Crime and Punishment (Translated by Constance Garnett with an Introduction by Nathan B. Fagin)

By Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Raskolnikov is an impoverished former student living in Saint Petersburg, Russia who feels compelled to rob and murder Alyona Ivanovna, an elderly pawn broker and money lender. After much deliberation the young man sneaks into her apartment and commits the murder. In the chaos of the crime Raskolnikov fails to steal anything of real value, the primary purpose of his actions to begin with. In the period that follows Raskolnikov is racked with guilt over the crime that he has committed and begins to worry excessively about being discovered. His guilt begins to manifest itself in physical ways. He falls into a feverish state and his actions grow increasingly strange almost as if he subconsciously wishes to be discovered. As suspicion begins to mount towards him, he is ultimately faced with the decision as to how he can atone for the heinous crime that he has committed, for it is only through this atonement that he may achieve some psychological relief. As is common with Dostoyevsky’s work, the author brilliantly explores the psychology of his characters, providing the reader with a deeper understanding of the motivations and conflicts that are central to the human condition. First published in 1866, “Crime and Punishment” is one of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s most famous novels, and to this day is regarded as one of the true masterpieces of world literature. This edition is translated by Constance Garnett, includes an Introduction by Nathan B. Fagin, and a biographical afterword.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Digireads.com Publishing
• Release date: Jan 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781420955101

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) was a Russian author and journalist. He spent four years in prison, endured forced military service and was nearly executed for the crime of reading works forbidden by the government. He battled a gambling addiction that once left him a beggar, and he suffered ill health, including epileptic seizures. Despite these challenges, Dostoevsky wrote fiction possessed of groundbreaking, even daring, social and psychological insight and power. Novels like Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov, have won the author acclaim from figures ranging from Franz Kafka to Ernest Hemingway, Friedrich Nietzsche to Virginia Woolf.

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CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

By FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY

Translated By CONSTANCE GARNETT

Introduction by NATHAN B. FAGIN

Crime and Punishment

By Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Translated By Constance Garnett

Introduction by Nathan B. Fagin

Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-5509-5

eBook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-5510-1

This edition copyright © 2017. Digireads.com Publishing.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Cover Image: a detail of The Exercise Yard, or The Convict Prison, 1890 (oil on canvas), by Vincent van Gogh (1853-90) / Pushkin Museum, Moscow, Russia / Bridgeman Images.

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CONTENTS

Introduction

Translator’s Preface

Part I

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Part II

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Part III

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Part IV

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Part V

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Part VI

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Epilogue

Biographical Afterword

Introduction

Nineteenth-century Russia contributed to the literary world three novelists of magnificent stature: Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy. Of these three Dostoyevsky is the most original. Turgenev and Tolstoy, great as they are—each in his own way—fit into the main stream of European literature; Dostoyevsky does not. He is more complex as a personality and more distinctive as an artist. He is by all odds less even, less disciplined, less polished, and more difficult to understand, to account for, and to evaluate. He is a phenomenon in both Russian and world literature: erratic, contradictory, yet searingly memorable.

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky was born in Moscow in 1821, the son of an army surgeon who was a dipsomaniac, a violent, tyrannous and suspicious husband, and a cruel father. He was so despotic a master that his own peasants killed him by smothering him with cushions. Fyodor’s elder brother, Mikhail, died of an unspeakable disease; his younger brother, Nikolai, inherited his father’s dipsomania; his sister Barbara accumulated a great deal of wealth but was murdered for her miserliness. There can be no question that in The Brothers Karamazov Dostoyevsky recalled his own family: old Fyodor Karamazov is certainly reminiscent of what we know of the author’s father, and Ivan is a portrait of the author himself.

Dostoyevsky’s childhood was harsh and unhappy. Yet he, managed to secure a good education. He attended private; schools, learned French, studied philosophy, and entered a school of engineering. Upon graduation in 1848, he received a commission in the army. But he found army life boring. He preferred the more carefree though uncertain life of literary Bohemia. His natural instability manifested itself early; he was childishly extravagant, a passionate gambler, incalculably moody, shy and arrogant by turns, and either excessively gay or excessively sad. His health was equally uncertain. He suffered from epilepsy and insomnia; yet he was a prodigious worker, often writing all night.

He began his literary labors by translating Balzac’s Eugenie Grandet, but after meeting Turgenev, who was three years older, he decided to attempt a novel of his own. Although he was steeped in Romanticism—having devoured the works of Schiller and Byron—he began as a Realist. Poor Folk, his first novel, was published in Nekrasov’s Petersburg Almanac in 1846, when he was twenty-five years old. The story is told that when Nekrasov, who—although of the same age as Dostoyevsky—was already a well-known poet, first received the manuscript, he and his friend the novelist Grigorovitch sat up most of the night to finish reading it and, at 4 A.M., rushed to Dostoyevsky’s home to kiss him. Even before its publication the book was hailed by the great critic Belinsky who, on the strength of it, solemnly announced to the public the birth of a great Russian writer, Poor Folk struck the key of Dostoyevsky’s characteristic melody; it indicated the milieu in which he was to labor so tirelessly and superlatively all his life. He was to become, unlike Turgenev, not the novelist of landed gentry and quiet country life, but a transcriber of city streets, of dark brooding rooms, of anguish and despair, of the secrets and terrors of life. Twenty years later, in 1866, he was to achieve his deepest expression of the fetid life of the city in Crime and Punishment.

But first it is necessary to return for a little while to Dostoyevsky’s own life. Biography, which is often a digression in literary criticism, is, in the case of a writer like Dostoyevsky, highly relevant and illuminating. There is so much of the man himself in his work, of his own experiences, travails, humiliations, and spiritual defeats and victories, that to ignore his biography would be to lose a valuable source of understanding.

