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novna and alarmed her by his appearance. He was like a
madman. He repeated all his conversation with Smerdya-
kov, every syllable of it. He couldn’t be calmed, however
much she tried to soothe him: he kept walking about the
room, speaking strangely, disconnectedly. At last he sat
down, put his elbows on the table, leaned his head on his
hands and pronounced this strange sentence: ‘If it’s not
Dmitri, but Smerdyakov who’s the murderer, I share his
guilt, for I put him up to it. Whether I did, I don’t know yet.
But if he is the murderer, and not Dmitri, then, of course, I
am the murderer, too.’
When Katerina Ivanovna heard that, she got up from her
seat without a word, went to her writing-table, opened a box
standing on it, took out a sheet of paper and laid it before
Ivan. This was the document of which Ivan spoke to Alyo-
sha later on as a ‘conclusive proof’ that Dmitri had killed
his father. It was the letter written by Mitya to Katerina
Ivanovna when he was drunk, on the very evening he met
Alyosha at the crossroads on the way to the monastery, after
the scene at Katerina Ivanovna’s, when Grushenka had in-
sulted her. Then, parting from Alyosha, Mitya had rushed
to Grushenka. I don’t know whether he saw her, but in the
evening he was at the Metropolis, where he got thoroughly
drunk. Then he asked for pen and paper and wrote a docu-
ment of weighty consequences to himself. It was a wordy,
disconnected, frantic letter, a drunken letter, in fact. It was
like the talk of a drunken man, who, on his return home,
begins with extraordinary heat telling his wife or one of his
household how he has just been insulted, what a rascal had

10 0 The Brothers Karamazov