11 The Brothers Karamazov
been erased in their minds and buried under the sands.
Look at our vice, at our profligates. Fyodor Pavlovitch, the
luckless victim in the present case, was almost an innocent
babe compared with many of them. And yet we all knew
him, ‘he lived among us!’...
‘Yes, one day perhaps the leading intellects of Russia
and of Europe will study the psychology of Russian crime,
for the subject is worth it. But this study will come later, at
leisure, when all the tragic topsy-turvydom of to-day is far-
ther behind us, so that it’s possible to examine it with more
insight and more impartiality than I can do. Now we are
either horrified or pretend to be horrified, though we re-
ally gloat over the spectacle, and love strong and eccentric
sensations which tickle our cynical, pampered idleness. Or,
like little children, we brush the dreadful ghosts away and
hide our heads in the pillow so as to return to our sports
and merriment as soon as they have vanished. But we must
one day begin life in sober earnest, we must look at our-
selves as a society; it’s time we tried to grasp something of
our social position, or at least to make a beginning in that
direction.
‘A great writer* of the last epoch, comparing Russia to a
swift troika galloping to an unknown goal, exclaims, ‘Oh,
troika, birdlike troika, who invented thee!’ and adds, in
proud ecstasy, that all the peoples of the world stand aside
respectfully to make way for the recklessly galloping troika
to pass. That may be, they may stand aside, respectfully or
no, but in my poor opinion the great writer ended his book
in this way either in an excess of childish and naive opti-