VIII. A Treatise on Smerdyakov

“In the first place, where did the possibility of such a suspicion come from?” Ippolit Kirillovich began with this question. “The first to cry out that Smerdyakov had killed was the defendant himself, at the moment of his arrest, and yet from that very first cry of his up to this very moment of the trial he has not produced a single fact in support of his accusation—and not only no fact, but not even a hint of any fact that is in any way consistent with human sense. Next, only three persons support this accusation: both of the defendant’s brothers and Miss Svetlova. But the defendant’s elder brother announced his suspicion only today, in illness, in a fit of indisputable derangement and fever, while before that, during the whole two months, as is positively known to us, he fully shared the conviction of his brother’s guilt and did not even try to object to this idea. But we shall take this up particularly later on. Next, the defendant’s younger brother himself announced to us a while ago that he has no facts in support of his idea of Smerdyakov’s guilt, none whatever, not the slightest, and concludes so merely from the words of the defendant himself and ‘from the expression of his face’—yes, this colossal proof was twice pronounced a while ago by his brother. And Miss Svetlova expressed herself perhaps even more colossally: ‘Whatever the defendant tells you, believe it, he is not the kind of man to lie.’ That is all the factual evidence against Smerdyakov from these three persons, who are all too interested in the defendant’s fate. And meanwhile the accusation against Smerdyakov went around and held its ground, and still holds it—can one believe this, can one imagine it?”

