The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (reading an ebook TXT) 📗
- Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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us, uttered some extremely offensive allusions to Doctor Herzenstube’s
qualifications. Though the Moscow doctor asked twenty-five roubles for
a visit, several people in the town were glad to take advantage of his
arrival, and rushed to consult him regardless of expense. All these
had, of course, been previously patients of Doctor Herzenstube, and
the celebrated doctor had criticised his treatment with extreme
harshness. Finally, he had asked the patients as soon as he saw
them, “Well, who has been cramming you with nostrums? Herzenstube?
He he!” Doctor Herzenstube, of course, heard all this, and now all the
three doctors made their appearance, one after another, to be
examined.
Doctor Herzenstube roundly declared that the abnormality of the
prisoner’s mental faculties was self-evident. Then giving his
grounds for this opinion, which I omit here, he added that the
abnormality was not only evident in many of the prisoner’s actions
in the past, but was apparent even now at this very moment. When he
was asked to explain how it was apparent now at this moment, the old
doctor, with simplehearted directness, pointed out that the
prisoner had “an extraordinary air, remarkable in the
circumstances”; that he had “marched in like a soldier, looking
straight before him, though it would have been more natural for him to
look to the left where, among the public, the ladies were sitting,
seeing that he was a great admirer of the fair sex and must be
thinking much of what the ladies are saying of him now,” the old man
concluded in his peculiar language.
I must add that he spoke Russian readily, but every phrase was
formed in German style, which did not, however, trouble him, for it
had always been a weakness of his to believe that he spoke Russian
perfectly, better indeed than Russians. And he was very fond of
using Russian proverbs, always declaring that the Russian proverbs
were the best and most expressive sayings in the whole world. I may
remark, too, that in conversation, through absent-mindedness he
often forgot the most ordinary words, which sometimes went out of
his head, though he knew them perfectly. The same thing happened,
though, when he spoke German, and at such times he always waved his
hand before his face as though trying to catch the lost word, and no
one could induce him to go on speaking till he had found the missing
word. His remark that the prisoner ought to have looked at the
ladies on entering roused a whisper of amusement in the audience.
All our ladies were very fond of our old doctor; they knew, too,
that having been all his life a bachelor and a religious man of
exemplary conduct, he looked upon women as lofty creatures. And so his
unexpected observation struck everyone as very queer.
The Moscow doctor, being questioned in his turn, definitely and
emphatically repeated that he considered the prisoner’s mental
condition abnormal in the highest degree. He talked at length and with
erudition of “aberration” and “mania,” and argued that, from all the
facts collected, the prisoner had undoubtedly been in a condition of
aberration for several days before his arrest, and, if the crime had
been committed by him, it must, even if he were conscious of it,
have been almost involuntary, as he had not the power to control the
morbid impulse that possessed him.
But apart from temporary aberration, the doctor diagnosed mania,
which promised, in his words, to lead to complete insanity in the
future. (It must be noted that I report this in my own words, the
doctor made use of very learned and professional language.) “All his
actions are in contravention of common sense and logic,” he continued.
“Not to refer to what I have not seen, that is, the crime itself and
the whole catastrophe, the day before yesterday, while he was
talking to me, he had an unaccountably fixed look in his eye. He
laughed unexpectedly when there was nothing to laugh at. He showed
continual and inexplicable irritability, using strange words,
‘Bernard!’ ‘Ethics!’ and others equally inappropriate.” But the doctor
detected mania, above all, in the fact that the prisoner could not
even speak of the three thousand roubles, of which he considered
himself to have been cheated, without extraordinary irritation, though
he could speak comparatively lightly of other misfortunes and
grievances. According to all accounts, he had even in the past,
whenever the subject of the three thousand roubles was touched on,
flown into a perfect frenzy, and yet he was reported to be a
disinterested and not grasping man.
“As to the opinion of my learned colleague,” the Moscow doctor
added ironically in conclusion “that the prisoner would, entering
the court, have naturally looked at the ladies and not straight before
him, I will only say that, apart from the playfulness of this
theory, it is radically unsound. For though I fully agree that the
prisoner, on entering the court where his fate will be decided,
would not naturally look straight before him in that fixed way, and
that that may really be a sign of his abnormal mental condition, at
the same time I maintain that he would naturally not look to the
left at the ladies, but, on the contrary, to the right to find his
legal adviser, on whose help all his hopes rest and on whose defence
all his future depends.” The doctor expressed his opinion positively
and emphatically.
