The Brothers Karamazov (132 page)

In short, although our public prosecutor had let his enthusiasm get the better of him, he did finish his speech with a dramatic flourish which had a tremendous effect on the audience. When he finished, he hurriedly left the courtroom, and as I said earlier, he almost fainted once he was safely out of sight. There was no applause, but the responsible citizens present were very satisfied. The ladies were less pleased with the prosecutor’s summation, but even they were duly impressed by his eloquence, especially since they were not in the least worried about the outcome and had complete confidence in Defense Counsel Fetyukovich, who was to speak at last and would, they felt, crush all opposition. Everybody kept glancing at Mitya who, throughout the prosecutor’s speech, had sat in silence, his hands tightly clasped, his teeth clenched, his eyes fixed on the ground, only now and then raising his head and listening intently. This he did when the prosecutor mentioned Grushenka and what Rakitin thought of her. At that point, a scornful, disgusted grin twisted Mitya’s lips and he muttered quite audibly, “The Bernards!” When the prosecutor described his methods of interrogation and of putting suspects under pressure, which he had applied to Mitya in Mokroye, Mitya looked up, listening to him with great curiosity. Once he seemed about to leap up and shout something, but, making an obvious effort to control himself, he remained seated and merely shrugged scornfully, as if dismissing his accuser. Later, those closing parts of the speech in which the prosecutor related the brilliant stratagems he had used in Mokroye became the target of various jokes in our society: “He couldn’t restrain himself,” they said. “He had to call people’s attention to his talents; he was afraid they would fail to notice them!”

The court was recessed, but only for fifteen or twenty minutes. Some of the spectators engaged in excited discussions interspersed with exclamations. Some of these I still remember.

“A business-like speech,” a gentleman in one group said.

“All that psychology—he really drove it in a bit hard!” someone else said.

“But he is right. Everything he said is irrefutably true!”

“He certainly is a past master at that!”

“He summed up the case perfectly.”

“And he brought us all into it, too, while summing up!” another voice butted in. “Do you remember his starting off by saying that everybody is just like the late Fyodor Karamazov?”

“But then again, the things he said in the end! He did get rather carried away.”

“Yes, and it was not always too clear what he was trying to say.”

“Well, so he got carried away, as you say.”

“You’re being very unfair, sir.”

“But no. I admit that it was all very well done. The fellow had waited for this opportunity for such a long time, and now he certainly got it all off his chest. Ha-ha-ha!”

“I wonder what the defense counsel will say now?”

And in another group I heard:

“I don’t think it was too smart of him to provoke that Petersburg lawyer by saying that he’d try to appeal to the jury’s emotions, do you remember?”

“Yes, it was a rather clumsy move.”

“He said it without thinking.”

“He’s too tense, I think.”

“You know, here we are laughing, but just think how the accused must feel about it.”

“Yes, I wonder how dear Mitya-boy feels?”

“Let’s see what the defense counsel has to say now.”

And in a third group:

“Who’s that fat lady with the lorgnette? The one sitting over there, at the end of the row?”

“She used to be married to a general. She’s divorced now. I know her.”

“Oh, so that’s why she keeps looking around with her lorgnette!”

“That won’t help her!”

“Don’t say that, there’s a lot to her!”

“Look two seats away from her—you see that little blonde? I’d rather go for that!”

“Say, don’t you think it was very clever, the way they caught up with him in Mokroye?”

“Yes, certainly, it was pretty clever, but he told the story all over again. Why, I’ve heard him tell it in every house I’ve seen him in!”

“So he couldn’t restrain himself here either! The vanity of it!”

“He’s an embittered man!”

“And so touchy too . . . Also, he goes in for rhetoric too much, and those long sentences . . .”

“And he keeps trying to scare us. Remember what he said about that troika? And then about their having their Hamlets while we still have only our Karamazovs? That was rather clever, I must say!”

“He’s trying to get on good terms with the liberals—he’s afraid of them.”

“He’s afraid of the defense counsel too!”

“Yes, I wonder what Mr. Fetyukovich will have to say?”

“Whatever he says, there’s no danger that he’ll get through to those thick-headed peasants!”

In a fourth group:

“About that troika—he put it nicely, didn’t he, when he said that about the other nations?”

“Yes, and it’s true that the other nations won’t stand for it.”

“Why, what makes you say that?”