Here Ippolit Kirillovich found it necessary to sketch lightly the character of the late Smerdyakov, “who put an end to his life in a fit of morbid derangement and insanity.” He presented him as a feeble-minded man, with the rudiments of some vague education, thrown off his bearings by philosophical ideas beyond the strength of his mind and frightened by certain modern teachings about duty and obligation, broadly taught to him in practice by the reckless life of his late master, and perhaps also his father, Fyodor Pavlovich, and in theory by various strange philosophical conversations with his master’s elder son, Ivan Fyodorovich, who willingly allowed himself this diversion—probably out of boredom or out of a need for mockery that had found no better application. “He himself told me about his state of mind during the last days of his stay in his master’s house,” Ippolit Kirillovich explained, “but others testify to the same thing: the defendant himself, his brother, and even the servant Grigory, that is, all those who must have known him very closely. Besides, afflicted with the falling sickness, Smerdyakov was ‘as cowardly as a hen.’ ‘He used to fall at my feet and kiss my feet,’ the defendant himself informed us at a moment when he was not yet aware that such information was somewhat to his disadvantage; ‘he’s a hen with the falling sickness,’ so he expressed himself about him in his characteristic language. And it is he whom the defendant (as he himself testifies) chooses as his confidant and frightens so thoroughly that the other agrees at last to serve him as a spy and a talebearer. In this capacity of household spy he betrays his master, informs the defendant both of the existence of the envelope with the money and of the signals by which one could get in to the master—and how could he not have informed him! ‘They’ll kill me, sir, I saw plainly that they’d kill me, sir,’ he said at the investigation, shaking and trembling even before us, although the tormentor who had frightened him was by then under arrest himself and could no longer come and punish him. ‘He suspected me every minute, sir, and I myself in fear and trembling, just to appease his wrath, made haste to tell him every secret, sir, so that he could see my innocence before him by it, sir, and let me go alive to repent, sir.’ Here are his own words, I wrote them down and remembered them: ‘The way he’d shout at me, I’d just drop on my knees before him.’ Being a highly honest young man by nature, and having thereby won the confidence of his master, who had singled out this honesty in him when he returned to him money he had lost, the unhappy Smerdyakov, one must suppose, was terribly tormented by remorse for betraying his master, whom he loved as his benefactor. People who suffer severely from the falling sickness, according to the testimony of the most profound psychiatrists, are always inclined to ceaseless and, of course, morbid self-accusation. They are tormented by their ‘guilt’ in something and before someone, they are tormented by the pangs of conscience, often, even without any grounds at all, they exaggerate and even invent for themselves all sorts of faults and crimes. And it is just such a subject who becomes really guilty and criminal out of fear and intimidation. Besides, he had a strong presentiment that something bad might come of the circumstances taking shape before his eyes. When Fyodor Pavlovich’s elder son, Ivan Fyodorovich, was leaving for Moscow just before the catastrophe, Smerdyakov begged him to stay, not daring, however, in his cowardly way, to express all his fears to him in a clear and categorical form. He contented himself with hints only, but the hints were not understood. It must be noted that in Ivan Fyodorovich he saw as it were his protection, as it were a guarantee that as long as he was at home no misfortune would happen. Remember the expression in Dmitri Karamazov’s ‘drunken’ letter: ‘I’ll kill the old man, if only Ivan has gone’; so Ivan Fyodorovich’s presence seemed to everyone as it were a guarantee of quiet and order in the house. And now he goes away, and Smerdyakov at once, almost an hour after the young master’s departure, falls down in a fit of the falling sickness. But this is perfectly understandable. Here it must be mentioned that Smerdyakov, weighed down by fears and by a kind of despair, had during these last days felt especially in himself the possibility of an approaching fit of the falling sickness, which had always come over him before too at moments of moral strain and shock. The day and hour of these fits cannot, of course, be guessed, but any epileptic can feel in himself a disposition to a fit beforehand. So medicine says. And so, no sooner has Ivan Fyodorovich driven out of the yard than Smerdyakov, under the impression of his, so to speak, orphanhood and defenselessness, goes on a household errand to the cellar, descends the stairs, and thinks: ‘Will there be a fit or won’t there, and what if it comes right now?’ And precisely from this mood, from this apprehensiveness, from these questions, he is seized by the spasm in the throat that always precedes the falling sickness, and he flies headlong, unconscious, to the bottom of the cellar. And so, in this most natural accident, people contrive to see some sort of suspicion, some sort of indication, some sort of hint that he pretended to be ill on purpose! But if on purpose, the question at once arises: what for? With what calculation, with what aim? I am not even speaking of medicine; science, they say, lies, science makes mistakes, the doctors were unable to tell the truth from pretense—so be it, so be it, but answer me this question, though: why should he pretend? Was it not in order, having planned the murder, to draw the attention of the household to himself beforehand and as soon as possible by the fit that occurred? You see, gentlemen of the jury, in Fyodor Pavlovich’s house on the night of the crime there were, or had been, five persons: first, Fyodor Pavlovich himself, but surely it was not he who killed himself, that is clear; second, his servant Grigory, but he was very nearly killed himself; third, Grigory’s wife, the servant Marfa Ignatyeva, but to picture her as the murderer of her master is simply shameful. Two persons, then, remain in view: the defendant and Smerdyakov. But since the defendant insists that it was not he who killed, then it must have been Smerdyakov who killed, there is no other way out, for no one else can be found, you cannot pick out any other murderer. There, there, then, is where this ‘cunning’ and colossal accusation against the unhappy idiot who did away with himself yesterday came from! Precisely and only for the one reason that there is no one else to pick out! Were there even a shadow, even a suspicion against someone else, against some sixth person, I am convinced that even the defendant himself would then have been ashamed to point to Smerdyakov, and would have pointed to that sixth person, for to accuse Smerdyakov of this murder is a complete absurdity.

