The Brothers Karamazov (127 page)

“Then there is the youngest son, who is still a youth, a pious and humble young man, whose views are just the opposite of his brother’s gloomy vision of decay. This young man is trying to latch on to the ‘national principle,’ or whatever is meant by that obscure phrase in the dark recesses of our theorizing intelligentsia. He, you see, tied himself to the monastery and almost became a monk. I believe that, unconsciously and very early in life, he felt a meek despair, such as is experienced by many among us, who, fearing the cynicism and depravity that they mistakenly consider a European influence, look for salvation in ‘their native soil,’ like small children rushing into the arms of their ailing mother, where they hope to be able to sleep, perhaps sleep throughout their entire lives, just so as not to see the sights that horrify them! As far as I am concerned, I wish all the best to that good and talented young man. I hope that his youthful idealism and his fascination with the fundamental beliefs of the uneducated Russian masses will not turn some day, as it so often does, into a gloomy mysticism in his moral outlook and an obtuse chauvinism in his political stand—two positions that present an even greater threat to our nation than the precocious corruption, resulting from overfeeding on the unearned and misinterpreted fruits of European enlightenment, that afflicts his elder brother.”

The words “mysticism” and “chauvinism” again elicited some applause for the prosecutor, although he had obviously, in his excitement, strayed a bit far afield from the case at hand. But then, this embittered and consumptive man had felt an irresistible urge to have his say, at least once in his life. People said later that, in his portrayal of Ivan, the prosecutor was motivated, to some extent, by personal resentment, which was quite improper in the present circumstances. They said that Ivan had bested him in a couple of arguments in front of many witnesses, and now the prosecutor was avenging himself. I am not sure whether such an accusation is entirely fair. In any case, thus far, what he had said was simply an introduction. Only after this did his speech deal with the business at hand.

“Now we come to the eldest son of this modern family,” the prosecutor went on, “who is here, sitting in the dock, before you. We know about his life and we know what he did, since it has now all been opened up to public scrutiny. Unlike his brothers, one of whom represents the ‘Western’ and the other the ‘Russian national’ principle, Dmitry Karamazov represents Russia directly, as it is today, although he certainly does not represent all of modern Russia—God forbid that he should! Nevertheless, she is all there, our old mother Russia; we can smell her! Oh, like him, we are such a spontaneous, sincere people; we are such an amazing mixture of good and evil; we love enlightenment and Schiller, but we also love to rage and storm in taverns and to tear out the beards of our drunken drinking companions. Oh, we can behave in a ‘beautiful and sublime’ way, provided we are in the right mood! Indeed, we are even obsessed—yes, obsessed—with the most noble ideals, if, that is, we happen to stumble on such ideals by chance, if they fall into our laps from the sky, and as long as we don’t have to pay for them. In general, we hate to pay for anything and we love to receive things for nothing—that goes for everything. Oh, just give us everything, everything that is good in life—for we won’t settle for less—and, above all, do not interfere in any way with our habits, our way of life, and our impulses, and then we shall prove to you that we can be good and beautiful and sublime. We are not avaricious, no, but you must give us lots and lots of money, and then you will see how generous we are, and you will be able to admire the scorn with which we scatter the despicable metal to the winds in wild, unrestrained revelry! And if you don’t give us money, we’ll show you that we can get it anyhow, if we want it badly enough . . .

“But I shall come to that later, for I want the events to unfold before you step by step, in proper order. First, we have before us a poor little boy, abandoned in the backyard, without shoes, as we were told by a shocked witness, a highly esteemed townsman of ours, a man, alas, of foreign extraction. I repeat again: I yield to no one the right to defend the accused, for I am both accuser and defender! Yes, we, too, are human beings, and we, too, can appreciate the effect the first memories and impressions in the family ‘nest’ can have upon the formation of a man’s character . . .

