Mitya’s attempted attack on his father

Mitya’s attempted attack on his father is a crucial distinction in his account of the night under investigation: he admits that he reached the window with a weapon and felt hatred, but says he did not strike his father. Recounting the episode before the investigators, he describes pulling back at the decisive moment, fleeing across the garden, and being caught by Grigory at the fence. The scene turns on the difference between a threatened act and a completed one—and on Mitya’s effort to make that difference understood.

The Account Under Investigation

Though sullen, Mitya tries to preserve every detail as he tells the investigators what happened. He recalls leaping over the fence into his father’s garden, going up to the window, and describing what passed there, along with the feelings that troubled him in the garden. His account is not offered as a calm, detached statement: the effort to be precise takes place amid anger and the pressure of questioning.

As he reaches the question of the signal by which his father was to be told that Grushenka had come, Mitya notices that the lawyers appear not to understand the word in its significance. That inattention becomes part of the exchange: he is alert not only to the night’s events, but to what his listeners seem to hear—or fail to hear—in his version of them.

At the Window

The decisive moment comes when Mitya sees his father peering out of the window. He says that hatred flared up and that he pulled the pestle from his pocket. The investigators’ question presses him to continue: what happened after he took out the weapon? Mitya responds as though accepting the account he believes they expect, saying that he murdered his father by striking him. His eyes flash, and his anger breaks through the controlled precision of his earlier narration.

When Nikolay Parfenovitch repeats the possessive question, Mitya falls silent, drops his eyes, and then begins again more softly. Instead of treating the imagined continuation as what actually happened, he returns to his own account of the moment. He does not deny the hatred or the weapon; he changes the action that followed them. The difference between what he was capable of doing and what he says he did becomes the center of the testimony.

The Retreat and Grigory’s Intervention

Mitya cannot say whether someone’s tears, his mother’s prayer, or a good angel turned him away. He describes the change as the devil being conquered, then says that he rushed from the window and ran toward the fence. His father, alarmed, saw him and cried out before springing back from the window. Mitya says he remembers this clearly.

The flight ends at the garden fence, where Grigory catches him as he sits on it. That encounter supplies the concrete ending to Mitya’s account of the attempted attack: he had reached his father’s window in a state of hatred, but did not carry through the threatened violence. His father’s alarm and Grigory’s intervention belong to the same brief sequence, linking the near-attack to the point at which Mitya’s escape is stopped.

What the Episode Establishes

The episode preserves a sharp tension between Mitya’s admissions and his denial of the decisive act. He acknowledges entering the garden, approaching the window, experiencing hatred, and taking the pestle from his pocket. He even briefly voices the murder as a sarcastic version of the investigators’ story. But when he resumes speaking, he describes withdrawing and fleeing instead. The account therefore establishes the attempted attack without proving, on its own, what happened later or who killed his father.

The investigators listen with unruffled attention as Mitya looks up at them after identifying the place where Grigory caught him. Their composure contrasts with his sudden anger and then his quieter effort to tell the story. The scene’s force lies in that unresolved encounter between testimony and suspicion: Mitya supplies details that implicate him in a violent approach to the window, while insisting that at the crucial instant he turned away.