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‘Do you understand, do you understand, dear sir, what it means to have nowhere left to go?’ The question Marmeladov had asked the day before suddenly came back to him. ‘For every man must have at least somewhere he can go …’
A percentage! Nice little words they use, to be sure: they're so reassuring, so scientific. Just say: “percentage”, and all your troubles are over. Now if one were to choose another word, well, then … then things might look a little less reassuring … And what if Dunechka ends up in the percentage? … If not this year's, then perhaps that of another?
it was the criminal himself who, in almost every case, became subject at the moment of his crime to a kind of failure of will and reason, which were replaced by a childish and phenomenal frivolity, and this right at the very moment when the things that were needed most of all were reason and caution.
Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms. It's by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth! I talk nonsense, therefore I'm human.
But sometimes it's not hypochondria at all that he's suffering from, he's simply cold and unfeeling to the point of inhumanity, it's really just as though there were two opposing characters alternating within him.
‘It is of course certain,’ he thought to himself, ‘that the queen who mended her stockings in prison looked like a real queen as she did it, and even more so than at the time of her most lavish triumphs and entrances.’1
‘It is perfectly true that in that sense we all of us, very often, conduct ourselves like mad folk,
The harmonious individual, it needs to be said, hardly exists at all; out of many tens, even hundreds of thousands perhaps one or two at most are encountered, and even then in rather feeble versions …’
Why do you demand of me a heroism you yourself probably don't possess? That's despotism! It's coercion! If I ruin anyone's life, it will only be my own … I haven't killed anyone yet!
‘Why, I feel better now; I don't like all that pretence and lying; I'd rather we spoke the whole truth … whether it makes Pyotr Petrovich angry or not!’
His round, puffy and slightly snub-nosed face had an unhealthy dark yellow hue, but it was cheerful enough, and even quizzical. It would even have been good-natured, were it not for the expression of his eyes, which had a kind of watery, liquid sheen, and were almost concealed by white, blinking eyelashes that seemed almost to be winking at someone. The look of those eyes was somehow strangely out of harmony with the rest of his figure, which had about it something that could only be described as feminine, and lent it a far more serious air than one might have expected at first sight.
What sparked it off was when we started talking about the view of the socialists. It's a view that is well-known: crime is a protest against the craziness of the social system – and that's all there is to it, no more than that, and no other reasons conceded – so it doesn't matter! …’
they put it all down to being “a prey to one's surroundings”2 – and that's it! It's their favourite expression! From that it follows directly that if only society were to be organized sanely, crime would simply disappear, as there would be nothing to protest about and everyone would become virtuous, just like that. Nature isn't taken into consideration, nature is banished, nature is not supposed to exist. The way they see it, it's not mankind which, moving along a historical, living path of development, will finally transmute itself into a sane society, but rather a social system which, having
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‘The whole point of his article is that the human race is divided into the “ordinary” and the “extraordinary”. The ordinary must live in obedience and do not have the right to break the law, because, well, because they're ordinary, you see. The extraordinary, on the other hand, have the right to commit all sorts of crimes and break the law in all sorts of ways precisely because they're extraordinary.
well, for example, all the law-makers and guiding spirits of mankind, starting with the most ancient ones, and continuing with the Lycurguses, the Solons, the Mahomets, the Napoleons and so on, were all every one of them criminals, if only by the fact that, in propounding a new law, they were thereby violating an old one that was held in sacred esteem by society and had been inherited from the ancestors;
the people of the first category, the raw material, that is, are in general conservative by nature, sedate, live lives of obedience and like to be obeyed. In my view, they have a duty to be obedient, as that is their function, and there is really nothing about this that is degrading to them. The second category all break the law, are destroyers, or have a tendency that way, depending on their abilities. The crimes of these people are, of course, relative and multifarious; for the most part what they are demanding, in highly varied forms, is the destruction of the present reality in the name of
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Those of the first category are always the lords of the present, while those of the second category are the lords of the future. The first conserve the world and increase its population; the second move the world and lead it towards a goal.
Pain and suffering are inevitable for persons of broad awareness and depth of heart. The truly great are, in my view, always bound to feel a great sense of sadness during their time upon earth,’7
The yardkeeper was standing by the doorway of his little cubicle, pointing straight at him for the benefit of a short man who had the air of an artisan, and was dressed in a waistcoat and something resembling a dressing-gown; from a distance he looked very like a woman.
‘No, those men aren't made like that; the real overlord, to whom all things are permitted, ransacks Toulon, commits a massacre in Paris, forgets an army in Egypt, throws away half a million men in his Moscow campaign and talks his way out at Vilna with a clever remark; and after his death they put up statues to him – and that means that everything is permitted to him. No! Men like that don't have bodies but lumps of bronze!’
The old woman was just an illness … I wanted to get my stepping-over done as quickly as possible … It wasn't a person but a principle that I killed! I killed the principle, but I didn't step over it, I remained on this side of it … All I was able to do was to kill. And the way it's turning out, it seems I didn't even manage to do that … The principle? Why was that imbecile Razumikhin calling the socialists such rude names just now? They're hardworking, businesslike people; they occupy themselves with the “common happiness” … No, life has been given me once and it won't come along again: I
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Oh, never, never will I forgive that old woman!’
