“Let us lay aside psychology, gentlemen, let us lay aside medicine, let us lay aside even logic itself, let us turn just to the facts, simply to the facts alone, and let us see what the facts will tell us. Smerdyakov killed him, but how? Alone or together with the defendant? Let us first consider the first alternative— that is, that Smerdyakov was working alone. Of course, if he did kill him, it was with some object, for some sort of profit. But, not having even the shadow of a motive for murder such as the defendant had—that is, hatred, jealousy, and so on and so forth—Smerdyakov would undoubtedly have killed only for the sake of money, in order to appropriate precisely the three thousand roubles he had seen his master put into the envelope. And so, having planned the murder, he informs another person beforehand—a highly interested person, moreover, namely, the defendant—of all the circumstances to do with the money and the signals: where the envelope lay, what exactly was written on it, how it was tied, and above all, above all, he tells him about these ‘signals’ by which one can get into his master’s house. Why does he do it? To betray himself straight off? Or so as to have a rival, who perhaps will want to get in and acquire the envelope himself? No, I shall be told, he did it out of fear. But how could that be? A man who did not shrink from planning such a fearless and beastly thing and then carrying it out, gives away information that he alone in the whole world knows, and that, if he had only kept silent about it, no one in the whole world would have found out? No, however cowardly the man might be, if he were planning such a thing, he would never tell anyone about the envelope and the signals, for that would mean giving himself away beforehand. He would deliberately invent something, some lie or other, if he absolutely had to give information, but he would be silent about that! On the contrary, I repeat, if he kept silent about the money at least, and then went and killed and appropriated the money for himself, no one in the whole world would in any case ever be able to accuse him of murder for the sake of robbery, because no one but he would have seen the money, no one else would have known it was there in the house. Even if he were accused, it would inevitably be thought that he had killed from some other motive. But since no one ever noticed any such motive in him before, and everyone saw, on the contrary, that he was loved by his master and honored with his trust, then of course he would be the last to be suspected, and the one to be suspected would be the one who had such motives, who himself shouted that he had such motives, who did not conceal them, who revealed them to everyone, in short, the one to be suspected would be the murdered man’s son, Dmitri Fyodorovich. Smerdyakov would have committed the murder and robbery, and the son would be accused of it—surely this would be advantageous for Smerdyakov, the murderer? Well, and it is this son Dmitri that Smerdyakov, having planned the murder, tells beforehand about the money, the envelope, and the signals—how clear, how logical it is!
“The day of the murder planned by Smerdyakov comes, and so he goes tumbling into the cellar, shamming an attack of the falling sickness—what for? But, of course, so that first of all the servant Grigory, who was planning his treatment, seeing that there was absolutely no one to watch the house, would perhaps postpone his treatment and stand guard himself. Second, naturally, so that the master himself, seeing that no one was on guard, and being terribly afraid of his son’s coming, which he did not conceal, would be twice as mistrustful and cautious. Finally, and above all, so that of course he, Smerdyakov, brought down by the fit, would at once be transferred from the kitchen, where he always slept apart from everyone and where he could come and go as he pleased, to the other end of the cottage, to Grigory’s little room, behind the partition, three steps away from their own bed, as had always been done from time immemorial whenever he was brought down by the sickness, on the orders of his master and the tenderhearted Marfa Ignatievna. Of course, lying there behind the partition, he would most likely start groaning, in order to show himself truly sick, thereby waking them up throughout the night (as he did, according to the evidence of Grigory and his wife)—and all that, all that to make it more convenient for himself to get up suddenly and then kill his master!
“But, I shall be told, perhaps he pretended to be sick precisely so that no one would suspect him, and informed the defendant about the money and the signals precisely to tempt him into coming and killing him himself, and, don’t you see, when he has killed him and leaves, taking the money with him, perhaps while doing so he will make some noise and clatter, awaking witnesses, and then, you see, Smerdyakov can also get up and go—well, what will he go and do? Why, he will precisely go and kill his master a second time, and a second time take the already-taken money. Do you laugh, gentlemen? Personally I am ashamed to make such suggestions, and yet, just imagine, this very thing is precisely what the defendant asserts: after me, he says, when I had already left the house, knocked Grigory down and raised the alarm, he got up, went in, killed, and robbed. I will not even ask how Smerdyakov could have calculated all this beforehand and foreknown it all as if on his fingers, I mean, that the furious and exasperated son would come with the sole purpose of peeking respectfully in the window, though he knew the signals, and then retreat, leaving him, Smerdyakov, with all the booty! Gentlemen, I put the question to you seriously: where is the moment when Smerdyakov committed his crime? Show me that moment, for without it there can be no accusation.
