleverer than he, and that is why I have even spoken of it: ‘If there is one,’ he said to me, ‘of the sons who is more like Fyodor Pavlovich in character, it is he, Ivan Fyodorovich!’ With this remark I break off the character sketch I have begun, not considering it delicate to go further. Oh, I do not want to draw further conclusions and, like a raven, croak nothing but ruin over a young destiny. We saw today, here in this hall, that the immediate force of truth still lives in his young heart, that the feelings of family attachment have not yet been stifled in him by unbelief and moral cynicism, acquired more by inheritance than through any true suffering of thought. Then the other son—oh, he is still a youth, pious and humble, in contrast to his brother’s gloomy, corrupting worldview, seeking to cling, so to speak, to ‘the people’s principles,’ or to what is called by that abstruse little word in certain theoretical corners of our thinking intelligentsia. He, you see, clung to the monastery; he very nearly took the tonsure as a monk himself. In him, it seems to me, as if unconsciously, and so early, was expressed that timid despair with which so many in our poor society now, fearing its cynicism and its debauchery and mistakenly ascribing all the evil to European enlightenment, throw themselves, as they put it, upon ‘their native soil,’ into the maternal embrace, so to speak, of their native earth, like children frightened by phantoms, and at the withered breast of an enfeebled mother long only to fall asleep peacefully, and even to sleep their whole life through, if only not to see the horrors that frighten them. For my part I wish the good and gifted youth all the best, I wish that his youthful beautiful-souledness and his striving toward the people’s principles may not turn later, as so often happens, on the moral side into gloomy mysticism, and on the civic side into dull chauvinism—two qualities that threaten the nation with perhaps even greater evil than the early corruption from a falsely understood and gratuitously acquired European enlightenment, from which his elder brother suffers.”

At chauvinism and mysticism two or three claps rang out again. And of course Ippolit Kirillovich had been carried away, and all of this had little bearing on the present case, not to mention that it came out rather unclear, but the consumptive and embittered man wanted too much to have his say at least once in his life. Afterward people among us said that in his character sketch of Ivan Fyodorovich he had been guided by a feeling that was even indelicate, because Ivan Fyodorovich had once or twice publicly put him in his place in arguments, and Ippolit Kirillovich, remembering this, now wanted revenge. But I do not know whether one could conclude that. In any case, all this was only an introduction; after that the speech went more directly and closer to the case.

