The Brothers Karamazov
our mother Russia, the very scent and sound of her. Oh, he is
spontaneous, he is a marvelous mingling of good and evil, he is a lover
of culture and Schiller, yet he brawls in taverns and plucks out the
beards of his boon companions. Oh, he, too, can be good and noble, but
only when all goes well with him. What is more, he can be carried off
his feet, positively carried off his feet by noble ideals, but only if
they come of themselves, if they fall from heaven for him, if they need
not be paid for. He dislikes paying for anything, but is very fond of
receiving, and that’s so with him in everything. Oh, give him every
possible good in life (he couldn’t be content with less), and put no
obstacle in his way, and he will show that he, too, can be noble. He is
not greedy, no, but he must have money, a great deal of money, and you
will see how generously, with what scorn of filthy lucre, he will fling
it all away in the reckless dissipation of one night. But if he has not
money, he will show what he is ready to do to get it when he is in
great need of it. But all this later, let us take events in their
chronological order.
“First, we have before us a poor abandoned child, running about the
back-yard ‘without boots on his feet,’ as our worthy and esteemed
fellow citizen, of foreign origin, alas! expressed it just now. I
repeat it again, I yield to no one the defense of the criminal. I am
here to accuse him, but to defend him also. Yes, I, too, am human; I,
too, can weigh the influence of home and childhood on the character.
But the boy grows up and becomes an officer; for a duel and other
reckless conduct he is exiled to one of the remote frontier towns of
Russia. There he led a wild life as an officer. And, of course, he
needed money, money before all things, and so after prolonged disputes
he came to a settlement with his father, and the last six thousand was
sent him. A letter is in existence in which he practically gives up his
claim to the rest and settles his conflict with his father over the
inheritance on the payment of this six thousand.
“Then came his meeting with a young girl of lofty character and
brilliant education. Oh, I do not venture to repeat the details; you
have only just heard them. Honor, self-sacrifice were shown there, and
I will be silent. The figure of the young officer, frivolous and
profligate, doing homage to true nobility and a lofty ideal, was shown
in a very sympathetic light before us. But the other side of the medal
was unexpectedly turned to us immediately after in this very court.
Again I will not venture to conjecture why it happened so, but there
were causes. The same lady, bathed in tears of long-concealed
indignation, alleged that he, he of all men, had despised her for her
action, which, though incautious, reckless perhaps, was still dictated
by lofty and generous motives. He, he, the girl’s betrothed, looked at
her with that smile of mockery, which was more insufferable from him
than from any one. And knowing that he had already deceived her (he had
deceived her, believing that she was bound to endure everything from
him, even treachery), she intentionally offered him three thousand
roubles, and clearly, too clearly, let him understand that she was
offering him money to deceive her. ‘Well, will you take it or not, are
you so lost to shame?’ was the dumb question in her scrutinizing eyes.
He looked at her, saw clearly what was in her mind (he’s admitted here
before you that he understood it all), appropriated that three thousand
unconditionally, and squandered it in two days with the new object of
his affections.
“What are we to believe then? The first legend of the young officer
sacrificing his last farthing in a noble impulse of generosity and
doing reverence to virtue, or this other revolting picture? As a rule,
between two extremes one has to find the mean, but in the present case
this is not true. The probability is that in the first case he was
genuinely noble, and in the second as genuinely base. And why? Because
he was of the broad Karamazov character—that’s just what I am leading
up to—capable of combining the most incongruous contradictions, and
capable of the greatest heights and of the greatest depths. Remember
the brilliant remark made by a young observer who has seen the
Karamazov family at close quarters—Mr. Rakitin: ‘The sense of their own
degradation is as essential to those reckless, unbridled natures as the
sense of their lofty generosity.’ And that’s true, they need
continually this unnatural mixture. Two extremes at the same moment, or
they are miserable and dissatisfied and their existence is incomplete.
They are wide, wide as mother Russia; they include everything and put
up with everything.
“By the way, gentlemen of the jury, we’ve just touched upon that three
thousand roubles, and I will venture to anticipate things a little. Can
you conceive that a man like that, on receiving that sum and in such a
way, at the price of such shame, such disgrace, such utter degradation,
could have been capable that very day of setting apart half that sum,
that very day, and sewing it up in a little bag, and would have had the
firmness of character to carry it about with him for a whole month
afterwards, in spite of every temptation and his extreme need of it!
Neither in drunken debauchery in taverns, nor when he was flying into
the country, trying to get from God knows whom, the money so essential
to him to remove the object of his affections from being tempted by his
father, did he bring himself to touch that little bag! Why, if only to
avoid abandoning his mistress to the rival of whom he was so jealous,
he would have been certain to have opened that bag and to have stayed
at home to keep watch over her, and to await the moment when she would
say to him at last ‘I am yours,’ and to fly with her far from their
fatal surroundings.
