Mihail’s remorse over the murder

Mihail’s remorse over the murder is a delayed moral awakening: for a long time he feels grief for the woman he loved but no pangs of conscience for killing her. That distinction eventually collapses. Haunted by the victim’s blood and the young life he destroyed, he comes to believe that only confession can heal his soul; when he finally tells his crime before an assembly, he accepts suffering as its consequence and describes a peace that had eluded him for years.

Remorse Delayed

Mihail’s account begins with an unsettling division between sorrow and guilt. His mysterious visitor, who has become his friend, tells the narrator that he was initially not troubled by conscience. His misery came instead from regret that he had killed the woman he loved. The emotional pain is real, but at first it concerns the loss of the beloved rather than responsibility for the murder.

That separation does not hold. Mihail later becomes bitterly haunted by the victim’s blood and by the young life he has destroyed. The recollection marks a change in what the crime means to him: it is no longer only the cause of personal bereavement, but an act whose victim and consequences demand an answer. His conscience arrives belatedly, after a period of suffering that he had not understood as remorse.

The Long Return of the Crime

The memory returns with persistence. Mihail has awful dreams, and for three years he dreams of rising, going out, and confessing before everyone that he committed murder. The dream recurs in different forms, keeping the crime present even while he has not yet made it public. Its repetition gives his remorse a history: confession is not a sudden impulse, but an action imagined and feared over a long interval.

At last, Mihail believes with his whole heart that confessing will heal his soul and leave him at peace for ever. That certainty does not make the decision easy. He is terrified by the prospect of carrying it out. His guilt thus develops through a conflict between the inward conviction that truth is necessary and the fear of making that truth public. The murder’s return in dreams connects private recognition to the act of testimony he has repeatedly contemplated.

Confession and Its Cost

The turning point comes when Mihail looks at the narrator and makes up his mind. He later reads aloud to an assembly a declaration containing a full account of the crime in every detail. The change is both moral and public: what had been concealed and rehearsed in dreams becomes an acknowledged fact heard by others.

At the conclusion of his declaration, Mihail says that he has cut himself off from people as a monster, that God has visited him, and that he wants to suffer for his sin. He then lays on the table the things he has kept. His statement joins confession to accountability: he does not present disclosure as a way to escape the consequences, but as the beginning of suffering he believes he must undergo.

Peace Near Death

Mihail’s later words describe a transformation that follows the confession. Believing that God has had pity on him and is calling him to Himself, he says he knows he is dying, yet feels joy and peace for the first time in many years. He locates the beginning of that peace in the moment when he did what he had to do: confession has not undone the murder or restored the life destroyed, but it has changed his relation to his crime.

The sequence gives his remorse its distinctive shape. It begins not as immediate moral anguish but as grief for the woman he loved; it grows through haunting memories and recurring dreams; and it reaches resolution in a full public account, a desire to suffer, and peace as death approaches. The narrative presents truth-telling not as erasure of guilt but as the act through which Mihail accepts its weight.