“Gentlemen, let us leave psychology, let us leave medicine, let us leave even logic itself, let us turn only to the facts, to the facts alone, and see what the facts will tell us. Smerdyakov killed, but how? Alone or in complicity with the defendant? Let us examine the first case first, that is, that Smerdyakov kills alone. Of course, if he killed, it was for something, for some advantage. But having not a shadow of motives for murder of the kind the defendant had, that is, hatred, jealousy, and so on, and so on, Smerdyakov, without any doubt, could have killed only for the money, so as to appropriate precisely those three thousand which he himself had seen his master putting into the envelope. And so, having planned the murder, he informs another person in advance—and, what is more, a person interested in the highest degree, namely the defendant—of all the circumstances about the money and the signals: where the envelope lies, what exactly is written on the envelope, what it is wrapped in, and, above all, above all, he informs him about those ‘signals’ by which one can get in to the master. What, does he do this simply to give himself away? Or to find himself a rival, who will perhaps want to go in himself and acquire the envelope? Yes, they will tell me, but he told him out of fear. But how can this be? A man who did not bat an eye at conceiving such a fearless and bestial deed and then carrying it out—gives away such information as he alone knows in the whole world, and of which, if only he had kept silent about it, no one would ever have guessed in the whole world. No, however cowardly a man may be, if he has conceived such a deed, then never for anything would he have told anyone, at least about the envelope and the signals, for that would have meant giving himself away entirely in advance. He would have invented something on purpose, lied about something else, if information was absolutely demanded of him, but about this he would have kept silent! On the contrary, I repeat, had he kept silent if only about the money, and then killed and appropriated that money, then no one in the whole world could ever have accused him, at least of murder for robbery, for after all no one but he had seen that money, no one knew that it existed in the house. Even if they had accused him, they would surely have considered that he had killed from some other motive. But since no one had previously noticed any such motives in him, and since everyone saw, on the contrary, that he was loved by his master and honored with his master’s confidence, he would of course have been the last to be suspected, and the first to be suspected would have been someone who had such motives, who himself shouted that he had such motives, who did not hide them, who displayed them before everyone; in a word, they would have suspected the murdered man’s son, Dmitri Fyodorovich. Smerdyakov would kill and rob, and the son would be accused—surely that would of course have been to the advantage of Smerdyakov the murderer? Well, so it is to this very son, Dmitri, that Smerdyakov, having planned the murder, tells in advance about the money, about the envelope, and about the signals—how logical that is, how clear!

“The day of the murder Smerdyakov has planned arrives, and there he goes flying off his feet, having pretended to be in a fit of the falling sickness, what for? Why, of course, in the first place so that the servant Grigory, who had planned his treatment, seeing that there was absolutely no one to guard the house, might perhaps put off his treatment and sit up on watch. In the second place, of course, so that the master himself, seeing that no one was guarding him, and terribly afraid of his son’s coming, which he did not hide, might redouble his mistrust and his caution. Finally, and above all, of course, so that he, Smerdyakov, broken by the fit, would at once be carried from the kitchen, where he always slept apart from everyone and where he had his own separate way in and out, to the other end of the cottage, to Grigory’s little room, behind the partition, where the two of them slept, three steps from their own bed, as always happened, from time immemorial, whenever the falling sickness broke him, by order of the master and of the tenderhearted Marfa Ignatyevna. There, lying behind the partition, he would most probably, so as to present himself as ill more convincingly, begin, of course, to moan, that is, to wake them all night long (as indeed happened, according to the testimony of Grigory and his wife)—and all this, all this, so as to get up all the more conveniently all of a sudden and then kill the master!

“But, they will tell me, perhaps he pretended precisely so that he, as a sick man, would not be thought of, and told the defendant about the money and the signals precisely so that the other would be tempted and would come himself and kill, and when, you see, the other, having killed, would go away and carry off the money, and in doing so perhaps make noise and racket and wake the witnesses, then, you see, Smerdyakov too would get up and go—well, and go to do what? Why, precisely to go and kill the master a second time and carry off the already carried-off money a second time. Gentlemen, you are laughing? I am ashamed myself to make such suppositions, and yet, imagine, this is precisely what the defendant maintains: after me, he says, when I had already left the house, having knocked Grigory down and raised the alarm, he got up, went, killed, and robbed. I am not even speaking of how Smerdyakov could have calculated all this in advance and foreknown it all as if counting on his fingers, namely that the irritated and furious son would come solely and only in order to peep respectfully into the window and, possessing the signals, beat a retreat, leaving him, Smerdyakov, all the booty! Gentlemen, I seriously put the question: where is the moment when Smerdyakov committed his crime? Point out this moment, for without it one cannot accuse.

“‘But perhaps the falling fit was real. The sick man suddenly came to, heard the shout, went out’—well, and what then? He took a look and said to himself: why don’t I go and kill the master? And how did he find out what had happened there, what had been going on there, since up to then he had been lying unconscious? However, gentlemen, there is a limit even to fantasies.

“‘Just so, sir,’ subtle people will say, ‘but what if the two of them were in agreement, what if they killed him together, the pair of them, and split the money, well, what then?’

