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crime_and_punish

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And if only fate would have sent him repentance--burning repentance that

would have torn his heart and robbed him of sleep, that repentance, the

awful agony of which brings visions of hanging or drowning! Oh, he would

have been glad of it! Tears and agonies would at least have been life.

But he did not repent of his crime.

At least he might have found relief in raging at his stupidity, as he

had raged at the grotesque blunders that had brought him to prison.

But now in prison, _in freedom_, he thought over and criticised all his

actions again and by no means found them so blundering and so grotesque

as they had seemed at the fatal time.

“In what way,” he asked himself, “was my theory stupider than others

that have swarmed and clashed from the beginning of the world? One has

only to look at the thing quite independently, broadly, and uninfluenced

by commonplace ideas, and my idea will by no means seem so... strange.

Oh, sceptics and halfpenny philosophers, why do you halt half-way!

“Why does my action strike them as so horrible?” he said to himself. “Is

it because it was a crime? What is meant by crime? My conscience is at

rest. Of course, it was a legal crime, of course, the letter of the law

was broken and blood was shed. Well, punish me for the letter of the

law... and that’s enough. Of course, in that case many of the

benefactors of mankind who snatched power for themselves instead of

inheriting it ought to have been punished at their first steps. But

those men succeeded and so _they were right_, and I didn’t, and so I

had no right to have taken that step.”

It was only in that that he recognised his criminality, only in the fact

that he had been unsuccessful and had confessed it.

He suffered too from the question: why had he not killed himself? Why

had he stood looking at the river and preferred to confess? Was the

desire to live so strong and was it so hard to overcome it? Had not

Svidrigaïlov overcome it, although he was afraid of death?

In misery he asked himself this question, and could not understand that,

at the very time he had been standing looking into the river, he had

perhaps been dimly conscious of the fundamental falsity in himself and

his convictions. He didn’t understand that that consciousness might be

the promise of a future crisis, of a new view of life and of his future

resurrection.

He preferred to attribute it to the dead weight of instinct which he

could not step over, again through weakness and meanness. He looked at

his fellow prisoners and was amazed to see how they all loved life and

prized it. It seemed to him that they loved and valued life more in

prison than in freedom. What terrible agonies and privations some of

them, the tramps for instance, had endured! Could they care so much for

a ray of sunshine, for the primeval forest, the cold spring hidden away

in some unseen spot, which the tramp had marked three years before, and

longed to see again, as he might to see his sweetheart, dreaming of the

green grass round it and the bird singing in the bush? As he went on he

saw still more inexplicable examples.

In prison, of course, there was a great deal he did not see and did not

want to see; he lived as it were with downcast eyes. It was loathsome

and unbearable for him to look. But in the end there was much that

surprised him and he began, as it were involuntarily, to notice much

that he had not suspected before. What surprised him most of all was

the terrible impossible gulf that lay between him and all the rest. They

seemed to be a different species, and he looked at them and they at

him with distrust and hostility. He felt and knew the reasons of his

isolation, but he would never have admitted till then that those reasons

were so deep and strong. There were some Polish exiles, political

prisoners, among them. They simply looked down upon all the rest as

ignorant churls; but Raskolnikov could not look upon them like that.

He saw that these ignorant men were in many respects far wiser than the

Poles. There were some Russians who were just as contemptuous, a former

officer and two seminarists. Raskolnikov saw their mistake as clearly.

He was disliked and avoided by everyone; they even began to hate him at

last--why, he could not tell. Men who had been far more guilty despised

and laughed at his crime.

“You’re a gentleman,” they used to say. “You shouldn’t hack about with

an axe; that’s not a gentleman’s work.”

The second week in Lent, his turn came to take the sacrament with his

gang. He went to church and prayed with the others. A quarrel broke out

one day, he did not know how. All fell on him at once in a fury.

“You’re an infidel! You don’t believe in God,” they shouted. “You ought

to be killed.”

He had never talked to them about God nor his belief, but they wanted to

kill him as an infidel. He said nothing. One of the prisoners rushed at

him in a perfect frenzy. Raskolnikov awaited him calmly and silently;

his eyebrows did not quiver, his face did not flinch. The guard

succeeded in intervening between him and his assailant, or there would

have been bloodshed.

There was another question he could not decide: why were they all so

fond of Sonia? She did not try to win their favour; she rarely met

them, sometimes only she came to see him at work for a moment. And yet

everybody knew her, they knew that she had come out to follow _him_,

knew how and where she lived. She never gave them money, did them no

particular services. Only once at Christmas she sent them all presents

of pies and rolls. But by degrees closer relations sprang up between

them and Sonia. She would write and post letters for them to their

relations. Relations of the prisoners who visited the town, at their