Crime and Punishment

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Isn’t it fearful that you are living in this filth which you loathe so, and at the same time you know yourself (you’ve only to open your eyes) that you are not helping anyone by it, not saving anyone from anything? Tell me,” he went on almost in a frenzy, “how this shame and degradation can exist in you side by side with other, opposite, holy feelings?

“There are three ways before her,” he thought, “the canal, the madhouse, or . . . at last to sink into depravity which obscures the mind and turns the heart to stone.”

How can she sit on the edge of the abyss of loathsomeness into which she is slipping and refuse to listen when she is told of danger? Does she expect a miracle? No doubt she does. Doesn’t that all mean madness?”

“I have only you now,” he added. “Let us go together. . . . I’ve come to you, we are both accursed, let us go our way together!”

We do not have an original thought

She looked at him and understood nothing. She knew only that he was terribly, infinitely unhappy.

“No one of them will understand, if you tell them, but I have understood. I need you, that is why I have come to you.”

He understands you but at what cost?

You have laid hands on yourself, you have destroyed a life . . . your own (it’s all the same!).

every crime, for instance, so soon as it actually occurs, at once becomes a thoroughly special case and sometimes a case unlike any that’s gone before.

It’s not merely that he has nowhere to run to, he is psychologically unable to escape me, he-he! What an expression! Through a law of nature he can’t escape me if he had anywhere to go. Have you seen a butterfly round a candle? That’s how he will keep circling and circling round me. Freedom will lose its attractions. He’ll begin to brood, he’ll weave a tangle round himself, he’ll worry himself to death!

You simply despise her. Seeing a fact which you mistakenly consider deserving of contempt, you refuse to take a humane view of a fellow creature.

Everything which is of use to mankind is honorable.

Perhaps the chief element was that peculiar “poor man’s pride,” which compels many poor people to spend their last savings on some traditional social ceremony, simply in order to do “like other people,” and not to “be looked down upon.”

“What an imbecile! Look, look! Why was he brought?

Why is Katerina looking down on people this much?

He could not, alas, even express himself correctly in Russian, though he knew no other language, so that he was quite exhausted, almost emaciated after this heroic exploit.

Pyotr Petrovitch felt that things were going badly with him.

Well good

Sonia, timid by nature, had felt before that day that she could be ill-treated more easily than anyone, and that she could be wronged with impunity. Yet till that moment she had fancied that she might escape misfortune by care, gentleness and submissiveness before everyone. Her disappointment was too great.

"An eternal victim so long as the world lasts"

“Good God!” she cried with flashing eyes, “is there no justice upon earth? Whom should you protect if not us orphans? We shall see! There is law and justice on earth, there is, I will find it!

So punishment of crime is for justice and fairness I suppose? That's why there's crime and punishment

How could it happen that it should depend on my decision—who has made me a judge to decide who is to live and who is not to live?”

“Then you won’t leave me, Sonia?” he said, looking at her almost with hope. “No, no, never, nowhere!” cried Sonia. “I will follow you, I will follow you everywhere.

how could you give away your last farthing and yet rob and murder!

The duality of man

“We are so different. . . .

yet the same

Because I couldn’t bear my burden and have come to throw it on another: you suffer too, and I shall feel better! And can you love such a mean wretch?” “But aren’t you suffering, too?”

Attracted to pain and suffering

I had to endure all the agony of that battle of ideas, Sonia, and I longed to throw it off: I wanted to murder without casuistry, to murder for my own sake, for myself alone! I didn’t want to lie about it even to myself. It wasn’t to help my mother I did the murder—that’s nonsense—I didn’t do the murder to gain wealth and power and to become a benefactor of mankind. Nonsense! I simply did it; I did the murder for myself,

Did I murder the old woman? I murdered myself, not her! I crushed myself once for all, for ever.

“You mean Siberia, Sonia? I must give myself up?” he asked gloomily. “Suffer and expiate your sin by it, that’s what you must do.” “No! I am not going to them, Sonia!” “But how will you go on living? What will you live for?”

“What a burden to bear! And your whole life, your whole life!”

He looked at Sonia and felt how great was her love for him, and strange to say he felt it suddenly burdensome and painful to be so loved. Yes, it was a strange and awful sensation!

From his childhood the thought of death and the presence of death had something oppressive and mysteriously awful;

But at last he had suddenly felt the same uneasiness again, as though his conscience smote him. “Here I sit listening to singing, is that what I ought to be doing?” he thought. Yet he felt at once that that was not the only cause of his uneasiness; there was something requiring immediate decision, but it was something he could not clearly understand or put into words.

“You always have been a very rational person and you’ve never been mad, never,”

So a man will sometimes go through half an hour of mortal terror with a brigand, yet when the knife is at his throat at last, he feels no fear.

he is a murderer, but looks upon himself as an honest man, despises others, poses as injured innocence. No, that’s not the work of a Nikolay, my dear Rodion Romanovitch!”

Oh he knows

“Who is the murderer?” he repeated, as though unable to believe his ears. “Why, you, Rodion Romanovitch! You are the murderer,” he added, almost in a whisper, in a voice of genuine conviction.

do you know to what a point of insanity a woman can sometimes love?

And if once a girl’s heart is moved to pity, it’s more dangerous than anything. She is bound to want to ‘save him,’ to bring him to his senses, and lift him up and draw him to nobler aims, and restore him to new life and usefulness—well,

She is simply thirsting to face some torture for someone, and if she can’t get her torture, she’ll throw herself out of a window.

Dounia

The peasants have vodka, the educated young people, shut out from activity, waste themselves in impossible dreams and visions and are crippled by theories;

A theory of a sort, the same one by which I for instance consider that a single misdeed is permissible if the principal aim is right, a solitary wrongdoing and hundreds of good deeds!

Suddenly she pulled out of her pocket a revolver, cocked it and laid it in her hand on the table. Svidrigaïlov jumped up.

Smart woman

he felt that strange and bitter sweet sensation that every author experiences the first time he sees himself in print; besides, he was only twenty-three.

“Aren’t you half expiating your crime by facing the suffering?”

I too wanted to do good to men and would have done hundreds, thousands of good deeds to make up for that one piece of stupidity, not stupidity even, simply clumsiness, for the idea was by no means so stupid as it seems now that it has failed. . . . (Everything seems stupid when it fails.) By that stupidity I only wanted to put myself into an independent position, to take the first step, to obtain means, and then everything would have been smoothed over by benefits immeasurable in comparison. . . . But I . . . I couldn’t carry out even the first step, because I am contemptible, that’s what’s the matter! And yet I won’t look at it as you do. If I had succeeded I should have been crowned with glory, but now I’m trapped.”

Oh, if only I were alone and no one loved me and I too had never loved anyone! Nothing of all this would have happened.

every one of them a scoundrel and a criminal at heart and, worse still, an idiot. But try to get me off and they’d be wild with righteous indignation.

There’s a peasant woman with a baby, begging. It’s curious that she thinks me happier than she is. I might give her something, for the incongruity of it.

Raskolnikov at that moment felt and knew once for all that Sonia was with him for ever and would follow him to the ends of the earth, wherever fate might take him.

And in the end the criminal was, in consideration of extenuating circumstances, condemned to penal servitude in the second class for a term of eight years only.

He is freed from his guilt

that she did sewing, and, as there was scarcely a dressmaker in the town, she was looked upon as an indispensable person in many houses.

Now that is beautiful Sonia!

He was ashamed just because he, Raskolnikov, had so hopelessly, stupidly come to grief through some decree of blind fate, and must humble himself and submit to “the idiocy” of a sentence, if he were anyhow to be at peace.

now in prison, in freedom,