The Brothers Karamazov

“Maybe in court they won’t believe all the words I was just telling you, sir, but among the public they will believe, sir, and you will be ashamed, sir.”

“So once again: ‘It’s always interesting to talk with an intelligent man’— eh?” Ivan snarled.

“Right on the mark, if I may say so, sir. So be intelligent, sir.”

Ivan Fyodorovich stood up all trembling with indignation, put his coat on, and no longer replying to Smerdyakov, not even looking at him, quickly left the cottage. The fresh evening air refreshed him. The moon was shining brightly in the sky. A terrible nightmare of thoughts and feelings seethed in his soul. “Go and denounce Smerdyakov right now? But denounce him for what: he’s innocent all the same. On the contrary, he will accuse me. Why, indeed, did I go to Chermashnya then? Why? Why?” Ivan Fyodorovich kept asking.”Yes, of course, I was expecting something, he’s right ... “And again for the hundredth time he recalled how, on that last night at his father’s, he had eavesdropped from the stairs, but this time he recalled it with such suffering that he even stopped in his tracks as if pierced through: “Yes, that is what I expected, it’s true! I wanted the murder, I precisely wanted it! Did I want the murder, did I ... ? I must kill Smerdyakov...! If I don’t dare kill Smerdyakov now, life is not worth living...!” Without going home, Ivan Fyodorovich then went straight to Katerina Ivanovna and frightened her by his appearance: he seemed insane. He told her the whole of his conversation with Smerdyakov, down to the last little detail. He could not be calmed, no matter how she talked to him; he kept pacing the room and spoke abruptly, strangely. Finally he sat down, put his elbows on the table, rested his head in both hands, and uttered a strange aphorism:

“If it was not Dmitri but Smerdyakov who killed father, then, of course, I am solidary with him, because I put him up to it. Whether I did put him up to it—I don’t know yet. But if it was he who killed him, and not Dmitri, then, of course, I am a murderer, too.” Hearing this, Katerina Ivanovna silently rose from her seat, went to her desk, opened a box standing on it, took out a piece of paper, and placed it before Ivan. This piece of paper was the same document of which Ivan Fyodorovich later told Alyosha, calling it “a mathematical proof” that brother Dmitri had killed their father. It was a letter to Katerina Ivanovna, written by Mitya in a drunken state the same evening he had met Alyosha in the fields on his way back to the monastery, after the scene in Katerina Ivanovna’s house when Grushenka had insulted her. Then, having parted with Alyosha, Mitya rushed to Grushenka; it is not known whether he saw her or not, but towards nightfall he turned up at the “Metropolis” tavern, where he got properly drunk. Once drunk, he called for pen and paper, and penned an important document against himself. It was a frenzied, verbose, and incoherent letter— precisely “drunk.” It was the same as when a drunken man comes home and begins telling his wife or someone in the house, with remarkable ardor, how he has just been insulted; what a scoundrel his insulter is; what a fine man, on the contrary, he himself is; and how he is going to show that scoundrel—and it is all so long, long, incoherent, and agitated, with pounding of fists on the table, with drunken tears. The paper they gave him for the letter in the tavern was a dirty scrap of some ordinary writing paper, of poor quality, on the back of which some bill had been written. Apparently there was not space enough for drunken verbosity, and Mitya not only filled all the margins with writing, but even wrote the last lines across the rest of the letter. The content of the letter was as follows:

Fatal Katya! Tomorrow I will get money and give you back your three thousand, and farewell, woman of great wrath, but farewell, too, my love! Let us end it! Tomorrow I’ll try to get it from all people, and if I don’t get it from people, I give you my word of honor, I will go to my father and smash his head in and take it from under his pillow, if only Ivan goes away. I may go to hard labor, but I will give you back the three thousand. And—farewell to you. I bow to you, to the ground, for I am a scoundrel before you. Forgive me. No, better not forgive, it will be easier for me and for you! Better hard labor than your love, for I love another, and you’ve found out too much

. about her today to be able to forgive. I will kill my thief. I will go away from you all, to the East, so as not to know anyone. From her as well, for you are not my only tormentor, but she is, too. Farewell!

P.S. I am writing a curse, yet I adore you! I hear it in my heart. One string