XIII. An Adulterer of Thought

“It is not the sum of the facts alone that is ruining my client, gentlemen of the jury,” he proclaimed, “no, what is really ruining my client is one fact only: it is the corpse of the old father! Were this a simple murder, then, given the insignificance, the lack of proof, the fantastic nature of the facts, if each of them is examined separately and not in their sum, you would reject the accusation, or at least you would hesitate to ruin a man’s fate solely on account of a prejudice against him which, alas, he has so well deserved! But this is not a simple murder, it is parricide! This makes an impression, and to such a degree that even the very insignificance and lack of proof of the accusing facts becomes not so insignificant and not so lacking in proof, and this even in the most unprejudiced mind. Well, how can such a defendant be acquitted? And what if he did kill and goes away unpunished—that is what each of us feels in his heart almost involuntarily, instinctively. Yes, it is a terrible thing to shed a father’s blood—the blood of the one who begot me, the blood of the one who loved me, the blood of the one who did not spare his life for me, who was sick with my illnesses from my childhood years, who suffered all his life for my happiness and lived only by my joys, by my successes! Oh, to kill such a father—why, it is impossible even to think of it! Gentlemen of the jury, what is a father, a real father, what sort of great word is this, what a terribly great idea lies in this name? We have just indicated in part what a true father is and what he ought to be. But in the present case, with which we are all so occupied now, over which our souls ache—in the present case the father, the late Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, did not in the least correspond to the idea of a father which has just spoken to our hearts. That is a misfortune. Yes, indeed, some fathers are like a misfortune. Let us examine this misfortune more closely, then—for there is nothing to be afraid of, gentlemen of the jury, in view of the importance of the decision before us. We must even especially not be afraid now and, so to speak, wave away a certain idea, like children or timid women, in the happy expression of the highly talented prosecutor. But in his ardent speech my respected opponent (and an opponent even before I had uttered my first word), my opponent exclaimed several times: ‘No, I will let no one defend the defendant, I will not yield his defense to the defense counsel who has come from Petersburg—I am the accuser, and I am the defender as well!’ That is what he exclaimed several times, and yet he forgot to mention that if this terrible defendant was so grateful for a whole twenty-three years for nothing more than one pound of nuts received from the only person who had been kind to him as a child in his parental home, then, conversely, such a man could not, surely, fail to remember also, all those twenty-three years, how he ran about barefoot at his father’s ‘in the backyard, without little boots, and in little trousers with one button,’ in the expression of the humane doctor Herzenstube. Oh, gentlemen of the jury, why should we examine this ‘misfortune’ more closely, why repeat what everyone already knows! What did my client meet with when he came here to his father? And why, why depict my client as unfeeling, an egoist, a monster? He is unrestrained, he is wild and violent, and now we are judging him for it, but who is to blame for his fate, who is to blame that, with good inclinations, with a noble, sensitive heart, he received such an absurd upbringing? Did anyone teach him sense, is he enlightened in the sciences, did anyone love him even a little in his childhood? My client grew up under the protection of God, that is, like a wild beast. He perhaps longed to see his father after a separation of many years, he perhaps a thousand times before that, remembering his childhood as through a dream, drove away the loathsome phantoms that had haunted the dreams of his childhood, and longed with his whole soul to justify and embrace his father! And what then? He is met with nothing but cynical sneers, suspiciousness, and pettifoggery over disputed money; he hears only talk and maxims of life that turn one’s heart, daily, ‘over the cognac,’ and finally he beholds his father taking his mistress away from him, from the son, with the son’s own money—oh, gentlemen of the jury, this is loathsome and cruel! And this same old man complains to everyone of his son’s disrespect and cruelty, besmirches him in society, harms him, slanders him, buys up his promissory notes in order to have him put in prison! Gentlemen of the jury, these souls, these people outwardly hardhearted, violent, and unrestrained, like my client, are frequently, and most often of all, extremely tender in heart, only they do not show it. Do not laugh, do not laugh at my idea! The talented prosecutor laughed pitilessly a while ago at my client, pointing out that he loves Schiller, loves ‘the beautiful and lofty.’ I would not have laughed at that 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 what is tender, beautiful, and just, and precisely as it were in contrast to themselves, to their violence, their cruelty—they thirst unconsciously, and they do thirst. Passionate and cruel on the outside, they are capable of loving to the point of torment, a woman, for example, and certainly with a spiritual and higher love. Again, do not laugh at me: this is precisely what happens most often in these natures! Only they cannot hide their passion, at times a very coarse one—that is what strikes people, that is what they notice, but the man inside they do not see. On the contrary, all their passions are quickly slaked, but beside a noble, beautiful being this apparently coarse and cruel man seeks renewal, seeks the possibility of reforming, of becoming better, of becoming lofty and honest—‘lofty and beautiful,’ however much that word has been mocked! A while ago I said that I would not permit myself to touch upon my client’s romance with Miss Verkhovtseva. But, however, half a word may be said: what we heard a while ago was not testimony but only the cry of a frenzied and vengeful woman, and it is not for her, oh, not for her to reproach anyone with betrayal, because she herself betrayed! Had she had even a little time to think better of it, she would not have given such testimony! Oh, do not believe her, no, my client is not a ‘monster,’ as she called him! The crucified lover of mankind, preparing to go to his cross, said: ‘I am the good shepherd, the good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep, so that not one of them may perish…’ Let us not destroy a human soul either! I asked just now what a father is, and exclaimed that it is a great word, a precious name. But one must deal honestly with words, gentlemen of the jury, and I will permit myself to call the thing by its own word, by its own name: such a father as the murdered old Karamazov cannot be called a father and is unworthy of being called one. Love for a father that the father has not justified is an absurdity, an impossibility. One cannot create love out of nothing; only God creates out of nothing. ‘Fathers, do not embitter your children,’ the apostle writes from his heart aflame with love. It is not for my client’s sake that I now cite these holy words, I recall them for all fathers. Who gave me this authority to teach fathers? No one. But as a man and a citizen I call out—vivos voco (I call the living)! We are not long on this earth, we do many bad deeds and speak many bad words. And therefore let us all seize the favorable minute of our being together to say a good word to one another too. And so with me: while I am in this place, I am making use of my minute. Not for nothing has this tribune been granted us by the highest will—from it all Russia hears us. I am speaking not only for the fathers here, but to all fathers I cry out: ‘Fathers, do not embitter your children!’ Let us first fulfill Christ’s commandment ourselves, and only then permit ourselves to make demands 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 the measure you measure, it will be measured to you’—this is no longer I who say it, it is the Gospel that prescribes it: to measure in the same measure with which you are measured. How can we blame children if they measure us by our own measure? Not long ago in Finland a certain girl, 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 some bricks, they found her trunk, which no one had known about; they unlocked it and took out of it the little corpse of a newborn infant she had killed. In the same trunk they found two skeletons of infants she had borne before and had likewise killed at the moment of birth, which she confessed. Gentlemen of the jury, is she the mother of her children? Yes, she gave birth to them, but is she a mother to them? Would any of us dare to pronounce over her the sacred name of mother? Let us be bold, gentlemen of the jury, let us even be daring, we are even obliged to be so at the present minute, and not be afraid of certain words and ideas, like the Moscow merchants’ wives who are afraid of ‘metal’ and ‘brimstone.’¹ No, let us prove, on the contrary, that the progress of recent years has touched our development too, and let us say outright: he who begets is not yet a father; a father is he who begets and deserves it. Oh, of course, there is another meaning too, another interpretation of the word ‘father,’ which demands that my father, though he be a monster, though he be a villain to his children, should all the same remain my father only because he begot me. But this meaning is already, so to speak, a mystical one, which I do not understand with my reason, but can accept only by faith, or, to put it more precisely, on faith, like much else that I do not understand but which religion nevertheless commands me to believe. But in that case let it remain outside the domain of actual life. And in the domain of actual life, which has not only its own rights but itself imposes great obligations—in this domain we, if we wish to be humane, to be Christians, finally, we must and are obliged to carry out only convictions justified by reason and experience, passed through the crucible of analysis; in a word, to act reasonably and not senselessly, as in a dream and in delirium, so as not to do harm to a man, so as not to torment and ruin a man. There, there, then, it will be a real Christian deed, not a mystical one only, but a reasonable and truly humane deed…”