“But here is the third son of the father of a modern family,” Ippolit Kirillovich went on. “He is in the dock, he is before us. Before us are his exploits as well, his life and his deeds: the hour has come, and everything has unfolded, everything has come to light. In contrast to the ‘Europeanism’ and the ‘people’s principles’ of his brothers, he seems to represent in himself Russia as she is, untouched—oh, not all of her, not all, and God forbid if it were all! And yet here she is, our dear little Russia, there is the smell of her, you can hear her, the dear old mother! Oh, we are spontaneous, we are evil and good in the most astonishing mixture, we are lovers of enlightenment and of Schiller, and at the same time we rampage through the taverns and tear out the scraggly beards of the drunkards, our drinking companions. Oh, we too can be fine and beautiful, but only when we ourselves are feeling fine and beautiful. On the contrary, we are even possessed—precisely possessed—by the noblest ideals, but only on condition that they be attained of themselves, that they fall down onto our table from heaven, and, above all, that they come gratis, gratis, that nothing has to be paid for them. We terribly dislike paying, but we very much like receiving, and that in everything. Oh, give us, give us every possible blessing of life (every possible one precisely, we will not settle for less), and above all do not hinder our temper in anything, and then we too will prove that we can be fine and beautiful. We are not greedy, no, but all the same, hand us money, more, more, as much money as possible, and you will see how magnanimously, with what contempt for filthy lucre, we will scatter it in one night in an unbridled spree. And if they do not give us money, then we will show how we can manage to get it when we want it very badly. But of that later, let us follow things in order. First of all, before us is a poor, neglected boy, ‘in the backyard without little boots,’ as our worthy and respected fellow citizen, alas, of foreign origin, put it earlier! Once again I repeat—I will yield the defense of the defendant to no one! I am the accuser, and I am the defender as well. Yes, sir, we too are people, we too are human beings, and we can weigh how the first impressions of childhood and of the home nest may affect a character. But here the boy is already a youth, already a young man, an officer; for riotous behavior and for challenging a man to a duel, he is exiled to one of the remote frontier towns of our blessed Russia. There he serves, there he carouses as well, and of course—a big ship needs deep water. We need means, sir, means above all, and so, after long disputes, it is settled between him and his father on a final six thousand rubles, and these are sent to him. Note that he gave a signed paper, and there exists a letter of his in which he all but renounces the rest and with these six thousand ends the wrangling with his father over the inheritance. At this point his meeting takes place with a young girl of lofty character and cultivation. Oh, I do not dare repeat the details, you have just heard them: here there is honor, here there is self-sacrifice, and I fall silent. The image of a young man, frivolous and depraved, but bowing before true nobility, before a higher idea, flashed before us extremely sympathetically. But suddenly, after that, in this very courtroom, there followed quite unexpectedly the reverse side of the medal as well. Again I do not dare to venture into guesses, and I will refrain from analyzing why it followed so. But, all the same, there were reasons why it followed so. This same person, all in tears of an indignation long concealed, declares to us that it was he, he himself, who was the first to despise her for her incautious, unrestrained, perhaps, impulse, but still an exalted one, still a magnanimous one. It was in him, in this girl’s betrothed, that there first of all flashed that mocking smile which, from him alone, she could not bear. Knowing that he had already betrayed her (betrayed her in the conviction that she must bear everything from him in advance, even his betrayal), knowing this, she deliberately offers him three thousand rubles and clearly, all too clearly, gives him to understand as she does so that she is offering him money for betraying her: ‘Well, will you take it or not, will you be so cynical?’ she says to him silently with her judging and testing gaze. He looks at her, understands her thoughts perfectly (he himself admitted here before you that he understood everything), and unconditionally appropriates these three thousand and squanders them in two days with his new beloved! What, then, are we to believe? The first legend—the impulse of lofty nobility, giving away its last means of life and bowing down before virtue, or the reverse side of the medal, so repulsive? Usually in life it happens that, with two opposites, the truth must be sought in the middle; in the present case this is literally not so. Most probably, in the first case he was sincerely noble, and in the second case just as sincerely base. Why? Why, precisely because we are broad natures, Karamazov natures—that is just what I am leading up to—capable of containing every possible opposite and of contemplating both abysses at once, the abyss above us, the abyss of the highest ideals, and the abyss beneath us, the abyss of the lowest and most stinking degradation. Remember the brilliant thought expressed earlier by a young observer who has contemplated the whole Karamazov family deeply and at close range, Mr. Rakitin: ‘The sense of the baseness of degradation is as necessary to these unbridled, unrestrained natures as the sense of the highest nobility’—and that is true: precisely they need this unnatural mixture constantly and unceasingly. Two abysses, two abysses, gentlemen, at one and the same moment—without that we are unhappy and unsatisfied, our existence is incomplete. We are broad, broad, like our whole mother Russia, we will contain everything and get along with everything! By the way, gentlemen of the jury, we have touched now upon those three thousand rubles, and I will permit myself to run somewhat ahead. Only imagine that he, this character, having received that money then, and in such a way besides, through such shame, through such disgrace, through humiliation of the last degree—only imagine that he was supposedly able that very day to set aside half of it, sew it up in a pouch, and for a whole month afterward have the firmness to carry it on his neck, in spite of all temptations and extraordinary needs! Neither in drunken sprees in the taverns, nor when he had to fly out of town to get money, God knows from whom, money that was most necessary to him in order to carry his beloved away from the temptations of his rival, his father—he does not dare to touch this pouch. Why, if only so as not to leave his beloved to the temptations of the old man of whom he was so jealous, he ought to have unsealed his pouch and stayed at home as his beloved’s unrelenting guard, waiting for the moment when she would at last say to him, ‘I am yours,’ so as to fly away with her somewhere far from the present fatal surroundings. But no, he does not touch his talisman, and on what pretext? The original pretext, we have said, was precisely this: that when he was told, ‘I am yours, take me wherever you like,’ he would have the means to take her. But this first pretext, by the defendant’s own words, paled before the second. As long, you see, as I carry this money on me—‘I am a scoundrel, but not a thief,’ for I can always go to the betrothed I have insulted and, laying before her this half of the whole sum I fraudulently appropriated from her, I can always say to her: ‘You see, I have squandered half of your money and have thereby proved that I am a weak and immoral man and, if you like, a scoundrel (I am expressing myself in the defendant’s own language), but though I am a scoundrel, I am not a thief, for if I were a thief, I would not have brought you this half of the remaining money, but would have appropriated it too, like the first half.’ An astonishing explanation of the fact! This same furious but weak man, who could not refuse the temptation of accepting three thousand rubles at the price of such disgrace—this very man suddenly feels in himself such stoic firmness and carries thousands of rubles on his neck without daring to touch them! Is this consistent in the least with the character we are examining? No, and I will permit myself to tell you how the real Dmitri Karamazov would have acted in such a case, if he really had resolved to sew his money up in a pouch. At the very first temptation—well, if only in order to amuse that same new beloved of his with something again, the one with whom he had already squandered the first half of this same money—he would have unstitched his pouch and taken out of it, well, let us say, for the first occasion only a hundred rubles, for why, you see, must I necessarily take back half, that is, fifteen hundred, fourteen hundred will do—it will come to the same thing anyway: ‘a scoundrel, you see, but not a thief, because after all I did bring back at least fourteen hundred rubles, and a thief would have taken it all and brought back nothing.’ Then, a little while later, he would have unstitched the pouch again and taken out a second hundred, then a third, then a fourth, and no later than the end of the month he would at last have taken out the next-to-last hundred: I’ll bring back even one hundred, you see, it will all come to the same: ‘a scoundrel, but not a thief. I squandered twenty-nine hundred, but all the same I returned one, a thief wouldn’t have returned even that.’ And finally, having squandered that next-to-last hundred too, he would have looked at the last one and said to himself: ‘And really, it isn’t worth taking back one hundred—come on, I’ll squander that one too!’ That is how the real Dmitri Karamazov, the one we know, would have acted! As for the legend of the pouch, it is such a contradiction of reality that nothing greater can be imagined. One can suppose anything, but not that. But we shall come back to this.”

Having set out in order everything that was known to the examination of the evidence about the property disputes and the family relations of father and son, and having drawn once again, and yet again, the conclusion that, according to the known data, there was not the slightest possibility of determining in this question of the division of the inheritance who had cheated whom or who had overcharged whom, Ippolit Kirillovich, in connection with those three thousand rubles that had lodged in Mitya’s mind like a fixed idea, mentioned the medical experts.