The Brothers Karamazov (119 page)

“So you’re absolutely convinced that someone was here with you?”

“Yes, he sat over there, on that sofa in the corner. It was you who chased him away. He vanished as soon as you came. I like your face, Alyosha. Did you know that I liked your face? And 
he
, Alyosha, is me, he is really me myself, everything that is base, wicked, and despicable in me. Yes, he noticed that I’m a ‘romantic,’ although of course that’s slander. He’s extremely stupid, but that’s how he gets around people. And he’s cunning, with an animal cunning. He knows so well how to drive me into a rage! It was by taunting me and telling me I believed in him that he forced me to listen to him. He fooled me, as if I were a little boy. But he also told me much that was true. I would never have told myself those things without him. And you know, Alyosha,” Ivan said, his tone suddenly very grave and confidential, “I would like it so very much if he really were 
him
 and not me.”

“He has exhausted you!” Alyosha said, looking compassionately at his brother.

“He taunted me, and, you know, he was rather clever at it. Conscience! What is conscience? I manufacture it myself. So why am I tormenting myself? Out of habit, a seven-thousand-year-old habit, shared by all mankind. All right, so we’ll overcome that habit and become gods . . . It was he who said that, Alyosha.”

“Are you sure it wasn’t you?” Alyosha couldn’t prevent himself from crying out, looking at Ivan with clear eyes. “Well, forget about him. Leave him alone! Let him go and take away with him everything that you loathe now, and may he never come back again.”

“Yes, but he’s vicious. He was laughing at me. You cannot imagine how impudent he was, Alyosha. But in many things, he slandered me. He accused me falsely to my face: ‘You will go and do a noble deed, accusing yourself of killing your father, announcing that the lackey killed him at your instigation!’ ”

“Ivan,” Alyosha interrupted him, “stop it. You didn’t kill him. It is not true!”

“He says that and he knows. ‘You’re going to perform a virtuous deed, although you don’t believe in virtue, and that’s what annoys and torments you and makes you so vengeful’—that’s what he said about me and he knows . . .”

“It’s you who’s saying that, not he!” Alyosha cried sadly. “And you say it because you are ill, delirious, tormenting yourself!”

“No, he knows what he’s talking about. He says that it’s out of pride that I’ll go before them and say to them: ‘It was I who did it. Why do you look so horrified? You’re lying! I despise your opinion and your horror.’ He says I’ll say that and then he says to me: ‘But you know, you’re longing for their appreciation. You want them to think: “He may be a criminal and a murderer, but what nobility of soul—he’s confessing to save his brother!” ’ But that, Alyosha, is a damned lie!” Ivan shouted, his eyes aflame. “I don’t want any praise from that stinking mob! He was lying, I swear! I threw a glass at him and it smashed against his ugly mug!”

“Calm down, Ivan. Stop it.”

“But he knows how to torment people. He’s very cruel,” Ivan went on, without hearing Alyosha. “I always felt I knew why he came here. ‘While you are going before them out of pride,’ he says, ‘you still hope that they’ll get enough evidence against Smerdyakov and pack him off to Siberia, that they’ll acquit Mitya, and condemn you only 
morally
, while some will even praise you.’ And he laughed, saying that, do you hear—he laughed! ‘But now,’ he says, ‘with Smerdyakov dead, who will believe your story when you tell it in court? But you’re still going to tell them. You are, because you’ve made up your mind that you’ll speak up. But what’s the point of it now?’ That’s frightening, Alyosha. I cannot stand those questions. How dare he ask me those questions?”

“Ivan,” Alyosha said, cold with fear but still hoping to bring Ivan to his senses, “how could he possibly have told you about Smerdyakov’s death before I came here, when no one else knew about it or could possibly have had time to find out about it?”

“He did tell me about it,” Ivan said in a tone that left no room for doubt. “As a matter of fact, he spoke of practically nothing else. ‘It would be all right,’ he said, ‘if you believed in virtue at least, and said: “Let them not believe me, I must still tell them as a matter of principle!” But you are just as much of a pig as your papa and you don’t give a damn about virtue! So what would be the point of your going through with it now, when your sacrifice would be quite useless? The answer is that you don’t know yourself why you want to do it. And it’s not at all that you’ve made up your mind, because you haven’t made it up yet. You’ll sit up all night trying to decide whether you should go or not. But in the end you’ll go and you know you’ll go, because you know that, whatever you decide, it no longer depends on you. You’ll go because you don’t dare not to. And why don’t you dare? Well, take a guess—it’s your problem!’ And when he said that, he got up and left. You came—he left. He called me a coward, Alyosha. 
Le mot de l’énigme
 is that I’m a coward. ‘You’re no eagle who soars above the earth,’ he added. Yes, he added that, and Smerdyakov said that too. He ought to be killed. Katya has despised me for months—I’ve been aware of it. And Lise too will start despising me soon. He says, ‘You’re going to do it because you want to be praised.’ That’s a filthy lie! And you too, Alyosha, you despise me. Now I’ll hate you again. And I hate the monster, I hate him! I don’t want to save the monster. Let him rot in prison! Now he’s started singing that hymn of his! Oh, I’ll go tomorrow, face them, and spit in their eye!”

