The Brothers Karamazov

What happened then was that Ivan Fyodorovich suddenly went out, and only when he had already gone about ten steps down the corridor did he suddenly feel that Smerdyakov’s last phrase contained some offensive meaning. He was about to turn back, but the impulse left him, and having said “Foolishness!” he quickly walked out of the hospital. He felt above all that he was indeed reassured, and precisely by the circumstance that the guilty one was not Smerdyakov but his brother Mitya, though it might seem that it should have been the opposite. Why this was so, he did not want to analyze then, he even felt disgusted at rummaging in his feelings. He wanted sooner to forget something, as it were. Then, during the next few days, when he had more closely and thoroughly acquainted himself with all the evidence weighing against him, he became completely convinced of Mitya’s guilt. There was the evidence of the most insignificant people, yet almost astounding in itself, Fenya’s and her mother’s, for example. To say nothing of Perkhotin, the tavern, Plotnikov’s shop, the witnesses at Mokroye. Above all, the details weighed against him. The news of the secret “knocks” struck the district attorney and the prosecutor almost to the same degree as Grigory’s evidence about the open door. In reply to Ivan Fyodorovich’s question, Grigory’s wife, Marfa Ignatievna, told him directly that Smerdyakov had been lying all night behind the partition, “less than three steps from our bed,” and that, though she herself was a sound sleeper, she had awakened many times hearing him moaning there: “He moaned all the time, moaned constantly.” When he spoke with Herzenstube and told him of his doubts, that Smerdyakov did not seem mad to him at all but simply weak, he only evoked a thin little smile in the old man. “And do you know what he is especially doing now?” he asked Ivan Fyodorovich. “He is learning French vocables by heart; he has a notebook under his pillow, and someone has written out French words for him in Russian letters, heh, heh, heh!” Ivan Fyodorovich finally dismissed all doubts. He could not even think of his brother Dmitri now without loathing. One thing was strange, though: Alyosha kept stubbornly insisting that Dmitri was not the murderer, and that “in all probability” it was Smerdyakov. Ivan had always felt that Alyosha’s opinion was very high for him, and therefore he was quite puzzled by him now. It was also strange that Alyosha did not try to talk with him about Mitya, and never began such conversations himself, but merely answered Ivan’s questions. This Ivan Fyodorovich noticed very well. However, at the time he was much diverted by an altogether extraneous circumstance: in the very first days after his return from Moscow, he gave himself wholly and irrevocably to his fiery and mad passion for Katerina Ivanovna. This is not the proper place to begin speaking of this new passion of Ivan Fyodorovich’s, which later affected his whole life: it could all serve as the plot for another story, for a different novel, which I do not even know that I shall ever undertake. But, all the same, even now I cannot pass over in silence that when Ivan Fyodorovich, as I have already described, leaving Katerina Ivanovna’s with Alyosha at night, said to him: “But I don’t fancy her,” he was lying terribly at that moment: he loved her madly, though it was true that at times he also hated her so much that he could even have killed her. Many causes came together here: all shaken by what had happened with Mitya, she threw herself at Ivan Fyodorovich, when he returned to her, as if he were somehow her savior. She was wounded, insulted, humiliated in her feelings. And here the man who had loved her so much even before—oh, she knew it only too well—had appeared again, the man whose mind and heart she always placed so far above herself. But the strict girl did not sacrifice herself entirely, despite all the Karamazovian unrestraint of her lover’s desires and all his charm for her. At the same time she constantly tormented herself with remorse for having betrayed Mitya, and in terrible, quarreling moments with Ivan (and there were many of them), she used to tell him so outright. It was this that, in talking with Alyosha, he had called “lie upon lie.” Of course there was indeed much lying here, and that annoyed Ivan Fyodorovich most of all ... but of all that later. In short, he almost forgot about Smerdyakov for a time. And yet, two weeks after his first visit to him, the same strange thoughts as before began tormenting him again. Suffice it to say that he began asking himself constantly why, on his last night in Fyodor Pavlovich’s house, before his departure, he had gone out silently to the stairs, like a thief, and listened for what his father was doing down below. Why had he recalled it later with such loathing, why had he suddenly felt such anguish the next morning on the road, why had he said to himself on reaching Moscow: “I am a scoundrel”? And then it once occurred to him that because of all these tormenting thoughts, he was perhaps even ready to forget Katerina Ivanovna, so strongly had they suddenly taken possession of him again! Just as this occurred to him, he met Alyosha in the street. He stopped him at once and suddenly asked him a question: