Crime and Punishment

by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

  Once or twice, though, she herself broached topics that made it impossible, when replying, not to mention Rodya's exact whereabouts; and when these replies inevitably proved unsatisfactory and suspicious, she would suddenly become extraordinarily sad, sullen and silent, and would remain in that state for a very long time. Dunya finally realized how hard it was to keep lying and making things up, and decided it would be better simply to say nothing at all on certain points; but it was becoming ever more obvious that her poor mother suspected something dreadful. Dunya remembered her brother saying that Mother had heard her raving the night before that last, fateful day, after her row with Svidrigailov: might she have caught something? Often, sometimes after several days and even weeks of sullen, gloomy silence and wordless tears, the ailing woman would become almost hysterically animated and suddenly start talking, with barely a pause, about her son, her hopes, the future . . . Her fantasies could be very strange indeed. They humoured her and encouraged her, and she herself, perhaps, could see very well that she was being encouraged and merely humoured, but still she went on talking . . .

  The sentence followed five months after the criminal's confession. Razumikhin went to see him in prison whenever he could. Sonya did the same. Then, finally, came the hour of parting. Dunya swore to her brother that it was not forever; Razumikhin did the same. A plan had lodged itself firmly in Razumikhin's hot, young head: to try, over the next three to four years, to lay at least the foundations of their future income, to put at least a certain amount of money aside and move to Siberia, where the soil was rich in every sense of the word, and where workers, people and capital were in short supply; to set up home there, in the very same town where Rodya would be, and . . . to begin a new life all together. Saying goodbye, they were all in tears. During the last few days Raskolnikov had been very pensive, kept asking about his mother and worried about her constantly. In fact, he tormented himself so much about her that Dunya became alarmed. Learning in detail about his mother's morbid mood, he became very gloomy. For some reason he was always especially untalkative with Sonya. With the help of the money left to her by Svidrigailov, Sonya had been ready and waiting, for some time now, to follow the party of convicts with which he would be sent. Not a word had been said about this between herself and Raskolnikov; but both knew that this was how it would be. At the final leave-taking he smiled strangely at the passionate assurances given by his sister and Razumikhin about the happy life ahead of them after his release, and predicted that his mother's illness would soon end in disaster. Finally, he and Sonya left.

  Two months later, Dunechka and Razumikhin were married. The wedding was a sad, quiet affair. Among the guests were Porfiry Petrovich and Zosimov. Throughout this period Razumikhin bore a look of unshakeable resolve. Dunya was unquestioning in her faith that he would carry out all his intentions, and how could she not be? There was no mistaking his iron will. He also began attending university lectures again, so as to complete his studies. Both were constantly hatching plans for the future, and both were set on moving to Siberia in five years' time. Until then, they were counting on Sonya . . .

  Pulkheria Alexandrovna gladly gave her blessing to her daughter's marriage; but after the wedding she seemed to become even sadder and more preoccupied. To offer her at least a moment's relief, Razumikhin told her, among other things, about the student and his decrepit father, about how Rodya was burned and even fell ill after rescuing two infants the previous year. Both these facts brought Pulkheria Alexandrovna's already unsettled mind to a pitch of near ecstasy. She couldn't stop talking about them, even with strangers in the street (though Dunya accompanied her everywhere). On the omnibus, in shops, wherever she could grab anyone's attention, she would steer the conversation to her son, to his article, to how he helped a student, was burned in a fire, etcetera. Dunechka couldn't think how to restrain her. Leaving aside all the dangers of such an ecstatic, morbid state of mind, there was the disastrous possibility of someone mentioning the name Raskolnikov in connection with the trial and talking about it. Pulkheria Alexandrovna even found out the address of the mother of the two infants rescued in the fire and was determined to go and see her. Eventually, her anxiety reached extreme proportions. Sometimes she would suddenly start crying, often she would fall ill and start raving. One morning she announced that, according to her calculations, Rodya should soon be arriving; that she remembered how, when saying goodbye to her, he himself mentioned that they should expect him back in precisely nine months' time. She began tidying up the apartment and preparing for the reunion, decorating the room set aside for him (her own), dusting off the furniture, washing and hanging new curtains, etcetera. Dunya was alarmed, but said nothing and even helped her prepare the room for her brother. After a restless day of ceaseless fantasies, joyous daydreams and tears, she fell ill overnight; the next morning she was already running a fever and raving, began shaking and shivering. Two weeks later she died. In her delirium, words slipped out to suggest that she suspected far more about her son's dreadful fate than they had even thought possible.

