Текст книги "The Brothers Karamazov"

Автор книги: Федор Достоевский

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Текущая страница: 62 (всего у книги 70 страниц)

After mentioning in order everything the investigation had disclosed about the property dispute and the family relations between father and son, and having again and again drawn the conclusion that, from the facts available, there was not the slightest possibility of determining who had outdone whom or who had been done out of what in this question of the property division, Ippolit Kirillovich brought up the medical opinions concerning the three thousand roubles stuck as a fixed idea in Mitya’s mind.

Chapter 7: A Historical Survey

“The medical experts strove to prove to us that the defendant is out of his mind and a maniac. I insist that he is precisely in his right mind, and so much the worse for him: had it not been his mind, he might have turned out to be much more intelligent. As for his being a maniac, I am prepared to agree, but precisely on one point only– that same point the experts indicated, precisely the defendant’s view of the three thousand roubles supposedly left owing to him by his father. Nevertheless, it may be possible to find an incomparably closer point of view than his inclination to madness to explain the defendant’s constant frenzy with regard to this money. For my part, I agree completely with the opinion of the young doctor who found that the defendant is and was in full and normal possession of his mental faculties, but has simply been exasperated and embittered. And that is just it: the object of the defendant’s constant and frenzied bitterness consisted not in the three thousand, not in the sum itself, but in the fact that there was a special reason that provoked his wrath. That reason was—jealousy!”

Here Ippolit Kirillovich unfolded at length the whole picture of the defendant’s fatal passion for Grushenka. He began from the very moment when the defendant went to “the young person” in order “to give her a beating”—in his own words, Ippolit Kirillovich commented—”but instead of beating her, he stays there at her feet—that is the beginning of this love. At the same time the old man, the defendant’s father, also sets his eye on the same person—a coincidence both surprising and fatal, for both hearts caught fire suddenly, simultaneously, though they had met and known this person before—and both hearts caught fire with the most unrestrained, the most Karamazovian passion. Here we have her own confession: ‘I laughed,’ she says, ‘at both of them.’ Yes, she suddenly wanted to laugh at the two of them; she had not wanted to before, but now suddenly this intention flew into her mind—and the end of it was that they both fell conquered before her. The old man, who worshipped money as if it were God, at once prepared three thousand roubles if she would only just visit his abode, but was soon driven to the point where he would have considered it happiness to lay his name and all his property at her feet if only she would consent to become his lawful wife. For this we have firm evidence. As for the defendant, his tragedy is obvious, it stands before us. But such was this young person’s ‘game.’ The seductress did not even give any hope to the unfortunate young man, for hope, real hope, was given him only at the very last moment, when he, kneeling before his tormentress, stretched out to her his hands already stained with the blood of his father and rival: precisely in that position he was arrested. ‘Send me, send me to hard labor with him, I drove him to it, I am the guiltiest of all!’—this woman herself exclaimed, in sincere repentance, at the moment of his arrest. The talented young man who has taken it upon himself to write about the present case– the same Mr. Rakitin whom I have already mentioned—defines this heroine’s character in a few concise and characteristic phrases: ‘Early disappointment, early deception and fall, the treachery of a fiancé-seducer who abandoned her, then poverty, the curses of a respectable family, and, finally, the patronage of a rich old man, whom she herself incidentally regards even now as her benefactor. Anger was buried far too early in a young heart, which perhaps contained much good. What formed was a calculating, money-hoarding character. What formed was a derisive and vengeful attitude towards society.’ After such a characterization one can understand how she might laugh at the two of them simply as a game, a vicious game. And so, during this month of hopeless love, of moral degradation, of betrayal of his fiancée, of appropriation of another person’s money, which was entrusted to his honor—the defendant, on top of that, was driven almost to frenzy, almost to fury, by continual jealousy, and of whom—of his own father! Worst of all, the crazy old man was luring and seducing the object of his passion with the very three thousand that he regarded as his family money, his maternal inheritance, for which he reproached his father. Yes, I agree, this was hard to bear! Here even a mania might appear. The point was not the money, but that by means of this very money his happiness was being shattered with such loathsome cynicism!”

Ippolit Kirillovich then went on to tell how the thought of killing his father gradually emerged in the defendant, and traced it fact by fact.

