The Brothers Karamazov

“And now he stands before his judges, before the arbiters of his fate. Gentlemen of the jury, there are moments when, in the exercise of our duty, we ourselves feel almost afraid before man, and afraid for man! These are the moments when one contemplates the animal terror of the criminal who already knows that all is lost but is still struggling, still intends to struggle with you. These are the moments when all the instincts of self-preservation rise up in him at once, and, trying to save himself, he looks at you with a piercing eye, questioning and suffering, he catches you and studies you, your face, your thoughts, waiting to see from which side you will strike, and instantly creates thousands of plans in his tremulous mind, but is still afraid to speak, afraid he will let something slip. These humiliating moments of the human soul, this journey through torments, this animal thirst for self-salvation, are terrible and sometimes evoke trepidation and commiseration even in an investigator! And so we then witnessed all that. At first he was stunned, and in his terror let drop a few words that gravely compromised him: ‘Blood! I’ve deserved it !’ But he quickly restrained himself. What to say, how to answer—none of this is prepared in him yet, but what is prepared in him is one unsubstantiated denial: ‘I am not guilty of my father’s death! ‘ That is our fence for the time being, and there, behind the fence, perhaps we can set up something, some sort of barricade. He hastens to explain his first compromising exclamations, forestalling our questions, by saying he considers himself guilty only of the death of the servant Grigory. ‘That blood I am guilty of, but who killed my father, gentlemen, who killed him? Who could have killed him if not IV Do you hear that? He asks us, us, who came to him with the very same question! Do you hear that little phrase—’if not I’—running ahead of itself, its animal cunning, its naivety, its Karamazovian impatience? It was not I who killed him, do not even think it was I: ‘I wanted to kill him, gentlemen, I wanted to kill him,’ he hastens to admit (he is in a hurry, he is in a terrible hurry! ), ‘and yet I am not guilty, it was not I who killed him! ‘ He concedes to us that he wanted to kill him, as if to say: you see how sincere I am, so you can all the sooner believe that I did not kill him. Oh, in such cases the criminal sometimes becomes incredibly careless and credulous. And here, quite inadvertently, as it were, the investigators suddenly asked him a most guileless question: ‘Could it be Smerdyakov who killed him?’ And the result was just as we expected: he became terribly angry that we had forestalled him and caught him unawares before he had time to prepare, to choose and catch the moment when it would be most plausible to bring up Smerdyakov. As is his nature, he at once rushed to the extreme and began assuring us with all his might that Smerdyakov could not have killed him, was incapable of killing him. But do not believe him, it was only a ruse: by no means, by no means was he giving up Smerdyakov; on the contrary, he still meant to bring him forward, because who else could he bring forward, but he would do it at some other moment, since for the time being the thing was spoiled. He would bring him forward only the next day, or even in a few days, picking the moment when he would cry out to us: ‘You see, I myself rejected Smerdyakov more than you did, you remember that yourselves, but now I, too, am convinced: it was he who killed him, it could not be anyone else!’ And with us, meanwhile, he falls into a gloomy and irritable denial, his anger and impatience prompting him, however, to a most inept and implausible explanation of how he looked into his father’s window and then respectfully went away from the window. The main thing being that he does not yet know the circumstances, the scope of the evidence given by the recovered Grigory. We proceed to the examination and search of his person. The examination angers him, but also encourages him: the full three thousand is not found, only fifteen hundred. And, of course, only in this moment of angry silence and denial does the idea of the amulet jump into his head for the first time in his life. He himself undoubtedly sensed the utter incredibility of his invention, and he was at pains, at terrible pains, to make it more credible, to spin a whole plausible novel out of it. In such cases the first thing, the chief task of the investigators is to keep the criminal from preparing himself, to take him by surprise so that he speaks out his cherished ideas in all their revealing ingenuousness, implausibility, and inconsistency. And it is possible to make the criminal speak only by unexpectedly, inadvertently, as it were, informing him of some new fact, some circumstance of the case that has colossal significance, but that he previously had no notion of and could in no way have foreseen. We had kept this fact in readiness, oh, long in readiness: it was the evidence of the recovered servant Grigory about the open door through which the defendant had fled. He had completely forgotten about this door, and it never occurred to him that Grigory could have seen it. The effect was colossal. He jumped up and suddenly shouted to us: ‘It was Smerdyakov who killed him, Smerdyakov!’