“But no, he did not touch his talisman, and what is the reason he gives
for it? The chief reason, as I have just said, was that when she would
say, ‘I am yours, take me where you will,’ he might have the
wherewithal to take her. But that first reason, in the prisoner’s own
words, was of little weight beside the second. While I have that money
on me, he said, I am a scoundrel, not a thief, for I can always go to
my insulted betrothed, and, laying down half the sum I have
fraudulently appropriated, I can always say to her, ‘You see, I’ve
squandered half your money, and shown I am a weak and immoral man, and,
if you like, a scoundrel’ (I use the prisoner’s own expressions), ‘but
though I am a scoundrel, I am not a thief, for if I had been a thief, I
shouldn’t have brought you back this half of the money, but should have
taken it as I did the other half!’ A marvelous explanation! This
frantic, but weak man, who could not resist the temptation of accepting
the three thousand roubles at the price of such disgrace, this very man
suddenly develops the most stoical firmness, and carries about a
thousand roubles without daring to touch it. Does that fit in at all
with the character we have analyzed? No, and I venture to tell you how
the real Dmitri Karamazov would have behaved in such circumstances, if
he really had brought himself to put away the money.
“At the first temptation—for instance, to entertain the woman with whom
he had already squandered half the money—he would have unpicked his
little bag and have taken out some hundred roubles, for why should he
have taken back precisely half the money, that is, fifteen hundred
roubles? why not fourteen hundred? He could just as well have said then
that he was not a thief, because he brought back fourteen hundred
roubles. Then another time he would have unpicked it again and taken
out another hundred, and then a third, and then a fourth, and before
the end of the month he would have taken the last note but one, feeling
that if he took back only a hundred it would answer the purpose, for a
thief would have stolen it all. And then he would have looked at this
last note, and have said to himself, ‘It’s really not worth while to
give back one hundred; let’s spend that, too!’ That’s how the real
Dmitri Karamazov, as we know him, would have behaved. One cannot
imagine anything more incongruous with the actual fact than this legend
of the little bag. Nothing could be more inconceivable. But we shall
return to that later.”
After touching upon what had come out in the proceedings concerning the
financial relations of father and son, and arguing again and again that
it was utterly impossible, from the facts known, to determine which was
in the wrong, Ippolit Kirillovitch passed to the evidence of the
medical experts in reference to Mitya’s fixed idea about the three
thousand owing him.
Chapter VII.
An Historical Survey
“The medical experts have striven to convince us that the prisoner is
out of his mind and, in fact, a maniac. I maintain that he is in his
right mind, and that if he had not been, he would have behaved more
cleverly. As for his being a maniac, that I would agree with, but only
in one point, that is, his fixed idea about the three thousand. Yet I
think one might find a much simpler cause than his tendency to
insanity. For my part I agree thoroughly with the young doctor who
maintained that the prisoner’s mental faculties have always been
normal, and that he has only been irritable and exasperated. The object
of the prisoner’s continual and violent anger was not the sum itself;
there was a special motive at the bottom of it. That motive is
jealousy!”
Here Ippolit Kirillovitch described at length the prisoner’s fatal
passion for Grushenka. He began from the moment when the prisoner went
to the “young person’s” lodgings “to beat her”—“I use his own
expression,” the prosecutor explained—“but instead of beating her, he
remained there, at her feet. That was the beginning of the passion. At
the same time the prisoner’s father was captivated by the same young
person—a strange and fatal coincidence, for they both lost their hearts
to her simultaneously, though both had known her before. And she
inspired in both of them the most violent, characteristically Karamazov
passion. We have her own confession: ‘I was laughing at both of them.’
Yes, the sudden desire to make a jest of them came over her, and she
conquered both of them at once. The old man, who worshiped money, at
once set aside three thousand roubles as a reward for one visit from
her, but soon after that, he would have been happy to lay his property
and his name at her feet, if only she would become his lawful wife. We
have good evidence of this. As for the prisoner, the tragedy of his
fate is evident; it is before us. But such was the young person’s
‘game.’ The enchantress gave the unhappy young man no hope until the
last moment, when he knelt before her, stretching out hands that were
already stained with the blood of his father and rival. It was in that
position that he was arrested. ‘Send me to Siberia with him, I have
brought him to this, I am most to blame,’ the woman herself cried, in
genuine remorse at the moment of his arrest.
“The talented young man, to whom I have referred already, Mr. Rakitin,
characterized this heroine in brief and impressive terms: ‘She was
disillusioned early in life, deceived and ruined by a betrothed, who
seduced and abandoned her. She was left in poverty, cursed by her
respectable family, and taken under the protection of a wealthy old
man, whom she still, however, considers as her benefactor. There was
perhaps much that was good in her young heart, but it was embittered
too early. She became prudent and saved money. She grew sarcastic and
resentful against society.’ After this sketch of her character it may