The Brothers Karamazov
that time, but only after he had been to see me three days running and
told me all about it. I thought he was mad, but ended by being
convinced, to my great grief and amazement. His crime was a great and
terrible one.
Fourteen years before, he had murdered the widow of a landowner, a
wealthy and handsome young woman who had a house in our town. He fell
passionately in love with her, declared his feeling and tried to
persuade her to marry him. But she had already given her heart to
another man, an officer of noble birth and high rank in the service,
who was at that time away at the front, though she was expecting him
soon to return. She refused his offer and begged him not to come and
see her. After he had ceased to visit her, he took advantage of his
knowledge of the house to enter at night through the garden by the
roof, at great risk of discovery. But, as often happens, a crime
committed with extraordinary audacity is more successful than others.
Entering the garret through the skylight, he went down the ladder,
knowing that the door at the bottom of it was sometimes, through the
negligence of the servants, left unlocked. He hoped to find it so, and
so it was. He made his way in the dark to her bedroom, where a light
was burning. As though on purpose, both her maids had gone off to a
birthday-party in the same street, without asking leave. The other
servants slept in the servants’ quarters or in the kitchen on the
ground-floor. His passion flamed up at the sight of her asleep, and
then vindictive, jealous anger took possession of his heart, and like a
drunken man, beside himself, he thrust a knife into her heart, so that
she did not even cry out. Then with devilish and criminal cunning he
contrived that suspicion should fall on the servants. He was so base as
to take her purse, to open her chest with keys from under her pillow,
and to take some things from it, doing it all as it might have been
done by an ignorant servant, leaving valuable papers and taking only
money. He took some of the larger gold things, but left smaller
articles that were ten times as valuable. He took with him, too, some
things for himself as remembrances, but of that later. Having done this
awful deed, he returned by the way he had come.
Neither the next day, when the alarm was raised, nor at any time after
in his life, did any one dream of suspecting that he was the criminal.
No one indeed knew of his love for her, for he was always reserved and
silent and had no friend to whom he would have opened his heart. He was
looked upon simply as an acquaintance, and not a very intimate one, of
the murdered woman, as for the previous fortnight he had not even
visited her. A serf of hers called Pyotr was at once suspected, and
every circumstance confirmed the suspicion. The man knew—indeed his
mistress did not conceal the fact—that having to send one of her serfs
as a recruit she had decided to send him, as he had no relations and
his conduct was unsatisfactory. People had heard him angrily
threatening to murder her when he was drunk in a tavern. Two days
before her death, he had run away, staying no one knew where in the
town. The day after the murder, he was found on the road leading out of
the town, dead drunk, with a knife in his pocket, and his right hand
happened to be stained with blood. He declared that his nose had been
bleeding, but no one believed him. The maids confessed that they had
gone to a party and that the street-door had been left open till they
returned. And a number of similar details came to light, throwing
suspicion on the innocent servant.
They arrested him, and he was tried for the murder; but a week after
the arrest, the prisoner fell sick of a fever and died unconscious in
the hospital. There the matter ended and the judges and the authorities
and every one in the town remained convinced that the crime had been
committed by no one but the servant who had died in the hospital. And
after that the punishment began.
My mysterious visitor, now my friend, told me that at first he was not
in the least troubled by pangs of conscience. He was miserable a long
time, but not for that reason; only from regret that he had killed the
woman he loved, that she was no more, that in killing her he had killed
his love, while the fire of passion was still in his veins. But of the
innocent blood he had shed, of the murder of a fellow creature, he
scarcely thought. The thought that his victim might have become the
wife of another man was insupportable to him, and so, for a long time,
he was convinced in his conscience that he could not have acted
otherwise.
At first he was worried at the arrest of the servant, but his illness
and death soon set his mind at rest, for the man’s death was apparently
(so he reflected at the time) not owing to his arrest or his fright,
but a chill he had taken on the day he ran away, when he had lain all
night dead drunk on the damp ground. The theft of the money and other
things troubled him little, for he argued that the theft had not been
committed for gain but to avert suspicion. The sum stolen was small,
and he shortly afterwards subscribed the whole of it, and much more,
towards the funds for maintaining an almshouse in the town. He did this
on purpose to set his conscience at rest about the theft, and it’s a
remarkable fact that for a long time he really was at peace—he told me
this himself. He entered then upon a career of great activity in the
service, volunteered for a difficult and laborious duty, which occupied
him two years, and being a man of strong will almost forgot the past.
Whenever he recalled it, he tried not to think of it at all. He became
active in philanthropy too, founded and helped to maintain many
institutions in the town, did a good deal in the two capitals, and in
both Moscow and Petersburg was elected a member of philanthropic
societies.
