Crime and Punishment

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

There are chance meetings with strangers that interest us from the first moment, before a word is spoken.

In spite of the momentary desire he had just been feeling for company of any sort, on being actually spoken to he felt immediately his habitual irritable and uneasy aversion for any stranger who approached or attempted to approach him.

“poverty is not a vice, that’s a true saying. Yet I know too that drunkenness is not a virtue, and that that’s even truer. But beggary, honored 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 human society with a stick, he is swept out with a broom, so as to make it as humiliating as possible;

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!

For she had nowhere to turn! Do you understand, sir, do you understand what it means when you have absolutely nowhere to turn?

they grieve over men, they weep, but they don’t blame them, they don’t blame them! But it hurts more, it hurts more when they don’t blame!

But they'd blame a woman

‘we overcome our moral feeling if necessary,’ freedom, peace, conscience even, all, all are brought into the market. Let my life go, if only my dear ones may be happy!

Sonia, Sonia Marmeladov, the eternal victim so long as the world lasts.

It was clear that he must not now suffer passively, worrying himself over unsolved questions, but that he must do something,

“Or throw up life altogether!” he cried suddenly, in a frenzy—“accept one’s lot humbly as it is, once for all and stifle everything in oneself, giving up all claim to activity, life and love!”

He longed to forget himself altogether, to forget everything, and then to wake up and begin life anew. . .

A certain percentage, they tell us, must every year go . . . that way . . . to the devil, I suppose, so that the rest may remain chaste, and not be interfered with. A percentage! What splendid words they have; they are so scientific, so consolatory. . . . Once you’ve said ‘percentage’ there’s nothing more to worry about.

“Father! Why did they . . . kill . . . the poor horse!”

He thought of nothing and was incapable of thinking; but he felt suddenly in his whole being that he had no more freedom of thought, no will, and that everything was suddenly and irrevocably decided.

Kill her, take her money and with the help of it devote oneself to the service of humanity and the good of all. What do you think, would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds?

One death, and a hundred lives in exchange—it’s simple arithmetic!

The question whether the disease gives rise to the crime, or whether the crime from its own peculiar nature is always accompanied by something of the nature of disease, he did not yet feel able to decide.

Recalling it afterward, that moment stood out in his mind vividly, distinctly, for ever; he could not make out how he had had such cunning, for his mind was as it were clouded at moments and he was almost unconscious of his body.

The conviction that all his faculties, even memory, and the simplest power of reflection were failing him, began to be an insufferable torture. “Surely it isn’t beginning already! Surely it isn’t my punishment coming upon me? It is!”

He was flinging himself on his knees to pray, but broke into laughter—not at the idea of prayer, but at himself.

but strange to say he suddenly felt completely indifferent to anyone’s opinion, and this revulsion took place in a flash, in one instant.

everyone he met seemed to stare and look round, as if they had nothing to do but to watch him. “Why is it, or can it be my fancy?” he thought.

I only say he is a nice man in his own way! But if one looks at men in all ways—are there many good ones left?

If they, or Nikolay alone, had murdered them and broken open the boxes, or simply taken part in the robbery, allow me to ask you one question: do their state of mind, their squeals and giggles and childish scuffling at the gate fit in with axes, bloodshed, fiendish cunning, robbery?

“She’s drunk herself out of her senses,” the same woman’s voice wailed at her side. “Out of her senses. The other day she tried to hang herself, we cut her down.

How much they misunderstand mental illness during this time actually scares me

I am so sad, so sad . . . like a woman.

Why sad like 'a woman'?

I am a man because I err! You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen.

To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s. In the first case you are a man, in the second you’re no better than a bird.

He glanced timidly at Avdotya Romanovna, but her proud countenance wore at that moment an expression of such gratitude and friendliness, such complete and unlooked-for respect (in place of the sneering looks and ill-disguised contempt he had expected), that it threw him into greater confusion than if he had been met with abuse.

“The queen who mended her stockings in prison,” he thought, “must have looked then every inch a queen and even more a queen than at sumptuous banquets and levées.”

noticed in him no joy at the arrival of his mother and sister, but a sort of bitter, hidden determination to bear another hour or two of inevitable torture.

“Is he answering us as a duty?” Dounia wondered. “Is he being reconciled and asking forgiveness as though he were performing a rite or repeating a lesson?”

A normal man, it is true, hardly exists.

Oh, base characters! They even love as though they hate. . . . Oh, how I . . . hate them all!”

“People will write anything. We were talked about and written about, too. Have you forgotten? I am sure that she is a good girl, and that it is all nonsense.”

It began with the socialist doctrine. You know their doctrine; crime is a protest against the abnormality of the social organization and nothing more, and nothing more; no other causes admitted! . . .”

if society is normally organized, all crime will cease at once, since there will be nothing to protest against and all men will become righteous in one instant.

Human nature is not taken into account, it is excluded, it’s not supposed to exist! They don’t recognize that humanity, developing by a historical living process, will become at last a normal society, but they believe that a social system that has come out of some mathematical brain is going to organize all humanity at once and make it just and sinless in an instant,

You can’t skip over nature by logic. Logic presupposes three possibilities, but there are millions!

you maintained that the perpetration of a crime is always accompanied by illness.

I maintain that if the discoveries of Kepler and Newton could not have been made known except by sacrificing the lives of one, a dozen, a hundred, or more men, Newton would have had the right, would indeed have been in duty-bound . . . to eliminate the dozen or the hundred men for the sake of making his discoveries known to the whole of humanity.

“If he has a conscience he will suffer for his mistake. That will be his punishment—as well as the prison.”

He will suffer if he is sorry for his victim. Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth,”

why speak against yourself?” “Because only peasants, or the most inexperienced novices deny everything flatly at examinations.

The real Master to whom all is permitted storms Toulon, makes a massacre in Paris, forgets an army in Egypt, wastes half a million men in the Moscow expedition and gets off with a jest at Vilna. And altars are set up to him after his death, and so all is permitted. No, such people, it seems, are not of flesh but of bronze!”

life is only given to me once and I shall never have it again; I don’t want to wait for ‘the happiness of all.’ I want to live myself, or else better not live at all.

Lizaveta! Sonia! Poor gentle things, with gentle eyes. . . . Dear women! Why don’t they weep? Why don’t they moan? They give up everything . . . their eyes are soft and gentle. . . . Sonia, Sonia! Gentle Sonia!”

The question is, am I a monster, or am I myself a victim? And what if I am a victim?

“I did not bow down to you, I bowed down to all the suffering of humanity,”

why did you say that?” “It was not because of your dishonor and your sin I said that of you, but because of your great suffering.