Crime and Punishment

Fyodor Dostoevsky's 1866 novel follows Rodion Raskolnikov, a destitute former student in St. Petersburg who convinces himself that murdering a parasitic old pawnbroker is morally justified—that extraordinary people stand above conventional law. After committing the act, the anticipated liberation never comes; instead, he is consumed by guilt, paranoia, and psychological disintegration, drawn inexorably toward confession by the detective Porfiry Petrovitch and the self-sacrificing love of Sonia Marmeladova.

Narrative Note

The novel is told in close third person, almost entirely from Raskolnikov's feverish, unstable perspective. Dostoevsky plunges the reader deep into his protagonist's consciousness—his rationalizations, hallucinations, contradictions, and anguish—while the surrounding cast (Sonia, Svidrigaïlov, Porfiry, Razumihin, Dounia) each embody alternative responses to suffering and moral choice.

Cast of Characters

• Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov — impoverished former law student; the murderer and moral center of the novel
• Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladova (Sonia) — Marmeladov's daughter, forced into prostitution; devoutly religious, she becomes Raskolnikov's path to redemption
• Avdotya Romanovna Raskolnikova (Dounia) — Raskolnikov's proud, beautiful sister; fiercely devoted to her brother
• Pulcheria Alexandrovna — Raskolnikov's loving, anxious mother
• Dmitri Prokofitch Razumihin — Raskolnikov's loyal, exuberant friend; falls in love with Dounia
• Semyon Zaharovitch Marmeladov — ruined titular counsellor and alcoholic; Sonia's father
• Katerina Ivanovna Marmeladova — Marmeladov's consumptive, proud second wife
• Porfiry Petrovitch — the investigating magistrate; shrewd, ironic, relentless in his psychological pursuit of Raskolnikov
• Arkady Ivanovitch Svidrigaïlov — a dissolute landowner who once pursued Dounia; morally complex, capable of both generosity and depravity
• Pyotr Petrovitch Luzhin — Dounia's calculating, vain fiancé; embodies petty self-interest disguised as virtue
• Andrey Semyonovitch Lebeziatnikov — Luzhin's young radical roommate; foolish but ultimately decent
• Alyona Ivanovna — the miserly old pawnbroker whom Raskolnikov murders
• Lizaveta Ivanovna — her timid, simple half-sister; an unintended second victim
• Nastasya — Raskolnikov's landlady's servant; kind and practical
• Nikodim Fomitch — the district superintendent of police
• Ilya Petrovitch — the explosive assistant superintendent
• Zossimov — a young doctor who tends to Raskolnikov during his illness

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Translator's Preface

Dostoevsky was the son of a poor, deeply religious doctor; the family of seven lived in two rooms. Though sickly, he graduated third from the Petersburg Engineering school, where he began his first work, "Poor Folk," which brought him instant celebrity. But in 1849 he was arrested—not as a revolutionary, but for attending a reading circle that discussed Fourier and Proudhon. Under Nicholas I, this was enough. He was condemned to death and taken to the Semyonovsky Square to be shot. "They made us put on the white shirts worn by persons condemned to death," he wrote to his brother. "Being the third in the row, I concluded I had only a few minutes of life before me." At the last moment, the sentence was commuted to hard labour. One prisoner, Grigoryev, went mad on the spot and never recovered.

Four years of penal servitude among common criminals in Siberia followed, then years in a disciplinary battalion. Epilepsy, which had shown early signs, now seized him violently for the rest of his life. Upon returning to Russia, he started journals that were promptly suppressed, lost his first wife and brother, took on his brother's debts, and wrote at desperate speed. His later years were softened by his second wife's devotion. In 1880 he gave his famous Pushkin speech in Moscow to extraordinary acclaim. A few months later he died, followed to the grave by a vast multitude. As a Russian critic wrote: "He was one of ourselves, but one who has suffered and seen so much more deeply than we have his insight impresses us as wisdom."

Part I

Chapter I

On an exceptionally hot July evening, a young man crept out of his garret—a cupboard of a room under the roof of a five-storied house—and walked slowly towards K. bridge. He had slipped past his landlady's kitchen unseen; he was hopelessly in debt to her and dreaded her pestering demands. Not from cowardice—but for months he had been in an overstrained, irritable state, isolated from everyone, crushed by poverty yet indifferent to it. He had ceased attending to practical matters entirely.

"I want to attempt a thing like that and am frightened by these trifles," he thought with an odd smile. "It's because I chatter that I do nothing."

The Petersburg heat, the stench from the pot-houses, the drunken men on a working day—all worked upon his overwrought nerves. He was exceptionally handsome, slim, with dark eyes, but so badly dressed that even in this wretched quarter his rags stood out. When a drunken man in a passing waggon shouted "Hey there, German hatter!" he clutched at his conspicuous tall hat in terror. "A stupid thing like this, the most trivial detail might spoil the whole plan," he muttered. "Trifles, trifles are what matter!"

He knew exactly how many steps it was to his destination: seven hundred and thirty. A month ago these had been idle dreams; now he was going for a "rehearsal."

With a sinking heart he entered a huge tenement house, slipped up a dark back staircase to the fourth floor, and rang the bell of the old pawnbroker's flat. The door cracked open; sharp malignant eyes peered out. She was a diminutive, withered woman of sixty, her thin neck like a hen's leg, a mangy fur cape on her shoulders despite the heat.

"Raskolnikov, a student, I came here a month ago," he muttered with a half bow.

He brought a silver watch to pawn. She offered a rouble and a half—robbery. He took it, seething, but stayed: he had another object in coming. While she fetched the money from behind a curtain, he listened carefully, noting which pocket held the keys, which drawer she opened, the large notched key that must belong to a strong-box. "How degrading it all is," he thought.

He asked casually whether her sister was at home. "What business is she of yours?" the old woman snapped.

Leaving, his confusion intensified with every step. "Oh, God, how loathsome it all is! And can I, can I possibly... No, it's nonsense, it's rubbish!" The feeling of intense repulsion had reached such a pitch that he walked like a drunken man, jostling passers-by. He stumbled into a basement tavern, ordered beer, and drank eagerly.

"All that's nonsense," he told himself. "It's simply physical derangement. A glass of beer, a piece of dry bread—and the mind is clearer and the will is firm!"

He felt suddenly cheerful, as though freed from a terrible burden—though even then he sensed this happier mood was not normal either. The tavern was nearly empty: a sleeping drunk on a bench, an artisan with his beer, and sitting apart, a man who looked like a retired government clerk—restless, with something strange in his expression.

Chapter II

Though Raskolnikov had avoided all society for months, he now felt a sudden thirst for company and was glad to stay in the tavern. The innkeeper's jaunty tarred boots appeared on the steps before the rest of his greasy person; on the counter lay sliced cucumber and dried black bread, all smelling very bad. The air was so thick with the fumes of spirits that five minutes might make a man drunk.