“But perhaps the falling fit was real. The sick man suddenly came to, heard a cry, went out—well, and what then? He looked around and said to himself: why don’t I go and kill the master? But how would he know what was going on, what was happening there, if he had been lying unconscious up to then? No, gentlemen, fantasy, too, must have its limits.
“‘Well, sir,’ subtle people will say, ‘and what if the two were accomplices, what if they murdered him together and divided the money—what then?’
“Yes, indeed, that is a weighty suspicion, and, to begin with, there is colossal evidence to confirm it: one kills and takes all the labor upon himself, and the other accomplice lies on his back pretending to have a falling fit, precisely with the aim of arousing suspicion in everyone ahead of time, of alarming the master, of alarming Grigory. With what motives, I wonder, could the two accomplices have thought up precisely such an insane plan? But perhaps it was not at all an active complicity on Smerdyakov’s part, but, so to speak, passive and suffering: perhaps the bullied Smerdyakov merely agreed not to resist the murder and, anticipating that he would be accused of allowing his master to be killed, of not shouting or resisting, negotiated with Dmitri Karamazov beforehand for permission to spend the time lying down as if in a falling fit, ‘and you can go and kill him any way you like, it’s none of my apples.’ But even so, since this falling fit, again, would be bound to cause a commotion in the house, Dmitri Karamazov, foreseeing that, would by no means agree to such an arrangement. But suppose he did agree: in that case it would still come out that Dmitri Karamazov was the murderer, the direct murderer and instigator, while Smerdyakov would only be a passive participant, and not even a participant, but merely a conniver out of fear and against his will, as the court would surely discern—and yet what do we see? No sooner is the defendant arrested than he at once shifts all the blame onto Smerdyakov alone and accuses him alone.He does not accuse him as his accomplice, but him alone: he alone did it, he says, he killed him and robbed him, it is his handiwork! But what sort of accomplices are they, if they immediately start denouncing each other—no, that never happens. And notice the risk for Karamazov: he is the chief murderer, the other is not the chief one, he is merely a conniver, he was lying down behind the partition, and now he shifts it all onto the one lying down. But he, the one lying down, might get angry, and just for reasons of self-preservation alone might hasten to proclaim the real truth: we both participated, only I didn’t kill him, I just went along and connived at it out of fear. For surely he, Smerdyakov, would be able to understand that the court would immediately perceive the degree of his guilt, and he could therefore reckon that if he were to be punished, it would be far less severely than the other one, the chief murderer, who wanted to shift it all onto him. Which means, then, that willy-nilly he would make a confession. This, however, we have not seen. Smerdyakov never so much as whispered about any complicity, despite the fact that the murderer firmly accused him, and kept pointing at him all along as the sole murderer. Moreover, it was Smerdyakov who revealed to the prosecution that he himselfhad informed the defendant of the envelope with the money and of the signals, and that without him he would never have known anything. If he was indeed an accomplice and guilty, would he inform the prosecution of it so lightly—that is, that he himself informed the defendant of all that? On the contrary, he would try to deny it, and would most certainly distort the facts and diminish them. But he did not distort and he did not diminish. Only an innocent man, who has no fear of being accused of complicity, would act that way. And so, yesterday, in a fit of morbid melancholy resulting from his falling sickness and the outbreak of this whole catastrophe, he hanged himself. And, hanging himself, he left a note, written in his own peculiar style: ‘I exterminate myself by my own will and liking, so as not to blame anybody.’ It would have cost him nothing to add: ‘I am the murderer, not Karamazov. ‘ But he did not add it: did he have enough conscience for the one thing, but not for the other?