In those early years, for instance, at the beginning of his literary career, he felt impelled to join a group of young revolutionists known in Russian history as the Petrashevsky Circle. Dostoyevsky himself was not a revolutionist, but his compassion for the poor and the downtrodden attracted him to the meetings of this group of intellectuals who seemed to be inspired by a love of the Russian masses to seek a program for their redemption. One early morning in April, 1849, Dostoyevsky was arrested and taken to the Fortress of Peter and Paul where he was kept for eight months. He was then tried and condemned to death and, together with twenty other men, was led to a windswept square to be shot. A platoon of soldiers with loaded rifles was already deployed for the execution when a messenger arrived with a commutation of the sentence. The whole proceeding, it seems, had been intended by the Emperor as a forceful lesson to the young revolutionaries. But, in the meantime, one of the men went mad and another developed tuberculosis.

Dostoyevsky never forgot the lesson. Many years later, in his novel The Idiot, he described vividly the terrors of a man waiting for execution. He had turned his terrible ordeal into an asset for his art. Perhaps another asset should be mentioned: during the eight months of his imprisonment in the Fortress he kept himself from going insane by reading the Bible and Shakespeare.

His sentence was commuted to four years penal servitude in the mines of Siberia, to be followed by four years of service in the army as a common soldier. The horrors of his Siberian experiences are depicted in his The House of the Dead. It was in Siberia that his epileptic fits became frequent tortures, and to them was added the wracking pain of rheumatism.

It was also in Siberia, after his release from the mines, that he married his first wife, the widow Issayeva, only to discover that she had a lover and had no intention of relinquishing him after her marriage. Upon discharge from the army, where he had risen to the rank of a non-commissioned officer, he returned to Petersburg, alone, and threw himself into literary activity, he published short stories, a minor novel, his The House of the Dead and, together with his brother Mikhail, edited a magazine, The Times.

Then he fell in love again, this time with a girl named Apollinaria Suslova. She was an eternal student, a revolutionary who sang the Marseillaise, and believed in free love. She made all the overtures and begged Dostoyevsky to follow her to Paris. He agreed, but by the time he reached her two weeks had elapsed and she was now in love with a Frenchman. Dostoyevsky went to London, alone. Some years later she wrote to him that she was free again, her lover having proved unfaithful, and begged him to come to her. Should he refuse she threatened to commit suicide. He went to her and took her with him to Germany. She no doubt taught him many things about the emotion of love-hate. We have an authentic description of that emotion in Dostoyevsky’s story The Gambler. Mlle Suslova, says the noted historian of Russian literature, D. S. Mirsky, was a proud and . . . ‘infernal’ woman, with unknown depths of cruelty and of evil. She seems to have been to Dostoyevsky an important revelation of the dark side of things.

His wife died in 1865, but not before she called him to Moscow and told him the details of her life with her lover and subjected him to other humiliations, not the least of which was her contemptuous reference to him as a convict, a miserable convict. The next year his brother Mikhail died, leaving to Dostoyevsky the payment of his debts and the support of his illegitimate children.

It was during that same year of 1866 that Crime and Punishment appeared, first serially in a magazine, and then in book form. Its success should have alleviated his financial burdens, but Dostoyevsky, being impractical in business matters, had sold the copyright of all his works for a pitifully small sum to an unscrupulous publisher. He was equally impractical in his dealings with his relatives, many of whom sponged upon him all his life.

The year after the publication of Crime and Punishment he married Anna Grigorievna Snitkin, a young girl whom he had engaged as stenographer-secretary. They went to live in Germany in order to escape his creditors, but he found the roulette table in Baden-Baden, and later in Geneva, beyond his power to resist and his poverty was greater than ever before. Sometimes when he won he bought for his young wife everything he saw, but the very next day he sold everything, pawned his watch and his wife’s earrings, borrowed small sums—all he could get—from Turgenev and other friends and acquaintances, and lost it all.

Yet his married life was a happy one. Anna Grigorievna, twenty-six years younger than her husband, was a sensible, practical woman. She loved and understood him, watched over him, knew his weaknesses and helped him fight them, and worshipped his genius. By 1871 they were able to return to Russia, where Dostoyevsky resumed his place among the creative spirits of his generation. He died twenty years later, at the age of sixty, and was followed to his grave by an estimated populace of 40,000.

It is futile to inquire which is his greatest novel: Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov, or (in the opinion of at least one first-rate critic) The Possessed. All are the work of an artist of profound sensibility, of a fictive talent for which there is no other word than genius. Crime and Punishment will serve admirably to focus our attention upon those characteristics which are responsible for the power and overwhelming impression of a Dostoyevsky novel.

It is not wise to assume that the American reading public generally is familiar with Crime and Punishment, or, for that matter, with any of Dostoyevsky’s novels. The pressure to read contemporary fiction—the numerous masterpieces hailed by book review supplements every Sunday—is formidable. The Dostoyevskys can wait. Which in truth they can. Crime and Punishment is as fresh today, as timely, and as illuminating of man’s life on earth, as when it first appeared under the title of Rodion Raskolnikov in the St. Petersburg literary journal Russky Viestnik in 1866.

It is difficult to indicate the mere story of this great novel, the plot, the sequence of incidents in the lives of a group of characters, A good novel can no more be abstracted or paraphrased than a good poem or a good play. A synopsis of Hamlet or King Lear discloses only the bare skeleton on which Shakespeare’s tragedy is built. The wealth of detail and character perception and the pulse of life which the pages of Crime and Punishment contain can only be apprehended by a reading of the work itself. Yet an attempt to convey some idea of the story must be made.

