IX. Psychology at Full Steam. The Galloping Troika. The End of the Prosecutor’s Speech

Having reached this point in his speech, Ippolit Kirillovich, who had evidently chosen a strictly historical method of exposition, to which all nervous orators very much like to resort, seeking on purpose a strictly set framework so as to restrain their own impatient enthusiasm—Ippolit Kirillovich expatiated particularly on the “first” and “indisputable” one and expressed on this theme a few thoughts that were entertaining in their way. “Karamazov, who was jealous of everyone to the point of fury, suddenly and all at once as it were collapses and vanishes before the ‘first’ and ‘indisputable’ one. And this is all the stranger because before, he had almost paid no attention at all to this new danger for him, approaching in the person of a rival he had not expected. But he kept imagining that it was all still so far off, and Karamazov always lives only in the present minute. Probably he even considered him a fiction. But instantly understanding with his sick heart that perhaps this was precisely why the woman had been hiding this new rival, precisely why she had deceived him a while ago, because this newly arrived rival was all too far from being a fantasy or a fiction for her, but was everything to her, all her hope in life—instantly understanding this, he resigned himself. Well, gentlemen of the jury, I cannot pass over in silence this sudden trait in the soul of the defendant, who would seem to be incapable for anything in the world of displaying it: there suddenly spoke out an implacable need for truth, for respect for the woman, for recognition of the rights of her heart, and when—at the moment when for her sake he had stained his hands with his father’s blood! It is true also that the shed blood was already crying out for vengeance at that minute, for he, who had ruined his soul and his whole earthly destiny, he could not help feeling and asking himself at that instant: ‘What does he mean, and what can he mean now to her, to this being whom he loves more than his own soul, in comparison with this “first” and “indisputable” one, who has repented and returned to this woman he once ruined, with a new love, with honorable proposals, with the vow of a life reborn and already happy? And he, the unhappy one, what will he give her now, what will he offer her?’ Karamazov understood all this, understood that his crime had closed every road to him and that he was only a criminal condemned to execution, and not a man who was to live! This thought crushed and annihilated him. And so he instantly settles on one frenzied plan, which, given Karamazov’s character, could not but present itself to him as the only and fatal way out of his terrible situation. This way out is suicide. He runs for his pistols, pawned to the official Perkhotin, and at the same time, on the way, on the run, he snatches out of his pocket all his money, for the sake of which he had just spattered his hands with his father’s blood. Oh, money is what he needs most of all now: Karamazov is dying, Karamazov is shooting himself, and this will be remembered! Not for nothing are we a poet, not for nothing have we been burning our life like a candle at both ends. ‘To her, to her—and there, oh, there I will throw a feast for the whole world, such as has never been before, so that it will be remembered and told about for a long time. Amid wild shouts, mad Gypsy songs and dances, we shall raise a toast and congratulate the adored woman on her new happiness, and then—right there, at her feet, we shall blow our brains out before her and execute our life! Someday she will remember Mitya Karamazov, she will see how Mitya loved her, she will pity Mitya!’ A great deal of picturesqueness, of romantic frenzy, of wild Karamazov unrestraint and sentimentality—well, and of something else too, gentlemen of the jury, something that cries out in the soul, knocks ceaselessly in the mind, and poisons his heart to the point of death; this something—it is conscience, gentlemen of the jury, it is its judgment, its terrible pangs! But the pistol will reconcile everything, the pistol is the only way out, and there is no other, and there—I do not know whether Karamazov thought at that minute ‘what will be there,’ and whether a Karamazov can think, as Hamlet did, about what will be there? No, gentlemen of the jury, they have their Hamlets, but we so far still have our Karamazovs!”