“At first we only shout in the taverns—shout all that month. Oh, we love to live among people and to inform these people at once of everything, even our most infernal and dangerous ideas; we like sharing with people, and, who knows why, we demand immediately, on the spot, that these people respond to us at once with the fullest sympathy, enter into all our cares and concerns, nod in agreement with us, and never cross our humor. Otherwise we will get angry and wreck the whole tavern.” (There followed the anecdote about Captain Snegiryov.) “Those who saw and heard the defendant during this month felt finally that these were not mere shouts and threats against his father, but that, considering the frenzied state he was in, the threats might become reality.” (Here the prosecutor described the family meeting in the monastery, the conversations with Alyosha, and the ugly scene of violence in his father’s house when the defendant burst in after dinner.) “I do not mean to assert emphatically,” Ippolit Kirillovich continued, “that before this scene the defendant had already determined deliberately and premeditatedly to do away with his father by murdering him. Nevertheless the idea had already presented itself to him several times, and he deliberately contemplated it—for that we have facts, witnesses, and his own confession. I must admit, gentlemen of the jury,” Ippolit Kirillovich added, “that even until today I was hesitant whether to ascribe to the defendant complete and conscious premeditation of the crime that was suggesting itself to him. I was firmly convinced that his soul had already contemplated many times the fatal moment ahead, but merely contemplated it, imagined it only as a possibility, without settling either on the time or the circumstances of its accomplishment. But I was hesitant only until today, until this fatal document was presented to the court today by Miss Verkhovtsev. You heard her exclamation yourselves, gentlemen: ‘This is the plan, this is the program of the murder! ‘—thus she defined the unfortunate ‘drunken’ letter of the unfortunate defendant. And indeed this letter bears all the significance of a program and of premeditation. It was written two days before the crime, and thus we now know firmly that two days before accomplishing his horrible design, the defendant declared with an oath that if he did not get the money the next day, he would kill his father, so as to take the money from under his pillow, ‘in the envelope with the red ribbon, if only Ivan goes away.’ Do you hear: ‘if only Ivan goes away’—so everything had been thought out, the circumstances had been weighed—and what then? It was all accomplished as written! Premeditation and deliberateness are beyond doubt, the crime was to be carried out for the purpose of robbery, that is stated directly, it is written and signed. The defendant does not deny his signature. I shall be told: it was written by a drunk man. But that diminishes nothing, it makes it all the more important: he wrote when drunk what he had planned when sober. Had he not planned it when sober, he would not have written about it when drunk. I shall perhaps be asked: why was he shouting about his intentions in the taverns? If a man determines to do such a thing with premeditation,he is silent and keeps it to himself. True, but he shouted when there was no plan or premeditation as yet, when just the desire alone was present, a yearning that was ripening. Later on he did not shout so much about it. On the evening when this letter was written, having gotten drunk in the ‘Metropolis’ tavern, he was silent, contrary to his custom, did not play billiards, sat apart, spoke to no one, and only chased a local shop clerk from his seat, but this he did almost unconsciously, from a habit of quarreling, which he could not do without anytime he entered a tavern. True, along with his final determination, the fear must have occurred to the defendant that he had shouted around town too much beforehand and that it would go a long way towards exposing and accusing him once he had carried out his plan. But there was no help for it, the fact of publication had been accomplished, it could not be taken back, and, after all, things had always worked out before, so they would work out now as well. We set our hopes on our lucky star, gentlemen! I must admit, furthermore, that he did a lot to get around the fatal moment, that he exerted much effort to avoid the bloody outcome. ‘Tomorrow I’ll ask all people for the three thousand,’ as he writes in his peculiar language, ‘and if I don’t get it from people, blood will be shed.’ Again it was written in a drunken state, and again in a sober state it was accomplished as written!”

