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THE HARVARD CLASSICS 
SHELF OF FICTION 
SELECTED BY CHARLES W ELIOT LLD 
se 
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT 
BY 
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY 
TRANSLATED BY CONSTANCE GARNETT 
EDITED WITH NOTES AND INTRODUCTIONS 
BY WILLIAM ALLAN NEILSON PHD 
a 
P F COLLIER & SON COMPANY 
NEW YORK 
Published under special arrangement with 
The Macmillan Company 
Copyright, 1917 
By P. F. Cottier & Son 
MANUFACTURED IN U. SS. A, 
Brea. 
er 
ee ii eee ae as ras aceen 
CONTENTS 
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT 
SOAP IILCAE DET) uaa in Be Ns Ga ee ig |) ae 
CRITICISMS AND INTERPRETATIONS: 
I. By Emite Metcuior, VicomTE DE VoGuUE . . ._ Vii 
II. By Kazimierz WALISZEWSKI POETS Geo tna aie Rie x 
Ill.) From: tue Lonpow “Timms”... . ee 6 es 
Os et DA AURICRSMMERIN Peds oh a igi. Ue bec ety bey an eee 
Peer OW COMARACTERS (lemme ue Ug yhg) scp! cine) sl Lib atime tle: eee 
PART I 
CHapTer I yw. MMMM TRE Is Gah i ae Ma Sig) Asap I 
SACO ER so GERM hari et tat) wh ciples cake hc ave 10 
1 RE i 2 GRRRRRRINR 5h 8 Ta RR SL ha nw ae Ve CaP det 
RRND WY Gc MR ge gE Sg hace. Dig hs lah ng eg wi 39 
NN ig U5 MMMM PUG ag gg Ne gl aah Ma agL iL 6S ae 
Carter VI . . . Be oh me Tees.” Wai Nate wear la Em, im Re 
ESET BR G0 BORDA SF ARR AR Comin ee PR SN Sas NOMEN 
Cuapter I EO MS SRN AR Ue ear ae eerie Sa 
CBT eS Cas ae cee ea ee he ese Oe 
CACTER TEE Shi eee ie beta ie Nye ele! hog hgh ele tigt ie, BEG 
EE aS ARS So ae a MEE A LAUR 7 | 
RDS SE Ga a se iag My! SSE Ag gy roa QOS as 
I WE) a RM te ge yg th wwii Gwe owiehe gay we CR 
OM MCL G0) MNS sega gag tig Cg stmt ete awl clan ae a 
PART III 
CuHaptTer I i" Sa 1S ENT NU AS US Si NS ts gc ae 
cee ES Oe eS SNORE oO EEN RS eae Smiles nr aa aac any Wane} 
Ce GN). |. a CARR GaN gl gi Ooms tee ye le Beet he 
merrivas Sem gy erm i ee as alg We A Six ek Cn | ae 
Ee CU CE SDR or ORES an ed Pee er cn gue aE MRS 
SN MR rg roa Sah Ge rne ined. wc with ext ayy at Bee 
ry, 
II 
CHAPTER £ 
CuHaptTer II 
Cuapter IIT 
CuapTer IV 
CHAPTER V 
Cuapter VI 
CuHapter I 
CuHaptTer II 
Cuapter III 
CuaptTer IV 
CHAPTER V 
CuHaptTer I 
Cuapter II 
Cuapter III 
CuHapter IV 
Cuaprer V 
CuapTer VI 
Cuapter VIT 
Cuapter VIII 
EPILOGUE . 
os 
CONTENTS 
a 
PART IV 
PAGE 
284 
298 
311 
320 
338 
357 
366 
383 
396 
4II 
429 
444 
455 
470 
481 
492 
507 
521 
531 
543 
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 
YODOR MIKHAILOVITCH DOSTOEVSKY was 
born at Moscow on October 30, 1821, the son of a 
military surgeon. He was educated in his native city 
and at the School of Military Engineering at St. Petersburg; 
from which he graduated in 1843 with the grade of sub- 
lieutenant. The attraction of literature led him to give up 
the career that lay open to him, and he entered instead upon 
a long struggle with poverty. 
His first book, “Poor Folks” (1846), though obviously 
influenced by Gogol, was recognized by the critics as the 
work of an original genius, and he became a regular contrib- 
utor to a monthly magazine, “Annals of the Country.” He 
is said to have undertaken ten new novels at once, and was 
certainly working at a terrific pace when a sudden halt was 
called. He had joined the circle of a political agitator, 
Petrachevski, and had been taking part in its rather harm- 
less discussions on political economy, when the suspicions of 
the police were aroused and he, with his brother and thirty 
comrades, was arrested in April 1849, and thrown into 
the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul in St. Petersburg, 
where he wrote his story, “A Little Hero.” On December 
22d, he and twenty-one others were conducted to the foot 
of a scaffold in the Simonovsky Square, and told to pre- 
pare for death. But before the sentence was executed, as 
they stood in their shirts in the bitter December weather, 
it was announced that their penalty was commuted to exile 
in Siberia. On Christmas Eve he started on his journey, 
and the next four years were spent among convicts in 
a prison at Omsk. He has described his experiences there 
in his “Memories of the House of the Dead” (1853)— 
experiences which, though frightful in the extreme, seem to 
have strengthened rather than injured him in body and 
mind, though they may have embittered his temper. His 
iii 
Iv BIOGRAPHICAL NOTH | 
imprisonment was followed by three years of compulsory 
military service, during the last of which he became an 
under-officer, and married a widow, Madame Isaiev. He 
now resumed his literary career, publishing “The Injured 
and the Insulted” in 1860. In 1862 he visited western 
Europe, but seems to have made little use of his oppor- 
tunities to study the civilization or national character of 
other peoples. He was a confirmed gambler, and his con- 
duct at times reduced his wife and himself to an almost 
desperate situation. She died in 1863, and in the follow- 
ing year he lost his brother Michael, who had shared with 
him the management of a periodical. Left alone, he was 
unable to conduct the business affairs connected with it, 
and only the success of “Crime and Punishment” in 1866 
rescued him from ruin. He had now reached the height 
of his powers, and the novels written after this period 
are generally regarded as showing an increasing lack of 
the proportion and restraint which had never been his to 
any great degree. The most important ot the later works 
are “The Idiot” (1869), “The Possessed” (1873), “The 
Adult” (1875), and “The Brothers Karamazov” (1881). 
He married as his second wife, his stenographer, Anna 
Grigorevna Svitkine, a girl who, though not highly educated, 
was capable and devoted; and through her energy his last 
years were passed in comfort and comparative prosperity. 
He issued periodically “An Author’s Note-Book” to which 
he contributed an amount of autobiographical matter, and 
through this and other writings in magazines he exercised 
a good deal of influence. He came finally to have a very 
high position in the popular regard, and his death in 
February, 1881, brought forth an expression of public 
feeling such as St. Petersburg had seldom seen. 
