The Brothers Karamazov

The Moscow doctor, questioned in his turn, sharply and emphatically confirmed that he considered the defendant’s mental condition abnormal, “even in the highest degree.” He spoke at length and cleverly about “mania” and the “fit of passion,” and concluded from all the assembled data that the defendant, before his arrest, as much as several days before, was undoubtedly suffering from a morbid fit of passion, and if he did commit the crime, even consciously, it was also almost involuntarily, being totally unable to fight the morbid moral fixation that possessed him. But, besides this fit of passion, the doctor also detected a mania that, in his words, promised to lead straight to complete insanity. (N.B. The words are my own; the doctor expressed himself in a very learned and special language.) “All his actions are contrary to common sense and logic,” he continued. “I am not talking about what I did not see—that is, the crime itself and this whole catastrophe—but even the day before yesterday, during a conversation with me, he had an inexplicable, fixed look in his eyes. Unexpected laughter, when it was quite uncalled for. Incomprehensible, constant irritation; strange words: ‘Bernard’ and ‘ethics,’ and others that were uncalled for.” But the doctor especially detected this mania in the defendant’s inability even to speak of the three thousand roubles, of which he considered himself cheated, without extraordinary irritation, whereas he could recall and speak of all his other failures and offenses rather lightly. Finally, according to inquiries, it had been the same even before as well; each time the three thousand came up, he would fly almost into some sort of frenzy, and yet people said of him that he was disinterested and ungrasping. “And concerning the opinion of my learned colleague,” the Moscow doctor added ironically, concluding his speech, “that the defendant, on entering the courtroom, ought to have been looking at the ladies and not straight in front of him, I shall only say that, apart from the playfulness of such a conclusion, it is, besides, also radically erroneous; for though I fully agree that the defendant, on entering the courtroom where his fate is to be decided, ought not to have looked so fixedly in front of him, and that this indeed can be considered a sign of his abnormal psychological condition at that moment, yet at the same time I assert that he ought not to have been looking to the left, at the ladies, but, on the contrary, precisely to the right, seeking out his defense attorney, in whose help all his hopes lie, and on whose defense his entire fate now depends.” The doctor expressed his opinion decisively and emphatically. But the disagreement of the two learned experts became especially comical in light of the unexpected conclusion of Dr. Varvinsky, who was the last to be questioned. In his opinion the defendant, now as well as before, was in a perfectly normal condition, and although, before his arrest, he must have been in a very nervous and extremely excited state, this could have been owing to a number of quite obvious reasons: jealousy, wrath, continual drunkenness, and so on. But this nervous condition would not in itself imply any special “fit of passion” such as had just been discussed. As to which way the defendant ought to have been looking, to the left or to the right, on entering the courtroom, “in his humble opinion” the defendant, on entering the courtroom, ought to have looked straight in front of him, as in fact he did, because in front of him were sitting the presiding judge and the members of the court, on whom his entire fate now depended, “so that, by looking straight in front of him, he thereby precisely proved his perfectly normal state of mind at the present moment,” the young doctor somewhat heatedly concluded his “humble” testimony.

“Bravo, leech!” Mitya cried from his place. “Precisely right!”

Mitya, of course, was cut short, but the young doctor’s opinion had the most decisive influence both on the court and on the public, for, as it turned out later, everyone agreed with him. However, Dr. Herzenstube, when questioned as a witness, suddenly served quite unexpectedly in Mitya’s favor. As an old-timer in town who had long known the Karamazov family, he furnished some evidence that was quite interesting for “the prosecution,” but suddenly, as if he had just realized something, he added:

“And yet the poor young man might have had an incomparably better lot, for he was of good heart both in childhood and after childhood, for this I know. But the Russian proverb says: ‘It is good when someone has one head, but when an intelligent man comes to visit, it is better still, for then there will be two heads and not just one . . .’”