VII. A Historical Survey

“The medical experts strove to prove to us that the defendant is not in his right mind and is a maniac. I maintain that he is precisely in his right mind, and that this is the worst of it: if he were not in his right mind, he might perhaps have turned out to be far more intelligent. As for his being a maniac, I would agree to that, but on one point only—the very point the experts also indicated, namely the defendant’s view of those three thousand which his father had supposedly underpaid him. Nevertheless, it may be possible to find an incomparably nearer point of view to explain the defendant’s constant frenzy over this money than his inclination to insanity. For my part, I fully agree with the opinion of the young doctor, who found that the defendant is in full possession, and has been, of normal mental faculties, and was merely irritated and embittered. That is just the point: the object of the defendant’s constant and frenzied bitterness lay not in the three thousand, not in the sum as such, but in the fact that there was a particular reason here which aroused his anger. That reason is jealousy!”

Here Ippolit Kirillovich unfolded at length the whole picture of the defendant’s fatal passion for Grushenka. He began from the very moment when the defendant set off to see the “young person” in order “to give her a beating,” to use his own words, Ippolit Kirillovich explained, “but instead of beating her, he stayed at her feet—that is the beginning of this love. At the same time the old man, the defendant’s father, also casts his eye on the same person—an astonishing and fatal coincidence, for both hearts caught fire suddenly, at one and the same time, although before that both the one and the other had known this person and had met her—and both these hearts caught fire with the most unrestrained, the most Karamazov passion. Here we have her own admission: ‘I,’ she says, ‘laughed at the both of them.’ Yes, she suddenly felt like laughing at the both of them; before, she had not felt like it, but here this intention suddenly flew into her head—and it ended with both of them falling before her, vanquished. The old man, who worshiped money like a god, at once got ready three thousand rubles merely for her to visit his abode, but he was soon brought to the point where he would have counted it happiness to lay his name and his whole fortune at her feet, if only she would agree to become his lawful wife. For this we have firm testimony. As for the defendant, his tragedy is evident, it is before us. But such was the ‘game’ of the young person. The seductress did not even give the unhappy young man hope, for hope, real hope, was given him only at the very last moment, when, kneeling before his tormentress, he was stretching out to her hands already stained with the blood of his father and rival: it was precisely in this position that he was arrested. ‘Send me, me, to penal servitude with him, I drove him to it, I’m the most guilty of all!’ this woman herself exclaimed, already in sincere repentance, at the moment of his arrest. The talented young man who has taken it upon himself to describe the present case—that same Mr. Rakitin whom I have already mentioned—defines the character of this heroine in a few terse and characteristic phrases: ‘Early disappointment, early deception and fall, the betrayal of the seducer-fiancé who abandoned her, then poverty, the curse of an honest family, and, finally, the patronage of a certain rich old man, whom she, however, even now considers her benefactor. In the young heart, which perhaps contained much that was good, anger lay hidden from too early an age. A calculating character was formed, one that hoards capital. A mockery and a vindictiveness toward society were formed.’ After this character sketch it is understandable that she could laugh at the both of them solely for the sake of a game, a spiteful game. And so in this month of hopeless love, of moral falls, of betrayal of his fiancée, of appropriating another person’s money entrusted to his honor, the defendant, on top of all that, is brought almost to frenzy, to fury, by ceaseless jealousy, and of whom, of his own father! And the main thing, the crazed old man lures and entices the object of his passion with those very same three thousand which his son considers his own family money, his inheritance from his mother, and for which he reproaches his father. Yes, I agree, this was hard to bear! Here even a mania might have arisen. The point was not the money, but that with this very money his happiness was being shattered with such loathsome cynicism!”

Then Ippolit Kirillovich passed on to how the idea of parricide was gradually conceived in the defendant, and traced it through the facts.