“Don’t you remember, last week, that member of Parliament in England asking the Foreign Secretary whether the time hadn’t come for them to do something about our nihilists, whether they shouldn’t teach a lesson to that nation of barbarians—meaning us. That’s what the prosecutor was referring to, I know, because I heard him talking about it last week.”

“Nonsense, why should we care what those English fools think of us?”

“Why are they fools? And what makes you think they can’t do anything?”

“Because all we have to do is to seal off Kronstadt and not let them have any wheat. Where would they get it from then?”

“From America. That’s where they get it now.”

“Now you’re talking nonsense . . .”

The bell rang. Everyone hurried to his seat. Fetyukovich mounted the rostrum.

Chapter 10: The Summation Of The Defense. An Argument That Cuts Both Ways

EVERYTHING GREW completely quiet as the famous orator’s first words resounded. The eyes of all the spectators were fastened on him. He started simply, directly, with an air of sincere conviction and without a trace of conceit. He made no attempt at eloquence, at emotional modulations, at pathos, or at dramatic phrasemaking. He sounded like a man trying to explain something to intimate friends. His voice was beautiful—warm and powerful—and in itself conveyed sincerity and frankness. Nevertheless, everyone present felt that if he chose to, the speaker could suddenly raise himself to the summits of true pathos and strike at their hearts with uncanny power. His language was perhaps more colloquial than the prosecutor’s, but it was also more precise, and he avoided long and involved sentences. There was one thing in his manner, however, of which the ladies did not approve—that was the way he bent his back. At the beginning of his speech, in particular, it looked as if he were not just bowing to the spectators, but preparing to rush or fly toward them. He obtained that effect by folding his long, thin back roughly in the middle, as if he had a hinge in it that enabled him to keep it bent almost at right angles.

At first, he seemed to skip from one subject to another, as though stumbling on topics at random, without any system. Eventually, however, everything fell neatly into its proper place. His speech can be roughly divided into two parts: first, the refutation of the accusation, during which he sometimes used sarcasm and sometimes malice; and the second part, in which he suddenly changed both his tone and his manner and quickly raised himself to the summits of pathos, and when this happened, the audience responded at once with a quiver of delight, as if they had all been waiting for just that.

He went straight to the point by announcing that, although he usually practiced in Petersburg, he sometimes agreed to go to other towns to defend people of whose innocence he was either certain or at least instinctively convinced.

“And this is just such as case,” he said, “for the very first newspaper reports suggested something to me that was very much in favor of the accused. There was a certain legal problem that interested me here, and, although similar problems occur quite often in legal practice, I believe I have never seen this one appear so fully, with all its characteristic aspects, as here. I should really have kept this point for the end of my speech, for my final summation, but I will explain my idea now, at the outset, because I have a weakness for going straight to the point, without trying to save any possible effect for later, without economizing my ammunition. I may be accused of improvidence, but at least no one can say that I am not straightforward. This idea of mine is that, while I concede that the sum total of facts does point to the guilt of the accused, there is not one single fact that could be considered unassailable if taken individually. The more I read and heard about this case, the more this impression was confirmed. And then one day the family of the accused approached me and asked me to handle his defense. I accepted immediately and now I am completely convinced that my first impressions were absolutely correct. I accepted the case in order to destroy that frightening collection of facts by exposing them, one by one, as unproven and far-fetched.”

After this introduction, Fetyukovich suddenly exclaimed:

“Gentlemen of the jury, you must remember that I am a stranger here! I have no preconceived ideas, for everything is new to me. The accused, who, I understand, is a violent and unrestrained man, has never had the occasion to offend me, as he may perhaps have offended as many as a hundred people living in this town, thus prejudicing them against him. Of course, I won’t argue that the moral indignation against the accused here is not quite justified, because of his reprehensible behavior. I know, nevertheless, that he was received in the houses of members of local society and that, indeed, he was very warmly received in the house of the highly talented prosecutor.”

At these words two or three laughs came from among the spectators and, however muffled and quickly suppressed, they were noticed by everyone. It must be pointed out that, although the prosecutor had received Mitya, he had done so against his own wishes. This had been the doing of the prosecutor’s wife, a highly respectable but somewhat eccentric and stubborn lady, who had taken an unaccountable interest in Mitya and who liked in some instances, usually quite unimportant ones, to oppose her husband’s wishes. Mitya, incidentally, visited their house rather seldom.

