IX. Психология на всех парах. Скачущая тройка. Финал речи прокурора

“Karamazov, who had been jealous to the point of frenzy of every man alive, all at once and in an instant seems to collapse and vanish before the ‘previous’ and the ‘incontestable.’

And it is the stranger because before this he had paid almost no attention at all to that new danger to himself, looming in the person of a rival he had never expected.

But he kept imagining that it was still a long way off, and a Karamazov lives only in the present minute.

Most likely he even took the man for a fiction.

But the moment he grasped, with his aching heart, that this was perhaps the very reason the woman had hidden this new rival, the very reason she had deceived him earlier that day — that this rival, alighting out of the blue, was for her no fantasy and no fiction, but made up her whole world, her whole hope in life — the moment he grasped that, he submitted.

Well then, gentlemen of the jury, I cannot pass over in silence this sudden trait in the soul of the accused — a man who, one would have thought, was incapable of showing it for anything in the world — in whom there suddenly spoke an inexorable need for the truth, for respect toward the woman, for the acknowledgment of her heart’s rights, and at what moment, if you please — at the very moment when, because of her, he had stained his own hands with his father’s blood!

True it is, too, that the blood already spilt was crying out at that minute for vengeance, for he — having ruined his own soul and his whole earthly fate — must have felt, in spite of himself, and asked himself in that instant: ‘What am I, and what can I mean to her ''now'', to this creature I love more than my own soul, set beside that “previous” and “incontestable” one — the man who has repented and come back to this woman I once ruined, come back with a new love, with honourable proposals, with the vow of a life reborn and already happy.

And I, the wretch, what can I give her ''now'', what can I offer her?’

Karamazov understood all this; he understood that his crime had barred every road to him, and that he was nothing but a criminal sentenced to death — not a man with a life to live!

This thought crushed him and annihilated him.

And so in an instant he fastens upon one frenzied plan, which, given Karamazov’s character, could not but present itself to him as the sole and fatal way out of his terrible situation.

This way out is suicide.

He runs to fetch the pistols he had pawned with the clerk Perhotin, and at the same time, along the way, on the run, he snatches from his pocket all his money — the money for which he had only just spattered his hands with his father’s blood.

Oh, the money is more needful to him now than anything: Karamazov is dying, Karamazov is shooting himself, and this shall be remembered!

Not for nothing, after all, are we a poet; not for nothing have we burned away our life like a candle at both ends.

‘To her, to her — and there, oh, there I shall throw a feast for the whole world, such a feast as has never been seen, one to be remembered and told of long afterward.

Amid wild shouting, amid frantic gypsy songs and dancing, we shall raise the cup of health and toast the adored woman on her new happiness, and then — right there, at her feet, before her very eyes — we shall dash out our brains and execute our own life!

Some day she will remember Mitya Karamazov, will see how Mitya loved her, will feel pity for Mitya!’

Much of it is theatrical, full of romantic frenzy, of wild, headlong Karamazov abandon and sentimentality — well, and of something else besides, gentlemen of the jury, something that cries out in the soul, hammers ceaselessly in the mind and poisons the heart unto death; this ''something'' is conscience, gentlemen of the jury, it is the judgment of conscience, it is its dreadful pangs of remorse!

But the pistol will reconcile everything; the pistol is the only way out, and there is no other, while as for what lies beyond — I do not know whether Karamazov was thinking, at that minute, ''“of what would come beyond,”'' or whether a Karamazov is even capable of brooding, Hamlet-fashion, on what would come there.

No, gentlemen of the jury, they over there have their Hamlets, while we, as yet, have only Karamazovs!”

Here Ippolit Kirillovitch unfolded a most detailed picture of Mitya’s preparations — the scene at Perhotin’s, in the shop, with the drivers.

He cited a mass of words, sayings, and gestures, all confirmed by witnesses — and the picture had a terrible effect on the conviction of those who heard it.

Above all, it was the sum of the facts together that told.

The guilt of this man — frenzied, in torment, and no longer caring what became of himself — stood out irresistibly.

“He had nothing left to spare himself for,” said Ippolit Kirillovitch, “two or three times he came within a hair’s breadth of confessing outright, all but hinted at it, and stopped only just short of saying it (here followed the witnesses’ testimony).

He even cried out to the driver on the road: ‘Do you know you are carrying a murderer!’

But say it out fully he could not, all the same: he had first to reach the village of Mokroe, and only there to finish his poem.

But what, after all, awaits the unhappy man?

The thing is that almost from the very first minutes at Mokroe he sees, and at last grasps completely, that his “incontestable” rival is perhaps not so incontestable after all, and that no congratulations on her new happiness, no cup of health, are wanted from him or will be accepted.

But you already know the facts, gentlemen of the jury, from the judicial inquiry.

Karamazov’s triumph over his rival proved beyond dispute — and here, oh, here there began an altogether new phase in his soul, and the most terrible phase of all that this soul has lived through or will ever live through!

It may be positively affirmed, gentlemen of the jury,” cried Ippolit Kirillovitch, “that outraged nature and a guilty heart are themselves avengers more complete than any earthly justice!

More than that: justice and earthly punishment even lighten the punishment that nature inflicts — are even necessary to the criminal’s soul in such moments, as its salvation from despair, for I cannot so much as imagine the horror and the moral torments of Karamazov when he learned that she loved him, that for his sake she was casting off her “previous” and “incontestable” one, that she was calling him, him, “Mitya,” to a renewed life with her, was promising him happiness — and when was this?

When everything was already finished for him, and when nothing more was possible!

By the way, I will note in passing one remark of great importance to us, by way of explaining the true nature of the accused’s situation at that time: this woman, this love of his, right up to the very last minute, up to the very instant of arrest, had remained for him a creature beyond reach, passionately longed for but unattainable.

But why, why did he not shoot himself then and there, why did he abandon the resolution he had taken, and even forget where his pistol lay?

It was precisely this passionate craving for love, and the hope of slaking it then and there, on the spot, that held him back.

In the heat of the carousal he clings to his beloved, who is feasting there beside him, more enchanting and seductive to him than ever — he will not leave her side, he gazes on her, he loses himself before her.

This passionate craving could even, for a moment, smother not only the fear of arrest but the very pangs of conscience!

For a moment, oh, only for a moment!

I picture to myself the state of the criminal’s soul at that time as held in unquestionable, slavish thrall to three elements that overwhelmed it utterly: first, the drunken state, the fumes and the din, the stamp of the dancing, the shriek of the songs, and she, she, flushed with wine, singing and dancing, drunk and laughing at him!

Second, the heartening, far-off dream that the fatal reckoning was still a long way off — not close, at any rate — that surely not before the next day, not before morning, would they come and take him.

So then, several hours — that is a great deal, an awful lot!

In a few hours one can think up a great deal.

I picture to myself that something happened to him like what befalls a criminal being carried to execution, to the gallows: there is still a long, long street to drive down, and at a walking pace at that, past thousands of people, then there will be a turn into another street, and only at the end of that other street the dreadful square!

It seems to me precisely that at the start of the procession the condemned man, seated in his cart of shame, must feel precisely that an endless life still lies before him.

But there — the houses keep slipping away, the cart keeps moving on — oh, that is nothing, the turn into the second street is still so far off, and look, he still gazes briskly to right and left at these thousands of idly curious people who fasten their eyes upon him, and it still seems to him that he is a man like them, like any of them.

But now comes the turn into the other street — oh, that is nothing, nothing, there is a whole street yet.

And however many houses slip away, he will keep thinking: ‘There are still plenty of houses left.’