“Yes, indeed, this is a weighty suspicion, and in the first place there is at once colossal evidence confirming it: one kills and takes all the work upon himself, and the other accomplice lies on his side, pretending to be in a falling fit—precisely in order to arouse suspicion in everyone beforehand, alarm in the master, alarm in Grigory. It is curious from what motives the two accomplices could have devised precisely such a crazy plan? But perhaps it was not at all an active complicity on Smerdyakov’s part, but, so to speak, a passive and suffering one: perhaps the frightened Smerdyakov agreed only not to resist the murder and, foreseeing that he would be the one accused of having let the master be killed, did not cry out, did not resist—he bargained in advance with Dmitri Karamazov for permission to lie through this time as if in a falling fit, ‘and you go on and kill as you please, my cottage is at the edge, I know nothing.’ But even if so, then since, once again, this falling fit was bound to cause a commotion in the house, Dmitri Karamazov, foreseeing this, could never have agreed to such an arrangement. But I concede, let us say he agreed; why, then it would still turn out that Dmitri Karamazov is the murderer, the direct murderer and instigator, and Smerdyakov only a passive participant, and not even a participant, but merely one who allowed it out of fear and against his will, and surely the court would certainly have been able to distinguish that, and so, what do we see? The moment the defendant was arrested, he instantly shifts everything onto Smerdyakov alone and accuses him alone. He does not accuse him of complicity with himself, but him alone: he alone, he says, did it, he killed and robbed, it is his handiwork! Well, what kind of accomplices are these who at once begin to inform on each other—why, that never happens. And note what a risk for Karamazov: he is the chief murderer, and the other is not the chief, the other only allowed it and lay behind the partition, and so he shifts it onto the man lying down. Why, the man lying down might have got angry and, out of self-preservation alone, hastened to declare the real truth: we both took part, he would say, only I did not kill, I merely permitted and allowed it, out of fear. For surely he, Smerdyakov, could have understood that the court would at once distinguish the degree of his guilt, and therefore he could have calculated that if he were punished, it would be incomparably more lightly than the other, the chief murderer, who wished to shift everything onto him. But then, in that case, he would have made a confession willy-nilly. This, however, we have not seen. Smerdyakov did not even breathe a word of complicity, although the murderer firmly accused him and all the time pointed to him as the sole murderer. More than that: it was Smerdyakov who revealed to the investigation that it was he himself who had told the defendant about the envelope with the money and about the signals, and that without him the other would never have known anything. If he had really been an accomplice and guilty, would he have told the investigation so easily about this, that is, that it was he himself who had told the defendant all of it? On the contrary, he would have begun to deny it and would certainly have distorted the facts and diminished them. But he did not distort or diminish them. Only an innocent man can act so, one who is not afraid of being accused of complicity. And so, in a fit of morbid melancholy from his falling sickness and from this whole catastrophe that had burst upon him, he hanged himself yesterday. Having hanged himself, he left a note written in his peculiar style: ‘I do away with myself of my own will and desire, so that no one is to be blamed.’ Well, what would it have cost him to add in the note: I am the murderer, and not Karamazov? But that he did not add: was there conscience enough for the one and not for the other?