“Nevertheless,” Fetyukovich went on, “I can conceive that even a man whose judgment is as fair and as detached as that of my distinguished opponent’s could conceivably have formed a mistaken and prejudiced opinion of my unfortunate client. Oh, that is quite natural: the poor man deserved to have people prejudiced against him. An offended moral and, even worse, esthetic feeling often produces a most unappeasable resentment. Of course, the brilliant summation of the prosecutor—which gave us a severe analysis of the accused’s character and behavior, painted for us a grim picture of the whole situation, and, above all, took us down into such psychological depths, where we could understand for ourselves the essence of the case—could not have been delivered by someone who was in the slightest degree maliciously prejudiced, personally, against the accused, for, in that case, he would have been quite incapable of all those profound insights. But there are certain things that, in such cases, are even worse and even more lethal than a deliberately hostile bias. One such thing, for instance, is what we may describe as an irresistible urge for artistic self-expression, a desire to invent one’s own novel, especially, as in this case, when nature has lavished on the speaker such a talent for psychological insight. While I was still in Petersburg, preparing to come here, I was warned—although I was already aware of it myself and didn’t need the warning—that I would have to deal with an opponent who had earned a reputation for himself among our young jurists for his profound and subtle psychological insights.

“But, gentlemen, although I acknowledge that psychology is a very profound science, at the same time, I submit that it is a knife that cuts both ways.”

At this point there were a few chuckles among the audience.

“I hope you will forgive me this trivial simile,” Fetyukovich went on, “because I am not very good at elegant phrasemaking. But let me illustrate what I mean. I will take the first statement from the prosecutor’s speech that comes to my mind. It came up during the scene when, in the middle of the night, the accused flees across the garden, climbs the fence, and with a brass pestle knocks down the man-servant, who has caught him by the foot. Then he climbs down again and, for five minutes, fusses over the man he has felled, trying to see whether he has killed him or not. Now the prosecutor absolutely refuses to believe that the accused could have jumped back into the garden out of compassion for old Gregory. ‘No,’ the prosecutor declares, and then proceeds to claim something to the effect that such a sentimental impulse must be ruled out at such a moment because it would be unnatural; that he jumped down precisely to find out whether the only witness to the crime was dead or alive; and that this proves that he did commit the crime, because there was no other possible reason why he should jump back into the garden. That is psychology for you! But let us apply the same psychological reasoning in another way and we will find an explanation that is no less convincing. So we have the murderer jumping down from the fence as a precaution, to make sure that the only witness to his crime is dead, although he is a murderer who has left next to the body of his father, whom he has just killed, what the prosecutor himself described as a fatal piece of incriminating evidence, in the form of the envelope that had contained the money. Why, all he had to do, according to the prosecutor, was to take the envelope with him, and no one would ever have known of the existence of that money and, therefore, no one would ever have suspected him of stealing it. This, I repeat, is the prosecutor’s own conclusion. So we have here a criminal who does not have enough sense to take the proper precautions and who runs away from the scene of the crime, leaving behind evidence that is bound to incriminate him, but two minutes later, after he has struck and felled another victim, he suddenly is supposed to have become the coolest, the most calculating criminal, just because it suits the argument. But let us assume that everything happened exactly as my opponent described it, for the intricacy of psychology is such that at one moment a man can be as perspicacious and murderous as an eagle in the mountains of the Caucasus, and the next moment become as blind and meek as a poor mole. But then if, murderous, cold, and calculating, a man jumps down from the fence to see whether the only witness is dead or alive, what need is there for him to waste five minutes examining his new victim and thus risk having five more witnesses to his crimes? And why should he soak his handkerchief in the blood of this new victim, thus leaving one more clue that may lead to him? No, if the accused was so ruthless and calculating at that moment, why, once he had jumped down into the garden, didn’t he smash the old man’s skull with that same pestle and make really sure that the old man was well and truly dead, so that he would have nothing more to worry about on that score? What’s more, instead of doing so, the cunning murderer leaves his murder weapon, his pestle, there on the path, the pestle that he had picked up in the presence of two women who would obviously recognize it and testify that he had it! And he didn’t just drop it, forget about it; no, he must have actually tossed it away, because it was found on the path about fifteen yards from the spot where Gregory had been felled.