A young law student, Rodion Raskolnikov, harassed by poverty, conceives the idea of committing a murder. He has been obliged to withdraw from the university, he is half starved, and he has pawned everything valuable he possessed, including the keepsakes given him by his mother and sister, who are living somewhere in the provinces, living meanly but hopeful that someday Rodion will graduate, make a name for himself, and redeem the family’s fortunes. The mother has a small government pension and the sister is employed as a governess in the home of an upper middle-class family named Svidrigailov. The person Rodion has decided to murder is an old woman, a pawnbroker who has received his pledges and given him trifling sums for them. She is, he rationalizes, a silly, flint-hearted, evil-minded, sulky old woman, necessary to no one. He plans the murder carefully and executes his plan, but he finds himself under the necessity of killing the woman’s half-sister Lizaveta, an inoffensive younger woman whom he had no intention of killing. His deed fills him with horror and loathing and he is unable to profit from it. He grabs a few trinkets and a purse with money and makes his escape. He buries his loot under a stone in somebody’s yard, then buries himself in his lodgings and is sick of a fever.

Just before the murder he made friends with an alcoholic named Marmeladov, a discharged government clerk—titular counselor is Marmeladov’s own flattering description of himself—who laid bare to him his mind, his heart, and his life history. He had married, for the second lime, an intelligent, well-educated, handsome woman, with three young children. But his weakness for drink lost him his position and the family was reduced to rags and starvation. His wife, Katerina Ivanovna, had contracted tuberculosis and had turned into a scolding, bitter woman. And finally his own young daughter by a previous marriage, Sonia, had taken to the streets to support the family. Dostoyevsky himself must be permitted to tell when and how it happened the first time, or rather Dostoyevsky’s Marmeladov must be permitted to tell it:

. . . Katerina Ivanovna [was] walking up and down and wringing her hands, her cheeks flushed red, as they always are in that disease: Here you live with us, she says, you eat and drink and are kept warm and you do nothing to help. . . . I heard my Sonia speaking (she is a gentle creature with a soft little voice . . . fair hair and such a pale, thin little face). She said: Katerina Ivanovna, am I really to do a thing like that? . . . And why not? said Katerina Ivanovna with a jeer, you are something mighty precious to be so careful of! But don’t blame her, . . . honoured sir, don’t blame her! She was not herself when she spoke, but driven to distraction by her illness and the crying of the hungry children; and it was said more to wound her than anything else. . . . At six o’clock I saw Sonia get up, put on her kerchief and her cape, and go out of the room and about nine o’clock she came back. She walked straight up to Katerina Ivanovna and she laid thirty roubles on the table before her in silence. She did not utter a word, she did not even look at her, she simply picked up our big green . . . shawl . . . , put it over her head and face and lay down on the bed with her face to the wall; only her little shoulders and her body kept shuddering . . . . And then I saw, young man, I saw Katerina Ivanovna, in the same silence go up to Sonia’s little bed; she was on her knees all the evening kissing Sonia’s feet, and would not get up, and then they both fell asleep in each other’s arms . . . . together, together . . . yes . . . and I . . . lay drunk.

In the phantasmagoric days that follow the murder, Raskolnikov runs into Marmeladov again, is present at his death after Marmeladov had been run over in the street, and helps to arrange his funeral. Sonia looks upon him as an angel of mercy and, though she grows to love him, dares to worship him only silently and from afar. When Raskolnikov’s mother and sister Dounia arrive, brought to Petersburg by Dounia’s wealthy suitor Luzhin, he introduces Sonia to them and makes her sit down in their presence, as though she were a pure, respectable, and respected woman. In the end it is to Sonia that he unburdens himself of his guilt and she does not fail him: she responds with pity and terror and helps him to purge himself. Go at once, she tells him, this very minute, stand at the crossroads, bow down, first kiss the earth which you have defiled and then bow down to all the world and say to all men aloud, ‘I am a murderer!’ Then God will send you life again.

And this is what he actually does, in time. He also goes to the police station and gives himself up to Porfiry Petrovitch, the investigator who has suspected Raskolnikov’s guilt all along but being unable to prove it has bided his time and contributed to Raskolnikov’s deterioration by occasional psychological probings. Porfiry Petrovitch is, incidentally, the first criminal investigator in literature to employ the methods of modern psychology in the solution of crime. M. Dupin, the French detective in Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories of ratiocination, anticipated Porfiry, but Poe’s character is purely mental, cold and bloodless, like a calculating machine; Dostoyevsky’s investigator is a vivid personality—like all of Dostoyevsky’s characters—and is fully as memorable as a person as he is an investigator. Incidentally, also, Dostoyevsky was aware of Poe’s work and was generous in praise of him. He . . . places, he once wrote, his hero in a most extraordinary outward or psychological situation, and, then, describes the inner state of that person with marvellous acumen and amazing realism.

But to proceed with the story. Raskolnikov is sentenced to eight years in Siberia and Sonia follows him. For some time he is sullen and apathetic, heartily disliked by the other convicts, thieves and murderers from whom he recoils in horror. He is cold to Sonia, who hovers in the distance, and accepts her love and ministrations without gratitude or even interest. She in the meantime has become a welcome visitor to the prison yard. The prisoners all take their hats off to her and call her Little mother, Sofya Semyonovna. And then a day comes when. . . . But again it seems best to let Dostoyevsky tell it in his own inimitable way:

They were alone. . . . The guard had turned away for the time.

How it happened he did not know. But all at once something seemed to seize him and fling him at her feet. He wept and threw his arms round her knees. For the first instant she was terribly frightened and she turned pale. She jumped up and looked at him trembling. But at the same moment she understood, and a light of infinite happiness came into her eyes. She knew and had no doubt that he loved her beyond everything and that at last the moment had come. . . .

They wanted to speak, but could not; tears stood in their eyes. They were both pale and thin; but those sick pale faces were bright with the dawn of a new future, of a full resurrection into a new life.

On this note of resurrection the novel ends. Like Dickens, Dostoyevsky thought it necessary to wind up the story of every character in the book. Dounia marries Razumikhin, Raskolnikov’s fellow-student and best friend, and she helps her husband establish a prosperous publishing house. Svidrigailov, the strange, dandified, lustful man in whose house she had worked and who had persecuted her with his love, commits suicide. Katerina Ivanova dies and her children are taken care of. But enough of mere plot, I am afraid that this retelling of the bare bones of the story can only prove misleading and unfair to a superb story-teller and great artist.