“And what then: a while ago money is brought here, into the court, three thousand rubles—‘the very same, he says, that lay in this very envelope that is there on the table with the material evidence; I received it, he says, yesterday from Smerdyakov.’ But you yourselves, gentlemen of the jury, remember that sad scene of a while ago. I will not renew the details, but I will permit myself to make just two or three observations, choosing from the most insignificant—precisely because they are insignificant, and therefore will not occur to everyone and will be forgotten. In the first place, and once again: out of remorse Smerdyakov yesterday gave back the money and hanged himself. (For without remorse he would not have given back the money.) And of course it was only yesterday evening that he confessed his crime to Ivan Karamazov for the first time, as Ivan Karamazov himself declared, otherwise why would he have kept silent until now? And so he confessed, but why, I will repeat it again, did he not declare the whole truth to us in his dying note, knowing that the very next day a terrible judgment awaited the innocent defendant? The money alone is no proof, after all. To me, for example, and to two other persons in this hall, a certain fact became known quite by chance a week ago, namely that Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov had sent to the provincial capital to be changed two five-percent bonds of five thousand each, ten thousand altogether, therefore. I mention it only to show that anyone may happen to have money by a given date, and that by bringing three thousand one cannot necessarily prove that this is that very money, from that very same box or envelope. Finally, Ivan Karamazov, having received such an important communication yesterday from the real murderer, stays calm. But why should he not have announced it at once? Why did he put everything off till morning? I suppose I have the right to guess why: his health had already been disordered for a week, he himself had admitted to the doctor and to those close to him that he was seeing visions, that he was meeting people already dead; on the eve of the delirium tremens which struck him precisely today, he, suddenly learning of Smerdyakov’s death, suddenly constructs the following reasoning for himself: ‘The man is dead, one can lay it on him, and I will save my brother. And I have money: I will take a packet and say that Smerdyakov gave it to me before his death.’ You will say it is dishonest; even against a dead man, still it is dishonest to lie, even to save one’s brother? So it is, but what if he lied unconsciously, if he himself imagined that it was so, precisely because his reason had been finally stricken by the news of this sudden death of the lackey? You did see the scene of a while ago, you saw what condition this man was in. He stood on his feet and spoke, but where was his mind? The testimony of a while ago from the fevered man was followed by the document, the defendant’s letter to Miss Verkhovtseva, written by him two days before the commission of the crime, with a detailed program of the crime in advance. Well, then, why are we searching for the program and its authors? It was accomplished precisely according to this program, and accomplished by none other than its author. Yes, gentlemen of the jury, ‘accomplished just as it was written!’ And not at all, not at all did we run respectfully and timidly from father’s window, and that, too, in the firm conviction that our beloved was in there with him. No, that is absurd and implausible. He went in and—finished the business. Probably he killed in irritation, flaring up with spite the moment he looked at the object of his hatred and his rival, but having killed, which he did perhaps with one blow, with one sweep of his hand, armed with the brass pestle, and having then made sure, after a thorough search, that she was not there, he did not, however, forget to thrust his hand under the pillow and take out the envelope with the money, whose torn wrapper lies here now on the table with the material evidence. I speak of this so that you will note one circumstance which in my opinion is highly characteristic. Had it been an experienced murderer, and precisely a murderer with the sole aim of robbery—well, would he have left the wrapper of the envelope on the floor, in the state in which it was found beside the corpse? Well, had it been, for example, Smerdyakov killing for robbery—why, he would simply have carried off the whole envelope with him, without bothering at all to open it over the corpse of his victim, since he knew for certain that there was money in the envelope—after all, it had been put in and sealed in his presence—and, after all, had he carried off the envelope altogether, then it would become unknown whether there had been a robbery at all? I ask you, gentlemen of the jury, would Smerdyakov have acted so, would he have left the envelope on the floor? No, it is precisely so that a frenzied murderer must have acted, one who was already reasoning poorly, a murderer who was not a thief and had never stolen anything till then, and who even now snatched the money from under the bed not as a thief stealing it but as a man carrying off his own property from the thief who had stolen it—for such precisely were Dmitri Karamazov’s ideas about those three thousand, ideas that had reached the point of mania in him. And so, having seized the envelope, which he had never seen before, he tears the wrapper to make sure there is money in it, then runs off with the money in his pocket, even forgetting to think that he is leaving on the floor the most colossal accusation against himself in the form of the torn wrapper. All because it was Karamazov, and not Smerdyakov, he did not think, did not figure it out, and how could he! He runs away, he hears the yell of the servant overtaking him, the servant seizes him, stops him, and falls, struck down by the brass pestle. The defendant jumps down to him out of pity. Imagine, he suddenly assures us that he jumped down to him then out of pity, out of compassion, to see whether he could help him in any way. Well, was that the kind of minute in which to display such compassion? No, he jumped down precisely in order to make sure: was the only witness of his villainy alive? Any other feeling, any other motive would have been unnatural! Note, he works over Grigory, wipes his head with a handkerchief, and, having made sure that he is dead, he runs, like a man lost, all covered with blood, back there again, to his beloved’s house—how did he not think that he was all covered with blood and would be exposed at once? But the defendant himself assures us that he did not even pay attention to being all covered with blood; this one may grant, this is very possible, this always happens with criminals at such moments. For the one thing, a hellish calculation, and for the other, not enough sense. But at that minute he was thinking only of where she was. He had to find out as quickly as possible where she was, and so he runs to her lodgings and learns a piece of news, unexpected and most colossal for him: she had gone to Mokroye with her ‘first,’ her ‘indisputable’ one!”