The Galloping Troika. The End Of The Prosecutor's Speech. — The Brothers Karamazov

Ippolit closes with the historical method, turning to Grushenka's first lover. Mitya, who lives in the present, had treated the rival as remote fiction until he grasped that she had concealed him. He resigned himself with sudden respect for her right to love, even after parricide. Then he planned suicide: pistols at Perhotin's, a feast at Mokroe, a toast to her happiness, then brains dashed out at her feet so she would remember his love. Conscience torments him, yet Ippolit adds they have Hamlets while Russia still has Karamazovs.

He traces Perhotin, the shop, the drivers, and Mitya crying to a peasant that he was driving a murderer. At Mokroe, drink, dance, and Grushenka briefly stifled fear, guilt, and even the pistol he forgot. He learned she loved him and had rejected her lover only when nothing was possible. He hid half the money in the house like a man on the road to the scaffold who fancies infinite life until the last turning. On his knees before her he forgot the arrest until it came.

At arrest he blurted compromising words, then fenced with denial and Grigory's blood alone. Asked about Smerdyakov he swung to the opposite extreme until Grigory's open door shattered him and he shouted that Smerdyakov did it. Ippolit demolishes the little bag: torn shirt, landlady's cap, forgotten details that catch romancers. Justice cries out; he will welcome any real fact for the prisoner.

His peroration invokes Russia's fatal troika racing toward destruction while Europe watches in horror. Acquittal would heap hatred and justify parricide in foreign eyes. The speech ends without applause; Ippolit nearly faints. Mitya sits clenched, murmuring at Rakitin when her name is smeared. The gallery debates psychology, troika rhetoric, and vanity; the court adjourns briefly and Fetyukovitch mounts the tribune.