At this point loud applause was about to break out from many corners of the hall, but Fetyukovich even waved his hands, as if begging them not to interrupt and to let him finish. Everything at once fell silent. The orator went on:

“Do you think, gentlemen of the jury, that such questions can pass our children by—let us say already youths, let us say already beginning to reason? No, they cannot, and let us not demand an impossible restraint of them! The sight of an unworthy father, especially in comparison with other, worthy fathers belonging to other children, his peers, involuntarily prompts tormenting questions in a youth. He is given the official answer to these questions: ‘He begot you, and you are his blood, and therefore you must love him.’ The youth involuntarily falls to thinking: ‘But did he love me when he begot me,’ he asks, marveling more and more, ‘did he beget me for my sake? He knew neither me nor even my sex at that minute, the minute of passion, perhaps heated by wine, and the only thing he perhaps passed on to me was an inclination to drunkenness—those are all his benefactions… Why must I love him, only because he begot me and then did not love me all my life?’ Oh, these questions may seem coarse and cruel to you, but do not demand an impossible restraint from a young mind: ‘Drive nature out the door, and it will fly in at the window’—and above all, above all, let us not be afraid of ‘metal’ and ‘brimstone,’ and let us decide the question as reason and love of mankind prescribe, and not as mystical notions prescribe. How, then, is it to be decided? Why, like this: let the son stand before his father and ask him himself, with understanding: ‘Father, tell me: why must I love you? Father, prove to me that I must love you?’—and if this father has the strength and is in a position to answer and to prove it to him—then there you have the real, normal family, established not on mystical prejudice alone, but on foundations that are reasonable, self-accountable, and strictly humane. Otherwise, if the father does not prove it—that is the end of this family at once: he is not a father to him, and the son receives the freedom and the right henceforth to regard his father as a stranger to himself, and even as his enemy. Our tribune, gentlemen of the jury, must be a school of truth and of sound ideas!”

Here the orator was interrupted by unrestrained, almost frenzied applause. Of course, not the whole hall applauded, but half the hall did applaud all the same. The fathers and mothers applauded. From above, where the ladies sat, shrieks and cries were heard. Handkerchiefs were waved. The presiding judge began ringing his bell with all his might. He was visibly irritated by the behavior of the hall, but he decidedly did not dare to “clear” the hall, as he had recently threatened: even the dignitaries sitting behind on special chairs, little old men with stars on their tailcoats, applauded and waved their handkerchiefs at the orator, so that when the noise subsided, the presiding judge contented himself merely with his former most strict promise to “clear” the hall, and the triumphant and excited Fetyukovich went on with his speech again.

