On the 11th of December of the year 1900 Anton Ignatyeff Kerzhentseff, a physician by profession, perpetrated a murder. The evidence presented in connection with the act itself, as well as certain circumstances which preceded the crime, gave cause to suspect the abnormality of Kerzhentseff's mental faculties.

Placed for purposes of investigation in the Elizavetinsk Psychiatric Hospital, Kerzhentseff was subjected to a severe and attentive surveillance of several capable alienists, the recently deceased Prof. Derzhembitzky being among the number. Here are the documents furnished in connection with the case by no less a personage than Dr. Kerzhentseff himself a month after the test had begun; together with other data they formed the groundwork of expert judgment.

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Till the present moment, gentlemen experts, I have concealed the truth; but now circumstances compel me to reveal it. Realizing this, you will comprehend that this business is not at all so simple a matter as it would seem to the ignorant; not at all a matter of the strait-jacket or the hand-cuffs. The thing involved here is neither the one nor the other, but is more terrible than the two combined.

My victim, Alexis Konstantinovich Saveloff, was my companion in the gymnasia and in the university, though in our professions our ways were apart. I, as you know, am a physician; while he completed a course of jurisprudence. I cannot say that I did not love the man; he was always sympathetic toward me, and I never had a more intimate friend than he. Notwithstanding the possession of these sympathetic traits, he did not belong to the class of men capable of commanding my respect. The astonishing softness and yieldingness of his nature, his strange uncertainty in the domain of thought and feeling, the capricious extremes of his views, and the unsoundness of his constantly changing judgments impelled me to regard him as a child or a woman. Those near to him, suffering now and then from his caprices, and at the same time, owing to an illogical human nature, loving him, found a justification for his shortcomings and their own attitude, by calling him an "artist." Indeed, this worthless word seemed to justify him completely, and that which to the normal mind would appear as silly was made to seem indifferent or even good. Such is the power of words that even I at one time, succumbed to the popular misconception and eagerly overlooked the petty shortcomings of Alexis. Of grand faults, as indeed of all big things, he was incapable. His literary productions amply attest this fact; they are full of things petty and empty, notwithstanding those short-sighted critics who delight to assail newly-revealed talents. Handsome and shallow were his productions, even as their author was handsome and shallow.

When Alexis died he was thirty-one years old, about a year younger than myself.

Alexis was married. Gazing upon his wife now, in mourning for her husband, you can have but a faint idea of her former beauty. She has grown ugly. Her cheeks are colorless and the skin of her face is flabby, aged—aged like a worn glove. And she has wrinkles. They are wrinkles now, but another year will pass and these will become deep furrows and trenches. How she did love him! And her eyes have ceased to sparkle, and they laugh no longer; formerly they were wont to laugh always, even when they ought to have wept. I have had the opportunity to see her for about a minute, having met her by accident at the district attorney's office, and was astounded at the change. She was powerless even to cast an angry look upon me. What a pitiful figure!

Only three persons—Alexis, I and Tatiana Nikolayevna—knew that five years ago, two years before the marriage of Alexis, I had proposed to Tatiana Nikolayevna and had been rejected. Of course, it is a mere conjecture about the three; more likely Tatiana Nikolayevna has another half-score of friends who had been apprised in detail of Dr. Kerzhentseff's one-time desire to marry, and of his humiliating rejection. I do not know whether she remembers that she laughed then; probably she does not remember—she laughed so often. Remind her, if you will: on the fifth of September she laughed. If she should deny it—and she will deny it—recall to her the circumstances. I, that strong man who never had shed a tear, stood before her and trembled. I trembled and saw how she bit her lips, and I already had stretched out my arms to embrace her, when she lifted her eyes, and there was laughter in them. My arms remained suspended in the air. She began to laugh and she laughed for a long time—as long as it pleased her. Later, however, she apologized.

"Please forgive me," she said, but her eyes laughed.

I also smiled, and though I could forgive her laughter, I never could condone my own smile. This was on the fifth of September, six o'clock in the evening, according to St. Petersburg time. I have added the last remark because we were at that moment in a railroad station; and I see now before me clearly the big white time schedule and the rows of figures running up and down.

