1 The Brothers Karamazovbeen lying on the shelf from which it was snatched by the
prisoner, but had been put away in a cupboard? It would not
have caught the prisoner’s eye, and he would have run away
without a weapon, with empty hands, and then he would
certainly not have killed anyone. How then can I look upon
the pestle as a proof of premeditation?
‘Yes, but he talked in the taverns of murdering his fa-
ther, and two days before, on the evening when he wrote
his drunken letter, he was quiet and only quarrelled with
a shopman in the tavern, because a Karamazov could not
help quarrelling, forsooth! But my answer to that is, that,
if he was planning such a murder in accordance with his
letter, he certainly would not have quarrelled even with a
shopman, and probably would not have gone into the tav-
ern at all, because a person plotting such a crime seeks
quiet and retirement, seeks to efface himself, to avoid being
seen and heard, and that not from calculation, but from in-
stinct. Gentlemen of the jury, the psychological method is
a two-edged weapon, and we, too, can use it. As for all this
shouting in taverns throughout the month, don’t we often
hear children, or drunkards coming out of taverns shout,
‘I’ll kill you’? but they don’t murder anyone. And that fatal
letter- isn’t that simply drunken irritability, too? Isn’t that
simply the shout of the brawler outside the tavern, ‘I’ll kill
you! I’ll kill the lot of you!’ Why not, why could it not be
that? What reason have we to call that letter ‘fatal’ rather
than absurd? Because his father has been found murdered,
because a witness saw the prisoner running out of the gar-
den with a weapon in his hand, and was knocked down by