Though Dostoevsky did not regard himself as a martyr 
in his Siberian exile, and, indeed, even seems to have 
regarded the suffering of that time in the light of expia- 
tion—though of what crime it is hard for a non-Russian 
to see—he bore the marks of the experience through the 
rest of his life. His face looked aged and sorrow-stricken, 
and he became bitter, silent, and suspicious, He was sub- 
ject to epilepsy, and had strange hallucinations. Probably 
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE ¥ 
as a consequence of his long association with criminals, 
he had an intense interest in abnormal and perverted types, 
the psychology of which he analysed with an uncanny 
subtlety. His books form a striking contrast to those of 
Turgenev in point of art, for they are diffuse, often poorly 
constructed and incoherent, and without charm of style. 
But in spite of theselimitations, his power of rousing 
emotion, the grim intensity of his conceptions, and his 
command of the sources of fear and pity make him a very 
great writer. 
“Crime and Punishment” is his acknowledged masterpiece, 
and it displays some of his most characteristic ideas. Chief 
among them is that of expiation. The crime of Raskolnikov 
is not so much repented of as it is regarded as being 
canceled by voluntary submission to Siberian exile. Sonia, 
the pathetic girl of the streets through whom the hero 
learns the lesson of purification, represents the humility and 
devotion which are to Dostoevsky the saving virtues which 
are one day to save Russia. The most striking feature of 
the book to the Western reader, to whom the spiritual 
teaching is apt to seem strange and at times even perverse, 
is to be found in the analytical account of the states of 
mind of the half-crazed criminal, who cannot keep away 
from the very officials who were trying to get on his track, 
and who cannot refrain from discussing the crime he is 
trying to hide: As a study in morbid psychology, “Crime 
and Punishment” is one of the most amazingly convincing 
and terrifying books in all literature. 
W. A. N. 
CRITICISMS AND INTERPRETATIONS 
I 
By Emite MeEtcHior, VICOMTE DE VoGUE 
Mot subject is very simple. A man conceives the idea 
of committing a crime; he matures it, commits the 
deed, defends himself for some time from being 
arrested, and finally gives himself up to the expiation of it. 
For once, this Russian artist has adopted the European 
idea of unity of action; the drama, purely psychological, is 
made up of the combat between the man and his own pro- 
ject. The accessory characters and facts are of no conse- 
quence, except in regard to this influence upon the 
criminal’s plans. The first part, in which are described the 
birth and growth of the criminal idea, is written with con- 
summate skill and a truth and subtlety of analysis beyond 
all praise. The student Raskolnikov, a nihilist in the true 
sense of the word, intelligent, unprincipled, unscrupulous, 
reduced to extreme poverty, dreams of a happier condition. 
On returning home from going to pawn a jewel at an old 
pawnbroker’s shop, this vague thought crosses his brain 
without his attaching much importance to it: 
“An intelligent man who had that old woman’s money 
could accomplish anything he liked; it is only necessary to 
get rid of the useless, hateful old hag.” 
This was but one of those fleeting thoughts which cross 
the brain like a nightmare, and which only assume a dis- 
tinct form through the assent of the will. This idea 
becomes fixed in the man’s brain, growing and increasing 
on every page, until he is perfectly possessed by it. Every 
hard experience of his outward life appears to him to 
bear some relation to his project; and by a mysterious power 
of reasoning, to work into his plan and urge him on to the 
crime. The influence exercised upon this man is brought 
vii 
viii CRITICISMS AND INTERPRETATIONS 
out into such distinct relief that it seems to us itself 
like a living actor in the drama, guiding the criminal’s 
hand to the murderous weapon. The horrible deed is 
accomplished; and the unfortunate man wrestles with the 
recollection of it as he did with the original design. The 
relations of the world to the murderer are all changed, 
through the irreparable fact of his having suppressed a 
human life. Everything takes on a new physiognomy, and 
a new meaning to him, excluding from him the possibility # 
of feeling and reasoning like other people, or of finding 
his own place in life. His whole soul is metamorphosed 
and in constant discord with the life around him. This 
is not remorse in the true sense of the word. Dostoevsky 
exerts himself to distinguish and explain the difference. His 
hero will feel no remorse until the day of expiation; but 
it is a complex and perverse feeling which possesses him; 
the vexation at having derived no satisfaction from an 
act so successfully carried out; the revolting against the 
unexpected moral consequences of that act; the shame of 
finding himself so weak and helpless; for the foundation 
/ of Raskolnikov’s character is pride. Only one single 
interest in life is left to him: to deceive and elude the 
police. He seeks their company, their friendship, by an 
attraction analogous to that which draws us to the extreme 
edge of a dizzy precipice; the murderer keeps up intermi- 
nable interviews with his friends at the police office, and 
even leads on the conversation to that point, when a single 
word would betray him; every moment we fear he will 
utter the word; but he escapes and continues the terrible 
game as if it were a pleasure. 
The magistrate Porphyre has guessed the student’s secret; 
he plays with him like a tiger with its prey, sure of his 
game. Then Raskolnikov knows he is discovered; and 
through several chapters a long fantastic dialogue is kept 
up between the two adversaries; a double dialogue, that of 
the lips, which smile and wilfully ignore; and that of the 
eyes which know and betray all. At last when the author 
has tortured us sufficiently in this way, he introduces the 
salutary influence which is to break down the culprit’s pride 
and reconcile him to the expiation of his crime. Raskolnikov 
CRITICISMS AND INTERPRETATIONS ix 
loves a poor street-walker. The author’s clairvoyance 
divines that even the sentiment of love was destined in 
him to be modified like every other, to be changed into 
a dull despair. 
Sonia is a humble creature, who has sold herself to 
escape starvation, and is almost unconscious of her dis- 
honor, enduring it as a malady she cannot prevent. She 
wears her ignominy as a cross, with pious resignation. She 
is attached to the only man who has not treated her with 
contempt; she sees that he is tortured by some secret, and 
tries to draw it from him. After a long struggle the 
avowal is made, but not in words. In a mute interview 
which is tragic in the extreme, Sonia reads the terrible 
truth in her friend’s eyes. The poor girl is stunned for a 
moment, but recovers herself quickly. She knows the 
remedy; her stricken heart cries out: 
“We must suffer, and suffer together; . . . we must pray 
and atone; ... let us go to prison! .. .” 
Thus are we led back to Dostoevsky’s favorite idea, to 
the Russian’s fundamental conception of Christianity: the 
efficacy of atonement, of suffering, and its being the only 
solution of all difficulties. 
