Page 1178 - the-brothers-karamazov

thing of my words.
‘Now for the children of this father, this head of a fam-
ily. One of them is the prisoner before us, all the rest of my
speech will deal with him. Of the other two I will speak
only cursorily.
‘The elder is one of those modern young men of brilliant
education and vigorous intellect, who has lost all faith in
everything. He has denied and rejected much already, like
his father. We have all heard him, he was a welcome guest
in local society. He never concealed his opinions, quite
the contrary in fact, which justifies me in speaking rath-
er openly of him now, of course, not as an individual, but
as a member of the Karamazov family. Another person-
age closely connected with the case died here by his own
hand last night. I mean an afflicted idiot, formerly the ser-
vant, and possibly the illegitimate son, of Fyodor Pavlovitch,
Smerdyakov. At the preliminary inquiry, he told me with
hysterical tears how the young Ivan Karamazov had horri-
fied him by his spiritual audacity. ‘Everything in the world
is lawful according to him, and nothing must be forbidden
in the future — that is what he always taught me.’ I believe
that idiot was driven out of his mind by this theory, though,
of course, the epileptic attacks from which he suffered, and
this terrible catastrophe, have helped to unhinge his facul-
ties. But he dropped one very interesting observation, which
would have done credit to a more intelligent observer, and
that is, indeed, why I’ve mentioned it: ‘If there is one of the
sons that is like Fyodor Pavlovitch in character, it is Ivan
Fyodorovitch.’

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