  Raskolnikov did not learn about his mother's death for some time, even though correspondence with Petersburg had been established from the very beginning of his confinement in Siberia. It was arranged through Sonya, who wrote a punctual letter to Petersburg once a month, addressing it to Razumikhin, and once a month received a punctual reply. At first her letters struck Dunya and Razumikhin as a little dry and unsatisfactory; but in the end both came to the conclusion that there could be no better way of writing them, because from them the fullest and most precise picture began to emerge of the fate of their unfortunate brother. Sonya's letters were filled with the most ordinary reality, with the simplest and clearest description of all the conditions of Raskolnikov's life in penal servitude. There was nothing here about her hopes, no conjectures about the future, no account of her own feelings. Instead of attempts to explain his mental state and his whole inner life, there were facts and facts alone: his own words, detailed reports about the state of his health, accounts of what he wanted at their last meeting, what he asked for, what instructions he gave her, and so on. All these reports were set out in the minutest detail. In the end, the image of the unfortunate brother emerged all by itself, precisely and clearly delineated; here, there could be no scope for error: just one true fact after another.

  But Dunya and her husband could draw scant comfort from these reports, especially at the beginning. Sonya kept writing that he was always sullen, untalkative and barely interested in the news she passed on to him whenever she received a letter; that he would sometimes ask about Mother; and that when, seeing that he was already guessing the truth, she finally told him about her death, she found, to her astonishment, that even this did not appear to affect him greatly, or so it seemed from the outside. She wrote, among other things, that however self-absorbed he might have become and however much he might have closed himself off from everyone, his attitude towards his new life was straightforward and simple; he understood his situation perfectly well, expected no sudden improvements, entertained no frivolous hopes (as others in his situation are so prone to do) and found almost nothing to surprise him about his new surroundings, which were so different from anything he had known before. His health, she wrote, was satisfactory. He would go out to work without trying to shirk it and without going out of his way to find more. He barely noticed the food, but it was so bad, except on Sundays and holidays, that in the end he willingly took some money from Sonya to make his own tea once a day; as for everything else, he asked her not to go to any trouble, assuring her that all this concern for him only served to annoy him. Sonya added that he lived in a dormitory with everyone else; that she had not seen the barracks from the inside, but inferred that they were cramped, horrid and unhealthy; that he slept on a plank bed, spreading thick felt beneath him, and refused to try anything else. But it was not on account of any preconceived plan or intention that he lived in this coarse and beggarly way; no, it was simply because o
f his inattentive, indifferent attitude to his own fate. Sonya wrote quite bluntly that not only did he show no interest in her visits, especially at the beginning, he even became almost annoyed with her, was untalkative and even rude; in the end, though, these meetings became a habit for him and almost a need, to the point that he became quite despondent when she was taken ill for a few days and was unable to visit. They saw each other on rest days at the prison gates or in the guardhouse, where he would be summoned to her for a few minutes; on weekdays, when he was out working, she would come to find him in the workshops or at the brick factories or in the sheds on the bank of the Irtysh. As for her own news, Sonya informed them that she had even managed to make some acquaintances and patrons in the town; that she had taken up sewing and that since there was barely a single seamstress in the whole town she had become indispensable in many homes; the only thing she omitted was that through her Raskolnikov, too, had come under the authorities' protection, his workload had been lightened, and so on. Eventually (after Dunya detected a particular note of anxiety and alarm in Sonya's most recent letters), news arrived that he was shunning everyone, that the convicts in the prison had not taken kindly to him, that he was silent for days at a time and was becoming very pale. Suddenly, in her last letter, Sonya wrote that he had fallen very seriously ill and was laid up in hospital, in the convict ward . . .