For what Dostoyevsky has created is a whole world, at once imaginative and real. Into it he poured all of himself, his almost supernatural understanding of his fellowmen, of their broodings and dreams, their sins and cruelties, their saintlinesses and generosities. His novel has the lurid melodrama of life itself, and its deepest tragedy; it is raw and bitter; but it is also tender and invigorating. It is intensely Russian, with the authentic reek and smell of the streets, the taverns, the dank lodging houses, police stations, and prisons of St. Petersburg; but it is also universal, full of the faces, voices, and idioms which we recognize in all the cities and alleys of the world.

Except on a superficial level, this is not a murder story at all. It can, of course, be read on this superficial level, and it holds up beautifully as a tale of crime, although the murder is committed early in the book by the man through whose point of view the story is told, and therefore the usual suspense as to who is the murderer is completely lacking. Nor is there much suspense in guessing how soon and in what manner Raskolnikov will be detected. For the process of his cracking up begins immediately and he gives himself away long before Porfiry Petrovitch confronts him with the accusation. The suspense lies deeper and is of a higher order. It is imbedded in two other levels, the psychological and the moral. These are related in cause and effect, in supplying motivation for the crime and the disintegration and redemption of personality.

Psychologically, Raskolnikov is an introspective, intellectually confused and emotionally unstable person. He is not clear either about the purpose of his crime nor about the dark forces that impel him to it. At one time he thinks that it was his need of money, his poverty, his inability to proceed with his education, and the deprivations of his family that impel him to kill the useless old woman. But, much later, when he confesses to Sonia, he realizes that it was desire for power, power which is only vouchsafed to the man who dares to stoop to pick it up, I wanted to become a Napoleon, he says, that’s why I killed her. Perhaps it was not even power, in the conventional sense of sway over other people. All he wanted, he admits a little later, was to have the daring. . . . That, he summarizes, was the whole cause of it.

Morally, or perhaps I should say spiritually, Raskolnikov embodies the duality of man who is torn between evil and good, arrogance of intellect and kindliness of nature, lawlessness and religion. In one sense, Dostoyevsky, although an intellectual himself, was anti-intellectual. He saw the pitfalls of rationalization, of overweening pride which outrages the dignity of simple nature, of mind excluding the promptings and acceptances of the heart. The student, the dry casuist, shouted down his own intuitive perception of the dignity and sanctity of human life; he overlooked both the categorical imperative and the sixth commandment. It is only after his suffering had begun, his long ordeal of expiation, of the education of his heart, that he understood the value of life.

Where is it, thought Raskolnikov. Where is it I’ve read that some one condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he’d only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once! Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be! . . . How true it is! Good God, how true! Yet even with this new understanding of the value of life his pride of intellect is not conquered. A few hundred pages later it flares up to exclaim, I’ve only killed a louse, Sonia, a useless, loathsome, harmful creature. But Sonia, with her simplicity of heart, corrects him: A human being.

One of our own writers, Nathaniel Hawthorne, once wrote a short story called Ethan Brand. In it, a New England lime-burner returns from a journey of eighteen years which had taken him throughout the world on a strange search. He had been searching for the Unpardonable Sin and had come back defeated because he had found it. It was not out there in the great world, in alien lands, in far away places, but in his own heart. The Unpardonable Sin—the only crime for which Heaven could afford no mercy—was, in Hawthorne’s words, the sin of an intellect that triumphed over the sense of brotherhood with man and reverence for God. By his arrogance of pride Ethan Brand had severed the cords that bound him to the human family and had violated the pattern of relationship which God had established. He made an outcast, of himself and convinced himself to bleak and terrible loneliness. His heart, which should have been part of the beating heart of humanity had withered, had contracted, had hardened, had perished. Now he has nothing to live for and nothing to live with and he jumps into the fiery lime kiln. The next morning his successor arrives to clean the furnace and finds Ethan Brand’s heart, the only part of him which the heat could not burn; it had become marble.

Raskolnikov, too, can be said to have committed the Unpardonable Sin. His mind, his intellect, planned and reasoned, made distinctions between useful and non-useful individuals, with himself of course belonging to the first category, because, forsooth, he was an extraordinary being; he had a right to live, even at the cost of depriving another human being, an ordinary person, of her life. There was no recoil from the idea of shedding a fellow-mortal’s blood; no sympathy for another’s terror and pain. The heart was dead. For just as Emerson envisaged an Oversoul animating everything in the universe with divinity, we may envisage an Overheart which imparts its rhythm to all living humanity. By cutting itself off from this common heart of humanity, by withdrawing from the communal pulse beat, an individual heart shrivels and dies. It was only later when his ordeal of suffering had begun that Raskolnikov realized that along with his killing of the old woman and her sister he had killed a principle, that in murdering them he had murdered himself, his own humanity.

If Raskolnikov does not end like Ethan Brand it is because Dostoyevsky reserves him for a better fate. Having no strain of Puritan Calvinism within him, Dostoyevsky believed in the redemptive powers of compassion and love. Sonia, the pure little Magdalene, is Raskolnikov’s way to redemption. Her compassion and her love know no bounds and seek no compensation; she is completely unselfish and without the slightest impulse to cast stones. Long before the moment of glory in the Siberian prison yard when he comes to accept her gift of love and thereby is made whole again, reunited to life, he acquires compassion and feels the cleansing emotion of humility before suffering and degradation borne with meek nobility. One can never forget the moment when Raskolnikov, knowing her story from her drunken father, how she had gone out on the streets and submitted her body to shame and humiliation to appease the hunger of Katerina Ivanovna’s crying children—one can never forget the moment when Raskolnikov drops before her to the ground and kisses her feet. When she protests in anguish and perplexity, he exclaims, I did not bow down to you, I bowed down to all the suffering of humanity. It comes like a flash of revelation; it is an impulse to adoration and a profession of utter self-abnegation. Few scenes in the whole body of fiction can equal the electrifying effect of that moment.