The retired clerk stared persistently at Raskolnikov, obviously anxious to enter into conversation. He was a man over fifty, bald and grizzled, of medium height and stoutly built. His face, bloated from continual drinking, was of a yellowish-green tinge, with swollen eyelids out of which keen reddish eyes gleamed like little chinks. His ragged black dress coat had all its buttons missing except one, and that one he had buttoned, clinging to this last trace of respectability. A crumpled shirt front, covered with spots and stains, protruded from his canvas waistcoat. He had been so long unshaven that his chin looked like a stiff greyish brush. There was something respectable and like an official about his manner, but he was restless. At last he spoke with absurd grandiloquence:

"May I venture, honoured sir, to engage you in polite conversation? Marmeladov—such is my name; titular counsellor."

He pounced on Raskolnikov as greedily as though he too had not spoken to a soul for a month. "Poverty is not a vice, that's a true saying," he began almost with solemnity. "But beggary, honoured sir, beggary is a vice. In poverty you may still retain your innate nobility of soul, but in beggary—never. For beggary a man is not chased out of human society with a stick, he is swept out with a broom."

So began the story of his ruin. His wife, Katerina Ivanovna, was a woman of education and an officer's daughter—proud, spirited, consumptive. She had married her first husband for love and run away from her father's house; he gave way to cards, beat her, and died, leaving her with three small children in a wild, remote district in hopeless poverty. Her relations had all thrown her off. Marmeladov, then a widower with a fourteen-year-old daughter Sonia, offered his hand. "Weeping and sobbing and wringing her hands, she married me! For she had nowhere to turn! Do you understand what it means when you have absolutely nowhere to turn?" For a year he performed his duties faithfully and did not touch drink. Then he lost his place through changes in the office, and touched it. They drifted to Petersburg after many wanderings, where he obtained a situation and lost it again—this time through his own weakness. They now had part of a room at Amalia Lippevechsel's, a perfect Bedlam.

Sonia, his daughter by his first wife, had no education—"We stopped at Cyrus of Persia"—and could earn almost nothing by honest sewing. A respectable poor girl could not make fifteen farthings a day. One evening, while Marmeladov lay drunk, he heard Katerina Ivanovna, driven to distraction by the children's hunger, taunt Sonia: "You are something mighty precious to be so careful of!" A woman of evil character, Darya Frantsovna, had already tried to get at the girl. "But don't blame her, don't blame her! She was not herself when she spoke."

"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 Ivanovna 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 shawl, 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 shuddering." Katerina Ivanovna knelt at Sonia's bed all evening, kissing her feet, and they fell asleep in each other's arms. "And I... lay drunk."

Since then Sonia had been forced to take a yellow ticket and could no longer live with them. But five weeks ago, his excellency Ivan Afanasyvitch took Marmeladov back into the service. The household was transformed—Katerina Ivanovna walked on tiptoe, hushing the children: "Semyon Zaharovitch is resting, shh!" They made coffee with real cream, scraped together eleven roubles for a decent uniform. Katerina Ivanovna cooked two courses for dinner—soup and salt meat with horse radish—which they had never dreamed of. She smartened herself up with nothing at all, did her hair nicely, and looked younger and better. She invited the landlady in for coffee and invented elaborate stories about his excellency leading Marmeladov by the hand into his study. "She believes it all herself, she amuses herself with her own fancies!" When he brought home his first earnings—twenty-three roubles forty copecks—she called him her "poppet" and pinched his cheek.

The tavern, the degraded man, the five nights on a hay barge, and yet this poignant love for his wife and children bewildered Raskolnikov. He listened intently but with a sick sensation.

Then, five days ago, Marmeladov stole the key to Katerina Ivanovna's box, took what was left of his earnings, and fled. His uniform lay in a tavern on the Egyptian bridge, exchanged for the rags he wore now. That very morning he had gone to Sonia for a pick-me-up. "Thirty copecks she gave me with her own hands, her last, all she had. She said nothing, she only looked at me without a word... Not on earth, but up yonder... they grieve over men, they weep, but they don't blame them! But it hurts more, it hurts more when they don't blame!"

"To be pitied! Why am I to be pitied?" Marmeladov suddenly declaimed, rising with arm outstretched. "I ought to be crucified, crucified on a cross, not pitied! Crucify me, oh judge, crucify me but pity me!" He prophesied that on the Day of Judgment, God would summon even the drunkards and the children of shame. "'Come forth ye drunkards, come forth, ye weak ones, come forth, ye children of shame!' And He will say, 'This is why I receive them, oh ye of understanding, that not one of them believed himself to be worthy of this.' And He will hold out His hands to us and we shall fall down before him... and we shall understand all things!" He sank down on the bench, exhausted. There was a moment of silence; then laughter and oaths.

Marmeladov asked Raskolnikov to walk him home. As they went, the drunken man grew more and more dismayed. "It's not Katerina Ivanovna I am afraid of... it's her eyes I am afraid of... the red on her cheeks... and her breathing. Have you noticed how people in that disease breathe... when they are excited?"

They climbed to a grimy room on the fourth floor, lit by a candle-end—all in disorder, littered with children's garments, the room practically a passage. Katerina Ivanovna was pacing up and down, pressing her hands to her chest, her consumptive face flushed, her breathing in broken gasps. The youngest child slept curled on the floor; a boy shook and cried in the corner; the eldest girl, her arm thin as a stick around her brother's neck, watched her mother with alarm. Marmeladov dropped to his knees in the doorway.

"He has come back! The criminal! The monster!" Katerina Ivanovna screamed. She searched him—not a farthing. "He's drunk it all! And they are hungry, hungry!" She seized him by the hair and dragged him in. Marmeladov, crawling on his knees, called out that this was "a positive con-so-la-tion." The children screamed. Neighbours crowded in to watch, laughing. Amalia Lippevechsel threatened eviction.

As he left, Raskolnikov slipped the coppers from his pocket onto the windowsill. On the stairs he regretted it—"they have Sonia and I want it myself"—but could not take it back. Walking home, he laughed malignantly: "Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!" Then, suddenly: "What if man is not really a scoundrel... then all the rest is prejudice, simply artificial terrors and there are no barriers and it's all as it should be."

Chapter III

He woke late, bilious and ill-tempered, in his tiny cupboard of a room—six paces long, dusty yellow paper peeling from the walls, so low-pitched he felt he would knock his head against the ceiling. A clumsy sofa served as his bed; he slept on it without undressing, wrapped in his old student's overcoat. He had withdrawn from everyone like a tortoise in its shell. His landlady had stopped sending meals a fortnight ago; Nastasya, the cook, had given up cleaning his room.

Nastasya brought him her own tea and told him his landlady meant to complain to the police about his unpaid rent. "And why is it you do nothing now?" she asked. "I am thinking," he answered seriously. She laughed till she shook. "And have you made much money by your thinking?"