  II

  He'd been sick for some time; but it wasn't the horror of convict life, the forced labour, the food, the shaven head or the patched-together clothes that broke him: oh, what were all these torments and hardships to him? In fact, he was glad to have work to do: exhausting himself physically, he at least earned himself a few hours' untroubled sleep. And what did the food matter to him - this cabbage soup without meat, only cockroaches? Many times as a student, in his previous life, he hadn't even had that. His clothing was warm and well suited to his way of life. He couldn't even feel his shackles. Was he to be ashamed of his shaven head and his half-and-half jacket?4 Before whom? Before Sonya? Sonya was afraid of him. Was he to feel ashamed before her?

  And why not? He felt ashamed even before Sonya, whom he tormented in return with his rudeness and disdain. But it wasn't his shaven head and his shackles he was ashamed of: it was his pride that had been badly wounded; it was this that had made him ill. Oh, if only he could have blamed himself, how happy he would have been! He could have put up with anything then, even shame and disgrace. But he judged himself harshly, and his hardened conscience failed to find any especially dreadful guilt in his past, except perhaps for the kind of simple blunder that might have happened to anyone. What shamed him was precisely the fact that he, Raskolnikov, had come to grief so blindly, so hopelessly, so stupidly, by some decree of blind fate, and now he had to submit and resign himself to the 'absurdity' of such a decree, if he wanted to give himself any peace at all.

  In the present: pointless, purposeless anxiety; in the future: an endless sacrifice by which nothing was to be gained - this was what the world had in store for him. And what did it matter that in eight years' time he'd only be thirty-two and life could begin again? Why live? What would he have to live for? To aim for? Live to exist? But hadn't he been prepared even before, on a thousand occasions, to give up his existence for an idea, a hope, even a fantasy? Existence alone had never been enough for him; he'd always wanted more. And perhaps the only reason he'd considered himself a man to whom more was permitted than to others was the very strength of his desires.

  If only fate could bring him remorse - burning remorse that breaks the heart into pieces, that drives away sleep; the kind of remorse whose dreadful torments yield visions of the noose, the whirlpool! Oh, how glad he would have been! Torments and tears - that, too, is life. But he felt no remorse about his crime.

  At least then he could have raged at his own stupidity, just as before he had raged at the hideous, idiotic deeds that brought him to prison. But now that he was here, in prison, at liberty, he reconsidered all his previous deeds, all over again, and found them not nearly as stupid and hideous as they had seemed to him during that fateful time, before.

  'How, how,' he thought, 'was my idea any more stupid than all the other ideas and theories that have swarmed around, colliding with one another, since the beginning of time? You need only take an independent, broad view of things, free from the usual influences, and my idea, needless to say, won't seem remotely . . . strange. Oh, men of wisdom, who deny everything5 except money - why do you stop halfway?

  'Really, what is it about my deed that they find so hideous?' he asked himself. 'That it was evil? What does that mean - an "evil deed"? My conscience is untroubled. Yes, of course, a criminal act has been committed; yes, of course, the letter of the law has been violated and blood's been shed - so take my head for the letter of the law . . . and that's your lot! And, of course, plenty of humanity's benefactors, who never inherited power but grabbed it for themselves, should also have been executed after taking their very first step. But those people coped with the step that they took, which is why they are right, but I couldn't cope with mine, so I had no right to take it.'

  That was the only crime he acknowledged: that he hadn't coped and had turned himself in.