Here Ippolit Kirillovich embarked on a detailed description of all Mitya’s efforts to obtain the money, in order to avoid the crime. He described his adventures with Samsonov, his journey to Lyagavy—all of it documented. “Worn out, ridiculed, hungry, having sold his watch for the journey (but still keeping the fifteen hundred roubles on him—supposedly, oh, supposedly! ), tortured by jealousy over the object of his love, whom he had left in town, suspeering that without him she would go to Fyodor Pavlovich, he finally returns to town. Thank God, she has not been with Fyodor Pavlovich! He himself takes her to her patron Samsonov. (Strangely, we are not jealous of Samsonov, and this is a rather typical psychological peculiarity of this case! ) Then he races to his observation post ‘in the backyard’ and there—and there discovers that Smerdyakov is down with a falling fit, that the other servant is sick—the field is clear, and the ‘signals’ are in his hands—what a temptation! Nevertheless he still resists; he goes to Madame Khokhlakov, a temporary local resident greatly respected by us all. Having long felt compassion for his fate, this lady offers him the most reasonable advice: to drop all this carousing, this outrageous love affair, this idling in taverns, the fruitless waste of his young strength, and go to Siberia, to the gold mines: ‘There is an outlet for your stormy strength, your romantic character yearning for adventure.’” Having described the outcome of that conversation, and the moment when the defendant suddenly received word that Grushenka had not stayed at Samsonov’s at all, having described the instantaneous frenzy of the unfortunate, jealous, overwrought man at the thought that she had precisely deceived him and was now there, with Fyodor Pavlovich, Ippolit Kirillovich concluded by drawing attention to the fatal significance of chance: “If the maid had managed to tell him that his sweetheart was in Mokroye with the ‘former’ and ‘indisputable’ one—nothing would have happened. But she was overcome with fright, began vowing and swearing, and if the defendant did not kill her right then, it was only because he rushed headlong after his traitoress. But observe: beside himself as he may have been, he did take the brass pestle with him. Why precisely the pestle, why not some other weapon? But since we have been contemplating this picture for a whole month and preparing for it, the moment anything resembling a weapon flashes before us, we grab it as a weapon. And that some such object might serve as a weapon—this we have already been imagining for a whole month. That is why we recognized it so instantly and unquestionably as a weapon! Therefore it was by no means unconsciously, by no means inadvertently that he grabbed this fatal pestle. And now he is in his father’s garden—the field is clear, no witnesses, the dead of night, darkness, and jealousy. The suspicion that she is there, with his rival, in his arms, and perhaps is laughing at him that very minute—takes his breath away. And not merely the suspicion—why talk of suspicion, when the deception is evident, obvious: she is there, in that room, where the light is coming from, she is with him behind the screen—and so the unfortunate man steals up to the window, respectfully peeks in, virtuously resigns himself, and sensibly departs, hastening to put trouble behind him, lest something dangerous and immoral happen—and we are asked to believe this, we who know the defendant’s character, who understand what state of mind he was in, a state we know from the facts, and, above all, that he was in possession of the signals with which he could open the house at once and go in!” Here, apropos the “signals,” Ippolit Kirillovich left off his accusatory speech for a time, finding it necessary to expatiate on Smerdyakov, so as to exhaust completely this whole parenthetic episode to do with suspecting Smerdyakov of the murder, and have done with the idea once and for all. He did so quite thoroughly, and everyone understood that, despite the contempt he showed for this suggestion, he still considered it very important.