"Yes, I want a fortune," he answered firmly. A letter arrived from his mother—the first in months. He kissed the envelope, gazed at the small, sloping handwriting of the mother who had taught him to read, and opened it with trembling hands. It was a thick, heavy letter, two large sheets covered with very small handwriting.

"My dear Rodya," his mother wrote, "it's two months since I last had a talk with you by letter." She told him everything they had concealed. Dounia had taken a position as governess with the Svidrigaïlovs, accepting a hundred roubles in advance—chiefly to send sixty of it to Rodya, though they had told him it came from Dounia's savings. "Now I tell you all about it, because, thank God, things have suddenly changed for the better, and that you may know how Dounia loves you and what a heart she has."

Mr. Svidrigaïlov had treated Dounia rudely at first, but this concealed a passion he had nursed from the beginning. Perhaps he was ashamed of his own hopes, considering his years and his being the father of a family, and that made him angry with Dounia. At last he lost all control and made her an open, shameful proposal, promising all sorts of inducements. Dounia could not leave—she owed the money, and a scandal would have destroyed her. She endured it for six weeks with the fortitude that was her nature, without even writing to her mother for fear of upsetting her.

It ended when Marfa Petrovna overheard her husband imploring Dounia in the garden. Blaming Dounia entirely, she struck her, screamed at her for a whole hour, and had her packed off in a peasant's cart in the rain, her belongings flung in pell-mell. For a month the town was full of gossip; Dounia and her mother dared not go to church. Acquaintances avoided them; shopmen planned to smear their gates with pitch.

Then Svidrigaïlov repented and showed his wife a letter Dounia had written refusing his advances and reproaching him for his baseness. The servants' evidence confirmed everything. Marfa Petrovna, completely convinced, went straight to the Cathedral, prayed with tears, then came to them weeping and penitent. She spent days driving about the town, reading Dounia's letter aloud in every house, asserting her innocence, until the whole town's opinion reversed and the disgrace fell entirely upon her husband.

Now came the great news: Dounia had a suitor, Pyotr Petrovitch Luzhin—a counsellor of forty-five, well-to-do, with two government posts, distantly related to Marfa Petrovna who had been active in bringing the match about. He was respectable and presentable, though somewhat morose and conceited. At his second visit, after receiving Dounia's consent, he declared he had always meant to marry a girl who had experienced poverty, "because a man ought not to be indebted to his wife, but it is better for a wife to look upon her husband as her benefactor." Their mother found this somewhat rude and said so to Dounia, who was vexed and answered that "words are not deeds." Dounia did not sleep all night before deciding; she walked up and down the room, then knelt before the ikon and prayed long and fervently, and in the morning said she had decided.

Their mother's letter overflowed with plans: Luzhin was opening a legal bureau in Petersburg, and Dounia dreamed of Rodya becoming his secretary, then associate, then partner. They had not dared mention this to Luzhin directly. Of course there was no great love on either side, but Dounia was clever and had the heart of an angel, and would make it her duty to make her husband happy. Their mother planned to live apart after the wedding—"husbands don't quite get on with their mothers-in-law"—and would settle near Rodya if possible. They would all be together soon, perhaps in a week. She might send twenty-five or thirty roubles, though she was uneasy about travelling expenses; Luzhin had taken upon himself only the conveyance of their bags, and they would travel third class.

"Love Dounia your sister, Rodya; she loves you beyond everything, more than herself. She is an angel and you, Rodya, you are everything to us—our one hope, our one consolation. Do you still say your prayers, Rodya, and believe in the mercy of our Creator?"

Almost from the first, Raskolnikov's face was wet with tears; but when he finished, his face was pale and distorted and a bitter, wrathful smile was on his lips. He pondered a long time, his heart beating violently, his brain in turmoil. At last, cramped and stifled in his little yellow room, he seized his hat and went out, walking towards Vassilyevsky Ostrov, muttering aloud to himself. Passers-by took him for a drunk.

Chapter IV

His mother's letter had been a torture, but on the chief fact he had not hesitated for one moment: "Never such a marriage while I am alive and Mr. Luzhin be damned!"

He saw through everything with savage clarity. Luzhin wanted a wife raised from destitution who would look upon him as her benefactor—he had said as much at his second visit. And Dounia was sacrificing herself. There was no love on either side. "That seems beats everything! And that very Dounia for that very 'seems' is marrying him!"

He dissected the arrangement mercilessly. Luzhin's stinginess was already showing: the bride and her mother were to travel in a peasant's cart and third class, while he sent their luggage cheaply through acquaintances. Their mother would have three roubles left when she reached Petersburg, and was already guessing she could not live with them after the marriage. "She knits woollen shawls and embroiders cuffs, ruining her old eyes. And all her shawls don't add more than twenty roubles a year to her hundred and twenty."

"For one she loves, for one she adores, she will sell herself! That's what it all amounts to; for her brother, for her mother, she will sell everything!" He saw that he, Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov, was the central figure in the business. For such a son, who would not sacrifice such a daughter? "Do you understand that the Luzhin smartness is just the same thing as Sonia's and may be worse, viler, baser, because in your case, Dounia, it's a bargain for luxuries, after all, but with Sonia it's simply a question of starvation."

"It shall not be, so long as I am alive, it shall not!" he cried. But then he paused: "What are you going to do to prevent it? What can you promise them? Your whole life, your whole future, you will devote to them when you have finished your studies and obtained a post? But now? Now something must be done, now, do you understand that? And what are you doing now? You are living upon them."

So he tortured himself, and yet these questions were not new—they were old familiar aches that had long been gripping and rending his heart. Now his mother's letter had burst on him like a thunderclap. He must do something, do it at once, and do it quickly. "Or throw up life altogether!" he cried in a frenzy.

"Do you understand what it means when you have absolutely nowhere to turn?" Marmeladov's question came suddenly into his mind. And another thought slipped back—the thought he had had yesterday. But now it appeared not a dream at all; it had taken a new, menacing shape. He felt a hammering in his head, and there was a darkness before his eyes. He searched for a seat on the K–– Boulevard, his head hammering, darkness before his eyes. On the way he noticed a girl walking ahead of him—young, bareheaded in the heat, her dress of light silky material put on strangely awry, torn open at the waist, a kerchief flung slanting about her bare throat. She was staggering from side to side. She collapsed on a bench in extreme exhaustion: completely drunk, perhaps fifteen years old, a pretty fair-haired face flushed and swollen. She seemed hardly to know she was in the street, crossing one leg over the other indecorously.

On the far side of the boulevard, about fifteen paces away, a plump, fashionably dressed gentleman of about thirty stood watching, waiting impatiently for Raskolnikov to leave. His intentions were unmistakable—red lips, moustaches, a high colour. Raskolnikov felt furious. "Hey! You Svidrigaïlov! What do you want here?" he shouted, clenching his fists and spluttering with rage. The gentleman raised his cane; Raskolnikov rushed at him with his fists. A police constable stepped between them.