To express the singular relations between these two 
beings, that solemn pathetic bond, so foreign to every 
preconceived idea of love, we should make use of the 
word compassion in the sense in which Bossuet used it: 
the suffering with and through another being. When 
Raskolnikov falls at the feet of the girl who supports her 
parents by her shame, she, the despised of all, is terrified 
at his self-abasement, and begs him to rise. He then 
utters a phrase which expresses the combination of all the 
books we are studying: “It is not only before thee that I 
prostrate myself, but before all suffering humanity.” Let 
us here observe that our author has never yet once 
succeeded in representing love in any form apart from these 
subtleties, or the simple natural attraction of two hearts 
toward each other. He portrays only extreme cases; 
either that mystic state of sympathy and self-sacrifice for 
a distressed fellow-creature, of utter devotion, apart from 
any selfish desire; or the mad, bestial cruelty of a perverted 
ee nee 
x CRITICISMS AND INTERPRETATIONS 
nature. The lovers he represents are not made of flesh 
and blood, but of nerves and tears. Yet this realist evokes 
only harrowing thoughts, never disagreeable images. I 
defy any one to quote a single line suggestive of anything 
sensual, or a single instance where the woman is represented 
in the light of a temptress. His love scenes are absolutely 
chaste, and yet he seems to be incapable of portrayingany creation between an angel and a_ beast.—From 
“Dostoevsky” in “The Russian Novelists,” translated by | 
J. L. Edmands (1887). : 
Il 
By Kazimierz WALISZEWSKI 
ASKOLNIKOV, the student who claims the right to 
murder and steal by virtue of his ill-applied scientific 
theories, is not a figure the invention of which can 
be claimed by the Russian novelist. It is probable that 
before or after reading the works of Victor Hugo, 
Dostoevsky had perused those of Bulwer Lytton. Eugene 
Aram, the English novelist’s hero, is a criminal of a very 
different order, and of a superior species. When he commits 
his crime, he not only thinks, like Raskolnikov, of a rapid 
means of attaining fortune, but also, and more nobly, of a 
great and solemn sacrifice to science, of which he feels 
himself to be the high priest. Like Raskolnikov, he draws 
no benefit from his booty. Like him, too, he hides it, and 
like him, he is pursued, not by remorse, but by regret— 
haunted by the painful thought that men now have the 
advantage over him, and that he no longer stands above 
their curiosity and their spite—tortured by his conscious- 
ness of the total change in his relations with the world. 
In both cases, the subject and the story, save for the 
voluntary expiation at the close, appear identical in their 
essential lines. This feature stands apart. Yet, properly 
speaking, it does not belong to Dostoevsky. In Turgenev’s 
“The Tavern” (Postoialyi Dvor), the peasant Akime, 
whom his wife has driven into crime, punishes himself by 
going out to beg, in all gentleness and humble submission. 
CRITICISMS AND INTERPRETATIONS xi 
Some students, indeed, have chosen to transform both sub- 
ject and character, and have looked on Raskolnikov as a 
political criminal, disguised after the same fashion as 
Dostoevsky himself may have been, in his “Memories of 
the House of the Dead.” But this version appears to me 
to arise out of another error. A few days before the book 
appeared, a crime almost identical with that related in it, 
and committed under the apparent influence of Nihilist 
teaching, though without any mixture of the political ele- 
ment, took place at St. Petersburg. These doctrines, as 
personified by Turgenev in Bazarov, are, in fact, general 
in their scope. They contain the germs of every order 
of criminal attempt, whether public or private; and 
Dostoevsky’s great merit lies in the fact that he has dem- 
onstrated the likelihood that the development of this germ 
in one solitary intelligence may foster a social malady. In 
the domain of social psychology and pathology, the great 
novelist owes nothing to anybody; and his powers in this 
direction suffice to compensate for such imperfections as 
I shall have to indicate in his work. 
The “first cause” in this book, psychologically speaking, 
is that individualism which the Slavophil School has 
chosen to erect into a principle of the national life—an 
unbounded selfishness, in other words, which, when crossed 
by circumstances, takes refuge in violent and monstrous 
reaction. And indeed, Raskolnikov, like Bazarov, is so full 
of contradictions, some of them grossly improbable, that 
one is almost driven to inquire whether the author has 
not intended to depict a condition of madness. We see this 
selfish being spending his last coins to bury Marmeladov, 
a drunkard picked up in the street, whom he had seen for 
the first time in his life only a few hours previously. 
From this point of view Eugene Aram has more psycho- 
logical consistency, and a great deal more moral dignity. 
Raskolnikov is nothing but a poor half-crazed creature, soft 
in temperament, confused in intellect, who carries about 
a big idea in a head that is too small to hold it: He 
becomes aware of this after he has committed his crime, 
when he is haunted by hallucinations and wild terrors, which 
convince him that his pretension to rank as a man of power 
xii CRITICISMS AND INTERPRETATIONS 
was nothing but a dream. Then the ruling idea which 
has lured him to murder and to theft gives place to 
another—that of confessing his crime. And even here his 
courage and frankness fail him; he cannot run a straight 
course, and, after wandering round and round the police 
station, he carries his confession to Sonia. 
This figure of Sonia is a very ordinary Russian type, 
and strangely chosen for the purpose of teaching Raskol- 
nikov the virtue of expiation. She is a woman of the town, 
chaste in mind though not in deed, and is redeemed by 
one really original feature, her absolute humility. It may 
be inquired whether this element of moral redemption, in 
so far as it differs from those which so constantly occur 
to the imagination of the author of “Manon Lescaut,’ and 
to that of all Dostoevsky’s literary forerunners, is more 
truthful than the rest, and whether it must not be admitted 
that certain moral, like certain physical conditions, necessarily 
result in an organic and quite incurable deformation of 
character. Sonia is like an angel who rolls in the gutter 
every night and whitens her wings each morning by 
perusing the Holy Gospels. We may just as well fancy that 
a coal-heaver could straighten the back bowed by the 
weight of countless sacks of charcoal by practising Swedish 
gymnastics ! 
The author’s power of evocation, and his gift for analys- 
ing feeling, and the impressions which produce it, are very 
great, and the effects of terror and compassion he obtains 
cannot be denied. Yet, whether from the artistic or from 
the scientific point of view (since some of his admirers 
insist on this last), his method is open to numerous objec- 
tions. It consists in reproducing, or very nearly, the con- 
ditions of ordinary life whereby we gain acquaintance with 
a particular character. Therefore, without taking the 
trouble of telling us who Raskolnikov is, and in what his 
qualities consist, the story relates a thousand little incidents 
out of which the personal individuality of the hero is 
gradually evolved. And as these incidents do not neces- 
sarily present themselves, in real life, in any logical sequence, 
beginning with the most instructive of the series, the 
novelist does not attempt to follow any such course. As 
CRITICISMS AND INTERPRETATIONS xiii 
early as on the second page of the book, we learn that 
Raskolnikov is making up his mind to murder an old 
woman who lends out money, and it is only at the close 
of the volume that we become aware of the additional fact 
that he has published a review article, in which he has 
endeavoured to set forth a theory justifying this hideous 
design.—From “A History of Russian Literature” (1900). 