Here Ippolit Kirillovich unfolded a most detailed picture of Mitya’s preparations, the scene at Perkhotin’s, in the shop, with the coachmen. He cited a mass of words, sayings, gestures, all confirmed by witnesses—and the picture had a terrible effect on the convictions of the listeners. Above all, the sum of the facts had its effect. The guilt of this frenziedly rushing man, who no longer took care of himself, stood out irrefutably. “There was no longer any reason for him to take care of himself,” said Ippolit Kirillovich. “Two or three times he very nearly confessed completely, he almost hinted, and only just stopped short of saying it all (here followed the testimony of the witnesses). He even shouted to the coachman on the road: ‘Do you know that you’re driving a murderer!’ But all the same he could not say it all: he had first to get to the village of Mokroye and there finish his poem. But what, however, awaits the unhappy man? The point is that almost from the first minutes in Mokroye he sees and at last fully comprehends that his ‘indisputable’ rival is perhaps not so indisputable after all, and that his congratulations on a new happiness and his toast are not wanted and not accepted. But you already know the facts, gentlemen of the jury, from the examination of the evidence. Karamazov’s triumph over his rival turned out to be undeniable, and here—oh, here began an entirely new phase in his soul, and even the most terrible phase of all that this soul has lived through or will ever yet live through! One may positively acknowledge, gentlemen of the jury,” Ippolit Kirillovich exclaimed, “that outraged nature and a criminal heart are their own avengers, more completely than any earthly justice! More than that: justice and earthly punishment even lighten the punishment of nature, they are even necessary to the criminal’s soul at these moments as its salvation from despair, for I cannot even imagine the horror and the moral sufferings of Karamazov when he learned that she loved him, that for his sake she was rejecting her ‘first’ and ‘indisputable’ one, that she was calling him, him, ‘Mitya,’ to go with her into a renewed life, promising him happiness, and this when? When everything was already finished for him and when nothing was possible any longer! By the way, I will make in passing one remark that is very important for us, to explain the true essence of the defendant’s situation at that time: this woman, this love of his, remained for him, up to this very last minute, up to the very instant of his arrest, a being who was inaccessible, passionately desired but unattainable. But why, why did he not shoot himself then and there, why did he abandon the intention he had formed and even forget where his pistol lay? Why, it was precisely this passionate thirst for love and the hope of slaking it then and there that held him back. In the fumes of the feast he chained himself to his beloved, who was feasting along with him, more charming and seductive to him than ever—he does not leave her side, he admires her, he melts away before her. This passionate thirst could for a moment suppress not only the fear of arrest, but even the very pangs of conscience! For a moment, oh, only for a moment! I picture to myself the state of the criminal’s soul at that time, in indisputable slavish subjection to three elements that had suppressed it completely: first, the drunken state, the fumes and the din, the stamping of the dance, the shrieking of the songs, and she, she, flushed with wine, singing and dancing, drunk and laughing at him! Second, the encouraging distant dream that the fatal denouement was still far off, at least not near—perhaps only the next day, only in the morning would they come and take him. So, a few hours, that is a lot, terribly much! In a few hours one can think up a great deal. I imagine that something happened to him like what happens when a criminal is being driven to execution, to the gallows: there is still a long, long street to drive along, and at a walking pace too, past thousands of people, then there will be a turn into another street, and only at the end of that other street the terrible square! It precisely seems to me that at the beginning of the procession the condemned man, sitting on his cart of shame, must precisely feel that there is still an endless life before him. But now, however, the houses go by, the cart keeps moving on—oh, that is nothing, it is still so far to the turn into the second street, and so he still looks cheerfully to the right and to the left, at those thousands of indifferently curious people whose eyes are fastened on him, and it still seems to him that he is a man just like them. But now here is the turn into the other street—oh! that is nothing, nothing, there is still a whole street. And however many houses go by, he will keep thinking: ‘There are still many houses left.’ And so on to the very end, to the very square. So, I imagine, it was then with Karamazov too. ‘They haven’t had time yet over there,’ he thinks, ‘I can still find something, oh, there will still be time to compose a plan of defense, to figure out a rebuff, but now, now—now she is so charming!’ It is dim and terrible in his soul, but he nevertheless manages to set aside half his money and hide it somewhere—otherwise I cannot explain to myself where a whole half of those three thousand, just taken by him from under his father’s pillow, could have vanished. He has been in Mokroye more than once, he had already caroused there for two days and nights. This old, big wooden house is known to him, with all its sheds and galleries. I precisely suppose that part of the money was hidden then, and precisely in this house, not long before the arrest, in some crack, in a crevice, under some floorboard, somewhere in a corner, under the roof—what for? What for? The catastrophe may happen at any moment, of course we have not yet thought out how to meet it, and we have no time for that, and there is a pounding in our head, and we are drawn to her, well, and the money?—money is necessary in any situation! A man with money is a man everywhere. Perhaps such calculation at such a minute will seem unnatural to you? But surely he himself insists that a month before, at a moment that was also alarming and fatal for him, he set aside half of the three thousand and sewed it into a pouch, and if, of course, this is untrue, as we shall prove presently, still this idea is familiar to Karamazov, he has contemplated it. More than that, when he afterward assured the investigator that he had set aside fifteen hundred in a pouch (which never existed), he perhaps invented this pouch right then and there, instantly, precisely because two hours before he had set aside half the money and hidden it somewhere there in Mokroye, just in case, until morning, only so as not to keep it on his person, by an inspiration that had suddenly occurred to him. Two abysses, gentlemen of the jury, remember that Karamazov can contemplate two abysses, and both at once! We searched in that house but did not find it. Perhaps this money is still there even now, and perhaps it vanished the next day and is now with the defendant. In any case, he was arrested beside her, on his knees before her, she was lying on the bed, he was stretching out his hands to her, and he had so forgotten everything at that minute that he did not even hear the approach of those who came to arrest him. He had not yet had time to prepare anything in his mind for an answer. Both he and his mind were taken by surprise.