The point at issue here is as follows: am I a monster or am I myself a victim?
‘God, God wouldn't let anything so dreadful happen! …’ ‘He lets it happen to other people.’ ‘No, no! God will look after her, he will!’ she said, beside herself. ‘But there may not be any God,’ Raskolnikov replied with a kind of malicious satisfaction, gave a laugh and looked at her.
‘It wasn't you I was bowing to, but the whole of human suffering,’
The stub of candle had long been guttering in its crooked candlestick within that wretched room, shedding its dim light on the murderer and the prostitute who had so strangely encountered each other in the reading of the eternal book.
A law of nature will prevent him from getting away from me, even though he has somewhere to run to. Have you ever watched a moth near a candle-flame? Well, that's the way he'll be with me, hovering, circling around me like a moth at a lighted candle; he'll lose his taste for freedom, he'll start to think, get tangled in his thoughts, ensnare himself all round as though in some net or other, worry himself to death! … And that's not all: he himself will serve me up a nice, mathematical formula like two times two – if only I give him enough latitude … And on he'll go, performing a circular orbit
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Human nature is a mirror, sir, a mirror, of the most transparent kind! Look in it and feast your eyes, sir!
All that remained was for him to put his palm to his cheek and twist his head to one side, and he would have looked just like a woman.
about. He had heard, like everyone else, that particularly in St Petersburg there were to be found progressives, nihilists, public accusers, and so on, and so forth, but, like many people, he tended to exaggerate and distort the sense and significance of these labels to the point of the absurd. For several years now he had feared more than anything else being made the victim of a public accusation, and this was the principal reason for his constant, exaggerated sense of anxiety,
This is a murky, fantastic case, a contemporary one, an incident that belongs to our own age, an age in which the heart of man has grown dark and muddied; in which one hears the saying quoted that “blood reinvigorates”; in which material comfort is preached as life's only aim. It's a case that involves dreams derived from books, sir, a heart that has been overstimulated by theories; in it we see a determination to take the first step, but it's a determination of a peculiar kind – the man's taken his resolve, but it's as if he'd fallen off a cliff or jumped from a steeple, as if he'd blundered
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You have reached the moment of justice. So discharge the duty that justice requires of you. I know you don't believe it, but I promise you, life will carry you through. You'll even get to like each other afterwards. What you need now, though, is simply air, air, air!’
Being on the run is an unpleasant, arduous business, and what you need above all else is to live and to be in a clearly defined situation with its own clearly defined air, and I mean, what kind of air would you find on the run?
Because suffering, Rodion Romanych, is a great thing; don't go looking at how fat I've got, there's no need; and yet, and yet I know – don't laugh – that suffering has a purpose. Mikolka's
It should be a fine evening, as long as there isn't a thunderstorm. Though actually, it might be better if we were to have one, it might clear the air …’
And in any case Sonya frightened him. Sonya represented an inexorable judgement, a decision that could not be altered.
There aren't many places where there are as many gloomy, harsh and strange influences on the soul of man as there are in St Petersburg.
Yes, he was glad, he was very glad that there was no one else there, that he and his mother were alone together. It was as though after all this horrible time his heart had suddenly softened. He fell down before her, he kissed her feet, and both of them, clasping each other in their arms, wept.
‘Crime? What crime?’ he exclaimed in a sudden fit of fury. ‘My killing a loathsome, harmful louse, a filthy old moneylender woman who brought no good to anyone, to murder whom would pardon forty sins, who sucked the lifeblood of the poor, and you call that a crime? I don't think about it and I have no plans to wipe it out. And why do they keep poking me from all sides with their “Crime, crime!”? Only now do I see clearly the whole absurdity of my cowardice, now, when I've already taken the resolve to go to this needless shame!
‘The blood that's on everyone's hands,’ he caught her up, almost in a frenzy now, ‘that flows and has always flowed through the world like a waterfall, that is poured like champagne and for the sake of which men are crowned in the Capitol and then called the benefactors of mankind.
Oh, if I were alone and no one loved me and I had never loved anyone! All this would never have taken place!
We shall not convey to the reader the details of the conversation, or the tears of both women, or how intimate they became.
Dunya's fair image, as she had bowed to her with such courtesy and respect at the time of their first meeting in Raskolnikov's lodgings, had remained in her soul forever as one of the most beautiful and ineffable visions of her life.
He would have given the whole world to be alone; but he himself sensed that not for one moment would he be on his own.
He kneeled in the middle of the square, bowed down to the earth and kissed that dirty earth, with pleasure and happiness. He got up and bowed down a second time.
Existence on its own had never been enough for him; he had always wanted more than that. Perhaps it had been merely the strength of his own desires that made him believe he was a person to whom more was allowed than others.
They tried to speak, but were unable to. There were tears in their eyes. Both of them looked pale and thin; but in these ill, pale faces there now gleamed the dawn of a renewed future, a complete recovery to a new life. What had revived them was love, the heart of the one containing an infinite source of life for the heart of the other. They determined to wait and endure.