Alexis Konstantinovich also had been killed precisely at six o'clock—a curious coincidence which might reveal much to the perspicacious person.

One of the reasons for placing me here has been the absence of motive responsible for the crime. Do you perceive now that a motive existed? Of course, it was not jealousy. The latter presupposes an ardent temperament and a weakness of mental faculties—that is something directly antagonistic to a cool, reasoning nature like mine. Revenge? Yes, sooner that—if it is necessary to employ an old word for defining a new and unfamiliar emotion. The case is this: Tatiana Nikolayevna once more had caused me to blunder, and it irritated me. Knowing Alexis well, I was convinced that Tatiana Nikolayevna, married to him, would be unhappy and would long for me; therefore I insisted that Alexis, who was in love with her, should marry her. Only a month preceding his tragic death he remarked to me:

"It is to you that I owe my present happiness. Isn't that so, Tanya?"

She glanced at me and said: "That's true," while her eyes smiled. I also smiled. Presently we all laughed, as, embracing Tatiana Nikolayevna—they never felt abashed before me—he added:

"Yes, brother, you missed your stroke."

This misplaced and tactless joke shortened his life a whole week, as originally I had intended to kill him on the eighteenth of December.

Their marriage turned out to be a happy one, and especially happy was she. His love toward Tatiana Nikolayevna was not intense; and in general he was not capable of deep love. He had his favorite occupation—literature—which carried his interests beyond the bounds of the bedchamber. She, however, loved only him, and lived only in him. He was a victim to physical indispositions, such as frequent headaches and insomnia, and these, of course, caused him much suffering. And she considered it a happiness to look after the sick man and to gratify his capricious desires. When a woman loves she becomes altogether incomprehensible.

Day after day I saw her smiling face, her happy face, young, beautiful, without care. I thought: this is my doing. I wished to give her a dissolute husband and deprive her of my company, but instead I have given her a husband whom she loves, and at the same time she manages to keep me near her. Here is an explanation of this singularity: she was more clever than her husband, and loved to chat with me, and, having had her chat, she would go to sleep with him and be happy.

I cannot recall when the thought to kill Alexis first came to me. It appeared somehow imperceptibly; but from the first minute it became old, as if I had been born with it. I know that I wished to make Tatiana Nikolayevna unhappy, and that at first I had thought of various schemes less fatal to Alexis. I have been always an enemy of unnecessary violence. Taking advantage of my influence over Alexis, I had thought of causing him to fall in love with another woman or of making a drunkard of him (he had an inclination toward this last), but none of these plans was practical. The obstacle consisted in the fact that Tatiana Nikolayevna would have contrived to remain happy, even in the event of her husband's taking to another woman, or in spite of having to listen to his drunken chatter and being compelled to accept his drunken caresses. It was essential to her that this man should live, and in one way or another she would have served him. Such slavish natures exist. Slave-like, they cannot understand or value the strength of others than their master. The world has seen clever women, good women and talented women, but it has yet to see a just woman.

I candidly admit that this is not for the purpose of securing your unnecessary condescension, but rather to demonstrate the straightforward and normal manner in which was born my resolution, and that it was a no slight struggle with my compassion towards the man whom I had sentenced to death. I had pity for the terror he experienced just before he died, and for those moments of suffering he endured when his head was being crushed. I had pity—I don't know whether you'll comprehend—for the head itself. There is extraordinary beauty in a harmoniously working living organism, and death, like disease, like age, is first of all deformity. I remember how, many years ago, upon graduating from the university, I had gotten hold of a young and beautiful dog having extraordinarily strong limbs. It cost me much mental effort to take its skin, as my experiment demanded. For a long time afterward I recalled the animal with regret.

If Alexis had not been so sickly and weak—who knows, perhaps I should not have killed him. To this day, however, I am sorry for his beautiful head. Tell this to Tatiana Nikolayevna, if you please. Beautiful, beautiful was that head. Its eyes were its only weakness. They were pale, without fire and energy.