Chapter 8: A Treatise on Smerdyakov

“First of all, where did the possibility of such a suspicion come from?” was the question with which Ippolit Kirillovich began. “The first one to cry out against Smerdyakov as the murderer was the defendant himself at the moment of his arrest, and yet, from that very first cry down to this very moment of the trial, he has failed to present even one fact to confirm his accusation– and not only no fact, but not even the ghost of a fact to any degree congruous with human reason. Then, the accusation is confirmed by only three persons: the defendant’s two brothers and Miss Svetlov. Yet the defendant’s older brother announced his suspicion only today, when he was ill, in a fit of unquestionable delirium and fever, while previously, for the whole two months, as is positively known to us, he fully shared the conviction of his brother’s guilt and did not even attempt to object to the idea. But we shall go into that more particularly later on. Then, the defendant’s younger brother announces to us today that he has no facts, not even the slightest, to support his notion of Smerdyakov’s guilt, and that his conclusion is based only on the words of the defendant himself and ‘the look on his face’—yes, this colossal proof was uttered twice today by his brother. And Miss Svetlov expressed herself perhaps even more colossally: ‘Whatever the defendant tells you, you must believe, he’s not the sort of man to lie.’ That is the sum total of factual evidence against Smerdyakov produced by these three persons, who are only too interested in the defendant’s fate. Nevertheless the accusation against Smerdyakov made its way and held out, and is still holding out—can you believe it, can you imagine it?” Here Ippolit Kirillovich found it necessary to sketch briefly the character of the late Smerdyakov, “who put an end to his life in a fit of morbid delirium and madness.” He portrayed him as a feebleminded man with the rudiments of some vague education, who was confused by philosophical ideas that were too much for his mind, and frightened by certain modern-day teachings on duty and obligation, extensively offered him in practice by the devil-may-care life of his late master, and perhaps also father, Fyodor Pavlovich, and in theory by various strange philosophical conversations with the master’s elder son, Ivan Fyodorovich, who readily allowed himself this diversion—most likely out of boredom or a need for mockery that could find no better application. “He himself described to me the state of his soul during the last days of his life in his master’s house,” Ippolit Kirillovich explained, “but others, too, have given the same testimony: the defendant himself, his brother, even the servant Grigory, all those, that is, who must have known him quite well. Being oppressed, moreover, by the falling sickness, Smerdyakov was ‘cowardly as a chicken.’ ‘He used to fall at my feet and kiss them,’ the defendant told us at a time when he had not yet realized that such information was hardly beneficial to him. ‘It’s a chicken with falling sickness,’ as he put it in his characteristic language. And it is him that the defendant (he testifies to it himself) chooses as his confidant, and bullies into agreeing to serve him as a spy and informer. In this capacity of domestic rat, he betrays his master, he tells the defendant both about the existence of the envelope with the money and about the signals that would enable one to get into the master’s house—and how could he not tell! ‘He’d kill me, sir, I just saw that he’d kill me, sir,’ he kept saying in the interrogation, shaking and trembling even before us, notwithstanding that the tormentor who bullied him was then already under arrest and could no longer come and punish him. ‘He suspected me every minute, sir; in fear and trembling, just to satisfy his wrath, I hastened to tell him about every secret, sir, just so he could see my innocence before him, sir, and let me go in peace with my life, sir.’ These are his own words, I wrote them down and remembered them: ‘He’d start yelling at me, and I’d just fall on my knees before him.’ Being a highly honest young man by nature, and having thereby gained the trust of his master, who recognized this honesty in him when he returned the lost money, the unfortunate Smerdyakov was, one can only think, terribly tormented by remorse at his betrayal of his master, whom he loved as his benefactor. People severely afflicted with the falling sickness, according to the findings of the profoundest psychiatrists, are always inclined to constant and, of course, morbid self-accusation. They suffer from their ‘guilt’ for something and before someone, are tormented by pangs of conscience; often, even without any grounds, they exaggerate and even invent various guilts and crimes for themselves. And now one such individual, from fear and bullying, becomes guilty and criminal in reality. Moreover, he strongly anticipated that something bad might come of the circumstances taking shape before his eyes. When the elder son of Fyodor Pavlovich, Ivan Fyodorovich, was leaving for Moscow, just before the catastrophe, Smerdyakov begged him to stay, although, following his cowardly custom, he did not dare voice all his apprehensions clearly and categorically. He contented himself merely with hints, but these hints were not understood. It should be noted that he saw in Ivan Fyodorovich his protection, as it were, his guarantee, as it were, that as long as he stayed at home, no disaster would occur. Recall the phrase in the ‘drunken’ letter of Dmitri Karamazov: ‘I’ll kill the old man, if only Ivan goes away’; meaning that the presence of Ivan Fyodorovich seemed to everyone a guarantee of peace and order in the house, as it were. But then he leaves, and at once, scarcely an hour after the young master’s departure, Smerdyakov comes down with a falling fit. That is perfectly understandable. It should be mentioned here that Smerdyakov, oppressed by fears and despair of a sort, during those last days especially felt in himself the possibility of an impending attack of the falling sickness, which before, too, had always come upon him in moments of moral tension and shock. It is, of course, impossible to foresee the day and hour of such an attack, but every epileptic can feel in himself beforehand a disposition towards an attack. This medical science tells us. And so, as soon as Ivan Fyodorovich quits the place, Smerdyakov, under the impression of his, so to speak, orphaned and defenseless state, goes to the cellar on a household errand, thinking as he starts down the stairs: ‘Will I have a fit or not, and what if it comes now?’ And so, precisely because of this mood, this insecurity, these questions, the spasm in the throat, which always precedes a falling fit, seizes him, and he topples headlong, unconscious, into the bottom of the cellar. And people manage to see something suspicious in this perfectly natural accident, some sort of clue, some sort of hint that he was deliberatelypretending to be sick! But if it was deliberate, the question immediately arises: what for? Out of what calculation, with what aim? I am not speaking of medicine now; science lies, they say, science makes mistakes, the doctors were unable to distinguish truth from pretense– maybe so, maybe so, but all the same answer my question: why would he pretend? Could it be that, having planned the murder, he wanted in advance and at once to attract attention to himself in the house by having a fit? You see, gentlemen of the jury, there were five people in and around Fyodor Pavlovich’s house on the night of the crime: first, Fyodor Pavlovich himself, but he could not have killed himself, that is clear; second, his servant Grigory, but he himself was almost killed; third, Grigory’s wife, the serving-woman Marfa Ignatieva, but it is simply shameful to imagine her as her master’s murderer. Thus two people are left in view: the defendant, and Smerdyakov. But the defendant insists it was not he who killed his father, so Smerdyakov must have killed him, there is no other solution, for there is no one else to be found, there is no way to pick another murderer. Here, here then is the source of this ‘cunning’ and colossal accusation against the unfortunate idiot who yesterday took his own life! Precisely for the simple reason that there is no one else to pick! Were there at least a shadow, at least a suspicion of someone else, some sixth person, I am sure that in that case even the defendant himself would be ashamed to point to Smerdyakov, and would point to this sixth person instead, for to accuse Smerdyakov of this murder is utterly absurd.