III 
f bee novels of Dostoevsky may seem to discover a 
very strange world to us, in which people talk 
and act like no one that we have ever met. Yet we 
do not read them because we want to hear about these 
strange Russian people, so unlike ourselves. Rather we 
read them because they remind us of what we had for- 
gotten about ourselves, as a scent may suddenly remind 
us of some place or scene not remembered since childhood. 
And as we have no doubt about the truth of the memories 
recalled by a scent, so we have none about Dostoevsky’s 
truth. 
It is strange, like those memories of childhood, but 
only because it has been so long sleeping in our minds. 
He has no need to prove it, and he never tries to do so; 
he only presents it for our recognition; and we recognize 
it at once, however contrary it may be to all that we are 
accustomed to believe about ourselves. 
The strangeness of Dostoevsky’s novels lies in his method, 
which is unlike that of other novelists because his interest 
is different from theirs. The novel of pure plot is all con- 
cerned with success or failure. The hero has some definite 
task to perform, and we read to discover whether he suc- 
ceeds in performing it. But even in novels where 
character is more considered it is still the interest of failure 
and success which usually makesthe plot. The hero, for 
instance, falls in love and the plot forms round this love 
interest; or he is married, and there is a suspense about 
his happiness or unhappiness. But in the greatest of 
Dostoevsky’s books, such as “The Brothers Karamazov” or 
xiv CRITICISMS AND INTERPRETATIONS 
“The Idiot,” the interest is not even in the happiness or 
unhappiness of the hero; for to Dostoevsky happiness and 
unhappiness seem to be external things, and he is not con- 
cerned even with this kind of failure or success. He has 
such a firm belief in the existence of the soul, and with 
it a faith so strong in the order of the universe, that he 
applies no final tests whatever to his life. Plot with most 
novelists is an effort to make life seem more conclusive 
than it really is; and that is one of the reasons why we_ 
like a firm plot in a novel. With its tests and judgments 
and results it produces an illusion of certainty agreeable to 
our weakness of faith. But Dostoevsky needs no illusion 
of certainty, and gives none. He had a faith independent 
of happiness and even of the state of his own soul. Life 
indeed had poured unhappiness upon him, so that he knew 
the worst of it from his own experience; yet we can tell 
from his books that he knew also a peace of thought com- 
pared with which all his own miseries were unreal to him. 
In that he differs from Tolstoy, who saw this peace of 
thought in the distance and could not reach it. Tolstoy. 
therefore conceived of life as an inevitable discord between 
will and conviction, and tried to impose the impossible on 
mankind as he tried to impose it upon himself, judging them 
with the severity of his’ self-judgments. His books are 
full of his own pursuit of certainty and his own half- 
failure and half-success. He still makes happiness the 
test, even though he feels that the noblest of men cannot 
attain to it; for his own happiness was caused by the con- 
flict in his mind between will and conviction. But in 
Dostoevsky this conflict had ceased. He was not happy, 
but he was not torn by the desire for happiness; nor 
did he test his own soul or the souls of others by their 
happiness or unhappiness. His faith in the soul was so great 
that he saw it independent of circumstance, and almost inde- 
pendent of its own manifestation in action. For in these 
manifestations there is always the alloy of circumstance, or 
the passions of the flesh, or of good or evil fortune; and he 
tried to see the soul free of this. He did not judge men by 
their diversities which outward things seemed to impose on 
them. For him the soul itself was more real than all these 
CRITICISMS AND INTERPRETATIONS xv 
diversities, and they only interested him for their power 
of revealing or obscuring it. Therefore his object in his 
novels is to reveal the soul, not to pass any judgments upon 
men, nor to tell us how they fare in this world; and this 
object makes his peculiar method. He does not try to show 
us souls free from their bodies or free from circumstance, 
for to do that would be contrary to his own experience and 
his own faith. Rather he shows them tormented and mis- 
translated, even to themselves, but in such a way that we 
see the reality beyond the torments and the mistranslations. 
His characters drift together and fall into long wayward 
conversations that have nothing to do with any events in 
the book. They quarrel about nothing; they have no sense 
of shame; they behave intolerably, so that we know that 
we should hate them in real life. But, as we read, we do 
not hate them, for we recognize ourselves—not indeed in 
their words and behavior, but in what they reveal through 
them. They have an extraordinary frankness which may be 
in the Russian character but which is also part of 
Dostoevsky’s method, for the characters of other Russian 
novelists are not so frank as his. He makes them talk and 
act so as to reveal themselves, and for no other purpose 
whatever. And yet they always reveal themselves uncon- 
sciously, and their frankness, though surprising, is not 
incredible. 
But we, accustomed to novels concerned with failure 
and success, with plots formed upon that concern, are 
bewildered by Dostoevsky’s method; and even he is a little 
bewildered by it. He never quite learned how to tell his 
own kind of story—a story in which all outward events 
are subordinate to the changes and manifestations of the 
soul. Even in “The Brothers Karamazov” there is a plot, 
made out of the murder of old Karamazov, which seems 
to be imposed upon the real interest of the book as the 
unintelligible plot of “Little Dorrit” is imposed upon the 
real interest of that masterpiece. And in “The Idiot” events 
are so causeless and have so little effect that we cannot 
remember them. The best plan is not to try to remember 
them, for they matter very little. The book is about the 
souls of men and women, and where the construction is 
xvi CRITICISMS AND INTERPRETATIONS 
clumsy it is only because Dostoevsky is impatient to tell 
us what he has to tell. 
Those who believe that the soul is only an illusion— 
and there are many who believe this without knowing it 
—will be surprised to find how much truth Dostoevsky has 
discovered through his error. Whether his faith was right 
or wrong, it certainly served him well as a novelist, and 
so did his experience. No modern writer has been so well 
acquainted with evil and misery as he was. Other novelists 
write about them as moving exceptions in life; he wrote 
about them, because in his experience they were the rule. 
Other novelists have a quarrel with life or with society, 
or with particular institutions; but he has no quarrel with 
anything. There is neither hatred in him, nor righteous 
indignation, nor despair. He had suffered from govern- 
ment as much as any man in the world, yet he never saw 
it as a hideous abstraction, and its crimes and errors 
were for him only the crimes and errors of men like 
himself. 