He leapt up frantically, threw away the wet towel, and again began to walk up and down the room. Alyosha thought of what Ivan had told him about sleeping while awake, about walking about, seeing, and talking, and yet sleeping at the same time. And that was happening right now. For a moment he thought of rushing out to get a doctor, but he was afraid to leave Ivan alone, since there would be no one to look after him while he was gone.

Gradually Ivan began to lose consciousness altogether. He was still talking constantly, but quite incoherently now. His very words were becoming blurred and unclear. Suddenly he staggered violently. Alyosha ran to him, to prevent him from collapsing, and led him over to the bed. He undressed him, put him to bed, and sat there for a couple of hours watching over him. Ivan slept deeply, without stirring, breathing quietly and regularly. Alyosha took a pillow and, without undressing, lay down on the sofa. Before he fell asleep, he prayed for Mitya and for Ivan. He was beginning to understand the nature of Ivan’s sickness—the agony caused by his proud resolution and deep-seated feeling of responsibility. God, in whom Ivan did not believe, and His truth were beginning to overcome the heart, which still refused to submit. “Yes,” Alyosha thought, his head already on the pillow, “with Smerdyakov dead, Ivan’s testimony will not be believed; nevertheless he’ll go and testify!” Alyosha smiled gently. “God will triumph,” he thought. “And Ivan will either rise in the light of truth or . . . or he will perish in hate, punishing himself and all the others for having served something in which he does not believe,” Alyosha added sadly and once again prayed for Ivan.

Book XII: Miscarriage Of Justice

Chapter 1: The Fatal Day

AT TEN in the morning of the day following the events just described, the trial of Dmitry Karamazov opened in district court.

I must make it clear from the outset that I feel unable to give a really complete account of all that happened during the trial or, for that matter, to report the events in their proper sequence. I believe that to bring it all up and explain it properly would take a whole volume of its own, and a big volume at that. So I hope it will not be held against me if I report only what particularly struck me and then stuck in my mind. I may very well have mistaken points of secondary importance for crucial developments and have omitted altogether some essential facts. Now that I have said this, I regret having embarked upon explanations. I’ll do my best and the reader will see for himself that that is all I can do.

And now, before we enter the courtroom, I will mention the thing that surprised me most that day. Actually, as it turned out later, it surprised not only me, but everyone else as well. Everybody knew that the trial had aroused great interest among the general public, that people could hardly wait for it to begin, that everyone in town had been talking, conjecturing, exclaiming, and making surmises about the trial for the past two months. Yet, although they were all aware that the case stirred up curiosity all across the country, they never expected it to produce such violent excitement all over Russia as was evidenced on the opening day.

The town was full of visitors from other parts of the country, including many people from Moscow and Petersburg. Among the visitors were many jurists, quite a few famous public figures, and also a number of society ladies. All the admission tickets had been snatched up. For the most prominent and illustrious visiting gentlemen, special armchairs had been installed behind the judges’ table, something that had never been done in our courtroom before.