“And so here he is before his judges, before those who decide his fate. Gentlemen of the jury, there are moments when, in the course of our duty, we ourselves become almost afraid before a man, afraid for a man too! These are the minutes of contemplating that animal terror when the criminal already sees that all is lost, but still struggles, still intends to struggle with you. These are the minutes when all the instincts of self-preservation rise up in him at once and he, saving himself, looks at you with a piercing gaze, questioning and suffering, catches you and studies you, your face, your thoughts, waits to see from which side you will strike, and instantly creates in his shaken mind thousands of plans, but still he is afraid to speak, afraid of letting something slip! These humiliating moments of the human soul, this journey of the soul through its ordeals, this animal thirst for self-salvation—are terrible, and at times arouse a shudder and compassion for the criminal even in the investigator! And we were witnesses of all this then. At first he was stunned, and in his horror a few words escaped him that compromised him badly: ‘Blood! I’ve deserved it!’ But he quickly restrained himself. What to say, how to answer—all this is not yet ready for him, but only one thing is ready, a bare denial: ‘I am not guilty of my father’s death!’ That is our fence for the time being, and there, behind the fence, we may perhaps put up something else, some sort of barricade. His first compromising exclamations he hastens, forestalling our questions, to explain by saying that he considers himself guilty only of the death of the servant Grigory. ‘Of this blood I am guilty, but who killed my father, gentlemen, who killed him? Who could have killed him, if not I?’ Do you hear that: he asks us, us, who have come to him with that very question! Do you hear that little phrase running on ahead, ‘if not I,’ that animal cunning, that naivety, and that Karamazov impatience? It was not I who killed, and don’t you dare think it was I: ‘I wanted to kill him, gentlemen, I wanted to kill him,’ he hastens to confess (he is in a hurry, oh, in a terrible hurry!), ‘but all the same I am innocent, it was not I who killed!’ He concedes to us that he wanted to kill: you see for yourselves, he says, how sincere I am, so all the sooner believe that it was not I who killed. Oh, in these cases a criminal sometimes becomes incredibly light-minded and credulous. And here, quite as if by chance, the investigation suddenly put the most simple-hearted question to him: ‘But wasn’t it Smerdyakov who killed?’ And it happened just as we had expected: he got terribly angry at having been forestalled and caught off guard before he had time to prepare, to choose and seize the moment when bringing Smerdyakov forward would be most plausible. By his nature he at once rushed to the extreme and himself began assuring us with all his might that Smerdyakov could not have killed, was incapable of killing. But do not believe him, this is only his cunning: he is not at all, not at all giving up Smerdyakov yet, on the contrary, he will bring him forward yet, because whom else is he to bring forward if not him, but he will do it at another minute, because for now this business has been spoiled. He will bring him forward only perhaps tomorrow, or even after several days, having found a moment in which he himself will shout to us: ‘You see, I denied Smerdyakov more than you did, you remember that yourselves, but now I too am convinced: it was he who killed, and how could it not be he!’ But for the time being he falls into gloomy and irritable denial with us, and impatience and anger prompt him, however, to the most inept and implausible explanation of how he looked through the window at his father and how he respectfully went away from the window. The main thing is that he does not yet know the circumstances, the extent of the testimony of Grigory, who has come to. We proceed to the inspection and the search. The inspection angers him, but also encourages him: the whole three thousand has not been found, only fifteen hundred has been found. And of course it is only at this moment of angry silence and denial that the idea of the pouch pops into his head for the first time in his life. Without doubt he himself feels the whole improbability of the invention and is tormented, terribly tormented, over how to make it more probable, how to compose it so that a whole plausible novel comes out. In these cases the very first thing, the very main task of the investigation, is not to let the man prepare, to come upon him unexpectedly, so that the criminal will speak out his cherished ideas in all their self-betraying simple-heartedness, improbability, and contradiction. And the criminal can be made to speak only by a sudden and as it were accidental communication to him of some new fact, some circumstance of the case that is colossal in its significance, but that he had never supposed till then and could in no way have foreseen. This fact we had ready, oh, ready long since: it was the testimony of the servant Grigory, who had come to, about the open door from which the defendant ran out. He had completely forgotten about this door, and he did not even suppose that Grigory could have seen it. The effect was colossal. He jumped up and suddenly shouted at us: ‘It was Smerdyakov who killed him, Smerdyakov!’