Ippolit Kirillovich then went on to tell how the thought of killing his father gradually emerged in the defendant, and traced it fact by fact.
“At first we only shout in the taverns—shout all that month. Oh, we love to live among people and to inform these people at once of everything, even our most infernal and dangerous ideas; we like sharing with people, and, who knows why, we demand immediately, on the spot, that these people respond to us at once with the fullest sympathy, enter into all our cares and concerns, nod in agreement with us, and never cross our humor. Otherwise we will get angry and wreck the whole tavern.” (There followed the anecdote about Captain Snegiryov.) “Those who saw and heard the defendant during this month felt finally that these were not mere shouts and threats against his father, but that, considering the frenzied state he was in, the threats might become reality.” (Here the prosecutor described the family meeting in the monastery, the conversations with Alyosha, and the ugly scene of violence in his father’s house when the defendant burst in after dinner.) “I do not mean to assert emphatically,” Ippolit Kirillovich continued, “that before this scene the defendant had already determined deliberately and premeditatedly to do away with his father by murdering him. Nevertheless the idea had already presented itself to him several times, and he deliberately contemplated it—for that we have facts, witnesses, and his own confession. I must admit, gentlemen of the jury,” Ippolit Kirillovich added, “that even until today I was hesitant whether to ascribe to the defendant complete and conscious premeditation of the crime that was suggesting itself to him. I was firmly convinced that his soul had already contemplated many times the fatal moment ahead, but merely contemplated it, imagined it only as a possibility, without settling either on the time or the circumstances of its accomplishment. But I was hesitant only until today, until this fatal document was presented to the court today by Miss Verkhovtsev. You heard her exclamation yourselves, gentlemen: ‘This is the plan, this is the program of the murder! ‘—thus she defined the unfortunate ‘drunken’ letter of the unfortunate defendant. And indeed this letter bears all the significance of a program and of premeditation. It was written two days before the crime, and thus we now know firmly that two days before accomplishing his horrible design, the defendant declared with an oath that if he did not get the money the next day, he would kill his father, so as to take the money from under his pillow, ‘in the envelope with the red ribbon, if only Ivan goes away.’ Do you hear: ‘if only Ivan goes away’—so everything had been thought out, the circumstances had been weighed—and what then? It was all accomplished as written! Premeditation and deliberateness are beyond doubt, the crime was to be carried out for the purpose of robbery, that is stated directly, it is written and signed. The defendant does not deny his signature. I shall be told: it was written by a drunk man. But that diminishes nothing, it makes it all the more important: he wrote when drunk what he had planned when sober. Had he not planned it when sober, he would not have written about it when drunk. I shall perhaps be asked: why was he shouting about his intentions in the taverns? If a man determines to do such a thing with premeditation, he is silent and keeps it to himself. True, but he shouted when there was no plan or premeditation as yet, when just the desire alone was present, a yearning that was ripening. Later on he did not shout so much about it. On the evening when this letter was written, having gotten drunk in the ‘Metropolis’ tavern, he was silent, contrary to his custom, did not play billiards, sat apart, spoke to no one, and only chased a local shop clerk from his seat, but this he did almost unconsciously, from a habit of quarreling, which he could not do without anytime he entered a tavern. True, along with his final determination, the fear must have occurred to the defendant that he had shouted around town too much beforehand and that it would go a long way towards exposing and accusing him once he had carried out his plan. But there was no help for it, the fact of publication had been accomplished, it could not be taken back, and, after all, things had always worked out before, so they would work out now as well. We set our hopes on our lucky star, gentlemen! I must admit, furthermore, that he did a lot to get around the fatal moment, that he exerted much effort to avoid the bloody outcome. ‘Tomorrow I’ll ask all people for the three thousand,’ as he writes in his peculiar language, ‘and if I don’t get it from people, blood will be shed.’ Again it was written in a drunken state, and again in a sober state it was accomplished as written!”
Here Ippolit Kirillovich embarked on a detailed description of all Mitya’s efforts to obtain the money, in order to avoid the crime. He described his adventures with Samsonov, his journey to Lyagavy—all of it documented. “Worn out, ridiculed, hungry, having sold his watch for the journey (but still keeping the fifteen hundred roubles on him—supposedly, oh, supposedly! ), tortured by jealousy over the object of his love, whom he had left in town, suspeering that without him she would go to Fyodor Pavlovich, he finally returns to town. Thank God, she has not been with Fyodor Pavlovich! He himself takes her to her patron Samsonov. (Strangely, we are not jealous of Samsonov, and this is a rather typical psychological peculiarity of this case! ) Then he races to his observation post ‘in the backyard’ and there—and there discovers that Smerdyakov is down with a falling fit, that the other servant is sick—the field is clear, and the ‘signals’ are in his hands—what a temptation! Nevertheless he still resists; he goes to Madame Khokhlakov, a temporary local resident greatly respected by us all. Having long felt compassion for his fate, this lady offers him the most reasonable advice: to drop all this carousing, this outrageous love affair, this idling in taverns, the fruitless waste of his young strength, and go to Siberia, to the gold mines: ‘There is an outlet for your stormy strength, your romantic character yearning for adventure.’” Having described the outcome of that conversation, and the moment when the defendant suddenly received word that Grushenka had not stayed at Samsonov’s at all, having described the instantaneous frenzy of the unfortunate, jealous, overwrought man at the thought that she had precisely deceived him and was now there, with Fyodor Pavlovich, Ippolit Kirillovich concluded by drawing attention to the fatal significance of chance: “If the maid had managed to tell him that his sweetheart was in Mokroye with the ‘former’ and ‘indisputable’ one—nothing would have happened. But she was overcome with fright, began vowing and swearing, and if the defendant did not kill her right then, it was only because he rushed headlong after his traitoress. But observe: beside himself as he may have been, he did take the brass pestle with him. Why precisely the pestle, why not some other weapon? But since we have been contemplating this picture for a whole month and preparing for it, the moment anything resembling a weapon flashes before us, we grab it as a weapon. And that some such object might serve as a weapon—this we have already been imagining for a whole month. That is why we recognized it so instantly and unquestionably as a weapon! Therefore it was by no means unconsciously, by no means inadvertently that he grabbed this fatal pestle. And now he is in his father’s garden—the field is clear, no witnesses, the dead of night, darkness, and jealousy. The suspicion that she is there, with his rival, in his arms, and perhaps is laughing at him that very minute—takes his breath away. And not merely the suspicion—why talk of suspicion, when the deception is evident, obvious: she is there, in that room, where the light is coming from, she is with him behind the screen—and so the unfortunate man steals up to the window, respectfully peeks in, virtuously resigns himself, and sensibly departs, hastening to put trouble behind him, lest something dangerous and immoral happen—and we are asked to believe this, we who know the defendant’s character, who understand what state of mind he was in, a state we know from the facts, and, above all, that he was in possession of the signals with which he could open the house at once and go in!” Here, apropos the “signals,” Ippolit Kirillovich left off his accusatory speech for a time, finding it necessary to expatiate on Smerdyakov, so as to exhaust completely this whole parenthetic episode to do with suspecting Smerdyakov of the murder, and have done with the idea once and for all. He did so quite thoroughly, and everyone understood that, despite the contempt he showed for this suggestion, he still considered it very important.