“Let us lay aside psychology, gentlemen, let us lay aside medicine, let us lay aside even logic itself, let us turn just to the facts, simply to the facts alone, and let us see what the facts will tell us. Smerdyakov killed him, but how? Alone or together with the defendant? Let us first consider the first alternative– that is, that Smerdyakov was working alone. Of course, if he did kill him, it was with some object, for some sort of profit. But, not having even the shadow of a motive for murder such as the defendant had—that is, hatred, jealousy, and so on and so forth—Smerdyakov would undoubtedly have killed only for the sake of money, in order to appropriate precisely the three thousand roubles he had seen his master put into the envelope. And so, having planned the murder, he informs another person beforehand—a highly interested person, moreover, namely, the defendant—of all the circumstances to do with the money and the signals: where the envelope lay, what exactly was written on it, how it was tied, and above all, above all, he tells him about these ‘signals’ by which one can get into his master’s house. Why does he do it? To betray himself straight off? Or so as to have a rival, who perhaps will want to get in and acquire the envelope himself? No, I shall be told, he did it out of fear. But how could that be? A man who did not shrink from planning such a fearless and beastly thing and then carrying it out, gives away information that he alone in the whole world knows, and that, if he had only kept silent about it, no one in the whole world would have found out? No, however cowardly the man might be, if he were planning such a thing, he would never tell anyone about the envelope and the signals, for that would mean giving himself away beforehand. He would deliberately invent something, some lie or other, if he absolutely had to give information, but he would be silent about that! On the contrary, I repeat, if he kept silent about the money at least, and then went and killed and appropriated the money for himself, no one in the whole world would in any case ever be able to accuse him of murder for the sake of robbery, because no one but he would have seen the money, no one else would have known it was there in the house. Even if he were accused, it would inevitably be thought that he had killed from some other motive. But since no one ever noticed any such motive in him before, and everyone saw, on the contrary, that he was loved by his master and honored with his trust, then of course he would be the last to be suspected, and the one to be suspected would be the one who had such motives, who himself shouted that he had such motives, who did not conceal them, who revealed them to everyone, in short, the one to be suspected would be the murdered man’s son, Dmitri Fyodorovich. Smerdyakov would have committed the murder and robbery, and the son would be accused of it—surely this would be advantageous for Smerdyakov, the murderer? Well, and it is this son Dmitri that Smerdyakov, having planned the murder, tells beforehand about the money, the envelope, and the signals—how clear, how logical it is!

“The day of the murder planned by Smerdyakov comes, and so he goes tumbling into the cellar, shamming an attack of the falling sickness—what for? But, of course, so that first of all the servant Grigory, who was planning his treatment, seeing that there was absolutely no one to watch the house, would perhaps postpone his treatment and stand guard himself. Second, naturally, so that the master himself, seeing that no one was on guard, and being terribly afraid of his son’s coming, which he did not conceal, would be twice as mistrustful and cautious. Finally, and above all, so that of course he, Smerdyakov, brought down by the fit, would at once be transferred from the kitchen, where he always slept apart from everyone and where he could come and go as he pleased, to the other end of the cottage, to Grigory’s little room, behind the partition, three steps away from their own bed, as had always been done from time immemorial whenever he was brought down by the sickness, on the orders of his master and the tenderhearted Marfa Ignatievna. Of course, lying there behind the partition, he would most likely start groaning, in order to show himself truly sick, thereby waking them up throughout the night (as he did, according to the evidence of Grigory and his wife)—and all that, all that to make it more convenient for himself to get up suddenly and then kill his master!