“Next, we see the little boy grown into a youth, then into a young officer and gentleman. For his wild behavior and his dueling, they send him off to a regiment stationed in a remote garrison town on one of the borders of our vast Russia. There he serves his country and there he leads an even wilder and more extravagant life. And, of course, the wilder the life, the higher the cost. And so he needs money, more and more of it. Well, after lengthy haggling with his father, they reach an agreement that he is entitled to six thousand rubles more, as a final settlement of the inheritance left him by his mother, and he receives that sum. Please note that there exists a document in which he practically renounces all further claims and, with this six thousand rubles, his argument with his father over the inheritance ends. At this moment, the young officer meets a young lady of high intelligence and high moral standards. Oh, I do not wish to go into the details of their relations. You have heard them here; they involve honor and self-sacrifice, and I won’t say any more. We had a glimpse of that irresponsible and wayward young man subdued by true nobility of feeling and higher ideals, and a spark of sympathy for him was lighted in our hearts. But shortly after that, in this same courtroom, we were also shown the other side of the coin. Again, I do not feel I have the right to make guesses and assumptions or to offer my analysis of how such a reversal of testimony took place. But there certainly were good reasons for it. The same young lady, her eyes now filled with the tears of indignation that had been suppressed for so long, told us that he was the first to despise her for her spontaneous, perhaps reckless, but certainly high-minded and generous, impulse. He was the first on whose face she detected that sarcastic little smile, and he, the man she was to marry, was the only person on whose face she could not bear to see it. Although she was well aware that he was deceiving her (being fully convinced that now she would have to bear everything, including even his faithlessness), she nevertheless put three thousand rubles at his disposal, letting him understand quite clearly that she was offering him this money to betray her with. ‘Will you be so cynical as to accept it?’ her intent, scrutinizing eyes asked him. He met her look and understood perfectly what she was thinking (why, he admitted here in court that he had understood everything), but he went on and took that three thousand and squandered it all in two days, on a wild spree with his new mistress. So what are we to believe? The first legend about the impulse of this noble man who gives away his last penny and who admires the young lady’s virtue? Or the obverse side of the coin, that is so revolting? Usually, in life, the truth lies between the two extremes. But, in this case, this rule definitely does not apply. Most probably, he was absolutely sincere in his generous impulse in the first instance, and just as sincere in his villainy in the second. And why is this so? Well, precisely because we are in the presence of one of these wide-ranging natures, the Karamazov nature, that can accommodate simultaneously the most contradictory traits and the two infinities—the infinite heights of the most noble ideals and the infinite depths of the lowest festering degradation. And that is what I am leading up to. Let me remind you of a brilliant thought expressed here earlier by Mr. Rakitin, a young observer who had observed the Karamazov family at very close quarters: ‘The feeling of degradation is as indispensable to these unbridled and unrestrained natures as the sense of supreme nobility.’ And this is very true; what they need is that unnatural combination, and they need it all the time, unceasingly. The two infinities, gentlemen, they need the two infinities at the very same moment, and without them they are unhappy and frustrated, they feel that their life is not complete. Ah, the breadth of our natures is as wide as our mother Russia, and it can contain everything; everything can coexist within us!

