The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (reading an ebook TXT) 📗

class="calibre1">opinions, quite the contrary in fact, which justifies me in speaking

rather openly of him now, of course, not as an individual, but as a

member of the Karamazov family. Another personage closely connected

with the case died here by his own hand last night. I mean an

afflicted idiot, formerly the servant, and possibly the illegitimate

son, of Fyodor Pavlovitch, Smerdyakov. At the preliminary inquiry,

he told me with hysterical tears how the young Ivan Karamazov had

horrified him by his spiritual audacity. ‘Everything in the world is

lawful according to him, and nothing must be forbidden in the

future-that is what he always taught me.’ I believe that idiot was

driven out of his mind by this theory, though, of course, the

epileptic attacks from which he suffered, and this terrible

catastrophe, have helped to unhinge his faculties. But he dropped

one very interesting observation, which would have done credit to a

more intelligent observer, and that is, indeed, why I’ve mentioned it:

‘If there is one of the sons that is like Fyodor Pavlovitch in

character, it is Ivan Fyodorovitch.’

 

“With that remark I conclude my sketch of his character, feeling

it indelicate to continue further. Oh, I don’t want to draw any

further conclusions and croak like a raven over the young man’s

future. We’ve seen to-day in this court that there are still good

impulses in his young heart, that family feeling has not been

destroyed in him by lack of faith and cynicism, which have come to him

rather by inheritance than by the exercise of independent thought.

 

“Then the third son. Oh, he is a devout and modest youth, who does

not share his elder brother’s gloomy and destructive theory of life.

He has sought to cling to the ‘ideas of the people,’ or to what goes

by that name in some circles of our intellectual classes. He clung

to the monastery, and was within an ace of becoming a monk. He seems

to me to have betrayed unconsciously, and so early, that timid despair

which leads so many in our unhappy society, who dread cynicism and its

corrupting influences, and mistakenly attribute all the mischief to

European enlightenment, to return to their ‘native soil,’ as they say,

to the bosom, so to speak, of their mother earth, like frightened

children, yearning to fall asleep on the withered bosom of their

decrepit mother, and to sleep there for ever, only to escape the

horrors that terrify them.

 

“For my part I wish the excellent and gifted young man every

success; I trust that youthful idealism and impulse towards the

ideas of the people may never degenerate, as often happens, on the

moral side into gloomy mysticism, and on the political into blind

chauvinism-two elements which are even a greater menace to Russia

than the premature decay, due to misunderstanding and gratuitous

adoption of European ideas, from which his elder brother is

suffering.”

 

Two or three people clapped their hands at the mention of

chauvinism and mysticism. Ippolit Kirillovitch had been, indeed,

carried away by his own eloquence. All this had little to do with

the case in hand, to say nothing of the fact of its being somewhat

vague, but the sickly and consumptive man was overcome by the desire

to express himself once in his life. People said afterwards that he

was actuated by unworthy motives in his criticism of Ivan, because the

latter had on one or two occasions got the better of him in

argument, and Ippolit Kirillovitch, remembering it, tried now to

take his revenge. But I don’t know whether it was true. All this was

only introductory, however, and the speech passed to more direct

consideration of the case.

 

“But to return to the eldest son,” Ippolit Kirillovitch went on.

“He is the prisoner before us. We have his life and his actions,

too, before us; the fatal day has come and all has been brought to the

surface. While his brothers seem to stand for ‘Europeanism’ and ‘the

principles of the people,’ he seems to represent Russia as she is. Oh,

not all Russia, not all! God preserve us, if it were! Yet, here we

have her, our mother Russia, the very scent and sound of her. Oh, he

is spontaneous, he is a marvellous mingling of good and evil, he is

a lover of culture and Schiller, yet he brawls in taverns and plucks

out the beards of his boon companions. Oh, he, too, can be good and

noble, but only when all goes well with him. What is more, he can be

carried off his feet, positively carried off his feet by noble ideals,

but only if they come of themselves, if they fall from heaven for him,

if they need not be paid for. He dislikes paying for anything, but

is very fond of receiving, and that’s so with him in everything. Oh,

give him every possible good in life (he couldn’t be content with

less), and put no obstacle in his way, and he will show that he,

too, can be noble. He is not greedy, no, but he must have money, a

great deal of money, and you will see how generously, with what

scorn of filthy lucre, he will fling it all away in the reckless

dissipation of one night. But if he has not money, he will show what

he is ready to do to get it when he is in great need of it. But all

this later, let us take events in their chronological order.

 

“First, we have before us a poor abandoned child, running about

the backyard ‘without boots on his feet,’ as our worthy and

esteemed fellow citizen, of foreign origin, alas! expressed it just

now. I repeat it again, I yield to no one the defence of the criminal.