Raskolnikov is finally redeemed when he learns, like Sonia, simply to feel. It is then that—Dostoyevsky tells us—Life had stepped into the place of theory. And it is then that Raskolnikov picks up the New Testament she had given him and turns to the story of the raising of Lazarus from the dead.

The man who is not redeemed, who is permitted to end in suicide, is Svidrigailov, whose only sin was that of lechery. Before he dies he reviews his life in his mind. It’s queer and funny, he says, I never had a great hatred for any one, I never particularly desired to revenge myself even. . . . I never liked quarrelling either, and never lost my temper—that’s a bad sign too. Yes, that is a bad sign. He deserves no redemption because he has not been great enough to sin greatly. Like Ibsen’s Peer Gynt he has earned neither Heaven nor Hell, only the Button Moulder with his ladle to collect his remains for recasting. Redemption can only come through intense participation in life, involving great temptation, the capacity for great sin and great suffering, and the Svidrigailovs, skating on the surface of life, are too negligible to qualify for that. Their relation to humanity is only peripheral and they are contemptible rather than pitiful. They are dismissible.

But only from Dostoyevsky’s book of life. To the novel, as a work of art, they are indispensable. Svidrigailov is one of the finest creations. And so is Luzhin, that self-absorbed, self-valuating, calculating peacock. Both of these negligible people, who generally play such important roles in life, are done in the round, like all of Dostoyevsky’s diameters. They are carefully observed and delineated. Every man, woman, and child that enters the picture of his action is captured fully and completely, not because they are needed but because for Dostoyevsky all people are infinitely interesting, infinitely important, and deserve to be portrayed, nay, must be portrayed with justice.

His description of the Svidrigailovs and the Luzhins raises the interesting question of Dostoyevsky’s hardness toward them. He who was the most compassionate of writers has no glint of compassion toward them, only cold contempt. One is tempted to find in this phenomenon support for Andre Gide’s theory that Dostoyevsky is suffering from humiliation rather than blessed with humility. This of course overlooks for the moment the perpetual duality of Dostoyevsky, the perpetual conflict within him between the memories of the indignities he may have suffered at the hands of the Luzhins and his impulse toward Christian forgiveness. This conflict is always there and supplies much of the tension that any novel of his has. It is psychological tension, which redeems much of the physical melodrama with which his novels are also full.

We must not ignore the weaknesses and the contradictions of Dostoyevsky. But what matters, in the final reckoning, is the wealth of his visions. Fyodor Dostoyevsky is one great novelist who has been able to strike off fiery lyrics out of the agonized chaos of existence. The riddle of life—with which all genuine literature, and Russian literature especially, is saturated—has through his pen become transmuted and ennobled. He has gone down to the darkest places, into the obscurest nooks of mind and matter, of impulse and urge, of vice and sublimity, and out of it all he has woven a passionate symphony, hard and irregular, rising to heights of intense terror and tenderness. Dostoyevsky is often crude, melodramatic, lurid, but never cold, and always the supreme psychologist, the prober of the obscure, the impassioned analyst of revolting forces that normal people are pleased to call pathological. It is not surprising that Nietzsche should have paid him the supreme tribute of saying: Dostoyevsky was the only psychologist from whom I had anything to learn: he belongs to the happiest windfalls of my life.

Dostoyevsky is not pleasant reading. His novels have little polish. They are morbid and harrowing. There is blood in them, and tears, and a hurricane of emotions. He writes of extreme suffering which brutalizes, but which also makes men gentle, keen, forgiving. The sympathy for the oppressed and disinherited of the earth that Dostoyevsky felt did not spring from mere good nature. He was spawned in the dirt, he lived with his Poor People and The Possessed, and he came up from the Underground and The House of the Dead. And he knew as no one else that the spirit of man is nowhere as virile as in the misery and the dirt, seeking its God, helplessly stretching itself toward the light. Among the sick and tortured, the harlots and the murderers and the drunkards he found truth, love, and brotherhood. Their suffering lifted them above the pretensions and the simulations, the pettinesses and snobberies of the balanced and happy. They debauch and they drink, but they know their unworthiness. They are humble before their God and their conscience. And in this humbleness lies their redemption. Dostoyevsky’s pen was clumsy and grim and nude—like life itself—like the soul of his sublime Idiot!

NATHAN BRYLLION FAGIN

1953.

Translator’s Preface

A few words about Dostoevsky himself may help the English reader to understand his work.

Dostoevsky was the son of a doctor. His parents were very hard-working and deeply religious people, but so poor that they lived with their five children in only two rooms. The father and mother spent their evenings in reading aloud to their children, generally from books of a serious character.

Though always sickly and delicate Dostoevsky came out third in the final examination of the Petersburg school of Engineering. There he had already begun his first work, Poor Folk.

This story was published by the poet Nekrassov in his review and was received with acclamations. The shy, unknown youth found himself instantly something of a celebrity. A brilliant and successful career seemed to open before him, but those hopes were soon dashed. In 1849 he was arrested.

Though neither by temperament nor conviction a revolutionist, Dostoevsky was one of a little group of young men who met together to read Fourier and Proudhon. He was accused of taking part in conversations against the censorship, of reading a letter from Byelinsky to Gogol, and of knowing of the intention to set up a printing press. Under Nicholas I. (that stern and just man, as Maurice Baring calls him) this was enough, and he was condemned to death. After eight months’ imprisonment he was with twenty-one others taken out to the Semyonovsky Square to be shot. Writing to his brother Mihail, Dostoevsky says: They snapped words over our heads, and they made us put on the white shirts worn by persons condemned to death. Thereupon we were bound in threes to stakes, to suffer execution. Being the third in the row, I concluded I had only a few minutes of life before me. I thought of you and your dear ones and I contrived to kiss Plestcheiev and Dourov, who were next to me, and to bid them farewell. Suddenly the troops beat a tattoo, we were unbound, brought back upon the scaffold, and informed that his Majesty had spared us our lives. The sentence was commuted to hard labour.