We hate men when they seem no longer men to us, when 
we see nothing in them but tendencies which we abhor; 
and a novelist who expresses his hatred of tendencies in 
his characters deprives them of life and makes them unin- 
teresting to all except those who share his hatred. Even 
Tolstoy makes some of his characters lifeless through 
hatred; but Dostoevsky hates no one, for behind every 
tendency he looks for the soul, and the tendency only 
interests him because of the soul that is concealed or 
betrayed by it. Thus his wicked people, and they abound, 
are never introduced into his books either to gratify his 
hatred of them or to make a plot with their wickedness. 
He is as much concerned with their souls as with the 
souls of his saints, Alyosha and Prince Myshkin. Iago 
seems to be drawn from life, but only from external 
observation. We never feel that Shakespeare has been 
Iago himself, or has deduced him from possibilities in him- 
self. But Dostoevsky’s worst characters are like Hamlet. 
He knows things about them that he could only know about 
himself, and they live through his sympathy, not merely 
through his observation. He makes no division of men into 
CRITICISMS AND INTERPRETATIONS xVii 
sheep and goats—not even that subtle division, common 
in the best novels, by which the sheep are more real than 
the goats. For him all men have more likeness to each 
other than unlikeness, for they all have souls; and because 
he is always aware of the soul in them he has a Christian 
sense of their equality. It is not merely rich and poor or 
clever or stupid that are equal to him, but even good and 
bad. He treats the drunkard Lebedyev with respect and, 
though his books contain other characters as absurd as any 
in Dickens, he does not introduce them, like Dickens, to 
make fun of them, but only because he is interested in 
the manner in which their absurdities mistranslate them. 
Nor is the soul made different for him by sex, for that 
is only a difference of the body; and so hedoes not insist 
on femininity in his women. He knows women, but he 
knows them as human beings like men; and he is interested 
in sexual facts not as they affect his own passions but 
as they affect the soul. He, like his hero, Myshkin, was 
an epileptic, and what he tells us of Myshkin’s attitude 
towards women may have been true of himself. But if 
that is so, his own lack of appetite, like the deafness of 
Beethoven, made his art more profound and spiritual. He 
makes no appeal to the passions of his readers, as Beethoven 
in his later works makes none to the mere sense of sound. 
Indeed, he was an artist purified by suffering as saints 
are purified by it; for through it he attained to that com- 
plete disinterestedness which is as necessary to the artist 
as to the saint. Whenever a man sees people and things 
in relation only to his own personal wants and appetites 
he cannot use them as subject matter for art. Dostoevsky 
learnt to free everything and everybody from this relation 
more completely, perhaps, than any writer known to us. 
Not even vanity or fear, nor any theory begotten of them, 
perverted his view of human life. In his art at any rate 
he achieved that complete liberation which is aimed at by 
the wisdom of the East; and his heroes exhibit that libera- 
tion in their conduct. Myshkin would be a man of no 
account in our world, but Christ might have chosen him 
for one of His Apostles. Any Western novelist, drawing 
such a character, would have made him unreal by insisting 
xviii CRITICISMS AND INTERPRETATIONS 
upon his goodness and by displaying it only in external © 
actions, as saints in most European pictures are to be 
recognized only by a halo and a look of silly sanctity. We 
fail with such characters because we should not recognize 
them if we met them in real life, and because we do not 
even want to be like them ourselves. They represent an 
ideal imposed on us long ago from the East, and now only 
faintly and conventionally remembered. We test every- 
body by some kind of success in this life, even if it be 
only the success of a just self-satisfaction. But Myshkin 
has not even that. He is unconscious of his own goodness, 
and even of the badness of other men. People who meet 
him are impatient with him and call him “the idiot,” 
because he seems to be purposeless and defenceless. But 
we do not feel that the novelist has afflicted them with 
incredible blindness, for we know, as we read, that we too 
should call Myshkin an idiot if we met him. Indeed, his 
understanding has never been trained by competition or 
defence; but that is the reason why now and then it sur- 
prises every one by its profundity. For he understands 
men’s minds just because, like Dostoevsky himself, he does 
not see them in relation to his own wants, and because his 
disinterestedness makes them put off all disguise before 
them. 
“Dear Prince,” some one says to him, “it’s not easy to 
reach Paradise on earth; but you reckon on finding it. 
Paradise is a difficult matter, Prince—much more difficult 
than it seems to your good heart.” But Myshkin’s heart is 
not good because it cherishes illusions. He does not expect 
to find Paradise on earth, and he does not like people 
because he thinks them better than they are. Seeing very 
clearly what they are, he likes even the worst of them in 
spite of it; and to read Dostoevsky’s books throws us for 
the time into Myshkin’s state of mind. When we are con- 
fronted with some fearful wickedness, even when we read 
about it in the newspapers, it shakes our faith in life and 
makes it seem like a nightmare in which ordinary com- 
fortable reality has suddenly turned into an inexplicable 
horror. But in Dostoevsky’s books the horror of the night- 
mare suddenly turns to a happy familiar beauty. He shows 
CRITICISMS AND INTERPRETATIONS xix 
us wickedness worse than any we had ever imagined, 
wickedness which if we met with it in real life, would 
make us believe in human monsters without souls; and 
then, like a melody rising through the discord of madness, 
be shows us the soul, just like our own behind that wicked- 
ness. And we believe in the one as we have believed in 
the other; for we feel that a man is telling us about life 
who has ceased to fear it, and that his faith, tested by all 
the suffering which he reveals in his books, is something 
more to be trusted than our own experience.—From the 
London “Times” (1913). 
IV 
By Maurice BAarInGc 
N 1866 came “Crime and Punishment,” which brought 
: Dostoevsky fame. This book, Dostoevsky’s “Macbeth,” 
is so well known in the French and English transla- 
tions that it hardly needs any comment. Dostoevsky never 
wrote anything more tremendous than the portrayal of 
the anguish that seethes in the soul of Raskolnikov, after 
he has killed the old woman, “mechanically forced,” as 
Professor Briickner says, “into performing the act, as if 
he had gone too near machinery in motion, had been caught 
by a bit of his clothing and cut to pieces.” And not only 
is one held spellbound by every shifting hope, fear, and 
doubt, and each new pang that Raskolnikov experiences, 
but the souls of all the subsidiary characters in the book 
are revealed to us just as clearly; the Marmeladov family, 
the honest Razumihin, the police inspector, and the atmos- 
phere of the submerged tenth in St. Petersburg—the 
steaming smell of the city in the summer. There is an 
episode when Raskolnikov kneels before Sonia, the prosti- 
tute, and says to her: “It is not before you I am kneeling, 
but before ail the suffering of mankind.” That is what 
Dostoevsky does himself in this and in all his books; but 
in none of them is the suffering of all mankind conjured 
up before us in more living colours, and in none of them 
is his act of homage in kneeling before it more impressive, 
—From “An Outline of Russian Literature” (1914). 
LIST OF CHARACTERS 
Ropion RomaAnovitcu RASKOLNIKov, a student. 