But the unexpected pronouncement of Doctor Varvinsky gave the last
touch of comedy to the difference of opinion between the experts. In
his opinion the prisoner was now, and had been all along, in a
perfectly normal condition, and, although he certainly must have
been in a nervous and exceedingly excited state before his arrest,
this might have been due to several perfectly obvious causes,
jealousy, anger, continual drunkenness, and so on. But this nervous
condition would not involve the mental abberation of which mention had
just been made. As to the question whether the prisoner should have
looked to the left or to the right on entering the court, “in his
modest opinion,” the prisoner would naturally look straight before him
on entering the court, as he had in fact done, as that was where the
judges, on whom his fate depended, were sitting. So that it was just
by looking straight before him that he showed his perfectly normal
state of mind at the present. The young doctor concluded his
“modest” testimony with some heat.
“Bravo, doctor!” cried Mitya, from his seat, “just so!”
Mitya, of course, was checked, but the young doctor’s opinion
had a decisive influence on the judges and on the public, and, as
appeared afterwards, everyone agreed with him. But Doctor Herzenstube,
when called as a witness, was quite unexpectedly of use to Mitya. As
an old resident in the town, who had known the Karamazov family for
years, he furnished some facts of great value for the prosecution, and
suddenly, as though recalling something, he added:
“But the poor young man might have had a very different life,
for he had a good heart both in childhood and after childhood, that
I know. But the Russian proverb says, ‘If a man has one head, it’s
good, but if another clever man comes to visit him, it would be better
still, for then there will be two heads and not only one.”’
“One head is good, but two are better,” the prosecutor put in
impatiently. He knew the old man’s habit of talking slowly and
deliberately, regardless of the impression he was making and of the
delay he was causing, and highly prizing his flat, dull and always
gleefully complacent German wit. The old man was fond of making jokes.
“Oh, yes, that’s what I say,” he went on stubbornly. “One head
is good, but two are much better, but he did not meet another head
with wits, and his wits went. Where did they go? I’ve forgotten the
word.” He went on, passing his hand before his eyes, “Oh, yes,
spazieren.”*
* Promenading.
“Wandering?”
“Oh, yes, wandering, that’s what I say. Well, his wits went
wandering and fell in such a deep hole that he lost himself. And yet
he was a grateful and sensitive boy. Oh, I remember him very well, a
little chap so high, left neglected by his father in the back yard,
when he ran about without boots on his feet, and his little breeches
hanging by one button.”
A note of feeling and tenderness suddenly came into the honest old
man’s voice. Fetyukovitch positively started, as though scenting
something, and caught at it instantly.
“Oh, yes, I was a young man then…. I was… well, I was
forty-five then, and had only just come here. And I was so sorry for
the boy then; I asked myself why shouldn’t I buy him a pound of… a
pound of what? I’ve forgotten what it’s called. A pound of what
children are very fond of, what is it, what is it?” The doctor began
waving his hands again. “It grows on a tree and is gathered and
given to everyone…”
“Apples?”
“Oh, no, no. You have a dozen of apples, not a pound…. No, there
are a lot of them, and call little. You put them in the mouth and
crack.”
“Quite so, nuts, I say so.” The doctor repeated in the calmest way
as though he had been at no loss for a word. “And I bought him a pound
of nuts, for no one had ever bought the boy a pound of nuts before.
And I lifted my finger and said to him, ‘Boy, Gott der Vater.’ He
laughed and said, ‘Gott der Vater’… ‘Gott der Sohn.’ He laughed
again and lisped ‘Gott der Sohn.’ ‘Gott der heilige Geist.’ Then he
laughed and said as best he could, ‘Gott der heilige Geist.’ I went
away, and two days after I happened to be passing, and he shouted to
me of himself, ‘Uncle, Gott der Vater, Gott der Sohn,’ and he had only
forgotten ‘Gott der heilige Geist.’ But I reminded him of it and I
felt very sorry for him again. But he was taken away, and I did not
see him again. Twenty-three years passed. I am sitting one morning
in my study, a white-haired old man, when there walks into the room
a blooming young man, whom I should never have recognised, but he held
up his finger and said, laughing, ‘Gott der Vater, Gott der Sohn,
and Gott der heilige Geist. I have just arrived and have come to thank
you for that pound of nuts, for no one else ever bought me a pound
of nuts; you are the only one that ever did.’ then I remembered my
happy youth and the poor child in the yard, without boots on his feet,
and my heart was touched and I said, ‘You are a grateful young man,
for you have remembered all your life the pound of nuts I bought you
in your childhood.’ And I embraced him and blessed him. And I shed
tears. He laughed, but he shed tears, too… for the Russian often
laughs when he ought to be weeping. But he did weep; I saw it. And
now, alas!…”
“And I am weeping now, German, I am weeping now, too, you
saintly man,” Mitya cried suddenly.
In any case the anecdote made a certain favourable impression on
the public. But the chief sensation in Mitya’s favour was created by
the evidence of Katerina Ivanovna, which I will describe directly.
Indeed, when the witnesses a decharge, that is, called the defence,
began giving evidence, fortune seemed all at once markedly more
favourable to Mitya, and what was particularly striking, this was a
surprise even to
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