Ippolit Kirillovich in The Brothers Karamazov

Ippolit Kirillovich

Kirillovich is the prosecutor who makes the case against Dmitri. He's not stupid; he just overestimates his talents. The narrator mocks his "artistic pretensions – for example, to psychologism, to a special knowledge of the human soul, to a special gift of comprehending the criminal and his crime" (9.2.1). Kirillovich's overconfidence in his own powers of detection leads him to wrongly accuse Dmitri of Fyodor's murder.