—and thus revealed his cherished, his basic idea in its most implausible form, for Smerdyakov could have committed the murder only after he himself had struck Grigory down and run away. But when we told him that Grigory had seen the door open before he fell, and, on going out of his bedroom, had heard Smerdyakov groaning behind the partition—Karamazov was truly crushed. My collaborator, our esteemed and witty Nikolai Parfenovich, told me later that at that moment he pitied him to the point of tears. And this is the moment when, to make things better, he hastens to tell us about the notorious amulet: very well, I’ll tell you my story! Gentlemen of the jury, I have already made known to you why I consider all this invention about money sewn into an amulet a month earlier not only an absurdity, but also the most implausible contrivance that could have been hit upon in this situation. If one bet on whether anything more implausible could be said or imagined, even then it would be impossible to invent anything worse than that. Here, above all, the triumphant novelist can be brought up short and demolished by details, those very details in which reality is always so rich, and which are always neglected by such unfortunate and unwilling authors, as if they were utterly insignificant and unnecessary trifles, if indeed they even occur to them. Oh, they cannot be bothered with that at the moment, their mind creates only the grandiose whole—and then someone dares suggest such a trifle to them! But that is where they get caught! The defendant is asked the question: ‘Well, would you mind telling us where you got the cloth for your amulet, and who sewed it for you?’ ‘I sewed it myself.’ ‘And where did you get the cloth?’ The defendant is now offended, he considers it almost offensively trifling, and believe me, he is sincere, sincere! But they are all like that. ‘I tore it off my shirt.”Splendid, sir. That means that tomorrow we will find among your linen this shirt with a piece torn from it.’ And, understand, gentlemen of the jury, that if only we had actually found this shirt (and how could we not have found it in his suitcase or chest of drawers, if such a shirt indeed existed?)—it would be a fact, a tangible fact in favor of the truth of his testimony! But this he is unable to understand. ‘I don’t remember, maybe it wasn’t from my shirt, I sewed it up in my landlady’s bon-net.”What sort of bonnet?”I took it from her, it was lying about, an old calico rag.”And you remember that firmly?”No,notfirrnly . . .’And he is angry, angry, and yet just think: how could one help remembering? In a man’s most terrible moment, say, when he is being taken to his execution, it is precisely such trifles that stick in his memory. He will forget everything, but some green roof that flashes by on the way, or a jackdaw sitting on a cross—that he will remember. For he was hiding from the rest of the household while he sewed his amulet, he must remember the humiliation he suffered, needle in hand, for fear someone would come in and catch him; how at the first knock he would jump up and run behind the partition (there is a partition in his apartment) ... But, gentlemen of the jury, why am I telling you all this, all these details, these trifles!” Ippolit Kirillovich suddenly exclaimed. “Precisely because the defendant has stubbornly insisted on all this absurdity up to this very minute! In the two whole months since that fatal night, he has not explained anything, he has not added even one real, clarifying circumstance to his earlier fantastic testimony; as if to say, that is all just trifles, you must believe me on my honor! Oh, we are glad to believe, we are eager to believe, even on his honor! What are we, jackals, eager for human blood? Give us, point out to us at least one fact in the defendant’s favor, and we shall be glad—but a real, tangible fact, not his own brother’s conclusion based on the defendant’s facial expression, or pointing out that when he was beating himself on the chest, he must certainly have been pointing to the amulet, and in the dark no less. We shall be glad of this 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 moved on to the finale. He was as if in a fever, crying out for the spilt blood, the blood of a father murdered by his son “with the base purpose of robbery.” He pointed firmly to the tragic and crying totality of the facts. “And whatever you are about to hear from the defendant’s renowned and talented attorney,” Ippolit Kirillovich could not refrain from saying, “whatever eloquent and moving words, aimed at your emotions, will resound here, remember still that at this moment 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 in her! Yes, here, at this moment, you represent Russia, and your verdict will resound not only in this courtroom but for all of Russia, and all of Russia will listen to you as to her defenders and judges, and will be either heartened or discouraged by your verdict. Then do not torment Russia and her expectations, our fateful troika is racing headlong, perhaps to its destruction. And all over Russia hands have long been held out and voices have been calling to halt its wild, impudent course. And if so far the other nations still stand aside for the troika galloping at breakneck speed, it is not at all, perhaps, out of respect, as the poet would have it, but simply from horror—mark that—from horror, and perhaps from loathing for her. And still it is good that they stand aside, but what if they should suddenly stop standing aside, and form into a solid wall before the speeding apparition, and themselves halt the mad course of our unbridledness, with a view to saving themselves, enlightenment, and civilization! We have already heard such anxious voices from Europe. They are already beginning to speak out. Do not tempt them, do not add to their ever-increasing hatred with a verdict justifying the murder of a father by his own son . . .!”