“At first we only shout in the taverns—all this month we shout. Oh, we love to live in public and to inform those people at once of everything, even our most infernal and dangerous ideas, we love to share with people, and, no one knows why, right then and there, at once, we demand that those people respond to us at once with the fullest sympathy, enter into all our cares and anxieties, agree with us, and not stand in the way of our temper. Otherwise we get angry and smash up the whole tavern. (There followed the anecdote about Staff Captain Snegiryov.) Those who saw and heard the defendant during this month came to feel at last that here there might be not only shouts and threats against his father, but that, given such frenzy, the threats would perhaps pass into deeds. (Here the prosecutor described the family meeting at the monastery, the conversations with Alyosha, and the outrageous scene of violence in his father’s house, when the defendant burst in on him after dinner.) I do not intend to maintain insistently,” Ippolit Kirillovich went on, “that before this scene the defendant had already deliberately and with premeditation resolved to make an end of his father by murdering him. Nevertheless, this idea had already presented itself to him several times, and he contemplated it deliberately—for this we have facts, witnesses, and his own confession. I confess, gentlemen of the jury,” Ippolit Kirillovich added, “that until today I even hesitated to attribute to the defendant full and conscious premeditation of the crime that kept suggesting itself to him. I was firmly convinced that his soul had already many times contemplated the fatal moment ahead, but only contemplated it, imagined it to itself only as a possibility, but had not yet determined either the time of its execution or the circumstances. But I hesitated only until today, until this fatal document presented to the court today by Miss Verkhovtseva. You yourselves heard, gentlemen, her exclamation: ‘This is the plan, this is the program of the murder!’—that is how she defined the unhappy ‘drunken’ letter of the unhappy defendant. And in fact the whole significance of a program and of premeditation lies behind this letter. It was written two days before the crime, and thus we now know firmly that two days before carrying out his terrible design the defendant declared with an oath that if he did not get money the next day, he would kill his father, so as to take the money from under his pillow ‘in an envelope with a red ribbon, if only Ivan has gone.’ Do you hear: ‘if only Ivan has gone’—here, then, everything has already been thought out, the circumstances weighed—and what then: everything was afterward carried out just as it was written! Premeditation and deliberation are beyond doubt, the crime was to be committed for the purpose of robbery, this is stated outright, this is written and signed. The defendant does not deny his signature. They will say: a drunken man wrote this. But that diminishes nothing and makes it all the more important: when drunk he wrote what he had planned when sober. Had it not been planned when sober, it would not have got written when drunk. They will say, perhaps: why did he shout about his intention in the taverns? Whoever decides on such a deed with premeditation keeps silent and keeps it to himself. True, but he shouted at a time when there were not yet any plans or premeditation, but only a desire stood there, only an urge was ripening. Afterward he shouts less about it. On the evening when this letter was written, having got drunk in the Metropolis tavern, he was, contrary to his habit, silent, did not play billiards, sat apart, spoke to no one, and only drove a local merchant’s clerk from his seat, but that was almost unconsciously, from the habit of quarreling, without which, once he had entered a tavern, he could no longer manage. True, together with the final decision the defendant must surely have been struck by the fear that he had shouted too much about the town beforehand, and that this might very well serve to expose and accuse him once he carried out what he had planned. But what was to be done, the publicity was an accomplished fact, there was no bringing it back, and, after all, the crooked road had carried us through before, it would carry us through now. We trusted in our star, gentlemen! I must, besides, confess that he did a great deal to get around the fatal minute, that he made a very great many efforts to avoid a bloody outcome. ‘Tomorrow I will ask everyone for three thousand,’ as he writes in his peculiar language, ‘and if people don’t give it, blood will be shed.’ Again written in a drunken state, and again in a sober state carried out just as it was written!”

Here Ippolit Kirillovich proceeded to a detailed description of all Mitya’s efforts to get himself money in order to avoid the crime. He described his adventures at Samsonov’s, the journey to Lyagavy—all from the documents. “Worn out, mocked, hungry, having sold his watch for this journey (while having on him, however, fifteen hundred rubles—and supposedly, oh, supposedly!), tormented by jealousy over the object of his love left behind in town, suspecting that without him she would go to Fyodor Pavlovich, he returns at last to town. Thank God! She has not been at Fyodor Pavlovich’s. He himself escorts her to her patron Samsonov. (A strange thing, of Samsonov we are not jealous, and this is a highly characteristic psychological peculiarity in this case!) Then he rushes off to his observation post ‘out back,’ and there—and there he learns that Smerdyakov is in a falling fit, that the other servant is ill—the field is clear, and the ‘signals’ are in his hands—what a temptation! Nevertheless he still resists; he goes to a lady who is highly respected by all of us and is temporarily residing here, Mrs. Khokhlakova. Having long since sympathized with his fate, this lady offers him the most sensible of advice: to give up all this carousing, this outrageous love, this loitering about the taverns, this fruitless waste of young strength, and to set off for Siberia, to the gold mines: ‘There is an outlet there for your raging strength, for your romantic character, thirsting for adventures.’” Having described the outcome of the conversation and the moment when the defendant suddenly received the news that Grushenka had not been at Samsonov’s at all, having described the instantaneous frenzy of the unhappy, nerve-racked jealous man at the thought that she had precisely deceived him and was now at his, Fyodor Pavlovich’s, Ippolit Kirillovich concluded, drawing attention to the fatal significance of chance: “Had the maid managed to tell him that his beloved was in Mokroye with her ‘first’ and ‘indisputable’ one, nothing at all would have happened. But she was struck dumb with fear, swore up and down by God, and if the defendant did not kill her right there, that is because he dashed headlong after his faithless one. But note: however beside himself he was, he did after all take the brass pestle with him. Why precisely a pestle, why not some other weapon? But if we had been contemplating this picture for a whole month and preparing ourselves for it, then the moment something in the way of a weapon flashed before us, we seize it as a weapon. And that some object of this kind might serve as a weapon—this we had already been imagining for a whole month. That is why we recognized it as a weapon so instantly and indisputably! And therefore, all the same, it was not unconsciously, all the same not involuntarily, that he seized this fatal pestle. And now he is in his father’s garden—the field is clear, there are no witnesses, deep night, darkness, and jealousy. The suspicion that she is here, with him, with his rival, in his embraces, and perhaps laughing at him at this very minute—takes his breath away. And not suspicion only—what suspicions can there be now, the deception is plain, evident: she is here, in that very room where the light is, she is in there with him, behind the screen—and so the unhappy man steals up to the window, respectfully peeps into it, virtuously resigns himself, and sensibly goes away, away from trouble as quickly as possible, lest anything should happen, dangerous and immoral—and they want to convince us of this, us, who know the defendant’s character, who understand what state of mind he was in, a state known to us from the facts, and, above all, possessing the signals with which he could at once have unlocked the house and gone in!” Here, in connection with the “signals,” Ippolit Kirillovich left off his accusation for a time and found it necessary to expatiate on Smerdyakov, so as to exhaust completely this whole incidental episode about suspecting Smerdyakov of the murder and to have done with this idea once and for all. He did this very thoroughly, and everyone understood that, despite all the contempt he displayed for this supposition, he nevertheless considered it very important.