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The Brothers Karamazov · Book IX

The preparatory proceedings

GuiltFamilySufferingJustice and Law

Summary of the book

Book IX turns the novel inside out. What the two previous books left only for the reader (the jealousy, the pestle, the race to Mokroye) must now become testimony before people who were not there, and the book measures the distance between the two sides. The clerk Perkhotin sets the machinery in motion without meaning to, out of restlessness and fear of scandal. The town, when he arrives, already knows. In three "ordeals" that fill the small hours of the morning, Dmitri Fyodorovich Karamazov talks too much, loses his temper, hides only what shames him most, and when at last he tells it, tells it well and is not believed. The prosecutor Hippolyte Kirillovich and the examining magistrate Nikolai Parfenovich read Mitya as a familiar type, the braggart who kills himself after a binge, and every witness, without meaning to harm him, confirms it. The part the inquiry does not hear, the pain that made him leap onto Grigory, returns in a dream in the form of a cold child, and it is with that dream that the book closes.

Chapter I: Perkhotin and Madame Khokhlakova

Chapter summary

Perkhotin keeps knocking at Morozova's gate until the doorman, after asking who it is, lets him in. Fenya, terrified two hours earlier and terrified again now, tells him about the pestle Mitya took from the kitchen, which came back without the pestle but with bleeding hands ("the blood was dripping, dripping!", she exaggerates). She says Mitya told her it was human blood and that he had just killed someone. Perkhotin, who saw the hands and helped wash them, insists only on the question of where Mitya ran with the pestle, and he leaves convinced that Mitya could only have gone to his father's house. The shortest way would be to go to the house of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov to see whether something has happened. But the night is dark, the gate is strong, he barely knows the old man, and the scandal of knocking and being ridiculed in town is what he fears most in the world. He decides instead on the most scandalous thing he could do: knock at eleven at night on the door of a lady he does not know and ask her whether she gave Mitya three thousand rubles. If she says no, he goes straight to the ispravnik. If she says yes, he goes home.

Analysis

Perkhotin changes his destination twice on the same street, because what moves him is not deduction but restlessness, which grows until it becomes pain and carries him along "against his will." He chooses to check the origin of Mitya's money rather than the blood, because it is the easiest point to prove or disprove. Thus the question to which the town will reduce the case, where the money came from, is born as the pretext of a clerk afraid of ridicule.

Madame Khokhlakova refuses to receive him, then gives in to curiosity. When he pronounces Mitya's name, she explodes: when will they leave her in peace with that horrible man, who came there three hours ago to kill her? Perkhotin tells her about the pistol, the money, and the blood, and that Mitya claimed to have received the three thousand from her, to go to the gold mines. Her face changes:

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Chapter II: The Alarm

Chapter summary

At the house of the ispravnik Mikhail Makarovich, a retired officer, widower, good host, of little knowledge about his own office and much hospitality, the assistant prosecutor Hippolyte Kirillovich happened to be present that night. He is about thirty-five, suffers from a chest ailment, is married to a stout childless woman, and is ambitious and irritable. He fancies himself a psychologist and wronged in his career. Also present were the doctor Varvinsky and, with the ladies, the young examining magistrate Nikolai Parfenovich Nelyudov, recently arrived from Petersburg, small, vain, and refined. Perkhotin enters and sees that everyone already knows: Fyodor Pavlovich has been murdered and robbed.

The alarm was raised by Grigory and his wife. Marfa Ignatyevna had been woken by the cry that opens Smerdyakov's epileptic fits. She saw her husband's bed empty, went out, heard moans in the garden, and found him twenty paces from the fence, where he had dragged himself after fainting and coming to, his head covered in blood, murmuring "killed... the father killed... don't shout, silly woman... run, call." Through the window she had seen her master lying on the floor, in his dressing gown, his chest bathed in blood. She ran to the neighbors, Maria Kondratievna and her daughter, and to a vagrant sleeping there, Foma. Maria Kondratievna remembered the cry she had heard at nine, "someone shouted and then suddenly fell silent," the one Grigory gave when he seized Mitya's leg. They washed the old man's head with water and vinegar. Once awake, he asked for his master and sent for the ispravnik. Maria Kondratievna arrived five minutes before Perkhotin.

Analysis

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Chapter III: The First Ordeal

Guilt

Chapter summary

Almost at dawn, the ispravnik, the prosecutor, and the examining magistrate reach Mokroye, and the inquiry begins. The chapter title calls it the first ordeal, the first of the passages Mitya must go through to answer for his father's death. He sits in a room with a wild look, not understanding what they say to him. Suddenly he rises, raises his arms, and shouts in one breath both the denial of guilt and the confession of desire, which the procedure will want to separate:

Analysis

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Chapter IV: The Second Ordeal

Justice and Law

Chapter summary

Nikolai Parfenovich grows animated at Mitya's willingness, and the narrator clarifies the pairing. The judge, recently arrived, venerates the prosecutor, the only one who believes in Hippolyte Kirillovich's psychological and oratorical talent and in his career injustice. The prosecutor, in return, loves the young man as the only person who admires him. The two agreed on the plan of the case during the journey and read each other's glances. They know what they want from Mitya.

Mitya asks to be allowed to tell his story alone, without interruptions. They begin with a trifle, the ten rubles for the pistols, which makes him backtrack: he tells the day from the beginning, from the plan with Samsonov. To the prosecutor's question of why he needed precisely three thousand rubles, he replies that this cannot be explained without three volumes. Asked whom he owed, he refuses.

