The Brothers Karamazov

“It is not only the totality of the facts that ruins my client, gentlemen of the jury,” he exclaimed, “no, my client is ruined, in reality, by just one fact: the corpse of his old father! Were it simply a homicide, you, too, would reject the accusation, in view of the insignificant, the unsubstantiated, the fantastic nature of the facts when they are each examined separately and not in their totality; at least you would hesitate to ruin a man’s destiny merely because of your prejudice against him, which, alas, he has so richly deserved! But here we have not simply a homicide, but a parricide! This is impressive, and to such a degree that the very insignificance and unsubstantiatedness of the incriminating facts become not so insignificant and unsubstantiated, and that even in the most unprejudiced mind. Now, how can such a defendant be acquitted? And what if he did kill him and goes unpunished—that is what everyone feels in his heart, almost unwittingly, instinctively. Yes, it is a horrible thing to shed a father’s blood—his blood who begot me, his blood who loved me, his life’s blood who did not spare himself for me, who from childhood ached with my aches, who all his life suffered for my happiness and lived only in my joys, my successes! Oh, to kill such a father—who could even dream of it! Gentlemen of the jury, what is a father, a real father, what does this great word mean, what terribly great idea is contained in this appellation? We have just indicated something of what a true father is and ought to be. In the present case, with which all of us are now so involved, for which our souls ache—in the present case the father, the late Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, in no way fitted the idea of a father that has just spoken to our hearts. That is a calamity. Yes, indeed, some fathers are like a calamity. Let us examine this calamity more closely—we must not be afraid of anything, gentlemen of the jury, in view of the importance of the impending decision. We more especially ought not to be afraid now, or, so to speak, to wave certain ideas away, like children or frightened women, as the highly talented prosecutor happily expressed it. Yet in his ardent speech my esteemed opponent (my opponent even before I uttered my first word) exclaimed several times: ‘No, I shall not turn over the defense of the accused to anyone, I shall not yield his defense to the defense attorney from Petersburg—I am both prosecutor and defender!’ So he exclaimed several times, and yet he forgot to mention that if this terrible defendant was, for all of twenty-three years, so grateful just for one pound of nuts given him as a child by the only man who was ever nice to him in his paternal home, then, conversely, such a man could not fail to remember, for all those twenty-three years, how his father had him running around barefoot ‘in the backyard, without any shoes, his little britches hanging by one button,’ as the philanthropic Dr. Herzenstube put it. Oh, gentlemen of the jury, why need we examine this ‘calamity’ more closely, why repeat what everyone already knows! What did my client meet when he came home to his father? And why, why portray my client as heartless, as an egoist, a monster? He is unbridled, he is wild and stormy, that is why we are trying him now, but who is responsible for his destiny, who is responsible that for all his good inclinations, his noble, sensitive heart, he received such an absurd upbringing? Did anyone teach him any sense at all, has he been enlightened by learning, did anyone give him at least a little love in his childhood? My client grew up in God’s keeping—that is, like a wild beast. Perhaps he longed to see his father after so many years of separation; perhaps a thousand times before then, recalling his childhood as if in sleep, he had driven away the loathsome ghosts of his childhood dreams, and longed with all his soul to vindicate his father and embrace him! And now what? He meets with nothing but cynical jeers, suspiciousness, and pettifoggery over the disputed money; all he hears daily, ‘over the cognac,’ are talk and worldly precepts that make him sick at heart; and, finally, he beholds his father stealing his mistress away from him, from his own son, and with the son’s own money—oh, gentlemen of the jury, this is loathsome and cruel! And this same old man complains to everyone about the irreverence and cruelty of his son, besmirches him in society, injures him, slanders him, buys up his promissory notes in order to put him in jail! Gentlemen of the jury, these souls, these people who seem hardhearted, stormy, and unrestrained, people like my client, sometimes, and indeed most often, are extremely tenderhearted, only they keep it hidden. Do not laugh, do not laugh at my idea! Earlier the talented prosecutor laughed mercilessly at my client, pointing to his love for Schiller, his love for ‘the beautiful and lofty.’ I should not laugh at that if I were him, if I were a prosecutor! Yes, these hearts—oh, let me defend these hearts, which are so rarely and so wrongly understood—these hearts quite often thirst for what is tender, for what is beautiful and righteous, precisely the contrary, as it were, of themselves, of their storminess, their cruelty—thirst for it unconsciously, precisely thirst for it. Outwardly passionate and cruel, they are capable, for instance, of loving a woman to the point of torment, and inevitably with a lofty and spiritual love. Again, do not laugh at me: it most often happens precisely so with such natures! Only they are unable to conceal their passion, at times very coarse— and that is what strikes everyone, that is what everyone notices, and no one sees the inner man. On the contrary, all such passions are quickly spent, but at the side of a noble, beautiful being this apparently coarse and cruel man seeks renewal, seeks the chance to reform, to become better, to become lofty and honest—’lofty and beautiful,’ much ridiculed though the phrase may be! I said earlier that I would not venture to touch on my client’s romance with Miss Verkhovtsev. Yet I may allow myself half a word: what we heard earlier was not testimony, but only the cry of a frenzied and vengeful woman, and it is not for her, no, it is not for her to reproach him with betrayal, because she herself has betrayed him! If she had had a little time to think better of it, she would not have given such testimony! Oh, do not believe her, no, my client is not a ‘monster,’ as she called him! The crucified lover of mankind, as he was going to his cross, said: ‘I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep, so that not one will be destroyed . . .’^[349] Let us, too, not destroy a human soul! What is a father, I was asking just now, and exclaimed that it is a great word, a precious appellation. But, gentlemen of the jury, one must treat words honestly, and I shall allow myself to name a thing by the proper word, the proper appellation: such a father as the murdered old Karamazov cannot and does not deserve to be called a father. Love for a father that is not justified by the father is an absurdity, an impossibility. Love cannot be created out of nothing: only God creates out of nothing. ‘Fathers, provoke not your children,’ writes the apostle,^[350] from a heart aflame with love. I quote these holy words now not for the sake of my client, but as a reminder to all fathers. Who has empowered me to teach fathers? No one. But as a man and a citizen I call out—vivos voco!^[351] We are not long on this earth, we do many evil deeds and say many evil words. And therefore let us all seize the favorable moment of our being together in order to say a good word to each other as well. And so I do; while I am in this place, I make the best of my moment. Not in vain is this tribune given us by a higher will—from here we can be heard by the whole of Russia. I speak not only to fathers here, but to all fathers I cry out: ‘Fathers, provoke not your children!’ Let us first fulfill Christ’s commandment ourselves, and only then let us expect the same of our children. Otherwise we are not fathers but enemies of our children, and they are not our children but our enemies, and we ourselves have made them our enemies! ‘With what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you’^[352]—it is not I who say this, it is the Gospel precept: measure with the same measure as it is measured to you. How can we blame our children if they measure to us with our own measure? Recently in Finland a girl, a servant, was suspected of secretly giving birth to a baby. They began watching her, and in the attic of the house, in a corner, behind some bricks, found her chest, which no one knew about, opened it, and took out of it the little body of a newborn baby that she had killed. In the same chest were found two skeletons of babies she had given birth to previously and killed at the moment of birth, as she confessed. Gentlemen of the jury, was she a mother to her children? Yes, she gave birth to them, but was she a mother to them? Would any one of us dare pronounce over her the sacred name of mother? Let us be brave, gentlemen of the jury, let us even be bold, it is even our duty to be so in the present moment and not to be afraid of certain words and ideas, like Moscow merchants’ wives who are afraid of ‘metal’ and ‘brimstone.’^[353] No, let us prove, on the contrary, that the progress of the past few years has touched our development as well, and let us say straight out: he who begets is not yet a father; a father is he who begets and proves worthy of it. Oh, of course, there is another meaning, another interpretation of the word ‘father,’ which insists that my father, though a monster, though a villain to his children, is still my father simply because he begot me. But this meaning is, so to speak, a mystical one, which I do not understand with my reason, but can only accept by faith, or, more precisely, on faith, like many other things that I do not understand, but that religion nonetheless tells me to believe. But in that case let it remain outside the sphere of real life. While within the sphere of real life, which not only has its rights, but itself imposes great obligations—within this sphere, if we wish to be humane, to be Christians finally, it is our duty and obligation to foster only those convictions that are justified by reason and experience, that have passed through the crucible of analysis, in a word, to act sensibly and not senselessly as in dreams or delirium, so as not to bring harm to a man, so as not to torment and ruin a man. Then, then it will be a real Christian deed, not only a mystical one, but a sensible and truly philanthropic deed ...”