One of the prisoners, Grigoryev, went mad as soon as he was untied, and never regained his sanity.

The intense suffering of this experience left a lasting stamp on Dostoevsky’s mind. Though his religious temper led him in the end to accept every suffering with resignation and to regard it as a blessing in his own case, he constantly recurs to the subject in his writings. He describes the awful agony of the condemned man and insists on the cruelty of inflicting such torture. Then followed four years of penal servitude, spent in the company of common criminals in Siberia, where he began the Dead House, and some years of service in a disciplinary battalion.

He had shown signs of some obscure nervous disease before his arrest and this now developed into violent attacks of epilepsy, from which he suffered for the rest of his life. The fits occurred three or four times a year and were more frequent in periods of great strain. In 1859 he was allowed to return to Russia. He started a journal—Vremya, which was forbidden by the Censorship through a misunderstanding. In 1864 he lost his first wife and his brother Mihail. He was in terrible poverty, yet he took upon himself the payment of his brother’s debts. He started another journal—The Epoch, which within a few months was also prohibited. He was weighed down by debt, his brother’s family was dependent on him, he was forced to write at heart-breaking speed, and is said never to have corrected his work. The later years of his life were much softened by the tenderness and devotion of his second wife.

In June 1880 he made his famous speech at the unveiling of the monument to Pushkin in Moscow and he was received with extraordinary demonstrations of love and honour.

A few months later Dostoevsky died. He was followed to the grave by a vast multitude of mourners, who gave the hapless man the funeral of a king. He is still probably the most widely read writer in Russia.

In the words of a Russian critic, who seeks to explain the feeling inspired by Dostoevsky: He was one of ourselves, a man of our blood and our bone, but one who has suffered and has seen so much more deeply than we have his insight impresses us as wisdom... that wisdom of the heart which we seek that we may learn from it how to live. All his other gifts came to him from nature, this he won for himself and through it he became great.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

Part I

Chapter I

On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge. He had successfully avoided meeting his landlady on the staircase. His garret was under the roof of a high, five-storied house and was more like a cupboard than a room. The landlady who provided him with garret, dinners, and attendance, lived on the floor below, and every time he went out he was obliged to pass her kitchen, the door of which invariably stood open. And each time he passed, the young man had a sick, frightened feeling, which made him scowl and feel ashamed. He was hopelessly in debt to his landlady, and was afraid of meeting her.

This was not because he was cowardly and abject, quite the contrary; but for some time past he had been in an overstrained irritable condition, verging on hypochondria. He had become so completely absorbed in himself, and isolated from his fellows that he dreaded meeting, not only his landlady, but anyone at all. He was crushed by poverty, but the anxieties of his position had of late ceased to weigh upon him. He had given up attending to matters of practical importance; he had lost all desire to do so. Nothing that any landlady could do had a real terror for him. But to be stopped on the stairs, to be forced to listen to her trivial, irrelevant gossip, to pestering demands for payment, threats and complaints, and to rack his brains for excuses, to prevaricate, to lie—no, rather than that, he would creep down the stairs like a cat and slip out unseen.

This evening, however, on coming out into the street, he became acutely aware of his fears.

"I want to attempt a thing like that and am frightened by these trifles, he thought, with an odd smile. Hm... yes, all is in a man’s hands and he lets it all slip from cowardice, that’s an axiom. It would be interesting to know what it is men are most afraid of. Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what they fear most.... But I am talking too much. It’s because I chatter that I do nothing. Or perhaps it is that I chatter because I do nothing. I’ve learned to chatter this last month, lying for days together in my den thinking... of Jack the Giant-killer. Why am I going there now? Am I capable of that? Is that serious? It is not serious at all. It’s simply a fantasy to amuse myself; a plaything! Yes, maybe it is a plaything."

The heat in the street was terrible: and the airlessness, the bustle and the plaster, scaffolding, bricks, and dust all about him, and that special Petersburg stench, so familiar to all who are unable to get out of town in summer—all worked painfully upon the young man’s already overwrought nerves. The insufferable stench from the pot-houses, which are particularly numerous in that part of the town, and the drunken men whom he met continually, although it was a working day, completed the revolting misery of the picture. An expression of the profoundest disgust gleamed for a moment in the young man’s refined face. He was, by the way, exceptionally handsome, above the average in height, slim, well-built, with beautiful dark eyes and dark brown hair. Soon he sank into deep thought, or more accurately speaking into a complete blankness of mind; he walked along not observing what was about him and not caring to observe it. From time to time, he would mutter something, from the habit of talking to himself, to which he had just confessed. At these moments he would become conscious that his ideas were sometimes in a tangle and that he was very weak; for two days he had scarcely tasted food.

He was so badly dressed that even a man accustomed to shabbiness would have been ashamed to be seen in the street in such rags. In that quarter of the town, however, scarcely any shortcoming in dress would have created surprise. Owing to the proximity of the Hay Market, the number of establishments of bad character, the preponderance of the trading and working class population crowded in these streets and alleys in the heart of Petersburg, types so various were to be seen in the streets that no figure, however queer, would have caused surprise. But there was such accumulated bitterness and contempt in the young man’s heart, that, in spite of all the fastidiousness of youth, he minded his rags least of all in the street. It was a different matter when he met with acquaintances or with former fellow students, whom, indeed, he disliked meeting at any time. And yet when a drunken man who, for some unknown reason, was being taken somewhere in a huge waggon dragged by a heavy dray horse, suddenly shouted at him as he drove past: Hey there, German hatter bawling at the top of his voice and pointing at him—the young man stopped suddenly and clutched tremulously at his hat. It was a tall round hat from Zimmerman’s, but completely worn out, rusty with age, all torn and bespattered, brimless and bent on one side in a most unseemly fashion. Not shame, however, but quite another feeling akin to terror had overtaken him.