Raskolnikov explained everything—the girl had been deceived, given drink, dressed by a man's unpractised hands and put out into the street. The dandy was following her. He gave the policeman twenty copecks for a cab. The constable bent over the girl with genuine compassion: "Ah, what a pity! She is quite a child! She has been deceived, you can see that at once." But the girl only waved her hand: "Go away! They won't let me alone." The policeman shook his head: "Ah, the shameful things that are done in the world nowadays! And as likely as not she belongs to gentlefolk too, poor ones maybe."

Raskolnikov persisted: "The chief thing is to keep her out of this scoundrel's hands!" The dandy walked slowly another ten paces away and halted again. The girl got up suddenly, walked away staggering, and the dandy followed along another avenue. "Don't be anxious, I won't let him have her," the policeman said resolutely, and set off after them.

Then something stung Raskolnikov; a complete revulsion of feeling came over him. "Hey, here!" he shouted after the policeman. "Let them be! What is it to do with you? Let her go! Let him amuse himself!" The policeman stared, bewildered, and walked off after the dandy and the girl, taking Raskolnikov for a madman.

Left alone, he felt wretched. "And why did I want to interfere? Have I any right to help? Let them devour each other alive—what is it to me? How did I dare to give him twenty copecks? Were they mine?" He sat on the deserted seat, his thoughts straying aimlessly. He foresaw the girl's future with terrible clarity: her mother would find out, beat her, perhaps turn her out; then the Darya Frantsovnas would get wind of it, and the girl would be slipping out on the sly. "Then there will be the hospital directly... and then again the hospital... drink... the taverns... and more hospital, in two or three years—a wreck, and her life over at eighteen or nineteen." A certain percentage, they told him, must every year go that way. "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. But what if Dounia were one of the percentage! Of another one if not that one?"

He remembered he had been going to see Razumihin—his one friend at the university. Raskolnikov had hardly any friends; he kept aloof from everyone, worked with great intensity, and was respected but not liked. There was a sort of haughty pride about him, as though he were keeping something to himself. With Razumihin alone he was more unreserved. Razumihin was an exceptionally good-humoured, candid youth, good-natured to the point of simplicity, though both depth and dignity lay concealed under that simplicity. Tall, thin, black-haired, always badly shaved, of great physical strength—no failure could crush him. He could bear the extremes of cold and hunger, had spent one winter without lighting his stove, declaring he slept more soundly in the cold. He knew of no end of resources by which to earn money. He too had been obliged to give up the university, but was working to return. Raskolnikov had not seen him for four months and had even crossed the street to avoid him two months ago.

Chapter V

"What help can Razumihin be to me now?" Raskolnikov thought. "Suppose he gets me lessons, suppose he shares his last farthing with me—what shall I do with a few coppers? That's not what I want now. It's really absurd for me to go to Razumihin."

The question why he was going to Razumihin agitated him more than he was aware; he kept seeking some sinister significance in this apparently ordinary action. He pondered, and suddenly a fantastic thought came into his head, calmly, as though he had reached a final determination: "I shall go to Razumihin's of course, but... not now. I shall go to him on the next day after It, when It will be over and everything will begin afresh."

"After It!" he shouted, jumping up from the seat. "But is It really going to happen? Is it possible it really will happen?" He went off almost at a run, but the thought of going home filled him with intense loathing—in that hole, in that awful little cupboard, all this had been growing up in him for a month. He walked on at random, his nervous shudder passing into a fever that made him shiver despite the heat. He tried to stare at objects to distract himself but kept dropping into brooding. He walked right across Vassilyevsky Ostrov, crossed the bridge, turned towards the islands. The greenness and freshness were at first restful after the dust and stench of the town, but soon passed into morbid irritability. He counted his money—thirty copecks. He went into a tavern, drank a glass of vodka, ate a pie. His legs grew heavy, a great drowsiness came upon him. Reaching Petrovsky Ostrov, he turned off the road into the bushes, sank down upon the grass, and instantly fell asleep. He had a fearful dream. He was a child of seven, walking with his father past a tavern on the way to the graveyard where his grandmother and baby brother lay buried. Near the tavern stood a big cart—but in its shafts, instead of a heavy cart-horse, was a thin little sorrel mare, one of those peasants' nags he had often seen beaten cruelly under impossible loads.

"Get in, get in! I'll take you all!" shouted Mikolka, a thick-necked peasant with a fleshy face red as a carrot. The crowd laughed—that wretched nag, drag a cartload at a gallop? Six men clambered in, then more. Three whips showered blows upon the mare like hail; she could scarcely move forward. Mikolka flew into a fury. "I'll beat her to death!"

"Father, father, what are they doing? They are beating the poor horse!" the boy cried, tearing himself from his father's hand and running to the mare. She was gasping, standing still, then tugging again and almost falling. "What are you about, are you a Christian, you devil?" shouted an old man. "Don't meddle! It's my property!" Mikolka screamed.

He threw down the whip and picked up a long thick shaft. "He'll crush her!" the crowd shouted. The shaft fell with a heavy thud, then again, then again. The mare sank back on her haunches but lurched forward, tugging with all her force. Mikolka seized an iron crowbar and dealt a stunning blow; she fell like a log. Several young men ran to the dying mare with whips and sticks. She stretched out her head, drew a long breath, and died.

The boy, beside himself, made his way screaming through the crowd, put his arms round the bleeding dead head and kissed it—kissed the eyes and kissed the lips. Then he flew at Mikolka with his little fists. His father snatched him up. "Father! Why did they kill the poor horse!" he sobbed, his voice breaking into shrieks.

He woke gasping, soaked with perspiration. "Thank God, that was only a dream." But darkness and confusion were in his soul. "Good God! Can it be that I shall really take an axe, that I shall strike her on the head, split her skull open... tread in the sticky warm blood? Good God, can it be?"

He was shaking like a leaf. "No, I couldn't do it, I couldn't do it! I knew that I could never bring myself to it." He rose and went towards the bridge, pale, exhausted, but suddenly breathing more easily. He felt he had cast off that fearful burden. "Lord, show me my path—I renounce that accursed dream of mine." Crossing the bridge, he gazed calmly at the Neva, at the glowing red sun. Freedom! He was free from that spell, that obsession!

But later he could never explain why, instead of going home by the shortest way, he returned through the Hay Market—as though it had been lying in wait for him on purpose. At the corner of an alley he overheard a huckster and his wife talking to Lizaveta, the old pawnbroker's younger half-sister—tall, clumsy, timid, submissive, a complete slave whom her sister beat and worked day and night.

"Come round tomorrow about seven," the huckster was saying. "And don't say a word to Alyona Ivanovna."

"All right, I'll come," said Lizaveta, pondering, and slowly moved away.

