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Chapter 9

The Galloping

Troika. The End of the

Prosecutor’s Speech

I

PPOLIT KIRILLOVITCH had chosen the historial meth-

od of exposition, beloved by all nervous orators, who find

in its limitation a check on their own eager rhetoric. At this

moment in his speech he went off into a dissertation on

Grushenka’s ‘first lover,’ and brought forward several inter-

esting thoughts on this theme.

‘Karamazov, who had been frantically jealous of every-

one, collapsed, so to speak, and effaced himself at once

before this first lover. What makes it all the more strange

is that he seems to have hardly thought of this formidable

rival. But he had looked upon him as a remote danger, and

Karamazov always lives in the present. Possibly he regarded

him as a fiction. But his wounded heart grasped instantly

that the woman had been concealing this new rival and de-

ceiving him, because he was anything but a fiction to her,

because he was the one hope of her life. Grasping this in-