I knew it, he muttered in confusion, I thought so! That’s the worst of all! Why, a stupid thing like this, the most trivial detail might spoil the whole plan. Yes, my hat is too noticeable.... It looks absurd and that makes it noticeable.... With my rags I ought to wear a cap, any sort of old pancake, but not this grotesque thing. Nobody wears such a hat, it would be noticed a mile off, it would be remembered.... What matters is that people would remember it, and that would give them a clue. For this business one should be as little conspicuous as possible.... Trifles, trifles are what matter! Why, it’s just such trifles that always ruin everything....

He had not far to go; he knew indeed how many steps it was from the gate of his lodging house: exactly seven hundred and thirty. He had counted them once when he had been lost in dreams. At the time he had put no faith in those dreams and was only tantalising himself by their hideous but daring recklessness. Now, a month later, he had begun to look upon them differently, and, in spite of the monologues in which he jeered at his own impotence and indecision, he had involuntarily come to regard this hideous dream as an exploit to be attempted, although he still did not realise this himself. He was positively going now for a rehearsal of his project, and at every step his excitement grew more and more violent.

With a sinking heart and a nervous tremor, he went up to a huge house which on one side looked on to the canal, and on the other into the street. This house was let out in tiny tenements and was inhabited by working people of all kinds—tailors, locksmiths, cooks, Germans of sorts, girls picking up a living as best they could, petty clerks, etc. There was a continual coming and going through the two gates and in the two courtyards of the house. Three or four door-keepers were employed on the building. The young man was very glad to meet none of them, and at once slipped unnoticed through the door on the right, and up the staircase. It was a back staircase, dark and narrow, but he was familiar with it already, and knew his way, and he liked all these surroundings: in such darkness even the most inquisitive eyes were not to be dreaded.

If I am so scared now, what would it be if it somehow came to pass that I were really going to do it? he could not help asking himself as he reached the fourth storey. There his progress was barred by some porters who were engaged in moving furniture out of a flat. He knew that the flat had been occupied by a German clerk in the civil service, and his family. This German was moving out then, and so the fourth floor on this staircase would be untenanted except by the old woman. That’s a good thing anyway, he thought to himself, as he rang the bell of the old woman’s flat. The bell gave a faint tinkle as though it were made of tin and not of copper. The little flats in such houses always have bells that ring like that. He had forgotten the note of that bell, and now its peculiar tinkle seemed to remind him of something and to bring it clearly before him.... He started, his nerves were terribly overstrained by now. In a little while, the door was opened a tiny crack: the old woman eyed her visitor with evident distrust through the crack, and nothing could be seen but her little eyes, glittering in the darkness. But, seeing a number of people on the landing, she grew bolder, and opened the door wide. The young man stepped into the dark entry, which was partitioned off from the tiny kitchen. The old woman stood facing him in silence and looking inquiringly at him. She was a diminutive, withered up old woman of sixty, with sharp malignant eyes and a sharp little nose. Her colourless, somewhat grizzled hair was thickly smeared with oil, and she wore no kerchief over it. Round her thin long neck, which looked like a hen’s leg, was knotted some sort of flannel rag, and, in spite of the heat, there hung flapping on her shoulders, a mangy fur cape, yellow with age. The old woman coughed and groaned at every instant. The young man must have looked at her with a rather peculiar expression, for a gleam of mistrust came into her eyes again.

Raskolnikov, a student, I came here a month ago, the young man made haste to mutter, with a half bow, remembering that he ought to be more polite.

I remember, my good sir, I remember quite well your coming here, the old woman said distinctly, still keeping her inquiring eyes on his face.

And here... I am again on the same errand, Raskolnikov continued, a little disconcerted and surprised at the old woman’s mistrust. Perhaps she is always like that though, only I did not notice it the other time, he thought with an uneasy feeling.

The old woman paused, as though hesitating; then stepped on one side, and pointing to the door of the room, she said, letting her visitor pass in front of her:

Step in, my good sir.

The little room into which the young man walked, with yellow paper on the walls, geraniums and muslin curtains in the windows, was brightly lighted up at that moment by the setting sun.

"So the sun will shine like this then too!" flashed as it were by chance through Raskolnikov’s mind, and with a rapid glance he scanned everything in the room, trying as far as possible to notice and remember its arrangement. But there was nothing special in the room. The furniture, all very old and of yellow wood, consisted of a sofa with a huge bent wooden back, an oval table in front of the sofa, a dressing-table with a looking-glass fixed on it between the windows, chairs along the walls and two or three half-penny prints in yellow frames, representing German damsels with birds in their hands—that was all. In the corner a light was burning before a small ikon. Everything was very clean; the floor and the furniture were brightly polished; everything shone.

Lizaveta’s work, thought the young man. There was not a speck of dust to be seen in the whole flat.

It’s in the houses of spiteful old widows that one finds such cleanliness, Raskolnikov thought again, and he stole a curious glance at the cotton curtain over the door leading into another tiny room, in which stood the old woman’s bed and chest of drawers and into which he had never looked before. These two rooms made up the whole flat.

What do you want? the old woman said severely, coming into the room and, as before, standing in front of him so as to look him straight in the face.

I’ve brought something to pawn here, and he drew out of his pocket an old-fashioned flat silver watch, on the back of which was engraved a globe; the chain was of steel.

But the time is up for your last pledge. The month was up the day before yesterday.

I will bring you the interest for another month; wait a little.

But that’s for me to do as I please, my good sir, to wait or to sell your pledge at once.

How much will you give me for the watch, Alyona Ivanovna?

You come with such trifles, my good sir, it’s scarcely worth anything. I gave you two roubles last time for your ring and one could buy it quite new at a jeweler’s for a rouble and a half.