At least half the audience was made up of women, local or visiting ladies. And the number of jurists who wanted to attend the trial was so large that fitting them into the courtroom was a serious problem, for all the tickets had long since been requested, even begged for, and distributed. I myself saw them hurriedly put up a special enclosure at the end of the courtroom, behind the dais, from which they removed all the chairs so as to be able to pack as many of the visiting jurists as possible into the space; and those who managed to get in there considered themselves very lucky, even though they were packed in tight and had to stand up throughout the whole trial. Some of the ladies, especially the out-of-towners, appeared in the gallery in the most sumptuous attire, but most of the women gave no thought to elegance. Their faces reflected a hysterical, greedy, almost morbid curiosity. A remarkable fact about the ladies was that the overwhelming majority of them, it turned out later, were on Mitya’s side and wanted to see him acquitted. The main reason for this may have been his reputation as a conqueror of women’s hearts. They knew that the two women contending for his love would appear at the trial. Katerina was an object of particular interest. All sorts of extraordinary stories circulated about her passionate love for Mitya, even after he had committed the crime. A great deal was said about her pride—“She practically never visits anyone in town”—and her “aristocratic connections.” It was rumored that she was planning to request permission from the authorities to accompany Mitya to Siberia and marry him there, somewhere in the mines, underground. There was also great curiosity about Katerina’s rival, Grushenka. People were eagerly anticipating the confrontation in court between the two rivals—the proud, aristocratic young lady and the “hetaera.” Our local ladies, however, knew more about Grushenka than about Katerina. They had seen “that woman who spelled the doom of Fyodor Karamazov and his unhappy son,” and they were quite puzzled to know “how such a plain, or in any case, by no means beautiful, low-class woman could have inspired such violent love in both the father and the son.” In short, there was a lot of talk going around. I even heard from unimpeachable sources that several serious family quarrels had broken out on Mitya’s account. Many ladies could not tolerate their husbands’ disagreement with their sympathy for the accused, which naturally caused those husbands, by the time they appeared in court, not only to be unsympathetic toward Mitya but even to feel personally irritated against him. But then we may say that, by and large, men were as unfavorably disposed toward the accused as women were favorable to him. There were many stern and frowning faces, some of them outright hostile. It is true that Mitya had managed to offend some of these gentlemen since he had come to our town. Of course, some of the men in the audience appeared to be perfectly cheerful and quite indifferent to what would happen to Mitya personally, although they were extremely interested in the trial itself. As we said before, the majority of the men wanted to see the accused convicted. The jurists, however, were not interested in the moral aspects of the case and viewed the whole business from the point of view of the legal technicalities involved as a result of the recent judicial reforms.

Everybody was excited by the presence of the famous defense counsel, Fetyukovich. His talent was acclaimed all over Russia and this was not the first time that he had appeared in a sensational criminal case in the provinces. With such appearances, the trials became famous and were remembered for a long time. There were also some amusing stories about our public prosecutor and our presiding judge. It was said that our prosecutor, Ippolit Kirillovich, was terrified of Fetyukovich and that they had been old enemies since the days in Petersburg when they were starting out on their careers. It was said that our conceited prosecutor, who always considered his talents so unfairly undervalued, had at first seen in the Karamazov case an unexpected chance to restore his hopes for recognition and that it was only the prospect of facing Fetyukovich that frightened him. But the stories of his fear of Fetyukovich were not quite fair. Our prosecutor was not one of those men who become dispirited in the face of danger, but rather one whose pride grows and who may become inspired as the danger grows. It must be noted, in general, that he was a hot-tempered and rather erratic man. In some instances he would put his whole soul into a case and act as though his entire career and his very life depended on it. This caused many members of the legal profession to laugh at him and gave him a greater notoriety than his modest position would otherwise have afforded him. It was, above all, his passion for the psychological approach that made him the butt of jokes. I feel they were wrong to find him so ridiculous, because he was much more serious and determined, as a lawyer and as a man, than they suspected. But from the very outset of his legal career, this sickly man had been unable to command the respect due his talents, and he never managed to close this gap later.

As to the presiding judge, it can only be said of him that he was well educated and humane, a competent jurist, and a man with the most modern views. He was rather proud, but was not overly concerned with his career. His main aim in life was to be considered as “progressive” as possible. With all that, he was a wealthy man with good connections. He was, it turned out later, extremely interested in the Karamazov case from “the social point of view.” He was interested in it as a social manifestation and was anxious to classify the accused and his outlook as the product of his social background, as a typically Russian phenomenon, etc., etc. As to the specific case, the tragedy itself and the individuals involved, from the accused on down—the presiding judge felt quite indifferent and detached about it all, as perhaps, indeed, he should have.

Long before the appearance of the judges, the court was packed to overflowing. Our courtroom is the best hall in town: it is spacious, has high ceilings and excellent acoustics. To the right of the members of the court, who were seated on a dais, a table and two rows of chairs had been reserved for the jury. On the left sat the accused and his counsel. In the middle was the table for the material exhibits; the blood-stained white silk dressing gown that had belonged to Fyodor Karamazov; what was assumed to be the murder weapon, the brass pestle; Mitya’s shirt with its bloodstained sleeve; his jacket covered with bloodstains in the back over the pocket, where he had put his blood-soaked handkerchief; the handkerchief itself, all caked with blood and by now quite yellow; the pistol that Mitya had loaded at Perkhotin’s so that he could shoot himself but that had later been secretly taken out of its box by Trifon in Mokroye; the envelope Fyodor Karamazov had inscribed to Grushenka, from which the three thousand rubles had been removed; the narrow pink ribbon that had been tied around it; and various other items that I cannot remember offhand. Farther down, there were the seats for the public, but before the balustrade there were a few chairs for the witnesses, who were required to remain in court after they had testified.