I should not have killed Alexis had the critics really been justified in attributing to him the supreme literary gift. The roads of life are dark, and great is the need of masterly men as beacon-bearers. Each of them should be guarded as a rare jewel. It is these few who justify the existence of a thousand good-for-nothings and the commonplace. Alexis, however, was not a genius.

This is not the place for a critical article, but if you will read the more well-known productions of the deceased you cannot but agree with me that they are unnecessary to life. They are necessary to a lot of satiated people in want of diversion, but not to life, nor to us, engaged upon solving life's problems. At a time when the author, employing the power of his thought and genius, should have created new life, Saveloff clung in his books to the old, not making an effort to solve life's hidden significance. His solitary story which appealed to me, encroaching as it did upon the domain of the unexplored, was a story called "A Secret"—that was the sole exception. Worse still, Alexis was beginning to show evidence of having "written himself out," his happy existence having deprived him of his last teeth, which are so essential to the "biting into" life and to the gnawing of it. He frequently spoke to me of his doubts, and I saw that they were fundamental. I sounded him on his plans of his future labors exactly and minutely. His lamenting admirers may rest assured there was nothing new or grand in them. From among those near to Alexis only his wife failed to see the decline of his talent; nor would she ever have seen it. Do you know why? She did not always read her husband's productions. When I once made an attempt to open her eyes even slightly, she simply considered me a wretch. Seeing that we were alone, she said:

"You cannot forgive him something else."

"What is that?"

"That he is my husband and that I love him. If Alexis were not so attached to you . . ."

She faltered, and I anticipatingly finished her thought.

"You'd drive me out?"

Her eyes flashed laughter. And, smiling innocently, she pronounced slowly:

"No. I would let you remain."

And I, understand, never, even by a single word or gesture, let her know that I continued to love her. I thought to myself: so much the better that she has guessed.

The thought of taking a man's life did not leave me. I knew that this was a crime severely punishable by the law; but then nearly all we do is considered as criminal; only the blind do not perceive this. Those believing in God consider a crime as committed before God; others consider a crime as before the people; such as I consider a crime as before myself. It would have been a great crime if, having decided it necessary to kill Alexis, I had failed to carry out this resolution. That people classify crimes as grand and petty, and call murder a grand crime, is nothing more than a conventional and pitiful lie before oneself—an attempt to conceal oneself from the answer behind one's own spine.

I did not fear myself—that was more important than all else. The most terribly thing to the murderer, the criminal, is not the police, nor the court, but he himself, his nerves, the potent protest of his entire body trained in the familiar traditions. You will recall Raskolnikoff, that pitifully and absurdly lost man, and the benightedness of his like. I had given much time and much thought to this question, imagining myself as I should be after the murder. I will not say that I became convinced fully of my tranquillity. Such a conviction could not find existence in a thinking man capable of considering all possibilities. However, having gathered carefully all facts of my past, taking into account the strength of my will, the vigor of my unexhausted nervous system, my deep and sincere contempt of the existing morals, I could maintain a relative confidence in the successful issue of the undertaking. It would not be amiss to relate here one interesting fact out of my life.

Upon one occasion, when I was yet a student of the fifth semester, having stolen fifteen roubles of students' money confided to my care, I asserted that the cashier had made a mistake in his accounts, and all believed me. It was more than a simple theft. It was not a case where the needy one stole from the rich man. Here was not solely a violated confidence; it was the deprivation of a hungry one, a comrade at that, and a student, and by a man with means—that is why they believed me. This action, no doubt, seems more contemptible to you than the murder of my chum. Isn't that so? I, on the contrary, recall that I felt jolly because I could do it so well and adroitly, and I looked into the eyes, directly into the eyes of those to whom I so boldly and freely lied. My eyes are dark, beautiful, frank—and they were believed. Above all, I was proud because I had felt no remorse. To this day I recall with particular gratification the menu of the unnecessarily festive dinner which I had ordered with the stolen money and had eaten with appetite.

Do I experience remorse even now—repentance of the act? Not a bit.

I feel sad. I feel intensely sad, as no other person in this world feels; and my hairs are turning grey; but that is something else. Something else. Something terrible, unanticipated, incredible in its fearful simplicity.