Give me four roubles for it, I shall redeem it, it was my father’s. I shall be getting some money soon.

A rouble and a half, and interest in advance, if you like!

A rouble and a half! cried the young man.

Please yourself—and the old woman handed him back the watch. The young man took it, and was so angry that he was on the point of going away; but checked himself at once, remembering that there was nowhere else he could go, and that he had had another object also in coming.

Hand it over, he said roughly.

The old woman fumbled in her pocket for her keys, and disappeared behind the curtain into the other room. The young man, left standing alone in the middle of the room, listened inquisitively, thinking. He could hear her unlocking the chest of drawers.

It must be the top drawer, he reflected. So she carries the keys in a pocket on the right. All in one bunch on a steel ring.... And there’s one key there, three times as big as all the others, with deep notches; that can’t be the key of the chest of drawers... then there must be some other chest or strong-box... that’s worth knowing. Strong-boxes always have keys like that... but how degrading it all is.

The old woman came back.

Here, sir: as we say ten copecks the rouble a month, so I must take fifteen copecks from a rouble and a half for the month in advance. But for the two roubles I lent you before, you owe me now twenty copecks on the same reckoning in advance. That makes thirty-five copecks altogether. So I must give you a rouble and fifteen copecks for the watch. Here it is.

What! only a rouble and fifteen copecks now!

Just so.

The young man did not dispute it and took the money. He looked at the old woman, and was in no hurry to get away, as though there was still something he wanted to say or to do, but he did not himself quite know what.

I may be bringing you something else in a day or two, Alyona Ivanovna—a valuable thing—silver—a cigarette-box, as soon as I get it back from a friend... he broke off in confusion.

Well, we will talk about it then, sir.

Good-bye—are you always at home alone, your sister is not here with you? He asked her as casually as possible as he went out into the passage.

What business is she of yours, my good sir?

Oh, nothing particular, I simply asked. You are too quick.... Good-day, Alyona Ivanovna.

Raskolnikov went out in complete confusion. This confusion became more and more intense. As he went down the stairs, he even stopped short, two or three times, as though suddenly struck by some thought. When he was in the street he cried out, Oh, God, how loathsome it all is! and can I, can I possibly.... No, it’s nonsense, it’s rubbish! he added resolutely. And how could such an atrocious thing come into my head? What filthy things my heart is capable of. Yes, filthy above all, disgusting, loathsome, loathsome!—and for a whole month I’ve been.... But no words, no exclamations, could express his agitation. The feeling of intense repulsion, which had begun to oppress and torture his heart while he was on his way to the old woman, had by now reached such a pitch and had taken such a definite form that he did not know what to do with himself to escape from his wretchedness. He walked along the pavement like a drunken man, regardless of the passers-by, and jostling against them, and only came to his senses when he was in the next street. Looking round, he noticed that he was standing close to a tavern which was entered by steps leading from the pavement to the basement. At that instant two drunken men came out at the door, and abusing and supporting one another, they mounted the steps. Without stopping to think, Raskolnikov went down the steps at once. Till that moment he had never been into a tavern, but now he felt giddy and was tormented by a burning thirst. He longed for a drink of cold beer, and attributed his sudden weakness to the want of food. He sat down at a sticky little table in a dark and dirty corner; ordered some beer, and eagerly drank off the first glassful. At once he felt easier; and his thoughts became clear.

All that’s nonsense, he said hopefully, and there is nothing in it all to worry about! It’s simply physical derangement. Just a glass of beer, a piece of dry bread—and in one moment the brain is stronger, the mind is clearer and the will is firm! Phew, how utterly petty it all is!

But in spite of this scornful reflection, he was by now looking cheerful as though he were suddenly set free from a terrible burden: and he gazed round in a friendly way at the people in the room. But even at that moment he had a dim foreboding that this happier frame of mind was also not normal.

There were few people at the time in the tavern. Besides the two drunken men he had met on the steps, a group consisting of about five men and a girl with a concertina had gone out at the same time. Their departure left the room quiet and rather empty. The persons still in the tavern were a man who appeared to be an artisan, drunk, but not extremely so, sitting before a pot of beer, and his companion, a huge, stout man with a grey beard, in a short full-skirted coat. He was very drunk: and had dropped asleep on the bench; every now and then, he began as though in his sleep, cracking his fingers, with his arms wide apart and the upper part of his body bounding about on the bench, while he hummed some meaningless refrain, trying to recall some such lines as these:

"His wife a year he fondly loved

His wife a—a year he—fondly loved."

Or suddenly waking up again:

"Walking along the crowded row

He met the one he used to know."

But no one shared his enjoyment: his silent companion looked with positive hostility and mistrust at all these manifestations. There was another man in the room who looked somewhat like a retired government clerk. He was sitting apart, now and then sipping from his pot and looking round at the company. He, too, appeared to be in some agitation.

Chapter II

Raskolnikov was not used to crowds, and, as we said before, he avoided society of every sort, more especially of late. But now all at once he felt a desire to be with other people. Something new seemed to be taking place within him, and with it he felt a sort of thirst for company. He was so weary after a whole month of concentrated wretchedness and gloomy excitement that he longed to rest, if only for a moment, in some other world, whatever it might be; and, in spite of the filthiness of the surroundings, he was glad now to stay in the tavern.

The master of the establishment was in another room, but he frequently came down some steps into the main room, his jaunty, tarred boots with red turn-over tops coming into view each time before the rest of his person. He wore a full coat and a horribly greasy black satin waistcoat, with no cravat, and his whole face seemed smeared with oil like an iron lock. At the counter stood a boy of about fourteen, and there was another boy somewhat younger who handed whatever was wanted. On the counter lay some sliced cucumber, some pieces of dried black bread, and some fish, chopped up small, all smelling very bad. It was insufferably close, and so heavy with the fumes of spirits that five minutes in such an atmosphere might well make a man drunk.

There are chance meetings with