Crime and Punishment

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

She was a diminutive, 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.

First impression of the victim. He is critical and hateful of her appearance.

looked like a retired clerk. The young man often recalled this impression

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.

Moreover, in order to understand any man one must be deliberate and careful to avoid forming prejudices and mistaken ideas, which are very difficult to correct and get over afterwards.

It was remarkable that Raskolnikov had hardly any friends at the university; he kept aloof from everyone, went to see no one, and did not welcome anyone who came to see him, and indeed everyone soon gave him up. He took no part in the students’ gatherings, amusements or conversations. He worked with great intensity without sparing himself, and he was respected for this, but no one liked him. He was very poor, and there was a sort of haughty pride and reserve about him, as though he were keeping something to himself. He seemed to some of his comrades to look down upon them all as children, as though he were superior in development, knowledge and convictions, as though their beliefs and interests were beneath him.

Raskolnikov's personality from the perspective of his peers. He is arrogant in his opinions and selfish with his time.

We may add only that the practical, purely material difficulties of the affair occupied a secondary position in his mind. “One has but to keep all one’s will-power and reason to deal with them, and they will all be overcome at the time when once one has familiarised oneself with the minutest details of the business...”

“When reason fails, the devil helps!” he thought with a strange grin. This chance raised his spirits extraordinarily.

“So probably men led to execution clutch mentally at every object that meets them on the way,”

“Surely it isn’t beginning already! Surely it isn’t my punishment coming upon me? It is!”

Something was happening to him entirely new, sudden and unknown. It was not that he understood, but he felt clearly with all the intensity of sensation that he could never more appeal to these people in the police-office with sentimental effusions like his recent outburst, or with anything whatever; and that if they had been his own brothers and sisters and not police-officers, it would have been utterly out of the question to appeal to them in any circumstance of life. He had never experienced such a strange and awful sensation. And what was most agonising — it was more a sensation than a conception or idea, a direct sensation, the most agonising of all the sensations he had known in his life.

all his old past, his old thoughts, his old problems and theories, his old impressions and that picture and himself and all, all... He felt as though he were flying upwards, and everything were vanishing from his sight.

if I were told, ‘love thy neighbour,’ what came of it?” Pyotr Petrovitch went on, perhaps with excessive haste. “It came to my tearing my coat in half to share with my neighbour and we both were left half naked. As a Russian proverb has it, ‘Catch several hares and you won’t catch one.’

“Where is it,” thought Raskolnikov. “Where is it I’ve read that someone condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he’d only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once! Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!... How true it is! Good God, how true! Man is a vile creature!... And vile is he who calls him vile for that,” he added a moment later.

“What do you think?” shouted Razumihin, louder than ever, “you think I am attacking them for talking nonsense? Not a bit! I like them to talk nonsense. That’s man’s one privilege over all creation. Through error you come to the truth! I am a man because I err! You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen. And a fine thing, too, in its way; but we can’t even make mistakes on our own account! Talk nonsense, but talk your own nonsense, and I’ll kiss you for it. To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s.

It was natural enough that a warm, open, simple-hearted, honest giant like Razumihin, who had never seen anyone like her and was not quite sober at the time, should lose his head immediately. Besides, as chance would have it, he saw Dounia for the first time transfigured by her love for her brother and her joy at meeting him. Afterwards he saw her lower lip quiver with indignation at her brother’s insolent, cruel and ungrateful words — and his fate was sealed.

Razumihin in love with Dounia.

Why do you demand of me a heroism that perhaps you have not either? It is despotism; it is tyranny. If I ruin anyone, it is only myself... I am not committing a murder.

“God give peace to the dead, the living have still to live.

Everything with them is ‘the influence of environment,’ and nothing else. Their favourite phrase! From which it follows that, if society is normally organised, 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!

The living soul demands life, the soul won’t obey the rules of mechanics, the soul is an object of suspicion, the soul is retrograde!

“What then?” Raskolnikov smiled in reply; “that’s not my fault. So it is and so it always will be. He said just now (he nodded at Razumihin) that I sanction bloodshed. Society is too well protected by prisons, banishment, criminal investigators, penal servitude. There’s no need to be uneasy. You have but to catch the thief.” “And what if we do catch him?” “Then he gets what he deserves.”