Raskolnikov passed softly, trying not to miss a word. A thrill of horror ran down his spine. He had learnt, suddenly and unexpectedly, that the next day at seven o'clock Lizaveta would be away from home—and the old woman would be left entirely alone.

He went in like a man condemned to death. 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.

Chapter VI

Raskolnikov had become superstitious of late. He was always disposed to see something strange and mysterious in coincidences. In the previous winter a fellow student had given him the pawnbroker's address. Six weeks ago he had finally gone to her with his sister's gold ring, felt an insurmountable repulsion at the first glance, got two roubles, and stopped in a miserable tavern on his way home. A strange idea was pecking at his brain like a chicken in the egg. At the next table, a student he had never seen was telling an officer about Alyona Ivanovna—as though speaking expressly for him.

"She is first-rate. You can always get money from her. She is as rich as a Jew... But she is an awful old harpy." The student described how spiteful she was, how she kept her sister Lizaveta in complete bondage, beat her, and had left everything in her will to a monastery—not a farthing to Lizaveta. The student in the tavern had gone on to argue the case with his officer friend: "On one side we have a stupid, senseless, worthless, spiteful old woman, not simply useless but doing actual mischief, who will die in a day or two in any case. On the other side, fresh young lives thrown away for want of help, by thousands! Kill her, take her money and devote oneself to the service of humanity. One death, and a hundred lives in exchange—it's simple arithmetic!"

"Of course she does not deserve to live," the officer agreed, "but there it is, it's nature."

"But tell me, would you kill the old woman yourself?"

"Of course not! I was only arguing the justice of it."

"But I think, if you would not do it yourself, there's no justice about it."

Raskolnikov was violently agitated. Why had he heard such ideas at the very moment his own brain was conceiving the very same? This trivial tavern talk had an immense influence on his later action, as though there had been in it something preordained.

On returning from the Hay Market he flung himself on the sofa and sat for an hour without stirring. Heavy, leaden sleep crushed him. Nastasya had difficulty rousing him the next morning. He lay all day, barely eating, haunted by strange daydreams—an oasis in Egypt, blue cold water running over clean sand. Suddenly a clock struck. He jumped up wide awake. It had struck six—and he had done nothing, prepared nothing!

An extraordinary, feverish haste seized him. The preparations were few. He sewed a noose into his overcoat—an ingenious device to carry the axe hidden under his arm. He drew out the fake pledge he had prepared: a smoothly planed piece of wood wrapped carefully in white paper, tied so it would be difficult to untie, weighted with an iron strip so the old woman would not guess it was wood. All this had been stored under his sofa.

He had still the most important thing to do—steal the axe from the kitchen. He had decided long ago it must be done with an axe. He had also concluded that almost all criminals are subject to a failure of will and reasoning power at the very instant when prudence is most essential—an eclipse of reason that attacks like a disease. In his own case, he had decided, there could be no such morbid reaction, for the simple reason that his design was "not a crime."

But when he reached the kitchen, Nastasya was there, hanging linen on a line. He had not the axe! He was overwhelmed, crushed, humiliated. Standing in the gateway, raging at himself, he suddenly noticed something shining under a bench in the porter's room—an axe, lying between two chunks of wood. The porter was not at home. He dashed in, pulled it out, made it fast in the noose, and walked out. No one had noticed him. "When reason fails, the devil helps!" he thought with a strange grin.

He walked quietly, sedately, to avoid suspicion, his mind occupied by irrelevant matters—the building of fountains, the extension of the summer garden. "So probably men led to execution clutch mentally at every object that meets them on the way," flashed through his mind. A hay waggon screened him as he slipped through the gateway. He ascended the stairs softly, listening. Painters were at work on the first floor but did not glance at him. On the fourth floor—dead silence. He listened at the old woman's door, his heart throbbing violently. He rang the bell. No answer. He rang again. He heard the cautious touch of a hand on the lock, the rustle of a skirt. She was listening on the other side. He rang a third time, quietly, soberly. An instant later the latch unfastened.

Chapter VII

The door opened a tiny crack; two sharp suspicious eyes stared out. Raskolnikov seized the door and drew it towards him. "Good evening, Alyona Ivanovna," he began, but his voice broke and shook. "I have brought something... but we'd better come in... to the light."

He passed into the room uninvited. He held out the fake pledge. The old woman stared at him intently, maliciously, mistrustfully—he fancied something like a sneer in her eyes, as though she had already guessed everything. "Why do you look at me as though you did not know me?" he said with sudden malice. "Take it if you like, if not I'll go elsewhere."

She took the pledge. "The silver cigarette case; I spoke of it last time," he said. She held out her hand. "But how pale you are, to be sure... and your hands are trembling too? Have you been bathing, or what?" "Fever," he answered abruptly. His answer sounded like the truth; she took the pledge and turned to the window to untie it, her back to him for some seconds. He unbuttoned his coat and freed the axe from the noose, holding it in his right hand under the coat. His hands were fearfully weak, growing more numb every moment. He was afraid he would let the axe slip. "But what has he tied it up like this for?" the old woman cried with vexation and moved towards him. He had not a minute more to lose. He pulled the axe quite out, swung it with both arms, scarcely conscious of himself, and almost without effort, almost mechanically, brought the blunt side down on her head.

She cried out, but very faintly, and sank all of a heap on the floor. He dealt her another and another blow on the same spot. The blood gushed as from an overturned glass; the body fell back. She was dead—her eyes starting from their sockets, her face drawn and contorted.

He pulled the keys from her right-hand pocket, trying to avoid the streaming blood, and ran into the bedroom. The big notched key fitted a box under the bed—red leather, studded with steel nails. Under a white sheet lay a coat of red brocade; he wiped his blood-stained hands on it. "It's red, and on red blood will be less noticeable." Among the clothes he found gold articles—bracelets, chains, ear-rings, pins—all pledges, unredeemed. He began filling his pockets without examining them.

Then he heard a faint cry from the other room. He seized the axe and ran out. In the middle of the room stood Lizaveta with a big bundle in her arms, gazing in stupefaction at her murdered sister, white as a sheet. Seeing him, she began quivering all over like a leaf. She lifted her hand, opened her mouth, but did not scream. She began slowly backing away, staring at him, as though she could not get breath to scream. He rushed at her with the axe; her mouth twitched piteously, as one sees babies' mouths when they are on the point of screaming. This hapless Lizaveta was so simple and so thoroughly crushed that she did not even raise a hand to guard her face. She only put up her empty left hand, slowly holding it out before her as though motioning him away. The axe fell with the sharp edge just on the skull and split at one blow all the top of the head. She fell heavily at once.

Fear gained more and more mastery over him, especially after this second, unexpected murder. The feeling of loathing surged up and grew stronger every minute. He washed his hands and the axe in a bucket in the kitchen, wiped the blade, examined his clothes. Then he rushed to the entry and discovered with horror that the outer door had been standing open the whole time—the old woman had not shut it after him, and Lizaveta had come in through it.

