VI. Речь прокурора. Характеристика

He said so himself afterward.

He regarded this speech as his chef-d'œuvre, the chef-d'œuvre of his whole life, his swan song.

True, nine months later he did die of a galloping consumption, so that, as it turned out, he would indeed have had the right to compare himself to a swan singing its last song, had he foreseen his end in advance.

Into this speech he poured his whole heart and all the intelligence he possessed, and he proved unexpectedly that within him there lay hidden both a civic feeling and those "accursed" questions — at least insofar as our poor Ippolit Kirillovitch was able to contain them.

Above all, his words carried because they were sincere: he sincerely believed in the prisoner's guilt; it was not to order, not merely out of duty that he accused him, and in calling for "retribution" he truly shook with the longing "to save society."

Even our ladies in the audience, hostile to Ippolit Kirillovitch in the end, nonetheless confessed to the extraordinary impression they carried away.

He began in a cracked, faltering voice, but very soon his voice gained strength and rang out across the whole courtroom, and so it stayed to the end of the speech.

But the moment he had finished it, he very nearly fainted away.

"Gentlemen of the jury," the prosecutor began, "this present case has thundered through all of Russia.

But what, one might ask, is there to wonder at, what is there to be so particularly horrified by?

We of all people, we especially?

For we are people so accustomed to all of this!

That is the very horror of our condition — that such grim affairs have almost ceased to be horrifying to us!

That is what we ought to be horrified by — our own habituation — and not the isolated misdeed of this or that individual.

Where, then, lie the causes of our indifference, of our barely lukewarm response to such affairs, to such signs of the times, which prophesy for us an unenviable future?

Is it in our cynicism, in the early exhaustion of the mind and imagination of our society, still so young and yet so prematurely decrepit?

Is it in our moral foundations, shaken to their very base — or, finally, in the fact that perhaps we have no such moral foundations at all?

I do not resolve these questions; even so, they are tormenting, and every citizen not only should but is bound to suffer over them.

Our nascent, still timid press has nonetheless already rendered society some services, for without it we should never have learned, in any measure of fullness, about those horrors of unbridled will and moral degradation which it relays without cease on its pages to everyone now, not only to those who attend the halls of the new public court granted to us under the present reign.

And what do we read almost daily?

Oh, of such things every minute — things beside which even the present case pales and comes to seem almost something already ordinary.

But the most important thing is this: that a multitude of our Russian, our national criminal cases bear witness precisely to something universal, to some common affliction that has settled in among us and which, as with any universal evil, it is already hard to combat.

Here is a young, brilliant officer of high society, scarcely beginning his life and career, who basely, in stealth, without the slightest pang of conscience, cuts the throat of a petty official, in part his own former benefactor, and of that official's servant-woman, in order to make off with his own promissory note and, along with it, the rest of the official's money: "It will come in handy for my high-society pleasures and for my career ahead."

Having cut both their throats, he leaves, having slipped pillows under the heads of the two corpses.

There a young hero, hung with crosses for valor, murders like a brigand on the high road the mother of his own commander and benefactor, and, talking his comrades into it, assures them that "she loves him like her own son, and will therefore follow all his advice and take no precautions."

Granted he is a monster — but now, in our time, I no longer dare to say that he is merely an isolated monster.

Another would not cut a throat, but he would think and feel exactly as that man did; in his soul he is just as dishonorable as he.

In stillness, alone with his own conscience, he perhaps asks himself: "And what, after all, is honor — and is not blood a prejudice?"

Perhaps they will cry out against me and say that I am a sick man, a hysteric, that I slander monstrously, that I rave and exaggerate.

Let them, let them — and, God, how glad I would be of it, the first to rejoice!

Oh, do not believe me, count me a sick man, but all the same remember my words: for if even a tenth, even a twentieth part of what I say is true, then even then it is dreadful!

Look, gentlemen, look how our young people shoot themselves: oh, without the least of Hamlet's questions about "what will be there," without a trace of those questions, as though that whole matter of our spirit and of all that awaits us beyond the grave had long ago been blotted out of their nature, buried and strewn over with sand.

Look, finally, at our debauchery, at our sensualists.

Fyodor Pavlovitch, the hapless victim of the present trial, is before some of them almost an innocent babe.

And yet we all knew him, "he lived among us"…

Yes, the psychology of Russian crime will perhaps one day be taken up by the foremost minds, both ours and Europe's, for the theme is worth it.

But that study will be undertaken sometime later, at leisure, and when the whole tragic muddle of our present moment has receded into a more distant plane, so that it can already be examined more wisely and more dispassionately than men such as I are able to do.

But for now we either are horrified or pretend to be horrified, while in truth, on the contrary, we relish the spectacle like connoisseurs of strong, eccentric sensations that stir our cynically lazy idleness — or else, finally, like little children, we wave the frightful specters away from us with our hands and hide our heads in the pillow until the frightful vision passes, only to forget it the next instant in mirth and games.

But sometime we too must begin to live our life soberly and thoughtfully; we too must cast a glance at ourselves as a society; we too must make sense of at least something in our public affairs, or at least begin our reckoning of it.

A great writer of the preceding age, in the finale of the greatest of his works, personifying all of Russia as a dashing Russian troika racing toward an unknown goal, exclaims: "Ah, troika, bird-troika, who dreamed you up!" — and adds in proud rapture that before the troika racing headlong all the nations respectfully step aside.

So be it, gentlemen, let them step aside, respectfully or not; but, to my sinful eye, the writer of genius ended thus either in a fit of childishly innocent fine-feeling, or simply out of fear of the censorship of his day.

For if you harness to his troika only his own heroes — the Sobakevitches, the Nozdryovs and the Tchitchikovs — then whomever you set up as driver, you will get nowhere worthwhile on such horses!

And those are still only the old horses, far inferior to today's — ours are of a finer breed…"

Here Ippolit Kirillovitch's speech was interrupted by applause.

The liberalism of his depiction of the Russian troika had pleased the room.

True, only two or three claps broke out, so that the presiding judge did not even find it necessary to address the public with a threat to "clear the hall" and merely glanced sternly in the direction of the clappers.

But Ippolit Kirillovitch was heartened: never until now had he been applauded!

Here was a man no one had cared to listen to for so many years, and suddenly the chance to speak out before all of Russia!

"Indeed," he went on, "what is this Karamazov family that has suddenly earned such mournful renown throughout all of Russia?

Perhaps I exaggerate too much, but it seems to me that in the picture of this little family there flicker, as it were, certain general, fundamental elements of our contemporary educated society — oh, not all the elements, and they flickered only in microscopic form, "like the sun in a small drop of water," but still something was reflected, something made itself known.

Look at this unhappy, unbridled and debauched old man, this "father of a family," who brought his existence to so mournful a close.

A nobleman by birth, who began his career as a poor little hanger-on, who through a chance and unlooked-for marriage seized a small bit of capital as a dowry, at first a petty cheat and fawning buffoon with the germ of mental abilities — fairly capable ones, by the way — and above all a usurer.

With the years — that is, as his little capital grew — he took heart.

The cringing and the toadying fell away, and there remained only a mocking, malicious cynic and sensualist.

The spiritual side was wholly blotted out, while his thirst for life was extraordinary.

It came down to this: that apart from voluptuous pleasures he saw nothing at all in life — and so he taught his children too.