1 The Brothers Karamazovwhat is this defence if not one romance on the top of an-
other? All that was lacking was poetry. Fyodor Pavlovitch,
while waiting for his mistress, tears open the envelope and
throws it on the floor. We are even told what he said while
engaged in this strange act. Is not this a flight of fancy? And
what proof have we that he had taken out the money? Who
heard what he said? The weak-minded idiot, Smerdyakov,
transformed into a Byronic hero, avenging society for his il-
legitimate birth — isn’t this a romance in the Byronic style?
And the son who breaks into his father’s house and murders
him without murdering him is not even a romance- this
is a sphinx setting us a riddle which he cannot solve him-
self. If he murdered him, he murdered him, and what’s the
meaning of his murdering him without having murdered
him — who can make head or tail of this?
‘Then we are admonished that our tribune is a tribune
of true and sound ideas and from this tribune of ‘sound
ideas’ is heard a solemn declaration that to call the murder
of a father ‘parricide’ is nothing but a prejudice! But if par-
ricide is a prejudice, and if every child is to ask his father
why he is to love him, what will become of us? What will
become of the foundations of society? What will become
of the family? Parricide, it appears, is only a bogy of Mos-
cow merchants’ wives. The most precious, the most sacred
guarantees for the destiny and future of Russian justice are
presented to us in a perverted and frivolous form, simply to
attain an object — to obtain the justification of something
which cannot be justified. ‘Oh, crush him by mercy,’ cries
the counsel for the defence; but that’s all the criminal wants,