—and so he gave away his cherished, his fundamental idea, in its most implausible form, for Smerdyakov could have killed only after he had knocked Grigory down and run away. But when we informed him that Grigory had seen the door unlocked before his fall, and on coming out of his bedroom had heard Smerdyakov moaning behind the partition—Karamazov was truly crushed. My colleague, our respected and witty Nikolai Parfenovich, told me afterward that at that instant he felt sorry for him to the point of tears. And it is at this very instant, to set matters right, that he hastens to tell us about this notorious pouch: so be it, he says, hear this tale! Gentlemen of the jury, I have already expressed to you my thoughts on why I consider this whole invention about money sewn into a pouch a month before not only nonsense, but the most implausible fabrication that could possibly have been found in the given case. Even if one were to search for it on a bet—what could one say and present that would be more implausible—even then one could not have invented anything worse than this. Here, above all, the triumphant novelist can be checked and smashed to dust by details, by those very details in which reality is always so rich and which these unhappy and involuntary authors always neglect as supposedly quite insignificant and unnecessary trifles, and which never even enter their heads. Oh, at that minute they have no time for it, their minds are creating only a grandiose whole—and here people dare offer them such a trifle! But it is precisely on this that they are caught! They put a question to the defendant: ‘Well, and where were you pleased to get the material for your pouch, who sewed it for you?’ ‘I sewed it myself.’ ‘And where were you pleased to get the linen?’ The defendant is already offended, he considers this a trifle almost insulting to him, and, would you believe it, sincerely, sincerely! But they are all like that. ‘I tore it off my shirt.’ ‘Excellent, sir. So tomorrow we shall find among your linen this shirt with a piece torn out of it.’ And consider, gentlemen of the jury, why, if we had only actually found this shirt (and how could we not find it in his suitcase or his chest of drawers, if such a shirt actually existed)—why, that would be a fact, a tangible fact in favor of the truth of his testimony! But this he cannot figure out. ‘I don’t remember, maybe it wasn’t from my shirt, I sewed it into my landlady’s cap.’ ‘What sort of cap?’ ‘I took it from her, it was lying around at her place, an old calico rag.’ ‘And you remember this firmly?’ ‘No, I don’t remember firmly…’ And he is angry, angry, and meanwhile imagine: how could one not remember this? In the most terrible moments of a man’s life, say, when he is being driven to execution, it is precisely these trifles that are remembered. He will forget everything, but some green roof that flashed past him on the way, or a jackdaw on a cross—that he will remember. Why, when he was sewing his pouch, he was hiding from the household, he must have remembered how humiliatingly he suffered from fear with a needle in his hands, lest someone come in and catch him; how at the first knock he jumped up and ran behind the partition (there is a partition in his lodgings)… But, gentlemen of the jury, why am I telling you all this, all these details, these trifles!” Ippolit Kirillovich suddenly exclaimed. “Why, precisely because the defendant stubbornly stands by all this nonsense up to this very moment! In all these two months, since that very night that was fatal for him, he has explained nothing, he has not added a single explanatory real circumstance to his former fantastic testimony; all these, he says, are trifles, and you must believe me on my honor! Oh, we are glad to believe, we thirst to believe, even if only on his honor! What are we, jackals thirsting for human blood? Give us, point out to us just one fact in the defendant’s favor, and we shall rejoice—but a tangible fact, a real one, and not a conclusion drawn by his own brother from the expression of the defendant’s face, or the indication that he, beating his breast, must certainly have been pointing at a pouch, and in the dark at that. We shall rejoice at a new fact, we shall be the first to renounce our accusation, we shall hasten to renounce it. But now justice cries out, and we insist, we cannot renounce anything.” Here Ippolit Kirillovich passed on to his finale. He was as if in a fever, he cried out for the shed blood, for the blood of a father killed by his son “with the base aim of robbery.” He firmly pointed to the tragic and crying sum of the facts. “And whatever you may hear from the defendant’s counsel, famous for his talent,” Ippolit Kirillovich could not restrain himself, “whatever eloquent and touching words may resound here, striking at your sensibility, still remember that at this minute you are in the sanctuary of our justice. Remember that you are the defenders of our truth, the defenders of our holy Russia, of her foundations, of her family, of all that is holy to her! Yes, you represent Russia here at this given moment, and your verdict will resound not in this hall alone, but over all Russia, and all Russia will hear you as her defenders and judges and will be heartened or dismayed by your verdict. Do not torment Russia, then, and her expectations; our fatal troika is rushing headlong, and perhaps to perdition. And for a long time now in all Russia people have been stretching out their hands and calling out to stop this furious, shameless galloping. And if other nations still stand aside for the time being from the troika galloping at breakneck speed, then perhaps not at all out of respect for it, as the poet would have liked, but simply out of horror—note this. Out of horror, and perhaps out of loathing for it, and it is still a good thing that they stand aside, for they may perhaps go and stop standing aside, and stand like a solid wall before the onrushing apparition, and themselves stop the mad galloping of our licentiousness, with a view to saving themselves, enlightenment, and civilization! We have already heard these alarming voices from Europe. They are already beginning to resound. Do not tempt them, then, do not heap up their ever-growing hatred with a verdict acquitting the murder of a father by his own son!…”