Analysis

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Chapter V: The Third Ordeal

Chapter summary

Mitya tells how he jumped the fence, how he walked to the window, and what he felt there, with precision, and the two listen with a strange reserve. When he speaks of the signal he gave his father, the prosecutor and the judge do not remark on the word, as if they did not understand what it meant. When he reaches the moment he saw his father at the window and took the pestle from his pocket, he stops, looking at the wall. The judge asks what happened then.

Mitya, suddenly, with violent irony: "So I killed him, cracked his skull, isn't that how it goes in your version?" Then, slowly: his version is that, through someone's tears, through his mother's prayer, through a spirit of light that kissed him, the devil was defeated. He fled from the window, the father was frightened, saw him for the first time, and jumped back, and when he was already mounted on the fence, Grigory caught up with him. The two listen with calm attention, and Mitya explodes: they believe nothing. The prosecutor asks, as if without noticing, whether the garden door, at the other end of the house, was open.

Mitya replies that it was closed, and who would have opened it? But then the door! Did you find it open? They did. The prosecutor declares slowly that his father's murderer went in through it and came out through it; this is perfectly clear to them. Mitya is stunned. He swears he did not go in and that the door was closed all along. Only he, Smerdyakov, and the dead man knew the signals, and without the signals the old man would open to no one. The prosecutor, with a nearly hysterical curiosity, wants to know what these signals are. Mitya, who loves knowing something they do not, reveals them, taps them out on the table, and confesses that he himself tapped the signal "Grushenka has arrived." The prosecutor suddenly has an idea: Smerdyakov, who also knew the signals, might not have been the one who tapped them and made the old man open up?

Analysis

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Chapter VI: Mitya Stripped

Chapter summary

Behind the curtain, in the presence of peasants whom he judges to be there "for force, and perhaps for something more," they ask him to take off his jacket, and then to undress completely. Everything is done with a contempt he feels on his back. The judge and the prosecutor examine the coat, trousers, waistcoat, and cap. They feel the seams for money, and the clerk recalls the case of a copyist who hid hundred-ruble notes folded in the lining of a cap. They find large dried bloodstains and the shirt cuff, turned inside out and soaked, which Mitya explains by his contact with Grigory. The shirt, too, will be taken as evidence.

Analysis

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Chapter VII: The Secret of the Fifteen Hundred

Chapter summary

"Gentlemen, that money was mine," Mitya begins. The two of them are dumbfounded: they did not expect it. It was his, or rather "stolen," and it was fifteen hundred rubles, which had been with him all along, in a rag, hanging around his neck for a month, with shame and disgrace. Stolen from whom? Not from his father, but from Katerina Ivanovna. A month earlier she had given him three thousand rubles to send to a sister and a relative in Moscow. He, who had just fallen in love with Grushenka, took her to Mokroye and spent half of it in two days. The other half stayed on his chest, in a rag, for the day when she said "take me to the end of the world" and he had no means to go. The 836 rubles he handed over are the change from the fifteen hundred he spent last night. The prosecutor asks whether anyone knew. No one did. The whole town knows he spent three thousand, but it was he who said so, to the world, and the world has come to tell it that way.

The prosecutor loses patience: the explanation seems too little for such a costly secret. Appropriating three thousand rubles that were not his, even if only provisionally, is levity, at most something reproachable, not a disgrace. Many already suspected it, and the town had as its legend that he had squandered Katya's money. Why, then, such horror at the secret?

Analysis

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Chapter VIII: The Witnesses and the Dream

Suffering

Chapter summary

The questioning of the witnesses begins, and the narrator summarizes. The point on which everything turns is whether it was three thousand or fifteen hundred, at the first spree and now. Every testimony goes against Mitya, and some bring new facts that contradict him. The innkeeper Trifon Borisovich, stern and indignant, affirms that a month ago no less than three thousand was spent, more than a thousand of it on the gypsies alone. He says that yesterday Mitya told him, as he got down from the troika, that he was carrying three thousand, and that in the hall, while toasting the chorus, he shouted that he was leaving six thousand there, adding it to the sum of a month before. The figure "six thousand" pleases the magistrates: three plus three. The peasants, the coachman Andrei (who also recounts the conversation on the road, "whether I'll go to heaven or to hell, and whether they will forgive me there") and Kalganov confirm it. Kalganov, grudgingly, says he saw the Poles cheating, and that after they were thrown out Grushenka said she loved him. He speaks of her with respect, never once saying "Grushenka."

The Poles are the former veterinarian Mussialovich and the dentist Vrublevsky. They call the ispravnik "colonel," and Mitya shouts "scoundrel" and asks that it be recorded. The two relate how he bought them, in the little room, with three thousand: seven hundred down and two thousand three hundred "in town, tomorrow," swearing that he did not have the money there. Mitya first denies it and then admits he must have said it. The prosecutor seizes on this: part of the money remained hidden in town, or right there, which takes away from Mitya the only circumstance in his favor, that only eight hundred rubles were found. Mitya explains that he would have offered the Pole a document on the rights to Chermashnya, the same one he had offered Samsonov and Khokhlakova, and the prosecutor smiles at the "innocence of the device." The Poles leave with the two hundred rubles in their pockets. Maksimov, in tears, swears that Mitya had "twenty thousand" in his hand, but he saw such a pile only once, of seven thousand, when his wife mortgaged his village.

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Chapter IX: The Arrest Report

Guilt

Chapter summary

Once the record is signed, Nikolai Parfenovich reads Mitya the "Order" which, given the evidence against him and the lack of any evidence in his favor, sends him to jail. Mitya shrugs. He does not accuse them, and understands they have no other option. The judge says that the commissioner Mavriky Mavrikievich will take him.

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Reading of the book

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