Mitya embezzles Katerina Ivanovna’s money

Mitya embezzles Katerina Ivanovna’s money not by spending the whole sum at once, but by dividing it, hiding half, and investing that hidden remainder with the hope of a future repayment. In his account, the sewn bag of fifteen hundred roubles is at first a private pledge that he might still make things right. Its eventual opening and expenditure marks the point at which, in his own moral reckoning, a shameful act becomes an enduring identity: he has made himself a thief.

The entrusted money and its division

A month before the account he gives during the inquiry, Katerina Ivanovna sent for Mitya and entrusted him with three thousand roubles to forward to her sister and another relative in Moscow. He presents the commission as something she could have carried out herself, but the money’s purpose was plain: it was entrusted to him for delivery, not given for his own use. At the time, he says, he had just begun to love Grushenka. He carried her off to Mokroe and spent half of Katerina’s money there over two days.

The other fifteen hundred roubles followed a different course. Mitya says he kept that half “like a locket round my neck,” then sewed it into a little bag. The image of a keepsake makes the reserve more than concealed cash: it is money he continues to carry as a material reminder that he has not yet exhausted every possibility of restitution. He later confirms that although he and the town had spoken as if he had spent all three thousand, he had in fact spent only fifteen hundred at Mokroe and sewn the other fifteen hundred away.

Concealment and the hope of repayment

Mitya explains the division through his earlier misunderstanding of Grushenka. He says he did not understand her and thought she wanted money and would not forgive his poverty. Convinced that he might need money if he were to take her away, he sewed up half the entrusted sum before he was drunk, intending to preserve it, and then went off to get drunk on what remained. He calls that conduct base. The concealment therefore arose within a confused mixture of desire, fear of poverty, and the practical calculation that he might need funds for a future with Grushenka; none of that altered the original obligation to Katerina.

The bag also kept alive a different possible future: Mitya might go to Katerina and repay the fifteen hundred roubles. He says that until he opened and spent it, he had not been able to bring himself to tear the reserve away from himself. The money’s physical separation from what he had already squandered allowed him to imagine that repayment remained possible. That hope did not undo his misuse of the commission, but it distinguished, in his eyes, the earlier concealment from the later decision to spend the reserve as well.

The turning point in Mitya’s self-judgment

On the day before his account, Mitya finally opened the sewn reserve and spent it. He traces the decision to the way from Fenya’s to Perhotin, and describes tearing the money from his breast as the act that made him a downright thief. The significance lies in the threshold he draws: he already admits that he misused Katerina’s money, yet he treats the retained half as evidence that he could still repay her and so might not be a thief in the fullest sense. Once that safeguard was gone, the imagined return to Katerina with the money was gone too.

The amount he had left was no longer the hidden fifteen hundred. He tells Nikolay Parfenovitch that eight hundred roubles remained from the money he had spent the previous day, and that this change was now in the official’s hands. The reduced sum gives his confession an immediate, concrete present: the reserve that had been preserved as an amulet has become spent money, with only its remainder before the investigators. His account distinguishes the money’s successive states—entrusted for transmission, partly squandered at Mokroe, partly sewn away, then finally opened and spent—rather than treating the three thousand as a single undifferentiated loss.

Consequences and significance

Mitya connects the final expenditure not only with the loss of money but with the collapse of his own moral defense. He says that by tearing away and spending the reserve, he destroyed his dream of going to Katerina and telling her that he could repay her. He describes the consciousness of having finally spent the money as a torment, and says that during the night he learned a great deal. His language makes the hidden cash function as a test of intention: it cannot erase the original breach of trust, but while it remains untouched it sustains his belief that restitution is still open to him.

The episode consequently turns on two separate reckonings. The first concerns what Mitya did with money entrusted for Katerina’s relatives; the second concerns the point at which he believes he has forfeited even the possibility of making amends. His account does not convert concealment into innocence: he acknowledges both the drunken spending and the calculation behind sewing the rest away. But it shows why he assigns such weight to the final act of opening the bag. For Mitya, the money had served as a tangible boundary between an offense he might still repair and a self he could no longer excuse.