Crime and Punishment - Noyemi

By Fyodor Dostoevsky

him. And what comfort was it to him that at the end of eight years he
would only be thirty-two and able to begin a new life! What had he to
live for? What had he to look forward to? Why should he strive? To
live in order to exist? Why, he had been ready a thousand times before
to give up existence for the sake of an idea, for a hope, even for a
fancy. Mere existence had always been too little for him; he had
always wanted more. Perhaps it was just because of the strength of his
desires that he had thought himself a man to whom more was permissible
than to others.

And if only fate would have sent him repentance--burning repentance
that would have torn his heart and robbed him of sleep, that
repentance, the awful agony of which brings visions of hanging or
drowning! Oh, he would have been glad of it! Tears and agonies would
at least have been life. But he did not repent of his crime.

At least he might have found relief in raging at his stupidity, as he
had raged at the grotesque blunders that had brought him to prison.
But now in prison, in freedom, he thought over and criticised all
his actions again and by no means found them so blundering and so
grotesque as they had seemed at the fatal time.

"In what way," he asked himself, "was my theory stupider than others
that have swarmed and clashed from the beginning of the world? One has
only to look at the thing quite independently, broadly, and
uninfluenced by commonplace ideas, and my idea will by no means seem
so . . . strange. Oh, sceptics and halfpenny philosophers, why do you
halt half-way!"

"Why does my action strike them as so horrible?" he said to himself.
"Is it because it was a crime? What is meant by crime? My conscience
is at rest. Of course, it was a legal crime, of course, the letter of
the law was broken and blood was shed. Well, punish me for the letter
of the law . . . and that's enough. Of course, in that case many of
the benefactors of mankind who snatched power for themselves instead
of inheriting it ought to have been punished at their first steps. But
those men succeeded and so they were right, and I didn't, and so I
had no right to have taken that step."

It was only in that that he recognised his criminality, only in the
fact that he had been unsuccessful and had confessed it.

He suffered too from the question: why had he not killed himself? Why
had he stood looking at the river and preferred to confess? Was the
desire to live so strong and was it so hard to overcome it? Had not
Svidrigaļlov overcome it, although he was afraid of death?

In misery he asked himself this question, and could not understand
that, at the very time he had been standing looking into the river, he
had perhaps been dimly conscious of the fundamental falsity in himself
and his convictions. He didn't understand that that consciousness
might be the promise of a future crisis, of a new view of life and of
his future resurrection.

He preferred to attribute it to the dead weight of instinct which he
could not step over, again through weakness and meanness. He looked at
his fellow prisoners and was amazed to see how they all loved life and
prized it. It seemed to him that they loved and valued life more in
prison than in freedom. What terrible agonies and privations some of
them, the tramps for instance, had endured! Could they care so much
for a ray of sunshine, for the primeval forest, the cold spring hidden
away in some unseen spot, which the tramp had marked three years
before, and longed to see again, as he might to see his sweetheart,
dreaming of the green grass round it and the bird singing in the bush?
As he went on he saw still more inexplicable examples.

In prison, of course, there was a great deal he did not see and did
not want to see; he lived as it were with downcast eyes. It was
loathsome and unbearable for him to look. But in the end there was
much that surprised him and he began, as it were involuntarily, to
notice much that he had not suspected before. What surprised him most
of all was the terrible impossible gulf that lay between him and all
the rest. They seemed to be a different species, and he looked at them
and they at him with distrust and hostility. He felt and knew the
reasons of his isolation, but he would never have admitted till then
that those reasons were so deep and strong. There were some Polish
exiles, political prisoners, among them. They simply looked down upon
all the rest as ignorant churls; but Raskolnikov could not look upon
them like that. He saw that these ignorant men were in many respects
far wiser than the Poles. There were some Russians who were just as
contemptuous, a former officer and two seminarists. Raskolnikov saw
their mistake as clearly. He was disliked and avoided by everyone;
they even began to hate him at last--why, he could not tell. Men who
had been far more guilty despised and laughed at his crime.

"You're a gentleman," they used to say. "You shouldn't hack about with
an axe; that's not a gentleman's work."

The second week in Lent, his turn came to take the sacrament with his
gang. He went to church and prayed with the others. A quarrel broke
out one day, he did not know how. All fell on him at once in a fury.

"You're an infidel! You don't believe in God," they shouted. "You
ought to be killed."

He had never talked to them about God nor his belief, but they wanted
to kill him as an infidel. He said nothing. One of the prisoners
rushed at him in a perfect frenzy. Raskolnikov awaited him calmly and
silently; his eyebrows did not quiver, his face did not flinch. The
guard succeeded in intervening between him and his assailant, or there

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