Crim ana Punishment

Crime and Punishment

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Translated By Constance Garnett

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 temp 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.’

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.

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 strangers that interest us from the first moment, before a word is spoken. Such was the impression made on Raskolnikov by the person sitting a little distance from him, who looked like a retired clerk. The young man often recalled this impression afterwards, and  even  ascribed it  to  presentiment.  He looked repeatedly at the clerk, partly no doubt because the latter was staring persistently at him, obviously anxious to enter into conversation. At the other persons in the room, including the tavern- keeper, the clerk looked as though he were used to their company, and weary of it, showing a shade of condescending contempt for them as persons of station and  culture  inferior to  his own,  with  whom  it would be useless for him to converse. He was a man over fifty, bald and  grizzled, of medium  height,  and  stoutly built. His face, bloated from continual drinking, was of a yellow, even greenish, tinge, with swollen eyelids out of which  keen reddish eyes gleamed like little chinks. But there was something very strange in him; there was a light in  his eyes as  though  of intense feeling—perhaps there were even thought and intelligence, but at the same time there  was a gleam of something like madness. He  was wearing an  old  and  hopelessly ragged black dress coat, with all its buttons missing except one, and that one he had  buttoned,  evidently  clinging  to  this  last trace  of respectability.

Chapter III

He waked up late next day after a broken sleep. But his sleep had not refreshed him; he waked up bilious, irritable, ill-tempered, and looked with hatred at his room. It was a tiny cupboard of a room about six paces in length. It had a poverty-stricken appearance with  its dusty yellow paper peeling off the walls, and it was so low-pitched that a man of more than average height was ill at ease in it and felt every moment that he would knock his head against the ceiling. The furniture was in keeping with the room: there were three old chairs, rather rickety; a painted table in the corner on which lay a few manuscripts and books; the dust that lay thick upon them showed that they had been long untouched. A big clumsy sofa occupied almost the whole of one wall and half the floor space of the room; it was once covered with chintz, but was now in rags and served Raskolnikov as a bed. Often he went to sleep on it, as he was, without  undressing, without  sheets, wrapped in his old student’s overcoat, with his head on one little pillow, under which he heaped up all the linen he had, clean and dirty, by way of a bolster. A little table stood in front of the sofa.

Chapter IV

His mother’s letter had been a torture to him, but as regards the chief fact in it, he had felt not one moment’s hesitation,  even  whilst he  was reading the  letter.  The essential question was settled, and irrevocably settled, in his mind: ‘Never such a marriage while I am alive and Mr. Luzhin  be  damned!’ ‘The  thing  is perfectly clear,’ he muttered to himself, with a malignant smile anticipating the triumph of his decision. ‘No, mother, no, Dounia, you won’t deceive me! and then they apologise for not asking my advice and for taking the decision without me! I dare say! They imagine it is arranged now and can’t be broken off; but we will see whether it can or not! A magnificent excuse: ‘Pyotr Petrovitch is such a busy man that even his wedding has to be in post-haste, almost by express.’ No, Dounia, I see it all and I know what you want to say to me; and I know too what you were thinking about, when you walked up and down all night, and what your prayers were like before the Holy Mother of Kazan who stands in mother’s bedroom. Bitter is the ascent to Golgotha…. Hm

… so it is finally settled; you have determined to marry a sensible business man, Avdotya Romanovna, one who has a fortune (has already  made his fortune, that is so much more   solid  and  impressive) a  man   who   holds  two government posts and who shares the ideas of our most rising generation, as mother writes, and who seems  to be kind, as  Dounia herself observes. That seems  beats everything! And that very Dounia for that very ‘seems’  is marrying him! Splendid! splendid!

‘… But I should like to know why mother has written to  me  about  ‘our most rising generation’? Simply as  a descriptive touch, or with the idea of prepossessing me in favour of Mr. Luzhin? Oh, the cunning of them! I should like to know one thing more: how  far they were open with  one  another  that  day and  night  and  all this time since? Was it all put into words or did both understand that they had the same thing at heart and in their minds, so that there was no need to speak of it aloud, and better not to speak of  it.  Most  likely it  was partly  like  that,  from mother’s letter it’s evident: he struck her as rude a little and mother in her simplicity took her observations to Dounia. And she was sure to be vexed and ‘answered her angrily.’ I should think so! Who would not be angered when it was quite clear without any naïve questions and when it was understood that it was useless to discuss it. And why does she write to me, ‘love Dounia, Rodya, and she loves you more than herself’?  Has she a secret conscience-prick at sacrificing her  daughter  to  her  son? ‘You are our  one comfort, you are everything to us.’ Oh, mother!’

His bitterness grew more and more intense, and if he had happened to  meet  Mr.  Luzhin at the  moment,  he might have murdered him.

Chapter V

‘Of course, I’ve been meaning lately to go to Razumihin’s to ask for work, to ask him to get me lessons or  something …’ Raskolnikov thought,  ‘but what  help can  he  be  to  me  now?  Suppose he  gets me  lessons, suppose he shares his last farthing with me, if he has any farthings, so that I could get some boots and make myself tidy enough to give lessons … hm … Well and what then? What shall I do with the few coppers I earn? That’s not what  I  want  now.  It’s really absurd for  me  to  go  to Razumihin….’

The  question why he was now  going to  Razumihin agitated him even more  than he was himself aware; he kept uneasily seeking for some sinister significance in this apparently ordinary action.

‘Could I have expected to set it all straight and to find a way out by means of Razumihin alone?’ he asked himself in perplexity.

He pondered and rubbed his forehead, and, strange to say, after long musing, suddenly, as if it were spontaneously and  by chance, a fantastic thought  came into his head.

‘Hm … to Razumihin’s,’ he said all at once, calmly, as though he had reached a final determination. ‘I shall go to Razumihin’s of course, but … not now. I shall go to him

… on  the  next  day after It,  when  It  will be over and everything will begin afresh….’

And suddenly he realised what he was thinking.

‘After It,’ he shouted, jumping up from the seat, ‘but is It  really going  to  happen?  Is  it  possible it  really will happen?’ He left the seat, and went off almost at a run; he meant to turn back, homewards, but the thought of going home  suddenly filled him with  intense loathing; in that hole, in that awful little cupboard of his, all this had for a month past been growing up in him; and he walked on at random.