“Since the three thousand rubles has been mentioned now, I will allow myself to anticipate a little at this point. Can you conceive, gentlemen, that, having obtained money in such a shameful, degrading, and humiliating way, a man like the accused could, on the very day he had got hold of the money, set half the sum aside and sew it up in a rag, and then have the firmness of character to carry it around his neck for a whole month, despite all temptations to spend it and despite his urgent need for money? Neither during his drunken orgies nor when he had to rush out of town to look, God knows where, for the money he needed to take his beloved away from the temptations of his rival, his own father, could he bring himself to touch the little bag he carried around his neck! If only not to let his beloved succumb to the old man of whom he was so madly jealous, he would have ripped open the rag, stayed home, and guarded his lady love unceasingly until she finally told him, ‘I’m all yours!’ and then run away with her, as far as possible from this sinister setting. But no, he would not touch the little bag. And what reasons does he give? His original reason was that, when she finally said to him, ‘I’m all yours, take me away from here, wherever you want,’ he wanted to have the money to take her away with. But, according to the accused’s own admission, he had an even more important reason for not tearing open the rag: ‘As long as I have that money on me,’ he says he felt, ‘I may be a scoundrel but I’m not a thief, because I can always go to the woman I have betrayed, lay the remaining half of the misappropriated sum before her, and say to her, “See, I may have spent half your money and thus shown my weakness and lack of firm principles, shown myself to be, if you wish, a scoundrel” ’—I am using the accused’s own language—‘ “but I am, nevertheless, not a thief, for if I were, I would not have returned the remaining half of the money to you, but would have kept it and used it as I had the first half.” ’ This is the amazing explanation he offers us! We are asked to believe that this violent but weak man, a man who could not resist the temptation of accepting so dishonorably that three thousand rubles, would suddenly become so stoical as to carry fifteen hundred rubles around his neck without allowing himself to touch it! Is this the slightest bit consistent with what we have learned of his character? It is not, and I will take the liberty of telling you what Dmitry Karamazov would really have done if he had somehow decided to sew the money up in that little bag and carry it around his neck. Well, at the very first temptation, for instance, to entertain his new lady love, on whom he had already squandered fifteen hundred rubles, he would have ripped open the rag and taken out, let’s say, just one hundred rubles, for why should he return exactly half the original sum—fifteen hundred rubles—to its rightful owner? Wouldn’t fourteen hundred do as well? For, couldn’t he still tell her: ‘See, here I am bringing you back fourteen hundred rubles, so I am a scoundrel but not a thief, for a thief would have kept this too.’ Then, a bit later, he would have taken another hundred, then a third and a fourth and so on, and by the end of the month it would be the last hundred but one. He could still reason that, if he brought back even one single hundred-ruble bill, it would be the same thing and he could still tell her, ‘Here is your hundred rubles. I have spent twenty-nine hundred of your money, but this one I have brought back to you, because I am no thief, just a scoundrel.’ But finally, after the last but one hundred had been spent, he would look at the very last bill and he’d say to himself: ‘What’s the use of hanging on to this last hundred? I guess I might just as well spend it like the rest!’ Yes, that is how the real Dmitry Karamazov, whom we know, would have acted. The whole fiction about the little bag with the hundred-ruble bills in it is as incompatible with the facts as it could be. We could assume anything rather than that. But we shall come back to it.”

The prosecutor then summed up the known facts about the financial disputes between Fyodor Karamazov and his son Dmitry and about the personal relations between them, once again pointing out that it was impossible to determine who had been wronged and who had gained in the settlement of the inheritance left by Dmitry’s mother. After that, the prosecutor turned to the accused’s 
idée fixe
 about the three thousand rubles he considered his father owed him, and then he spoke of the testimony of the medical experts.

Chapter 7: A Chronological Survey

THE MEDICAL experts have tried to establish here that the accused is not in his right mind, that he is a maniac. I submit that he 
is
 in his right mind, but that this only makes things worse. If he were not in his right mind, he might have acted much more intelligently. As to his being a maniac, I would accept this notion, but only in one particular aspect—namely, when it comes to the three thousand rubles that his father allegedly still owed him, just as the medical experts pointed out. It may be possible, however, to find a much more obvious explanation for the accused’s excessively emotional attitude toward that money than a predisposition to insanity. Personally, I fully agree with the opinion of the young doctor, who believes that the accused is in complete possession of his mental faculties and that he was simply in a state of excessive resentment and irritation. And this is just the point: the constant frantic irritation of the accused was not actually caused by the three thousand rubles; something else triggered his anger. And that was jealousy!”

Here the prosecutor discussed at great length the accused’s fatal passion for Grushenka. He started from the point when the accused went to the lady’s house with the intention of “giving her a beating” (the prosecutor said he was using the accused’s own words), “but, instead of hitting her, he remained at her feet, and that was the beginning of his love.” But, at the same time, the accused’s father also noticed the young lady, and it was an amazing and fatal coincidence that these two hearts should have been set afire simultaneously, for although they had both met and known this person before, not until then were they seized by that violent, typically Karamazov passion.