1 The Brothers Karamazovall his life for my happiness, and has lived in my joys, in my
successes. To murder such a father — that’s inconceivable.
Gentlemen of the jury, what is a father- a real father? What
is the meaning of that great word? What is the great idea in
that name? We have just indicated in part what a true father
is and what he ought to be. In the case in which we are now
so deeply occupied and over which our hearts are aching
— in the present case, the father, Fyodor Pavlovitch Karam-
azov, did not correspond to that conception of a father to
which we have just referred. That’s the misfortune. And in-
deed some fathers are a misfortune. Let us examine this
misfortune rather more closely: we must shrink from noth-
ing, gentlemen of the jury, considering the importance of
the decision you have to make. It’s our particular duty not
to shrink from any idea, like children or frightened women,
as the talented prosecutor happily expresses it.
‘But in the course of his heated speech my esteemed op-
ponent (and he was my opponent before I opened my lips)
exclaimed several times, ‘Oh, I will not yield the defence of
the prisoner to the lawyer who has come down from Peters-
burg. I accuse, but I defend also!’ He exclaimed that several
times, but forgot to mention that if this terrible prisoner
was for twenty-three years so grateful for a mere pound of
nuts given him by the only man who had been kind to him,
as a child in his father’s house, might not such a man well
have remembered for twenty-three years how he ran in his
father’s back-yard, without boots on his feet and with his
little trousers hanging by one button’- to use the expression
of the kindhearted doctor, Herzenstube?