PuLCHERIA ALEXANDROVNA, his mother. 
AvpotyA RoMANovna (Dovunta), his sister. 
Deitri ProxoritcH Razuminin, his friend. 
Praskovya Paviovna, his landlady. 
Nastasya Perrovna, her maid-servant. 
Atyona IvANovna, an old woman, a pawnbroker. 
LizaveTa, her half-sister. 
SEMYON ZAHAROVITCH MARMELADOV, a drunken clerk. 
KATERINA Ivanovna, his wife. 
Her three little children. 
Sonta SEMyonovna, Marmeladov’s daughter. 
AMALIA IvANovNna LIPPEVECHSEL, his landlady. 
AnpDREY SEMYONOVITCH LEBEZIATNIKOV, an advanced young mai. 
Pyotr PretrovitcH LuzuHIn, suitor for Dounia. 
ARKADY IvANOVITCH SvIDRIGAILOV, a landowner. 
Marra Petrovna, his wife. 
Nixopim FomitTcu, superintendent of the district, 
of the St. 
ZAMETOV, head clerk, 
' Petersburg 
Inya PetrovitcHu, assistant clerk, 4 
: police. 
PorFiry PEtTROvITCH, detective, ] 
ZOSSIMOV, a young physician. 
XXI 
fae i. 
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT 
A NOVEL IN SIX PARTS AND 
AN EPILOGUE 
PART I 
CHAPTER I 
man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. 
Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, to- 
wards 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 land- 
lady, 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 over- 
strained, 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 land- 
lady, but any one at all. He was crushed by poverty, but 
the anxietiesof his position had of late ceased to weigh upon 
him. He had given up attending to matters of practical im- 
portance; 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, 
1 
(): an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young 
2 FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY 
irrelevant gossip, to pestering demands for payment, threats 
and complaints, and to rack his brains for excuses, to pre- 
varicate, 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. 
“T 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 coward- 
ice, 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 per- 
haps 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 par- 
ticularly 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, ex- 
ceptionally 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 speak- 
ing 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. 
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT 3 
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 short-coming 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 bit- 
terness 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 some- 
where in a huge wagon dragged by a heavy dray horse, sud- 
denly 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 remem- 
ber 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 hun- 
dred and thirty. He had counted them once when he had 
4, FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY 
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 miore 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, &c. 
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 inquisi- 
tive eyes were not to be dreaded. 
“Tf 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. ... 
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT 5 
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 land- 
ing, 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 diminu: 
tive, 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, remem- 
bering 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,” Raskolni- 
kov 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 
6 FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY 
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 Iva- 
novna ?” 
“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 jeweller’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.” 
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT x | 
“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 carried 
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 de- 
grading 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.” 
8 FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY 
“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 con- 
fusion 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 rub- 
bish!”’ he added resolutely. “And how could such an atro- 
cious thing come into my head? What filthy things my 
heart is capable of. Yes, filthy above all, disgusting, loath- 
some, loathsome !—and for a whole month I’ve been... .” 
But no words, no exciamations, 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 see 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 him- 
self 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 noth- 
ing in it all to worry about! It’s simply physical derange- 
ment. Just a glass of beer, a piece of dry bread—and in 
I—R 
ine i 
a ae 
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT9 
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 look- 
ing cheerful as though he were suddenly set free from a ter- 
rible 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 con- 
sisting 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 ex- 
tremely 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 mani- 
festations. 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 
ASKOLNIKOV 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 com- 
pany. 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 what- 
ever 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 his impression afterwards, and 
even ascribed it to presentiment. He looked repeatedly at 
the clerk, partly no doubt because the latter was staring per- 
sistently 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 
10 
LEP BE GPM T OA ie ONE A, NA OE 
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT il 
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. A crumpled shirt 
front, covered with spots and stains, protruded from his can- 
vas waistcoat. Like a clerk, he wore no beard, nor mous- 
tache, but had been so long unshaven that his chin looked 
like a stiff greyish brush. And there was something respect- 
able and like an official about his manner too. But he was 
restless; he ruffled up his hair and from time to time let 
his head drop into his hands dejectedly resting his ragged 
elbows on the stained and sticky table. At last he looked 
straight at Raskolnikov, and said loudly and resolutely: 
“May I venture, honoured sir, to engage you in polite con- 
versation? Forasmuch as, though your exterior would not 
command respect, my experience admonishes me that you are 
a man of education and not accustomed to drinking. I have 
always respected education when in conjunction with gen- 
uine sentiments, and I am besides a titular counsellor in rank. 
Marmeladov—such is my name; titular counsellor. I make 
bold to inquire—have you been in the service?” 
“No, I am studying,” answered the young man, somewhat 
surprised at the grandiloquent style of the speaker and also at 
being so directly addressed. In spite of the momentary de- 
sire he had just been feeling for company of any sort, on 
being actually spoken to he felt immediately his habitual irri- 
table and uneasy aversion for any stranger who approached 
or attempted to approach him. 
“A student then, or formerly a student,” cried the clerk. 
“Just what I thought! I’m a man of experience, immense 
experience, sir,” and he tapped his forehead with his fingers 
12 FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY 
in self-approval. “You’ve been a student or have attended 
some learned institution! ... But allow me—”’ He got 
up, staggered, took up his jug and his glass, and sat down 
beside the young man, facing him a little sideways. He was 
drunk, but spoke fluently and boldly, only occasionally losing 
the thread of his sentences and drawling his words. He 
pounced upon Raskolnikov as greedily as though he too 
had not spoken to a soul for a month, 
“Honoured sir,’ he began almost with solemnity, “povert 
is not a vice, that’s a true saying. Yet I know too Hat 
drunkenness is not a virtue, and that that’s even truer. But 
beggary, honoured sir, beggary is a vice. In poverty you 
may still retain your innate nobility of soul, but in beggary— 
never—no one. For beggary a man is not chased out of hu- 
man society with a stick, he is swept out with a broom, so 
as to make it as humiliating as possible; and quite right too, 
forasmuch as in beggary I am ready to be the first to hu- 
miliate myself. Hence the pot house! Honoured sir, a 
month ago Mr. Lebeziatnikov gave my wife a beating, and 
my wife is a very different matter from me! Do you un- 
derstand? Allow me to ask you another question out of 
simple curiosity: have you ever spent a night on a hay 
barge, on the Neva?” 
“No, I have not happened to,’ answered Raskolnikov. 
“What do you mean?” 
“Well I’ve just come from one and it’s the fifth night I’ve 
slept so—’ He filled his glass, emptied it and paused. 
Bits of hay were in fact clinging to his clothes and sticking 
to his hair. It seemed quite probable that he had not un- 
dressed or washed for the last five days. His hands, par- 
ticularly, were filthy. They were fat and red, with black 
nails. 