He fastened the latch, then unfastened it again. He listened on the staircase. Footsteps—heavy, even, unhurried—were mounting towards the fourth floor. He slipped back into the flat and fixed the hook. The unknown visitor rang the bell loudly. "What's up? Are they asleep or murdered?" he bawled. "Hey, Alyona Ivanovna, old witch!"

A second visitor arrived—a young man. They noticed the door was fastened with the hook from inside, not locked with a key. "That proves one of them is at home!" The young man ran for the porter; Koch remained, then grew impatient and went down too.

Raskolnikov unfastened the hook and went out. On the stairs he heard men coming up. Filled with despair, he went straight to meet them—and at the last instant whisked into the empty flat on the second floor where the painters had been working. They passed him and went up to the fourth floor. He slipped out, down the stairs, through the gateway, and into the street.

He turned the corner more dead than alive, lost himself in the crowd like a grain of sand. He went a long way round to get home from a different direction. On the staircase he remembered the axe—and by luck the porter's room was open and empty. He put the axe back under the bench, covered it with wood as before. In his room he flung himself on the sofa and sank into blank forgetfulness.

Part II

Chapter I

He lay a long while. Past two o'clock he leaped up and in one flash recollected everything. A dreadful chill came over him; his teeth chattered, his limbs shook. He rushed to examine his clothes—no traces, except thick drops of congealed blood on the frayed edge of his trousers, which he cut off with a clasp-knife.

Then he remembered: the purse and the stolen things were still in his pockets! He stuffed them all into a hole under the wallpaper in the corner—then shuddered with horror. The hole bulged. He had not prepared a hiding-place. "Is that the way to hide things? My reason's deserting me!"

He cut the noose from his overcoat armhole and tore it to pieces. A violent knocking woke him—Nastasya and the porter. The porter handed him a grey folded paper: a summons to the police office.

"To the police? What for?" His heart beat in positive pain. He dressed in a daze. He put on the blood-stained sock, pulled it off in loathing and horror, then put it on again–he had no other socks. "That's all conventional, that's all relative, merely a way of looking at it," he thought in a flash, but only on the top surface of his mind, while he was shuddering all over. He noticed the shreds from his trousers lying in the middle of the floor, and stuffed them under his coat. On the stairs he remembered the things were still in the hole in the wall. "And very likely, it's on purpose to search when I'm out." But despair drove him on. At the police station—a stifling, newly painted office on the fourth floor, crowded with porters and persons of all sorts—Raskolnikov was directed through several small rooms to the head clerk. "I'll go in, fall on my knees, and confess everything," he thought as he climbed the stairs. But the head clerk, a fashionably dressed young man of about twenty-two with pomaded hair and rings on his fingers, glanced at his notice and said "Wait a minute."

He breathed more freely. "It can't be that!" By degrees he regained confidence, urging himself to be calm. "Some foolishness, some trifling carelessness, and I may betray myself!"

The assistant superintendent, Ilya Petrovitch—an explosive man with a reddish moustache standing out horizontally on each side of his face—walked in jauntily and tossed his cockaded cap on the table. He looked at Raskolnikov's rags with indignation. "What do you want?" he shouted, astonished that such a ragged fellow was not annihilated by the majesty of his glance.

"I was summoned... by a notice," Raskolnikov faltered.

"For the recovery of money due, from the student," the head clerk interfered, flinging him a document. "Read that!"

"Money? What money?" thought Raskolnikov. "But then... it's certainly not that." He trembled with joy. Sudden, intense, indescribable relief. A load was lifted from his back. It was an I.O.U. for a hundred and fifteen roubles owed to his landlady, the widow Zarnitsyn.

Ilya Petrovitch shouted at him for arriving late. Raskolnikov, to his own surprise, grew suddenly angry and found a certain pleasure in it. "I'm not shouting, I'm speaking very quietly, it's you who are shouting at me. I'm a student, and allow no one to shout at me." And then: "You're in a government office too, and you're smoking a cigarette as well as shouting, so you are showing disrespect to all of us." He felt an indescribable satisfaction at having said this.

While Ilya Petrovitch berated a German madam named Luise Ivanovna about scandals in her "honourable house"—a drunken author had played the piano with one foot, hit everyone with a bottle, and squealed like a pig from the window over the canal—Raskolnikov listened with positive amusement, longing to laugh. The superintendent, Nikodim Fomitch, arrived—a good-looking officer with fresh face and splendid fair whiskers—and calmed things down. "Poverty is not a vice, my friend," he said affably to Raskolnikov. "He is a capital fellow, I assure you, but explosive!"

Raskolnikov explained his situation—a poor student, sick, shattered by poverty, unable to pay. He had once promised to marry the landlady's daughter, who had since died of typhus; the landlady had given him credit on that basis and now was calling in the I.O.U. "All these affecting details are no business of ours," Ilya Petrovitch interrupted. Raskolnikov signed the declaration.

But as he signed, something entirely new happened to him. A gloomy sensation of agonising, everlasting solitude took conscious form in his soul. If the whole room had been filled with those nearest and dearest to him, he would not have found one human word for them, so empty was his heart. He had never experienced such a strange and awful sensation—more a direct sensation than an idea, the most agonising he had known in his life.

Then, pressing his head in his hands, a strange impulse seized him: to get up, go to Nikodim Fomitch, and confess everything—show him the things in the hole in the corner. He rose from his seat—and froze. The officers were discussing the murders.

"The murderer must have been there and bolted himself in," Nikodim Fomitch was saying. "Koch keeps crossing himself: 'If I had been there, he would have jumped out and killed me with his axe.' He is going to have a thanksgiving service—ha, ha!" They debated how the murderer had slipped past. "The house is a regular Noah's Ark," said the head clerk.

Raskolnikov picked up his hat and walked towards the door, but did not reach it. He fainted. When he came to, they questioned him—had he been ill? Since yesterday. Did he go out? Yes, about seven, along the street. "Short and clear." Raskolnikov answered sharply, white as a handkerchief, without dropping his black feverish eyes. They let him go.

"A search—there will be a search at once," he repeated, hurrying home. "The brutes! They suspect." His former terror mastered him completely.

Chapter II

His room was untouched. He rushed to the corner, pulled the stolen things from the hole—eight articles in all: two little boxes with ear-rings, four small leather cases, a chain wrapped in newspaper, something that looked like a decoration, and the purse. He stuffed them all in his pockets and went out, walking quickly and resolutely. He had to hide everything before they came for him.

He had long decided to fling them into the canal, but it turned out to be very difficult. He wandered along the Ekaterininsky Canal for half an hour, looking for a place, but everywhere there were people—women washing clothes on rafts, boats moored at the steps. Everyone seemed to stare at him. He had become extremely absent and forgetful.