In a word, Ippolit Kirillovich, though he had been carried away a great deal, did end with pathos—and, in fact, the impression he produced was extraordinary. He himself, having finished his speech, hurriedly went out and, I repeat, almost fainted in the other room. The hall did not applaud, but serious people were satisfied. Only the ladies were not so satisfied, but even they liked the eloquence, all the more since they were not at all afraid of the consequences and expected everything from Fetyukovich: “At last he will speak, and of course he will defeat everyone!” Everyone kept glancing at Mitya; he had sat through the whole of the prosecutor’s speech in silence, his hands clasped, his teeth clenched, his eyes lowered. Only now and then did he raise his head and listen. Especially when they began to speak of Grushenka. When the prosecutor was conveying Rakitin’s opinion of her, a contemptuous and spiteful smile showed on his face, and he said rather audibly: “Bernards!” And when Ippolit Kirillovich was telling how he had questioned and tormented him in Mokroye, Mitya raised his head and listened with terrible curiosity. At one place in the speech he even seemed to want to jump up and shout something, but he mastered himself, however, and only shrugged his shoulders contemptuously. About this finale of the speech, namely about the prosecutor’s exploits in Mokroye during the questioning of the criminal, people in our society talked afterward and laughed a little at Ippolit Kirillovich: “The man couldn’t resist, they said, showing off his abilities.” The session was adjourned, but for a very short time, a quarter of an hour, twenty minutes at most. Conversations and exclamations were heard among the public. I remember some of them:

“A serious speech!” a gentleman in one group remarked with a frown.

“He spun out an awful lot of psychology,” another voice was heard.

“But it’s all true, the irrefutable truth!”

“Yes, he’s a master at that.”

“He summed it up.”

“He summed us up too, us too,” a third voice joined in. “At the beginning of the speech, remember, that we’re all just like Fyodor Pavlovich?”

“And at the end too. Only he was lying there.”

“And there were unclear places too.”

“He got carried away a bit.”

“Unjust, unjust, sir.”

“Oh no, all the same it was deft. The man waited a long time, and now he’s had his say, heh-heh!”

“I wonder what the defense counsel will say?”

In another group:

“He shouldn’t have had a dig just now at the one from Petersburg: ‘striking at your sensibility,’ remember?”

“Yes, that was clumsy of him.”

“He was too hasty.”

“A nervous man, sir.”

“Here we are laughing, but how does the defendant feel?”

“Yes, sir. How does our Mitenka feel?”

“And I wonder what the defense counsel will say?”

In a third group:

“Who is that lady, the fat one with the lorgnette, sitting at the end?”

“That’s a general’s wife, a divorcée, I know her.”

“That explains it, with a lorgnette.”

“Trash.”

“Oh no, a piquant little thing.”

“Two seats away from her there’s a little blonde sitting, she’s better.”

“They caught him deftly that time in Mokroye, eh?”

“Deftly, sure. He told it again. Why, he’s told about that here in people’s houses goodness knows how many times.”

“And now he couldn’t resist. Vanity.”

“A man with a grievance, heh-heh!”

“And touchy. And a lot of rhetoric, long sentences.”

“And he’s scaring us, note that, he keeps scaring us. Remember about the troika? ‘They have their Hamlets, but we so far still have our Karamazovs!’ That was deft of him.”

“He was burning incense to liberalism. He’s afraid!”

“And he’s afraid of the lawyer too.”

“Yes, what will Mr. Fetyukovich say?”

“Well, whatever he says, he won’t get through to our peasants.”

“You think so?”

In a fourth group:

“That bit of his about the troika was good, though, where it was about the nations.”

“And it’s true, remember, where he says the nations won’t wait.”

“What about it?”

“Why, in the English Parliament a member got up just last week, about the nihilists, and asked the ministry whether it wasn’t time to intervene with the barbarous nation, so as to educate us. Ippolit meant him, I know he meant him. He was talking about it last week.”

“The snipe have a long way to go.”

“What snipe? Why a long way?”

“Why, we’ll lock up Kronstadt and won’t give them any grain. Where will they get it?”

“What about America? It’s America now.”

“Nonsense.”

But the bell rang, everyone rushed to their places. Fetyukovich mounted the rostrum.