His conversation seemed to excite a general though lan- 
guid interest. The boysat the counter fell to sniggering. 
The innkeeper came down from the upper room, apparently 
on purpose to listen to the “funny fellow” and sat down at 
a little distance, yawning lazily, but with dignity. Evidently 
Marmeladov was a familiar figure here and he had most 
likely acquired his weakness for high-flown speeches from 
the habit of frequently entering into conversation with 
be A pe Re tetany IO 
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT 13 
strangers of all sorts in the tavern. This habit develops 
into a necessity in some drunkards, and especially in those 
who are looked after sharply and kept in order at home. 
Hence in the company of other drinkers they try to justify 
themselves and even if possible obtain consideration. 
“Funny fellow!” pronounced the innkeeper. “And why 
don’t you work, why aren’t you at your duty, if you are in 
the service ?” 
“Why am I not at my duty, honoured sir,” Marmeladov 
went on, addressing himself exclusively to Raskolnikov, as 
though it had been he who put that question to him. “Why 
am I not at my duty? Does not my heart ache to think 
what a useless worm I am? A month ago when Mr. Le- 
beziatnikov beat my wife with his own hands, and I lay drunk, 
didn’t I suffer? Excuse me, young man, has it ever happened 
to you... hm... well, to petition hopelessly for a loan?” 
“Yes, it has. But what do you mean by hopelessly ?” 
“Hopelessly in the fullest sense, when you know before- 
hand that you will get nothing by it. You know, for in- 
stance, beforehand with positive certainty that this man, this 
most reputable and exemplary citizen will on no considera- 
tion give you money; and indeed I ask you why should he? 
For he knows of course that I shan’t pay it back. From 
compassion? But Mr. Lebeziatnikov who keeps up with 
modern ideas explained the other day that compassion is 
forbidden nowadays by science itself, and that that’s what is 
done now in England, where there is political economy. 
Why, I ask you, should he give it to me? And yet though I 
know beforehand that he won’t, I set off to him and—” 
“Why do you go?” put in Raskolnikov. 
“Weil, when one has no one, nowhere else one can go! 
For every man must have somewhere to go. Since there 
are times when one absolutely must go somewhere! When 
my own daughter first went out with a yellow ticket, then 
I had to go... (for my daughter has a yellow passport,” ) 
he added in parenthesis, looking with a certain uneasiness 
at the young man. “No matter, sir, no matter!” he went 
on hurriedly and with apparent composure when both the 
boys at the counter guffawed and even the innkeeper 
smiled—“No matter, I am not confounded by the wagging of 
14 FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY 
their heads; for every one knows everything about it already, 
and all that is secret is made open. And I accept it all not 
with contempt, but with humility. So be it! So be it! 
‘Behold the man!’ Excuse me, young man, can you... 
No, to put it more strongly and more distinctly; not can you 
but dare you, looking upon me, assert that I am not a pig?” 
The young man did not answer a word. 
“Well,” the orator began again stolidly and with even in- 
creased dignity, after waiting for the laughter in the room 
to subside. “Well, so be it, I am a pig, but she is a lady! I 
have the semblance of a beast, but Katerina Ivanovna, my 
spouse is a person of education and an officer’s daughter 
Granted, granted, I am a scoundrel, but she is a woman of a 
noble heart, full of sentiments, refined by education. And 
yet... oh, if only she felt for me! Honoured sir, honoured 
sir, you know every man ought to have at least one place 
where people feel for him!! But Katerina Ivanovna, 
though she is magnanimous, she is unjust. ... And yet, al- 
though I realise that when she pulls my hair she only does 
it out of pity—for I repeat without being ashamed, she pulls 
my hair, young man,” he declared with redoubled dignity, 
' hearing the sniggering again—‘but, my God, if she would 
but once. ... But no, no! It’s all in vain and it’s no use 
talking! No use talking! For more than once, my wish did 
come true and more than once she has felt for me but... 
such is my fate and I am a beast by nature!” 
“Rather !” assented the innkeeper yawning. Marmeladov 
struck his fist resolutely on the table. 
“Such is my fate! Do you know, sir, do you know, I have 
sold her very stockings for drink? Not her shoes—that 
would be more or less in the order of things, but her stock- 
ings, her stockings I have sold for drink! Her mohair 
shawl I sold for drink, a present to her long ago, her own 
property, not mine; and we live in a cold room and she 
caught cold this winter and has begun coughing and spitting 
blood too. We have three little children and Katerina 
Ivanovna is at work from morning till night; she is scrub- 
bing and cleaning and washing the children, for she’s been 
used to cleanliness from a child. But her chest is weak and 
she has a tendency to consumption and I feel it! Do you 
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT 15 
suppose I don’t feel it? And the more I drink the more I 
feel it. That’s why I drink too. I try to find sympathy and 
feeling in drink. . . . I drink so that I may suffer twice as 
much!” And as though in despair he laid his head down 
on the table. 
“Young man,” he went on, raising his head again, “in 
your face I seem to read some trouble of mind. When you 
came in I read it, and that was why I addressed you at once. 
For in unfolding to you the story of my life, I do not wish 
to make myself a laughing-stock before these idle listeners, 
who indeed know all about it already, but I am looking for 
a man of feeling and education. Know then that my wife 
was educated in a high-class school for the daughters of 
noblemen, and on leaving, she danced the shawl dance before 
the governor and other personages for which she was pre- 
sented with a gold medal and a certificate of merit. The 
medal , .. well, the medal of course was sold—long ago, 
hm ... but the certificate of merit is in her trunk still and 
not long ago she showed it to our landlady. And although she 
is most continually on bad terms with the landlady, yet she 
wanted to tell some one or other of her past honours and 
of the happy days that are gone. I don’t condemn her for 
it. I don’t blame her, for the one thing left her is recollec- 
tion of the past, and all the rest is dust and ashes. Yes, yes, 
she is a lady of spirit, proud and determined. She scrubs 
the floors herself and has nothing but black bread to eat, but 
won't allow herself to be treated with disrespect. That’s why 
she would not overlook Mr. Lebeziatnikov’s rudeness to her, 
and so when he gave her a beating for it, she took to her 
bed more from the hurt to her feelings than from the 
blows. She was a widow when I married her, with three 
children, one smaller than the other. She married her first 
husband, an infantry officer, for love, and ran away with him 
from her father’s house. She was exceedingly fond of her 
husband; but he gave way to cards, got into trouble and 
with that he died. He used to beat her at the end: and al- 
though she paid him back, of which I have authentic docu- 
mentary evidence, to this day she speaks of him with tears 
and she throws him up at me; and I am glad, I am glad that, 
though only in imagination, she should think of herself as 
16 FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY 
having once been happy.... And she was left at his 
death with three children in a wild and remote district where 
I happened to be at the time; and she was left in such hope- 
less poverty that, although I have seen many ups and downs 
of all sorts, I don’t feel equal to describing it even. Her 
relations had all thrown her off. And she was proud, too, 
excessively proud... . And then, honoured sir, and then, I, 
being at the time a widower, with a daughter of fourteen left 
me by my first wife, offered her my hand, for I could not 
bear the sight of such suffering. You can judge the extrem- 
ity of her calamities, that she,a woman of education and 
culture and distinguished family, should have consented to 
be my wife. But she did! Weeping and sobbing and wring- 
ing her hands, she married me! For she had nowhere to 
turn! Do you understand, sir, do you understand what it 
means when you have absolutely nowhere to turn? No, that 
you don’t understand yet... . And for a whole year, I per- 
formed my duties conscientiously and faithfully, and did not 
touch this” (he tapped the jug with his finger), “for I have 
feelings. But even so, I could not please her; and then I 
lost my place too, and that through no fault of mine but 
throngh changes in the office; and then I did touch it! ... 