At last, in a passage between two blank walls, he found a deserted courtyard. Near the gate was a big unhewn stone, weighing perhaps sixty pounds. He bent down, seized it, turned it over with all his strength, emptied his pockets into the hollow beneath—the purse on top—and turned the stone back. He scraped earth about it and pressed it with his foot. Nothing could be noticed.

An intense, almost unbearable joy overwhelmed him. He went out and turned into the square. "I have buried my tracks! And who can think of looking under that stone? It has been lying there most likely ever since the house was built." He laughed—a thin, nervous, noiseless laugh—and went on laughing all the time he was crossing the square.

But then he stopped suddenly, perplexed by a new question: "If it all has really been done deliberately and not idiotically, if I really had a certain and definite object, how is it I did not even glance into the purse and don't know what I had there, for which I have undergone these agonies?" Yes, he had known it all before. "It is because I am very ill," he decided grimly.

He walked on, filled with an immeasurable, almost physical repulsion for everything surrounding him—an obstinate, malignant hatred. All who met him were loathsome to him; he loathed their faces, their movements, their gestures. If anyone had addressed him, he felt he might have spat at him or bitten him.

He stopped on the bank of the Little Neva, near the bridge to Vassilyevsky Ostrov. "Why, he lives here, in that house"—Razumihin. He had come there without meaning to. "Have I come on purpose or have I simply walked here by chance?"

He went up to Razumihin's garret on the fifth floor. It was four months since they had seen each other. Razumihin was sitting in a ragged dressing-gown, unshaven and unwashed. "Is it you?" he cried, looking his comrade up and down. "As hard up as all that! Why, brother, you've cut me out!" He saw at once that his visitor was ill and began feeling his pulse.

"Never mind," said Raskolnikov, pulling away his hand. "I have come for this: I have no lessons... I wanted... but I don't really want lessons."

"But I say! You are delirious, you know!"

Raskolnikov got up from the sofa. As soon as he crossed Razumihin's threshold, he knew that what he was least disposed for was to be face to face with anyone. His spleen rose within him. "Good-bye," he said abruptly, and walked to the door.

"Then why the devil have you come? Are you mad, or what?"

"Well, then, I came to you because I know no one but you who could help... to begin... because you are kinder than anyone—cleverer, I mean, and can judge... and now I see that I want nothing. Do you hear? Nothing at all... no one's services... no one's sympathy. I am by myself... alone. Come, that's enough. Leave me alone."

Razumihin tried to detain him, offered him translation work from a bookseller named Heruvimov—six roubles a signature for translating German texts on the woman question. But Raskolnikov walked out without answering. On the Nikolaevsky Bridge, a coachman lashed Raskolnikov's back with his whip for walking in the middle of the traffic. An elderly woman, taking him for a beggar, pressed twenty copecks into his hand. He stood on the bridge gazing at the Neva, at the cathedral cupola glittering in the sunlight—a spot he had loved as a student, where a vague and mysterious emotion used to stir in him. Now it left him strangely cold; this gorgeous picture was blank and lifeless. Deep down, all his old past—his old thoughts, his old problems—seemed to be vanishing. He opened his hand, stared at the coin, and flung it into the water. He had cut himself off from everyone and everything.

That evening, lying on his sofa, he heard a fearful scream—his landlady being beaten on the stairs. He recognised the voice of Ilya Petrovitch. Terror gripped his heart. But when Nastasya brought him soup, she scrutinised him in silence. "Nobody has been beating the landlady," she said firmly. "That's the blood crying in your ears. When there's no outlet for it and it gets clotted, you begin fancying things." He swallowed one sip of cold water and fell into forgetfulness.

Chapter III

He was not completely unconscious all the time he was ill; he was in a feverish state, sometimes delirious, sometimes half conscious. He remembered a great deal afterwards. Sometimes it seemed as though there were a number of people round him; they wanted to take him away somewhere, there was a great deal of squabbling and discussing about him. Then he would be alone in the room; they had all gone away afraid of him, and only now and then opened the door a crack to look at him; they threatened him, plotted something together, laughed, and mocked at him. He remembered Nastasya bringing him water, holding his head, wiping his face with a wet cloth. He remembered Nastasya often at his bedside; he distinguished another person, too, whom he seemed to know very well, though he could not remember who he was, and this fretted him, even made him cry. Sometimes he fancied he had been lying there a month; at other times it all seemed part of the same day. But of that—of that he had no recollection, and yet every minute he felt that he had forgotten something he ought to remember. He worried and tormented himself trying to remember, moaned, flew into a rage, or sank into awful, intolerable terror. Then he struggled to get up, would have run away, but someone always prevented him by force, and he sank back into impotence and forgetfulness.

At last he returned to complete consciousness. It happened at ten o'clock in the morning. On fine days the sun shone into the room at that hour, throwing a streak of light on the right wall. Nastasya was standing beside him with another person, a complete stranger—a young man with a beard, wearing a short-waisted coat, who looked like a messenger. The landlady was peeping in at the half-opened door. And then, stooping a little, as he was so tall, Razumihin came in.

"What a cabin it is!" he cried. "I am always knocking my head. You call this a lodging! So you are conscious, brother? For the last four days you have scarcely eaten or drunk anything. We had to give you tea in spoonfuls. I brought Zossimov to see you twice. He examined you carefully and said at once it was nothing serious—something seemed to have gone to your head. Some nervous nonsense, the result of bad feeding, he says you have not had enough beer and radish, but it's nothing much, it will pass and you will be all right."

The messenger brought thirty-five roubles from Raskolnikov's mother, sent through the merchant Vahrushin. "If you are in an intelligible condition, I've thirty-five roubles to remit to you," the man began. Raskolnikov at first refused—"I don't want the money"—but Razumihin insisted. "Don't want the money! Come, brother, that's nonsense, I bear witness." And he made ready to hold Raskolnikov's hand in earnest. "Stop, I'll do it alone," said Raskolnikov, taking the pen and signing his name.

Razumihin sat down on the sofa beside him, as clumsily as a bear, put his left arm round Raskolnikov's head, and with his right hand gave him a spoonful of soup, blowing on it that it might not burn him. Razumihin fed him soup spoonful by spoonful, blowing on each one earnestly. He told him everything with his usual exuberance. He told him everything: how he had tracked down Raskolnikov's address through the bureau, made friends with Nikodim Fomitch and the head clerk Zametov, charmed the landlady Pashenka, and settled the I.O.U. business. The businessman Tchebarov had bought the note and filed a formal demand; Razumihin paid him off with ten roubles and got the I.O.U. back. "Here, take it, you see I have torn it."

Raskolnikov turned to the wall without a word.

"Was it you I did not recognise when I was delirious? What did I rave about?"

"You said a lot about a bulldog, and about ear-rings and chains, and about Krestovsky Island, and some porter, and Nikodim Fomitch. And another thing of special interest was your own sock. You whined, 'Give me my sock.' Zametov hunted all about your room for your socks, and with his own scented, ring-bedecked fingers he gave you the rag."

