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October 8, 2021 - May 8, 2022
You’re like Fyodor Pavlovich most of all, it’s you of all his children who came out resembling him most, having the same soul as him, sir.”
The gentleman looked as though he belonged to the category of former idle landowners that flourished in the time of serfdom; had obviously seen the world and decent society, had once had connections and perhaps had them still, but, after the gay life of his youth and the recent abolition of serfdom, had gradually fallen into poverty and become a sort of sponger, in bon ton, as it were, knocking about among good old acquaintances, and received by them for his easy, agreeable nature, and also considering that he was, after all, a decent man, who could even be invited to sit at the table in any
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“By abusing you, I’m abusing myself!” Ivan laughed again. “You are me, myself, only with a different mug. You precisely say what I already think … and you’re not capable of telling me anything new!”
agreeable. I sincerely love people—oh, so much of what has been said about me is slander! Here, when I move in with people from time to time, my life gets to be somewhat real, as it were, and I like that most of all. Because, like you, I myself suffer from the fantastic, and that is why I love your earthly realism.
I walk about here and dream. I love to dream. Besides,
My ideal is to go into a church and light a candle with a pure heart—by God, it’s true. That would put an end to my sufferings.
You want to overcome me with realism, to convince me that you are, but I don’t want to believe that you are! I won’t believe it!!”
By some pre-temporal assignment, which I have never been able to figure out, I am appointed ‘to negate,’ whereas I am sincerely kind and totally unable to negate. No, they say, go and negate, without negation there will be no criticism, and what sort of journal has no ‘criticism section’? Without criticism, there would be nothing but ‘Hosannah.’
simply and directly that I be destroyed. No, they say, live, because without you there would be nothing. If everything on earth were sensible, nothing would happen.
orders. People take this whole comedy for something serious, despite all their undeniable intelligence. That is their tragedy. Well, they suffer, of course, but … still they live, they live really, not in fantasy; for suffering is life. Without suffering, what pleasure would there be in
They had atoms in the ancient world, too. But when we found out that you had discovered your ‘chemical molecule,’ and ‘protoplasm,’ and devil knows what else—then we put our tails between our legs. A real muddle set in; above all—superstition, gossip
Take the soul of an enlightened Russian atheist and mix it with the soul of the prophet Jonah, who sulked in the belly of a whale for three days and three nights—you’ll get the character of this thinker lying in the road.”
The Russian character. I repeat: it’s a legend. Take it for what it’s worth.
“Precisely. But hesitation, anxiety, the struggle between belief and disbelief—all that is sometimes such a torment for a conscientious man like yourself, that it’s better to hang oneself. Precisely because I knew you had a tiny bit of belief in me, I let in some final disbelief, by telling you that anecdote. I’m leading you alternately between belief and disbelief, and I have my own purpose in doing so.
And some of them, by God, are not inferior to you in development, though you won’t believe it: they can contemplate such abysses of belief and disbelief at one and the same moment that, really, it sometimes seems that another hairsbreadth and a man would fall in ‘heel-over-headed,’
You’re insulted, first, in your aesthetic feelings, and, second, in your pride: how could such a banal devil come to such a great man?
propose to destroy everything and begin with anthropophagy. Fools, they never asked me! In my opinion, there is no need to destroy anything, one need only destroy the idea of God in mankind, that’s where the business should start! One should begin with that, with that—oh, blind men of no understanding!
People will come together in order to take from life all that it can give, but, of course, for happiness and joy in this world only. Man will be exalted with the spirit of divine, titanic pride, and the man-god will appear.
why, I wonder, should one also need the sanction of truth? But such is the modern little Russian man: without such a sanction, he doesn’t even dare to swindle, so much does he love the truth …”
‘You are going to perform a virtuous deed, but you don’t even believe in virtue—that’s what makes you angry and torments you, that’s why you’re so vindictive.’ He said it to me
He was beginning to understand Ivan’s illness: “The torments of a proud decision, a deep conscience!” God, in whom he did not believe, and his truth were overcoming his heart, which still did not want to submit. “Yes,”
almost all the ladies, at least the great majority of them, favored Mitya and his acquittal. Mainly, perhaps, because an idea had been formed of him as a conqueror of women’s hearts.
and takes wing precisely in pace with the growing danger. And generally it must be noted that our prosecutor was too ardent and morbidly susceptible. He would put his whole soul into some case and conduct it as if his whole fate and his whole fortune depended on the outcome.