It will be a year and a half ago soon since we found our- 
selves at last after many wanderings and numerous calamities 
in this magnificent capital, adorned with innumerable monu- 
ments. Here too I obtained a situation. ... I obtained it 
and I lost it again. Do you understand? This time it was 
through my own fault I lost it: for my weakness had come 
out. ... We have now part of a room at Amalia Ivanovna 
Lippevechsel’s; and what we live upon and what we pay our 
rent with, I could not say. There are a lot of people living 
there beside ourselves. Dirt and disorder, a perfect Bedlam 
...hm... yes.... And meanwhile my daughter by my 
first wife has grown up; and what my daughter has had to 
put up with from her step-mother whilst she was growing up, 
I won’t speak of. For, though Katerina Ivanovna is full of 
generous feelings, she is a spirited lady, irritable and short- 
tempered... . Yes. But it’s no use going over that! Sonia, 
as you may well fancy, has had no education. I did make an 
effort four years ago to give her a course of geography and 
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT 1 
universal history, but as I was not very well up in those sub- 
jects myself and we had no suitable books, and what books 
we had... hm, any way we have not even those now, so all 
our instruction came to an end. We stopped at Cyrus of 
Persia. Since she has attained years of maturity, she has 
read other books of romantic tendency and of late she has 
read with great interest a book she got through Mr. Lebe- 
ziatnikov, Lewes’ Physiology—do you know it?—and even 
recounted extracts from it to us: and that’s the whole of her 
education. And now may I venture to address you, honoured 
sir, on my own account with a private question. Do you 
suppose that a respectable poor girl can earn much by honest 
work? Not fifteen farthings a day can she earn, if she is 
respectable and has no special talent and that without putting 
her work down for an instant! And what’s more, Ivan 
Ivanitch Klopstock the civil counsellor—have you heard of 
him ?—has not to this day paid her for the half-dozen linen 
shirts she made him and drove her roughly away, stamping 
and reviling her, on the pretext that the shirt collars were 
not made like the pattern and were put in askew. And there 
are the little ones hungry....And Katerina Ivanovna 
walking up and down and wringing her hands, her cheeks 
flushed red, as they always are in that disease: ‘Here you 
live with us,’ says she, ‘you eat and drink and are kept warm 
and you do nothing to help.’ And much she gets to eat and 
drink when there is not a crust for the little ones for three 
days! I was lying at the time ... well, what of it! I was 
lying drunk and 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 Darya Frantsovna, a 
woman of evil character and very well known to the police, 
had two or three times tried to get at her through the land- 
lady. ‘And why not? said Katerina Ivanovna with a jeer, 
‘you are something mighty precious to be so careful of!’ 
But don’t blame her, 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. ... For that’s Katerina Ivanovna’s character, and 
18 FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY 
when children cry, even from hunger, she falls to beating 
them at once. 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 
Ivanoyna 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 drap de dames 
shawl (we have a shawl, made of drap de dames), 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 shudder- 
ing. ... And I went on lying there, just as before.... 
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...andI... Jay drunk.” 
Marmeladov stopped short, as though his voice had failed 
him. Then he hurriedly filled his glass, drank, and cleared 
his throat. . 
“Since then, sir,” he went on after a brief pause—“Since 
then, owing to an unfortunate occurrence and through in- 
- formation given by evil-intentioned persons—in all which 
Darya Frantsovna took a leading part on the pretext that 
she had been treated with want of respect—since then my 
daughter Sofya Semyonovna has been forced to take a yel- 
low ticket, and owing to that she is unable to go on living 
with us. For our landlady, Amalia Ivanovna would not 
hear of it (though she had backed up Darya Frantsovna be-. 
fore) and Mr. Lebeziatnikov too...hm.... All the 
trouble between him and Katerina Ivanovna was on Sonia’s 
account. At first he was for making up to Sonia himself 
and then all of a sudden he stood on his dignity: ‘how,’ said 
he, ‘can a highly educated man like me live in the same 
rooms with a girl like that?’ And Katerina Ivanovna would 
not let it pass, she stood up for her... and so that’s how 
it happened. And Sonia comes to us now, mostly after 
dark; she comforts Katerina Ivanovna and gives her all she 
can. ... She has a room at the Kapernaumovs, the tailors, 
she lodges with them: Kapernaumov is a lame man with a 
cleft palate and all of his numerous family have cleft palates 
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT 19 
too. And his wife, too, has a cleft palate. They all live in 
one room, but Sonia has her own, partitioned off.... Hm 
«+. yes... very poor people and all with cleft palates... 
yes. Then I got up in the morning, put on my rags, lifted up 
my hands to heaven and set off to his excellency Ivan Afa- 
nasyevitch. His excellency Ivan Afanasyevitch, do you know 
him? No? Well, then, it’s a man of God you don’t know. 
He is wax ... wax before the face of the Lord; even as 
wax melteth!... His eyes were dim when he heard my 
story. ‘Marmeladov, once already you have deceived my 
expectations ... Ill take you once more on my own re- 
sponsibility—that’s what he said, ‘remember,’ he said, ‘and 
now you can go.’ I kissed the dust at his feet—in thought 
only, for in reality he would not have allowed me to do it, 
being a statesman and a man of modern political and en- 
lightened ideas. I returned home, and when I announced 
that I’d been taken back into the service and should receive a 
salary, heavens, what a to-do there was.. .!” 
Marmeladov stopped again in violent excitement. At that 
moment a whole party of revellers already drunk came in 
from the street, and the sounds of a hired concertina and the 
cracked piping voice of a child of seven singing “The 
Hamlet” were heard in the entry. The room was filled with 
noise. The tavern-keeper and the boys were busy with the 
new-comers. Marmeladov paying no attention to the new 
arrivals continued his story. He appeared by now to be 
extremely weak, but as he became