XIII. Прелюбодей мысли

Were this a simple murder, then you — given the triviality, the want of proof, the fantastical character of the facts, if each is weighed on its own rather than all together — you would have rejected the charge, or would at the very least have hesitated to wreck a man's life merely on the strength of a prejudice against him, a prejudice that, alas, he has so richly earned!

But here it is no simple murder — it is parricide!

That impresses, and to such a degree that even the very triviality and groundlessness of the incriminating facts ceases to seem so trivial and so groundless — and this in even the least prejudiced mind.

Well, how is one to acquit such a defendant?

But what if he killed and walks away unpunished? — that is what each of us feels in his heart, almost involuntarily, by instinct.

Yes, it is a fearful thing to spill a father's blood — the blood of the man who begot him, who loved him, who did not begrudge his own life for his sake, who from my earliest years ached with my every illness, who suffered his whole life long for my happiness and lived only by my joys, my successes!

Oh, to kill such a father — why, the very thought of it is impossible!

Gentlemen of the jury, what is a father, a true father — what is this word, so great, what fearfully great idea lies in that very name?

We have just now indicated, in part, what a true father is and what he ought to be.

But in the present case, the case that so engrosses us all now, the case that makes our souls ache — in the present case the father, the late Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, in no way answered to that conception of a father which has just now spoken itself to our hearts.

That is a calamity.

Yes, indeed, a certain kind of father is very like a calamity.

Let us look at this calamity more closely, then — for there is nothing to fear, gentlemen of the jury, given the gravity of the decision before us.

We must not, just now, be especially afraid and, so to speak, wave off some idea like children or timid women — to borrow the felicitous phrase of the highly gifted prosecutor.

But in his fervent speech my esteemed adversary (and an adversary already before I had uttered my first word), my adversary cried out several times: 'No, I shall let no one else defend the accused; I will not yield his defense to a defender who has come up from Petersburg — I am the prosecutor, and I am the defender too!'

That is what he cried out several times, and yet he forgot to mention that, if the fearful defendant was for fully twenty-three years so grateful for nothing more than a single pound of nuts received from the one and only person who had ever shown him kindness as a child in his father's house, then, conversely, such a man surely could not have failed to remember, all those twenty-three years, how he had run barefoot at his father's place 'in the back yard, without boots, in little trousers held by a single button' — to use the phrase of that lover of his fellow men, Dr. Herzenstube.

Oh, gentlemen of the jury, why should we look more closely at this 'calamity,' why repeat what everyone already knows!

What did my client meet with when he came here, to his father? And why, why must we paint my client as unfeeling, an egotist, a monster?

He is unrestrained, he is wild and headstrong — and here we are now judging him for it — but who is to blame for his fate, who is to blame that, for all his good inclinations, for all his noble and sensitive heart, he received so preposterous an upbringing?

Did anyone teach him sense and reason, was he given any schooling, did anyone love him even a little in his childhood?

My client grew up under the protection of God — that is to say, like a wild beast.

He may, perhaps, have longed to see his father after the long years of separation; perhaps a thousand times before that, recalling his childhood as though through a dream, he drove off the loathsome specters that had haunted his boyhood, and with his whole soul longed to forgive his father and embrace him!

And what then?

He is met with nothing but cynical jeers, suspicion, and pettifogging quibbles over disputed money; daily, 'over the brandy,' he hears only talk and rules of living that turn the heart; and at last he beholds his father luring away his mistress — his, the son's — and with the son's own money: oh, gentlemen of the jury, it is loathsome and cruel!

And this same old man goes about complaining to everyone of his son's disrespect and cruelty, blackens his name in society, does him harm, slanders him, buys up his promissory notes so as to throw him into prison!

Gentlemen of the jury, these souls, these people who seem hard-hearted, turbulent, and unrestrained — like my client — are often, indeed most often, exceedingly tender at heart; they simply do not show it.

Do not laugh, do not laugh at my idea!

The gifted prosecutor was mocking my client mercilessly a little while ago, holding up against him that he loves Schiller, that he loves 'the beautiful and the lofty.'

I would not have laughed at that, were I in his place — in the prosecutor's place!

Yes, these hearts — oh, let me defend these hearts, so rarely and so unjustly understood — these hearts very often thirst for the tender, the beautiful, the just, precisely as a kind of counterpoise to themselves, to their own turbulence, their own cruelty; they thirst unconsciously, and thirst they truly do.

Passionate and cruel on the surface, they are capable of loving — a woman, for instance — to the point of torment, and inevitably with a spiritual and exalted love.

Again, do not laugh at me: it is precisely this that happens most often in such natures!

It is only that they cannot conceal their passion, often a very coarse one — and that is just what strikes the eye, that is just what people notice, while inside the man they do not see.

On the contrary, all their passions are quickly stilled; but in the presence of a noble, beautiful being, this seemingly coarse and cruel man seeks renewal, seeks the chance to mend himself, to become better, to make himself lofty and honorable — 'lofty and beautiful,' however much that phrase has been ridiculed!

A little while ago I said that I would not permit myself to touch upon my client's romance with Mademoiselle Verkhovtseva.

And yet a half-word may be said: what we heard a little while ago was not testimony but only the cry of a frenzied and avenging woman, and it is not for her — oh, not for her — to reproach anyone with betrayal, for she herself was the one who betrayed!

Had she had even a little time to collect herself, she would never have given such evidence!

Oh, do not believe her — no, my client is no 'fiend,' as she called him!

As he went up to his cross, the crucified lover of mankind said: 'I am the Good Shepherd; the good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep, that not one of them should perish…'

Let us, too, not destroy a human soul!

I asked just now: what is a father — and I exclaimed that it is a great word, a precious name.

But a word, gentlemen of the jury, must be handled honestly, and I shall permit myself to call the thing by its own word, its own name: such a father as the murdered old man Karamazov neither can nor deserves to be called a father.

Love for a father that the father has not earned is an absurdity, an impossibility.

One cannot create love out of nothing; only God creates out of nothing.

'Fathers, provoke not your children,' the Apostle writes out of a heart blazing with love.

It is not for my client's sake that I invoke these holy words now; I recall them for all fathers.

Who gave me this authority, to instruct fathers?

No one.

But as a man and a citizen I make my appeal — vivos voco!

We are on this earth but a short while; we do many evil deeds and speak many evil words.

And so let us all seize the convenient moment of our being together, to say a kind word to one another as well.

So it is with me: while I stand in this place, I make use of my moment.

Not for nothing has this tribune been granted to us by a higher will — from it all Russia hears us.

I speak not for the fathers here alone, but I cry out to all fathers: 'Fathers, provoke not your children!'

Let us first fulfill the commandment of Christ ourselves, and only then permit ourselves to demand it of our children too.

Otherwise we are not fathers but enemies to our children, and they are not our children but enemies to us — and we ourselves have made them our enemies!

'With what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again' — that is no longer I who speak; it is the Gospel that ordains it: to mete out in the same measure that is meted out to you.

How, then, are we to blame our children, if they mete out to us in our own measure?

Not long ago in Finland a certain young woman, a servant, was suspected of having secretly given birth to a child.

They began to watch her, and in the attic of the house, in a corner behind the bricks, they found her trunk, which no one had known of; they unlocked it and drew out the little corpse of a newborn infant she had killed.

In the same trunk they found the skeletons of two more infants she had borne earlier and likewise killed at the moment of birth, which she confessed to.

Gentlemen of the jury, is this a mother to her children?