The three judges marched in at ten o’clock—the presiding judge, the associate judge, and the honorary justice of the peace—and they were at once followed by the public prosecutor. The presiding judge was a squat, thick-set man of about fifty, with a hemorrhoidal complexion and dark, graying, close-cropped hair, and the red ribbon of some order, I no longer know which. The striking thing about the prosecutor was his pallor; indeed, his face was almost green and he seemed to have grown even thinner, perhaps in a single night—for I had seen him only two days before and then he had still looked quite his former self. The presiding judge opened the session by asking the bailiff whether all the jurors had reported . . .

But I realize I cannot continue like this, because there were quite a few things I didn’t catch, other things whose meaning escaped me, still other things that I have forgotten to mention, and, above all, as I said before, if I try to record everything that happened and was said, I will soon run out of both time and space. I can only say that neither the counsel for the defense nor the prosecutor challenged many jurors. I remember the final composition of the jury: of the twelve, four were government officials, two were merchants, and six were artisans and laborers. Well before the trial, I recall hearing members of the more elegant society of our town, ladies especially, saying something like: “How is it possible to entrust such a subtle, complex psychological case to the judgment of some obscure minor civil servants, and even laborers? What can a petty official and, still less, a peasant understand about these things?” And, indeed, the four officials were very minor, three of them already gray-haired (and the fourth only somewhat younger), none of them known in our society, people who probably eked out a living on a small salary, were married to elderly and unpresentable wives, and had many children who probably ran around barefoot. The only diversion of such officials was an occasional game of cards and it seemed certain that none of them would ever have been caught reading a book. The two merchants looked respectable enough, but they seemed strangely quiet and slow-moving. One of them was clean-shaven and dressed in the European style, while the other had a graying beard and wore some medal or other on a red ribbon around his neck. I need hardly speak of the artisans and laborers, because in our agricultural town such people are quite indistinguishable from peasants, and artisans often even till the soil. Two of these people were also dressed in European-style clothes, which perhaps only made them look shabbier and less tidy than the other four. So it was quite natural that, looking at them, one should start to wonder, as I did among others, what these people could understand in a business such as this one. Nevertheless, frowning and stern, their faces were strangely impressive, even awe-inspiring.

At last the presiding judge declared the case concerning the murder of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov open—I don’t remember the exact wording of the declaration. The bailiff was ordered to bring in the accused, and Mitya was brought in. The courtroom became so utterly quiet that one could have heard the buzzing of a fly. I cannot speak for the others but, on me personally, Mitya made a most unpleasant impression. The worst of it was that he came into court dressed up like a regular dandy in a new, perfectly fitted frock-coat. I found out later that he had ordered that frock-coat especially for the trial from his Moscow tailor, who had his measurements. His linen was immaculate and exquisite. He was also wearing brand new kid gloves. He marched in with his long stride, looking straight ahead of him, and sat down, looking completely detached. Right behind him came his celebrated defense counsel, Fetyukovich, and a subdued hum rose from the audience. He was a tall, spare man with very long, lean legs and very long, pale fingers. He was clean-shaven and wore his soberly brushed hair rather short. His thin lips would curve now and then into what could be interpreted either as a sneering grin or as a smile. He was about forty and his face might have been described as pleasant, had it not been for his eyes. These eyes, themselves rather small and unexpressive, were set exceptionally close together, divided only by the very thin bone of his long, slender nose. On the whole, there was something strikingly bird-like in the face of this jurist, who was dressed in a frock-coat and a white tie.

I remember that the presiding judge asked Mitya the routine preliminary questions—his name, occupation, etc. Mitya answered smartly and clearly, but somehow in an unexpectedly loud voice that made the presiding judge sit up slightly, looking almost surprised. Then they read the list of names of the people who were to take part in the court proceedings, that is, the witnesses and the special experts. It was a long list; four of the witnesses did not appear: Miusov, who was at that time in Paris but whose deposition was available in the records of the preliminary investigation; Mrs. Khokhlakov and Mr. Maximov, both unavailable because of illness; and Smerdyakov, because of his sudden death, the certificate of which had been presented by the police. The news of Smerdyakov’s suicide caused considerable commotion and whispering among the audience, for, clearly, many of those present could not have known so soon about that sudden development. But what really caused a sensation was Mitya’s unexpected outburst.