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

“Well, you see... I really don’t know how to express it properly... It’s a playful, psychological idea... When you were writing your article, surely you couldn’t have helped, he-he! fancying yourself... just a little, an ‘extraordinary’ man, uttering a new word in your sense... That’s so, isn’t it?” “Quite possibly,” Raskolnikov answered contemptuously. Razumihin made a movement. “And, if so, could you bring yourself in case of worldly difficulties and hardship or for some service to humanity — to overstep obstacles?... For instance, to rob and murder?” And again he winked with his left eye, and laughed noiselessly just as before. “If I did I certainly should not tell you,” Raskolnikov answered with defiant and haughty contempt.

Something peculiar betrayed itself in the very intonation of his voice.

Think only! Simply because a poor student, unhinged by poverty and hypochondria, on the eve of a severe delirious illness (note that), suspicious, vain, proud, who has not seen a soul to speak to for six months, in rags and in boots without soles, has to face some wretched policemen and put up with their insolence; and the unexpected debt thrust under his nose, the I.O.U. presented by Tchebarov, the new paint, thirty degrees Reaumur and a stifling atmosphere, a crowd of people, the talk about the murder of a person where he had been just before, and all that on an empty stomach — he might well have a fainting fit! And that, that is what they found it all on!

Police's argument

“But he would have told you at once that the workmen could not have been there two days before, and that therefore you must have been there on the day of the murder at eight o’clock. And so he would have caught you over a detail.” “Yes, that is what he was reckoning on, that I should not have time to reflect, and should be in a hurry to make the most likely answer, and so would forget that the workmen could not have been there two days before.” “But how could you forget it?” “Nothing easier. It is in just such stupid things clever people are most easily caught. The more cunning a man is, the less he suspects that he will be caught in a simple thing. The more cunning a man is, the simpler the trap he must be caught in. Porfiry is not such a fool as you think...”

Porfiry's trap

Raskolnikov went on walking beside him. His legs felt suddenly weak, a cold shiver ran down his spine, and his heart seemed to stand still for a moment, then suddenly began throbbing as though it were set free.

First encounter with someone who addresses his crime to him.

He thought of nothing. Some thoughts or fragments of thoughts, some images without order or coherence floated before his mind — faces of people he had seen in his childhood or met somewhere once, whom he would never have recalled, the belfry of the church at V., the billiard table in a restaurant and some officers playing billiards, the smell of cigars in some underground tobacco shop, a tavern room, a back staircase quite dark, all sloppy with dirty water and strewn with egg-shells, and the Sunday bells floating in from somewhere... The images followed one another, whirling like a hurricane. Some of them he liked and tried to clutch at, but they faded and all the while there was an oppression within him, but it was not overwhelming, sometimes it was even pleasant... The slight shivering still persisted, but that too was an almost pleasant sensation.

Raskolnikov's state of numbness, he is beginning to feel the weight of his crime. Almost in shock he lays on the couch and lets his mind wander

Master

Napoleon

Napoleon, the pyramids, Waterloo, and a wretched skinny old woman, a pawnbroker with a red trunk under her bed

I didn’t kill a human being, but a principle! I killed the principle, but I didn’t overstep, I stopped on this side... I was only capable of killing. And it seems I wasn’t even capable of that...

No, 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. I simply couldn’t pass by my mother starving, keeping my rouble in my pocket while I waited for the ‘happiness of all.’

A mark on socialism

“In the first place, because I can reason that I am one, and secondly, because for a month past I have been troubling benevolent Providence, calling it to witness that not for my own fleshly lusts did I undertake it, but with a grand and noble object — ha-ha! Thirdly, because I aimed at carrying it out as justly as possible, weighing, measuring and calculating. Of all the lice I picked out the most useless one and proposed to take from her only as much as I needed for the first step, no more nor less (so the rest would have gone to a monastery, according to her will, ha-ha!). And what shows that I am utterly a louse,”

His shortfallings. Raskolnikov laughs at himself and admits he's perhaps not as smart as he thought he was. Yet he shows no remorse for the pawnbroker.

“is that I am perhaps viler and more loathsome than the louse I killed, and I felt beforehandthat I should tell myself so after killing her.

Losing the moral highground. Doubt creeps in. He always knew it was wrong but needed to perform the crime to confirm it.

Allah commands and ‘trembling’ creation must obey! The ‘prophet’ is right, he is right when he sets a battery across the street and blows up the innocent and the guilty without deigning to explain! It’s for you to obey, trembling creation, and not to have desires, for that’s not for you!...

Comparing his crime to a biblical event, delusional here.