The Brothers Karamazov

“Gentlemen of the jury,” the prosecutor began, “the present case has resounded throughout all Russia. But what, one might think, is so surprising, what is so especially horrifying about it? For us, for us especially? We’re so used to all that! And here is the real horror, that such dark affairs have almost ceased to horrify us! It is this, and not the isolated crime of one individual or another, that should horrify us: that we are so used to it. Where lie the reasons for our indifference, our lukewarm attitude towards such affairs, such signs of the times, which prophesy for us an unenviable future? In our cynicism, in an early exhaustion of mind and imagination in our society, so young and yet so prematurely decrepit? In our moral principles, shattered to their foundations, or, finally, in the fact that we, perhaps, are not even possessed of such moral principles at all? I do not mean to resolve these questions; nevertheless they are painful, and every citizen not only ought, but is even obliged, to suffer over them. Our budding, still timid press has all the same rendered some service to society, for without it we should never have learned, in any measure of fullness, of those horrors of unbridled will and moral degradation that it ceaselessly reports in its pages, to everyone, not merely to those who attend the sessions of the new open courts granted us by the present reign.^[337] And what do we read almost daily? Oh, hourly we read of things before which the present case pales and seems almost something ordinary. But what is most important is that a great number of our Russian, our national, criminal cases bear witness precisely to something universal, to some general malaise that has taken root among us, and with which, as with universal evil, it is already very difficult to contend. Here we have a brilliant young officer of high society, just setting out on his life and career, who basely, stealthily, without any remorse, puts a knife into a petty official, in part his former benefactor, and his serving-woman, in order to steal his own promissory document, and the rest of the official’s cash along with it: ‘It will come in handy for my social pleasures and my future career.’ Having stabbed them both to death, he leaves, putting pillows under the heads of the two corpses. Or again we have a young hero, all hung with medals for valor, who, like a robber on the highway, kills the mother of his chief and benefactor and, to urge his comrades on, assures them that ‘she loves him like her own son, and will therefore follow all his advice and take no precautions.’ Granted he is a monster, but now, in our time, I no longer dare say he is just an isolated monster. Another man may not kill, perhaps, but he will think and feel exactly the same way, in his heart he is just as dishonest as the first. In silence, alone with his conscience, perhaps he asks himself: ‘What is honor, after all, and why this prejudice against shedding blood?’ Perhaps people will cry out against me, and say of me that I am a morbid man, a hysterical man, that I am raving, exaggerating, slandering monstrously. Let them, let them—and, God, how I would be the first to rejoice! Oh, do not believe me, consider me a sick man, but still remember my words: for if only a tenth, only a twentieth part of what I say is true, even then it is terrible! Look, gentlemen, look at how our young men are shooting themselves—oh, without the least Hamletian question of ‘what lies beyond,’^[338] without a trace of such questions, as if this matter of our spirit, and all that awaits us beyond the grave, had been scrapped long ago in them, buried and covered with dust. Look, finally, at our depravity, at our sensualists. Fyodor Pavlovich, the unfortunate victim in the current trial, is almost an innocent babe next to some of them. And we all knew him, ‘he lived among us’ . . .^[339] Yes, perhaps some day the foremost minds both here and in Europe will consider the psychology of Russian crime, for the subject is worthy of it. But this study will be taken up later on, at leisure, and when the whole tragic topsy-turveydom of our present moment has moved more into the background so that it will be possible to examine it more intelligently and more impartially than people like myself, for example, can do. For now we are either horrified or pretend that we are horrified, while, on the contrary, relishing the spectacle, like lovers of strong, eccentric sensations that stir our cynical and lazy idleness, or, finally, like little children waving the frightening ghosts away, and hiding our heads under the pillow until the frightening vision is gone, so as to forget it immediately afterwards in games and merriment. But should not we, too, some day begin to live soberly and thoughtfully; should not we, too, take a look at ourselves as a society; should not we, too, understand at least something of our social duty, or at least begin to understand? A great writer of the previous epoch, in the finale of the greatest of his works, personifying all of Russia as a bold Russian troika galloping towards an unknown goal, exclaims: ‘Ah, troika, bird-troika, who invented you!’—and in proud rapture adds that all nations respectfully stand aside for this troika galloping by at breakneck speed. Let it be so, gentlemen, let them stand aside, respectfully or not, but in my sinful judgment the artistic genius ended like that either in a fit of innocently infantile sunnymindedness, or simply from fear of contemporary censorship. For if his troika were to be drawn by none but his own heroes, the Sobakeviches, Nozdryovs, and Chichikovs, then no matter who is sitting in the coachman’s box, it would be impossible to arrive at anything sensible with such horses! And those were still former horses, a far cry from our own, ours are no comparison . . .”^[340]