The laughter was aimed especially at his passion for psychology.
His chief goal in life was to be a progressive man.
He was concerned with the phenomenon, its classification, seeing it as a product of our social principles, as characteristic of the Russian element, and so on and so forth.
“Can it be that the fatal decision in such a subtle, complex, and psychological case is to be turned over to a bunch of officials, and even to peasants?” and “What will some ordinary official make of it, not to mention a peasant?”
The whole tragedy seemed to unfold again before everyone, vivid, concentrated, lit by a fatal, inexorable light.
Dmitri Karamazov is a scoundrel, but not a thief!”
I even think that the ladies, one and all, who yearned with such impatience for the acquittal of an interesting defendant, were at the same time fully convinced of his complete guilt.
“He is guilty, but he will be acquitted because of humaneness, because of the new ideas, because of the new feelings that are going around nowadays,”
Of the late Smerdyakov he expressed the opinion, crossing himself, that he had been a capable fellow but stupid and oppressed by illness, and that, above all, he was a
godless man, and had learned his godlessness from Fyodor Pavlovich and his elder son.
“Who could say which of them was to blame or calculate who owed what to whom, with all that muddled Karamazovism, in which no one could either define or understand himself?”
Mr. Rakitin left the stage somewhat besmirched. The impression of the lofty nobility of his speech was indeed spoiled, and Fetyukovich, following him with his eyes, seemed to be saying, intending it for the public: “So, there goes one of your noble accusers!”
He spoke at length and cleverly about “mania” and the “fit of passion,” and concluded from all the assembled data that the defendant, before his arrest, as much as several days before, was undoubtedly suffering from a morbid fit of passion, and if he did commit the crime, even consciously, it was also almost involuntarily, being totally unable to fight the morbid moral fixation that possessed him.
“I could not but believe my brother. I know he would not lie to me. I saw by his face that he was not lying to me.” “Only by his face? That’s all the proof you have?” “I have no other proof.”
preferred better to remain a thief in her eyes, and did not return it, and the chief disgrace was that I knew beforehand that I wasn’t going to return it! Alyosha is right!
acquaintance with Fyodor Pavlovich, she observed sharply: “There
“It was all my fault, I was laughing at both of them—at the old man and at him—and drove them both to it. It all happened because of me.”
me. But as soon as he said he was not guilty, I believed him at once, and I still believe him and shall always believe him: he’s not the sort of man who would lie.”
All of Mr. Rakitin’s earlier speech, all its nobility, all its outbursts against serfdom, against the social disorder of Russia—all of it was now finally scrapped and destroyed in the general opinion.
head bowed, as though gloomily pondering something. He was dressed impeccably, but his face produced a morbid impression, at least on me: there was in his face something, as it were,
touched with clay, something resembling the face of a dying man.
He killed him, and killed him on my instructions … Who doesn’t wish for his father’s death … ?”
“They pull faces to each other. Liars! Everyone wants his father dead. Viper devours viper … If there were no parricide, they’d all get angry and go home in a foul temper … Circuses! ‘Bread and circuses!’
The paper she handed over was that same letter Mitya had written from the “Metropolis” tavern, which Ivan Fyodorovich referred to as a document of “mathematical” importance.
“And he wanted to marry me only because of the inheritance I received, that’s why, that’s why, I’ve always suspected that was why! Oh, he’s a beast! He was sure I would go on trembling before him all my life out of shame for having come to him that time, and that he could despise me eternally and so hold himself above me—that’s why he wanted to marry me!
He considered this speech his chef d’oeuvre, the chef d’oeuvre of his whole life, his swan song.
through the whole courtroom, and so to the end of his speech. But as soon as he finished it, he nearly fainted.
