The Brothers Karamazov

“Forgive me, gentlemen of the jury, but there is a human life here, and we must be more careful. We have heard the prosecution testify that until the very last day, until today, until the day of the trial, even they hesitated to accuse the defendant of full and complete premeditation of the murder, hesitated until this same fatal ‘drunken’ letter was produced today in court. ‘It was accomplished as written!’ But again I repeat: he ran to her, for her, only to find out where she was. This is an indisputable fact. Had she been at home, he would not have run anywhere, he would have stayed with her, and would not have done what he promised in the letter. He ran impulsively and suddenly, and perhaps had no recollection at all of his ‘drunken’ letter. ‘He took the pestle with him,’ they say—and you will remember how an entire psychology was derived for us from this pestle alone: why he had to take this pestle as a weapon, to snatch it up as a weapon, and so on and so forth. A most ordinary thought comes to my mind here: what if this pestle had not been lying in plain sight, had not been on the shelf from which the defendant snatched it, but had been put away in a cupboard?—then it wouldn’t have caught the defendant’s eye, and he would have run off without a weapon, empty-handed, and so perhaps would not have killed anyone. How, then, can I possibly arrive at the conclusion that the pestle is a proof of arming and premeditating? Yes, but he shouted in the taverns that he was going to murder his father, and two days before, on the evening when he wrote his drunken letter, he was quiet and quarreled only with a shop clerk, ‘because,’ they say, ‘Karamazov could not help quarreling.’ To which I reply that if he was contemplating such a murder, had planned it, moreover, and written it out, he surely would not have quarreled with a shop clerk, and perhaps would not have stopped at the tavern at all, because a soul that has conceived such a thing seeks silence and self-effacement, seeks disappearance, not to be seen, not to be heard: ‘Forget all about me if you can,’ and that not only from calculation, but from instinct. Gentlemen of the jury, psychology has two ends, and we, too, are able to understand psychology. As for all this shouting in taverns for the whole month, oftentimes children or drunken idlers, leaving a tavern or quarreling with each other, shout: ‘I’ll kill you,’ but they don’t kill anyone. And this fatal letter—is it not also drunken exasperation, the shout of a man coming out of a tavern: ‘I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you all! ‘ Why not, why could it not be so? What makes this letter a fatal one; why, on the contrary, is it not funny? Precisely because the corpse of the murdered father has been found, because a witness saw the defendant in the garden, armed and running away, and was himself struck down by him—therefore it was all accomplished as written, and therefore the letter is not funny but fatal. Thank God, we have gotten to the point: ‘Since he was in the garden, it means he also killed him.’ On these two words—since he was, it also inevitably means—everything, the entire accusation, rests: ‘He was, therefore it means.’ And what if it does not mean, even though he was? Oh, I agree that the totality of the facts and the coincidence of the facts are indeed rather eloquent. Consider all these facts separately, however, without being impressed by their totality: why, for instance, will the prosecution in no way accept the truth of the defendant’s testimony that he ran away from his father’s window? Remember the sarcasms the prosecution allows itself concerning the respectfulness and ‘pious’ feelings that suddenly took hold of the murderer. And what if there actually was something of the sort—that is, if not respectfulness of feeling, then piety of feeling? ‘My mother must have been praying for me at that moment,’ the defendant testified at the investigation, and so he ran away as soon as he was convinced that Miss Svetlov was not in his father’s house. ‘But he could not have been convinced by looking through the window,’ the prosecution objects to us. And why couldn’t he? After all, the window was opened when the defendant gave the signals. Fyodor Pavlovich might have uttered some one word then, some cry might have escaped him—and the defendant might suddenly have been convinced that Miss Svetlov was not there. Why must we assume what we imagine, or imagine what we have assumed? In reality a thousand things can flash by, which escape the observation of the subtlest novelist. ‘Yes, but Grigory saw the door open, therefore the defendant had certainly been in the house, and therefore he killed him.’ About that door, gentlemen of the jury ... You see, about that open door we have testimony from only one person, who was himself, however, in such a condition at the time ... But suppose it was so, suppose the door was open, suppose the defendant denied it, lied about it from a sense of self-protection, quite understandable in his position; suppose so, suppose he got into the house, was in the house—well, what of it, why is it so inevitable that if he was, he also killed him? He might have burst in, run through the rooms, might have pushed his father aside, might even have hit his father, and then, convinced that Miss Svetlov was not there, he might have run away rejoicing that she was not there and that he had run away without killing his father. Perhaps he jumped down from the fence a moment later to help Grigory, whom he had struck down in his excitement, precisely because he was capable of a pure feeling, a feeling of compassion and pity, because he had run away from the temptation to kill his father, because he felt in himself a pure heart and the joy that he had not killed his father. With horrifying eloquence, the prosecutor describes to us the terrible state the defendant was in when love opened to him again, in the village of Mokroye, calling him to new life, and when it was no longer possible for him to love, because behind him lay the bloodstained corpse of his father, and beyond that corpse—punishment. Yet the prosecutor still assumes there was love, and has explained it according to his psychology: ‘Drunkenness,’ he says ‘a criminal being taken to his execution, still a long time to wait,’ and so on and so forth. But, I ask you again, have you not created a different character, Mr. Prosecutor? Is the defendant so coarse, is he so heartless that he could still think at that moment about love and about hedging before the court, if indeed the blood of his father lay upon him? No, no, and no! As soon as it became clear to him that she loved him, was calling him to her, promised him new happiness—oh, I swear, he should then have felt a double, a triple need to kill himself, and he would certainly have killed himself if he had had his father’s corpse behind him! Oh, no, he would not have forgotten where his pistols lay! I know the defendant: the savage, stony heartlessness imputed to him by the prosecution is incompatible with his character. He would have killed himself, that is certain; he did not kill himself precisely because ‘his mother prayed for him,’ and his heart was guiltless of his father’s blood. That night in Mokroye he suffered, he grieved only for the stricken old man Grigory, and prayed to God within himself that the old man would rise and recover, that his blow would not be fatal and punishment would pass him by. Why should we not accept such an interpretation of events? What firm proof have we that the defendant is lying to us? But there is his father’s body, it will be pointed out to us again: he ran away, he did not kill him—then who did kill the old man?