I am here to accuse him, but to defend him also. Yes, I, too, am

human; I, too, can weigh the influence of home and childhood on the

character. But the boy grows up and becomes an officer; for a duel and

other reckless conduct he is exiled to one of the remote frontier

towns of Russia. There he led a wild life as an officer. And, of

course, he needed money, money before all things, and so after

prolonged disputes he came to a settlement with his father, and the

last six thousand was sent him. A letter is in existence in which he

practically gives up his claim to the rest and settles his conflict

with his father over the inheritance on the payment of this six

thousand.

 

“Then came his meeting with a young girl of lofty character and

brilliant education. Oh, I do not venture to repeat the details; you

have only just heard them. Honour, self-sacrifice were shown there,

and I will be silent. The figure of the young officer, frivolous and

profligate, doing homage to true nobility and a lofty ideal, was shown

in a very sympathetic light before us. But the other side of the medal

was unexpectedly turned to us immediately after in this very court.

Again I will not venture to conjecture why it happened so, but there

were causes. The same lady, bathed in tears of long-concealed

indignation, alleged that he, he of all men, had despised her for

her action, which, though incautious, reckless perhaps, was still

dictated by lofty and generous motives. He, he, the girl’s

betrothed, looked at her with that smile of mockery, which was more

insufferable from him than from anyone. And knowing that he had

already deceived her (he had deceived her, believing that she was

bound to endure everything from him, even treachery), she

intentionally offered him three thousand roubles, and clearly, too

clearly, let him understand that she was offering him money to deceive

her. ‘Well, will you take it or not, are you so lost to shame?’ was

the dumb question in her scrutinising eyes. He looked at her, saw

clearly what was in her mind (he’s admitted here before you that he

understood it all), appropriated that three thousand

unconditionally, and squandered it in two days with the new object

of his affections.

 

“What are we to believe then? The first legend of the young

officer sacrificing his last farthing in a noble impulse of generosity

and doing reverence to virtue, or this other revolting picture? As a

rule, between two extremes one has to find the mean, but in the

present case this is not true. The probability is that in the first

case he was genuinely noble, and in the second as genuinely base.

And why? Because he was of the broad Karamazov character-that’s

just what I am leading up to-capable of combining the most

incongruous contradictions, and capable of the greatest heights and of

the greatest depths. Remember the brilliant remark made by a young

observer who has seen the Karamazov family at close quarters-Mr.

Rakitin: ‘The sense of their own degradation is as essential to

those reckless, unbridled natures as the sense of their lofty

generosity.’ And that’s true, they need continually this unnatural

mixture. Two extremes at the same moment, or they are miserable and

dissatisfied and their existence is incomplete. They are wide, wide as

mother Russia; they include everything and put up with everything.

 

“By the way, gentlemen of the jury, we’ve just touched upon that

three thousand roubles, and I will venture to anticipate things a

little. Can you conceive that a man like that, on receiving that sum

and in such a way, at the price of such shame, such disgrace, such

utter degradation, could have been capable that very day of setting

apart half that sum, that very day, and sewing it up in a little

bag, and would have had the firmness of character to carry it about

with him for a whole month afterwards, in spite of every temptation

and his extreme need of it! Neither in drunken debauchery in

taverns, nor when he was flying into the country, trying to get from

God knows whom, the money so essential to him to remove the object

of his affections from being tempted by his father, did he bring

himself to touch that little bag! Why, if only to avoid abandoning his

mistress to the rival of whom he was so jealous, he would have been

certain to have opened that bag and to have stayed at home to keep

watch over her, and to await the moment when she would say to him at

last ‘I am yours,’ and to fly with her far from their fatal

surroundings.

 

“But no, he did not touch his talisman, and what is the reason

he gives for it? The chief reason, as I have just said, was that

when she would say’ I am yours, take me where you will,’ he might have

the wherewithal to take her. But that first reason, in the

prisoner’s own words, was of little weight beside the second. While

I have that money on me, he said, I am a scoundrel, not a thief, for I

can always go to my insulted betrothed, and, laying down half the

sum I have fraudulently appropriated, I can always say to her, ‘You

see, I’ve squandered half your money, and shown I am a weak and

immoral man, and, if you like, a scoundrel’ (I use the prisoner’s

own expressions), ‘but though I am a scoundrel, I am not a thief,

for if I had been a thief, I shouldn’t have brought you back this half

of the money, but should have taken it as I did the other half!’ A

marvellous explanation! This frantic, but weak man, who could not

resist the temptation of accepting the three thousand roubles at the

price of such disgrace, this very man suddenly develops the most

stoical firmness, and carries about a thousand roubles without

daring to