“Gentlemen of the jury, you remember that terrible night about which so much has been said today, when the son got over the fence into his father’s house and stood at last face to face with the one who had begotten him, his enemy and offender. I insist with all my strength—it was not for money that he came running at that minute: the accusation of robbery is an absurdity, as I have already set forth before. Nor was it to kill, oh no, that he broke in on him; if he had had this design with premeditation, he would at least have taken care beforehand to get some weapon, but the brass pestle he seized instinctively, not knowing himself why. Let us say he deceived his father with the signals, let us say he got in to him—I have already said that I do not believe this legend for one minute, but so be it, let us suppose it for one minute! Gentlemen of the jury, I swear to you by all that is holy, had this been not his father but some outside offender, he, having run through the rooms and made sure that this woman was not in this house, would have run away headlong without doing his rival any harm; he might have struck him, pushed him, perhaps, but that is all, for he had no thought for that, he had no time, he had to know where she was. But his father, his father—oh, it was all done merely by the sight of his father, the man who had hated him since childhood, his enemy, his offender, and now—his monstrous rival! A feeling of hatred seized him involuntarily, irrepressibly, there was no reasoning possible: everything rose up in one minute! It was a fit of passion, of madness and derangement, but a fit of passion of nature too, avenging its eternal laws unrestrainedly and unconsciously, like everything in nature. But even then the murderer did not kill—I affirm this, I cry it out—no, he only swung the pestle in loathsome indignation, not wishing to kill, not knowing that he would kill. Had this fatal pestle not been in his hands, he would only have beaten his father, perhaps, but would not have killed him. When he ran away, he did not know whether the old man he had struck down was killed. Such a murder is not a murder. Such a murder is not a parricide either. No, the murder of such a father cannot be called parricide. Such a murder can be counted as parricide only out of prejudice! But did this murder take place, did it take place in fact, I appeal to you again and again from the depths of my soul! Gentlemen of the jury, suppose we condemn him, and he will say to himself: ‘These people did nothing for my fate, for my upbringing, for my education, to make me better, to make me a man. These people did not give me food or drink, and did not visit me naked in prison, and now they are the very ones who have sent me to penal servitude. I am quits, I owe them nothing now, and I owe no one anything forever and ever. They are wicked, and I will be wicked. They are cruel, and I will be cruel.’ That is what he will say, gentlemen of the jury! And I swear: by your verdict of guilty you will only relieve him, you will relieve his conscience, he will curse the blood he has shed and not regret it. At the same time you will destroy the man that is still possible in him, for he will remain wicked and blind all his life. But do you wish to punish him terribly, formidably, with the most dreadful punishment that can possibly be imagined, but in order to save and regenerate his soul forever? If so, then crush him with your mercy! You will see, you will hear how his soul will tremble and be horrified: ‘Is it for me to bear this mercy, is it for me, so much love, am I worthy of it?’—that is what he will exclaim! Oh, I know, I know this heart, this wild but noble heart, gentlemen of the jury. It will bow down before your great deed, it thirsts for a great act of love, it will catch fire and rise again forever. There are souls which in their narrowness accuse the whole world. But crush this soul with mercy, show it love, and it will curse its deed, for there are so many good seeds in it. The soul will expand and behold how merciful God is and how beautiful and just people are. He will be horrified, he will be crushed by repentance and by the countless debt that lies before him henceforth. And then he will not say, ‘I am quits,’ but will say: ‘I am guilty before all people and am more unworthy than all people.’ In tears of repentance and of burning, suffering tenderness he will exclaim: ‘People are better than I am, for they wished not to destroy me but to save me!’ Oh, it is so easy for you to do this, this act of mercy, for in the absence of any evidence that even remotely resembles the truth it will be all too hard for you to pronounce: ‘Yes, guilty.’ Better to let ten guilty men go than to punish one innocent man—do you hear, do you hear this majestic voice from the past century of our glorious history? Is it for me, insignificant as I am, to remind you that the Russian court is not punishment only, but also the salvation of a man who is lost! Let other nations have the letter and the punishment; we have the spirit and the meaning, the salvation and regeneration of the lost. And if so, if Russia and her court are truly such, then—forward, Russia, and do not frighten, oh, do not frighten us with your furious troikas, from which all nations stand aside in loathing! Not a furious troika, but the majestic Russian chariot will arrive at its goal solemnly and calmly. In your hands is the fate of my client, in your hands is the fate of our Russian truth as well. You will save it, you will uphold it, you will prove that there are those who will keep it, that it is in good hands!”

Notes

1. 1. In Alexander Ostrovsky’s comedy Hard Days (1863) the merchant women are terrified by the strange words “metal” and “brimstone,” which they take for something dreadful.