The Brothers Karamazov

Here Ippolit Kirillovich unfolded at length the whole picture of the defendant’s fatal passion for Grushenka. He began from the very moment when the defendant went to “the young person” in order “to give her a beating”—in his own words, Ippolit Kirillovich commented—”but instead of beating her, he stays there at her feet—that is the beginning of this love. At the same time the old man, the defendant’s father, also sets his eye on the same person—a coincidence both surprising and fatal, for both hearts caught fire suddenly, simultaneously, though they had met and known this person before—and both hearts caught fire with the most unrestrained, the most Karamazovian passion. Here we have her own confession: ‘I laughed,’ she says, ‘at both of them.’ Yes, she suddenly wanted to laugh at the two of them; she had not wanted to before, but now suddenly this intention flew into her mind—and the end of it was that they both fell conquered before her. The old man, who worshipped money as if it were God, at once prepared three thousand roubles if she would only just visit his abode, but was soon driven to the point where he would have considered it happiness to lay his name and all his property at her feet if only she would consent to become his lawful wife. For this we have firm evidence. As for the defendant, his tragedy is obvious, it stands before us. But such was this young person’s ‘game.’ The seductress did not even give any hope to the unfortunate young man, for hope, real hope, was given him only at the very last moment, when he, kneeling before his tormentress, stretched out to her his hands already stained with the blood of his father and rival: precisely in that position he was arrested. ‘Send me, send me to hard labor with him, I drove him to it, I am the guiltiest of all!’—this woman herself exclaimed, in sincere repentance, at the moment of his arrest. The talented young man who has taken it upon himself to write about the present case— the same Mr. Rakitin whom I have already mentioned—defines this heroine’s character in a few concise and characteristic phrases: ‘Early disappointment, early deception and fall, the treachery of a fiancé-seducer who abandoned her, then poverty, the curses of a respectable family, and, finally, the patronage of a rich old man, whom she herself incidentally regards even now as her benefactor. Anger was buried far too early in a young heart, which perhaps contained much good. What formed was a calculating, money-hoarding character. What formed was a derisive and vengeful attitude towards society.’ After such a characterization one can understand how she might laugh at the two of them simply as a game, a vicious game. And so, during this month of hopeless love, of moral degradation, of betrayal of his fiancée, of appropriation of another person’s money, which was entrusted to his honor—the defendant, on top of that, was driven almost to frenzy, almost to fury, by continual jealousy, and of whom—of his own father! Worst of all, the crazy old man was luring and seducing the object of his passion with the very three thousand that he regarded as his family money, his maternal inheritance, for which he reproached his father. Yes, I agree, this was hard to bear! Here even a mania might appear. The point was not the money, but that by means of this very money his happiness was being shattered with such loathsome cynicism!”

Ippolit Kirillovich then went on to tell how the thought of killing his father gradually emerged in the defendant, and traced it fact by fact.