At last, however, he began brooding over the past, and the strain of it
was too much for him. Then he was attracted by a fine and intelligent
girl and soon after married her, hoping that marriage would dispel his
lonely depression, and that by entering on a new life and scrupulously
doing his duty to his wife and children, he would escape from old
memories altogether. But the very opposite of what he expected
happened. He began, even in the first month of his marriage, to be
continually fretted by the thought, “My wife loves me—but what if she
knew?” When she first told him that she would soon bear him a child, he
was troubled. “I am giving life, but I have taken life.” Children came.
“How dare I love them, teach and educate them, how can I talk to them
of virtue? I have shed blood.” They were splendid children, he longed
to caress them; “and I can’t look at their innocent candid faces, I am
unworthy.”
At last he began to be bitterly and ominously haunted by the blood of
his murdered victim, by the young life he had destroyed, by the blood
that cried out for vengeance. He had begun to have awful dreams. But,
being a man of fortitude, he bore his suffering a long time, thinking:
“I shall expiate everything by this secret agony.” But that hope, too,
was vain; the longer it went on, the more intense was his suffering.
He was respected in society for his active benevolence, though every
one was overawed by his stern and gloomy character. But the more he was
respected, the more intolerable it was for him. He confessed to me that
he had thoughts of killing himself. But he began to be haunted by
another idea—an idea which he had at first regarded as impossible and
unthinkable, though at last it got such a hold on his heart that he
could not shake it off. He dreamed of rising up, going out and
confessing in the face of all men that he had committed murder. For
three years this dream had pursued him, haunting him in different
forms. At last he believed with his whole heart that if he confessed
his crime, he would heal his soul and would be at peace for ever. But
this belief filled his heart with terror, for how could he carry it
out? And then came what happened at my duel.
“Looking at you, I have made up my mind.”
I looked at him.
“Is it possible,” I cried, clasping my hands, “that such a trivial
incident could give rise to such a resolution in you?”
“My resolution has been growing for the last three years,” he answered,
“and your story only gave the last touch to it. Looking at you, I
reproached myself and envied you.” He said this to me almost sullenly.
“But you won’t be believed,” I observed; “it’s fourteen years ago.”
“I have proofs, great proofs. I shall show them.”
Then I cried and kissed him.
“Tell me one thing, one thing,” he said (as though it all depended upon
me), “my wife, my children! My wife may die of grief, and though my
children won’t lose their rank and property, they’ll be a convict’s
children and for ever! And what a memory, what a memory of me I shall
leave in their hearts!”
I said nothing.
“And to part from them, to leave them for ever? It’s for ever, you
know, for ever!”
I sat still and repeated a silent prayer. I got up at last, I felt
afraid.
“Well?” He looked at me.
“Go!” said I, “confess. Everything passes, only the truth remains. Your
children will understand, when they grow up, the nobility of your
resolution.”
He left me that time as though he had made up his mind. Yet for more
than a fortnight afterwards, he came to me every evening, still
preparing himself, still unable to bring himself to the point. He made
my heart ache. One day he would come determined and say fervently:
“I know it will be heaven for me, heaven, the moment I confess.
Fourteen years I’ve been in hell. I want to suffer. I will take my
punishment and begin to live. You can pass through the world doing
wrong, but there’s no turning back. Now I dare not love my neighbor nor
even my own children. Good God, my children will understand, perhaps,
what my punishment has cost me and will not condemn me! God is not in
strength but in truth.”
“All will understand your sacrifice,” I said to him, “if not at once,
they will understand later; for you have served truth, the higher
truth, not of the earth.”
And he would go away seeming comforted, but next day he would come
again, bitter, pale, sarcastic.
“Every time I come to you, you look at me so inquisitively as though to
say, ‘He has still not confessed!’ Wait a bit, don’t despise me too
much. It’s not such an easy thing to do, as you would think. Perhaps I
shall not do it at all. You won’t go and inform against me then, will
you?”
And far from looking at him with indiscreet curiosity, I was afraid to
look at him at all. I was quite ill from anxiety, and my heart was full
of tears. I could not sleep at night.
“I have just come from my wife,” he went on. “Do you understand what
the word ‘wife’ means? When I went out, the children called to me,
‘Good-by, father, make haste back to read _The Children’s Magazine_
with us.’ No, you don’t understand that! No one is wise from another
man’s woe.”
His eyes were glittering, his lips were twitching. Suddenly he struck
the table with his fist so that everything on it danced—it was the
first time he had done such a thing, he was such a mild man.
“But need I?” he exclaimed, “must I? No one has been condemned, no one
has been sent to Siberia in my place, the man died of fever. And I’ve
been punished by my sufferings for the blood I shed. And I shan’t be
believed, they won’t believe my proofs. Need I confess, need I? I am
ready to go on suffering all my life for the blood I have shed, if only
my wife and children may be spared. Will it be just to ruin them with
me? Aren’t we making a mistake? What is right in this case? And will
people recognize it, will they appreciate it, will they respect it?”