  Another thought also brought him pain: why hadn't he killed himself back then? Why had he stood over the river and preferred to turn himself in? Was the desire to live really so strong, was it really so hard to overcome? Hadn't Svidrigailov overcome it, despite his fear of death?

  He tormented himself with this question, incapable of understanding that even then, standing over the river, he might already have sensed a deep falsehood in himself and his convictions. He couldn't understand that this premonition might have been the herald of a future breaking point in his existence, his future resurrection, his future view of life.

  He was more inclined to see in all this only the dull yoke of instinct, which it was not for him to break, and over which he, yet again, was unable to step (being weak and worthless). Observing his fellow prisoners he was astonished at how much they, too, loved life, how they all cherished it! In fact, he had the impression that in prison life is loved, valued and cherished even more than at liberty. What dreadful hardships and torments some of them had endured - for instance, the tramps! Could one single ray of sunshine really mean so much to them, or a thick forest, or a cold spring in the back of beyond, which the tramp spotted some two years before and which, like a lover, he yearns to see again and dreams about, with green grass all around, a bird singing in the bush? Looking deeper, he saw instances yet harder to explain.

  In the prison, in his immediate surroundings, there was, of course, much that he failed to notice, and didn't even wish to notice. He lived with eyes lowered: looking up seemed loathsome, unbearable. In the end, though, much began to astonish him, and almost against his will he began to notice things that previously he hadn't even suspected. In general, what astonished him most was the dreadful, unbridgeable gulf that lay between him and all these commoners. He and they seemed to belong to different nations. He and they looked at each other with mistrust and hostility. He knew and understood the general causes of this separation; but never before had he acknowledged that these causes might really be so deep, so potent. There were Polish convicts,6 too; political criminals. They considered the commoners to be nothing more than ignoramuses and slaves, and looked down on them with contempt; but Raskolnikov could not: to him it was clear that these ignoramuses were in many ways far more intelligent than those very same Poles. There were Russians, too, whose contempt for the peasants knew no bounds - one former officer and two seminarians; their error did not escape Raskolnikov either.

  He himself was disliked and shunned by everyone. Eventually, he even began to be hated. Why? He did not know. The ones who looked down on him, who mocked him and mocked his crime, were far more criminal than he.

  'You're gentry!' they'd say to him. 'What was a gentry boy like you doing with an axe?'7

  In the second week of Lent his turn
came to prepare for the Sacraments, along with everyone else in his barracks. They all went to the church together to pray.8 One day an argument flared up. Why? He himself did not know. But they fell on him all at once in a frenzy.

  'Atheist! You don't believe in God!' they shouted at him. 'You should be killed!'

  He'd never spoken with them about God or faith, but they wanted to kill him for his atheism; he said nothing in reply. One convict was on the point of throwing himself on him in sheer fury; Raskolnikov waited for him calmly and in silence: his eyebrows did not stir; not one muscle twitched on his face. A guard managed to put himself between him and the murderer just in time - or blood would have been shed.

  There was one other question to which he could find no answer: why had they all become so fond of Sonya? She never sought their approval and they saw her rarely, sometimes only when they were out working, when she came to him for no more than a minute. And yet they all already knew her, knew that she'd followed him, knew how she lived and where she lived. She gave them no money, did them no special favours. Only once, at Christmas, did she bring alms for the entire prison: pies and white buns. But little by little closer ties began to form between them and Sonya: she wrote letters for them to their families and posted them. At their request these relatives, on arriving in town, would leave things for them with Sonya, even money. Their wives and lovers knew her and called on her. And whenever she appeared at the place where Raskolnikov was working or met a party of convicts going out to work they all doffed their caps and bowed. 'Dear Sofya Semyonovna, dear mother, gentle, merciful mother!' these coarse, branded convicts would say to this skinny little creature. She smiled and returned their bows and they all liked it when she smiled at them. They even liked her gait, turned around to watch her walk away and praised her; they even praised her for being so little, and could never praise her enough. Some even went to her to be treated when they were sick.