“But, I shall be told, perhaps he pretended to be sick precisely so that no one would suspect him, and informed the defendant about the money and the signals precisely to tempt him into coming and killing him himself, and, don’t you see, when he has killed him and leaves, taking the money with him, perhaps while doing so he will make some noise and clatter, awaking witnesses, and then, you see, Smerdyakov can also get up and go—well, what will he go and do? Why, he will precisely go and kill his master a second time, and a second time take the already-taken money. Do you laugh, gentlemen? Personally I am ashamed to make such suggestions, and yet, just imagine, this very thing is precisely what the defendant asserts: after me, he says, when I had already left the house, knocked Grigory down and raised the alarm, he got up, went in, killed, and robbed. I will not even ask how Smerdyakov could have calculated all this beforehand and foreknown it all as if on his fingers, I mean, that the furious and exasperated son would come with the sole purpose of peeking respectfully in the window, though he knew the signals, and then retreat, leaving him, Smerdyakov, with all the booty! Gentlemen, I put the question to you seriously: where is the moment when Smerdyakov committed his crime? Show me that moment, for without it there can be no accusation.

“But perhaps the falling fit was real. The sick man suddenly came to, heard a cry, went out—well, and what then? He looked around and said to himself: why don’t I go and kill the master? But how would he know what was going on, what was happening there, if he had been lying unconscious up to then? No, gentlemen, fantasy, too, must have its limits.

“‘Well, sir,’ subtle people will say, ‘and what if the two were accomplices, what if they murdered him together and divided the money—what then?’

“Yes, indeed, that is a weighty suspicion, and, to begin with, there is colossal evidence to confirm it: one kills and takes all the labor upon himself, and the other accomplice lies on his back pretending to have a falling fit, precisely with the aim of arousing suspicion in everyone ahead of time, of alarming the master, of alarming Grigory. With what motives, I wonder, could the two accomplices have thought up precisely such an insane plan? But perhaps it was not at all an active complicity on Smerdyakov’s part, but, so to speak, passive and suffering: perhaps the bullied Smerdyakov merely agreed not to resist the murder and, anticipating that he would be accused of allowing his master to be killed, of not shouting or resisting, negotiated with Dmitri Karamazov beforehand for permission to spend the time lying down as if in a falling fit, ‘and you can go and kill him any way you like, it’s none of my apples.’ But even so, since this falling fit, again, would be bound to cause a commotion in the house, Dmitri Karamazov, foreseeing that, would by no means agree to such an arrangement. But suppose he did agree: in that case it would still come out that Dmitri Karamazov was the murderer, the direct murderer and instigator, while Smerdyakov would only be a passive participant, and not even a participant, but merely a conniver out of fear and against his will, as the court would surely discern—and yet what do we see? No sooner is the defendant arrested than he at once shifts all the blame onto Smerdyakov alone and accuses him alone.He does not accuse him as his accomplice, but him alone: he alone did it, he says, he killed him and robbed him, it is his handiwork! But what sort of accomplices are they, if they immediately start denouncing each other—no, that never happens. And notice the risk for Karamazov: he is the chief murderer, the other is not the chief one, he is merely a conniver, he was lying down behind the partition, and now he shifts it all onto the one lying down. But he, the one lying down, might get angry, and just for reasons of self-preservation alone might hasten to proclaim the real truth: we both participated, only I didn’t kill him, I just went along and connived at it out of fear. For surely he, Smerdyakov, would be able to understand that the court would immediately perceive the degree of his guilt, and he could therefore reckon that if he were to be punished, it would be far less severely than the other one, the chief murderer, who wanted to shift it all onto him. Which means, then, that willy-nilly he would make a confession. This, however, we have not seen. Smerdyakov never so much as whispered about any complicity, despite the fact that the murderer firmly accused him, and kept pointing at him all along as the sole murderer. Moreover, it was Smerdyakov who revealed to the prosecution that he himselfhad informed the defendant of the envelope with the money and of the signals, and that without him he would never have known anything. If he was indeed an accomplice and guilty, would he inform the prosecution of it so lightly—that is, that he himself informed the defendant of all that? On the contrary, he would try to deny it, and would most certainly distort the facts and diminish them. But he did not distort and he did not diminish. Only an innocent man, who has no fear of being accused of complicity, would act that way. And so, yesterday, in a fit of morbid melancholy resulting from his falling sickness and the outbreak of this whole catastrophe, he hanged himself. And, hanging himself, he left a note, written in his own peculiar style: ‘I exterminate myself by my own will and liking, so as not to blame anybody.’ It would have cost him nothing to add: ‘I am the murderer, not Karamazov. ‘ But he did not add it: did he have enough conscience for the one thing, but not for the other?