Raskolnikov lay pretending to be weaker than he was, listening with animal cunning. When Razumihin left, he leapt out of bed. "Do they know of it yet or not?" He rushed to the corner—the hole was empty, as he had left it. The stove—the frayed trouser-rags were still there. The sock under the quilt, covered with grime. No one had looked. "But what did Zametov come for?" He thought of escaping to America, snatched up the beer bottle, gulped it down, and sank back into drowsiness.

He woke to find Razumihin back with a parcel of new clothes: a cap for eighty copecks, summer trousers and waistcoat for two roubles twenty-five, boots for a rouble and a half—bought to match his old broken one—and three hempen shirts. "Nine roubles fifty-five copecks altogether. And so, Rodya, you are set up with a complete new rig-out!" He changed Raskolnikov's linen despite his resistance.

Chapter IV

Zossimov, the doctor, came in—a tall, fat, twenty-seven-year-old with spectacles and a massive gold watch-chain, studiously free and easy, making efforts to conceal his self-importance that was apparent at every instant. He pronounced Raskolnikov's pulse first-rate and said he could eat anything–soup, tea, but no mushrooms or cucumbers, and better not meat. "No more medicine or anything. I'll look at him again to-morrow." "To-morrow evening I shall take him for a walk," said Razumihin. "We are going to the Yusupov garden and then to the Palais de Cristal." "I would not disturb him to-morrow at all, but I don't know... a little, maybe... but we'll see."

Razumihin invited them both to his housewarming party that evening–Porfiry Petrovitch, the head of the Investigation Department, would be there too, a distant relation of Razumihin's. "Is he a relation of yours, too?" Zossimov asked. "A very distant one." "Well, there will be some students, a teacher, a government clerk, a musician, an officer and Zametov." "Do tell me, please, what you can have in common with this Zametov?" "Oh, you particular gentleman! If a man is a nice fellow, that's the only principle I go upon. Zametov is a delightful person." "Though he does take bribes." "Well, he does! And what of it?"

Razumihin mentioned that a house-painter named Nikolay had been arrested for the murders. "Lizaveta was murdered, too," Nastasya blurted out suddenly, addressing Raskolnikov. He murmured "Lizaveta" almost inaudibly and turned to the wall, where in the dirty yellow paper he picked out one clumsy white flower and began examining how many petals there were in it. He felt his arms and legs as lifeless as though they had been cut off.

Razumihin told the whole story with passionate indignation. A dram-shop keeper named Dushkin had brought gold ear-rings to the police—Nikolay, a journeyman painter who had been working in the same building, had pawned them for a rouble the day after the murder. Dushkin's story was long and detailed: Nikolay had come in, not sober, sat on the bench, turned white as chalk when told about the murders, and fled. Days later he was found in a tavern trying to hang himself with his sash. He confessed—but only to finding the ear-rings in the passage, behind the door, wrapped in paper. He and his partner Dmitri had been painting on the second floor; they had run out fighting and laughing like children, rolling across the entryway, at the very moment the murders were discovered.

"Don't you see?" Razumihin argued. "They'd just killed them, not five or ten minutes before, for the bodies were still warm, and at once, leaving the flat open, knowing that people would go there at once, flinging away their booty, they rolled about like children, laughing and attracting general attention? And there are a dozen witnesses to swear to that! It's a psychological impossibility!"

"Too clever," said Zossimov. "Everything fits too well... it's too melodramatic."

Razumihin explained his theory: the real murderer had been hiding in the flat when Koch knocked. He slipped out while the porter and others went upstairs, dropping the ear-rings from his pocket as he hid behind the door. "The jewel-case is conclusive proof that he did stand there."

"Behind the door? Lying behind the door?" Raskolnikov suddenly cried, staring with blank terror, and slowly sat up on the sofa. All were silent. "He must have waked from a dream," Razumihin said, looking inquiringly at Zossimov.

Chapter V

A stranger entered—a gentleman no longer young, of a stiff and portly appearance, who stopped short in the doorway, staring about him with offensive astonishment, as though asking himself what sort of place he had come to. He scrutinised Raskolnikov's low and narrow "cabin" with undisguised dismay, then the uncouth figure of Razumihin, who looked him boldly in the face without rising.

"Pyotr Petrovitch Luzhin. I believe I have reason to hope that my name is not wholly unknown to you?" he pronounced impressively.

But Raskolnikov gazed blankly at him, as though hearing the name for the first time, then sank languidly back on the pillow and stared at the ceiling. A look of dismay came into Luzhin's face.

Luzhin explained that he had come to Petersburg on business and wished to arrange lodgings for Dounia and her mother. He had found them rooms in Bakaleyev's house—"not quite what I could wish." He began expounding his progressive views with studied politeness—that science now teaches us to love ourselves above all, for everything in the world rests on self-interest, and that by acquiring wealth for oneself alone, one is thereby acquiring it for all. "It's a matter of common sense, if nothing else."

Razumihin, already half-drunk from his housewarming preparations, took an instant dislike to Luzhin and began needling him. When Luzhin mentioned that he shared the convictions of "our most rising generation," Raskolnikov suddenly spoke from his pillow:

"If you carry to its logical conclusion what you were preaching just now, it follows that people may be killed."

Luzhin was taken aback. The conversation grew heated. Raskolnikov told Luzhin bluntly that he had overheard him telling his mother he was glad his bride was poor, because "it is better for a wife to look upon her husband as her benefactor." Luzhin protested that the words had been distorted.

"I tell you what," cried Raskolnikov, raising himself on his pillow and fixing his piercing, glittering eyes upon Luzhin, "if ever again you dare to mention a single word about my mother, I shall send you flying downstairs!"

Luzhin turned pale and bit his lip. "Let me tell you, sir, at the first moment I saw you you were ill-disposed to me, but I remained here on purpose to find out more. I could forgive a great deal in a sick man and a connection, but you... never after this..."

He left, squeezing between the table and the chair, lifting his hat to the level of his shoulders to avoid crushing it as he stooped through the door. Even the curve of his spine was expressive of the horrible insult he had received.

"How could you—how could you!" Razumihin said, shaking his head. But Raskolnikov cried in a frenzy: "Let me alone—let me alone all of you! I am not afraid of anyone now! Get away from me! I want to be alone!"

Raskolnikov, left alone, looked with impatience and misery at Nastasya, but she still lingered. "Won't you have some tea now?" she asked. "Later! I am sleepy! Leave me." He turned abruptly to the wall; Nastasya went out.

Zossimov led Razumihin out. "If only he could get some favourable shock, that's what would do it!" the doctor said on the stairs. "He has got something on his mind. Some fixed idea weighing on him. Have you noticed he takes no interest in anything except one point—the murder?"

Chapter VI

Raskolnikov dressed in his new clothes, put the twenty-five roubles in his pocket, and slipped out while Nastasya's back was turned. It was nearly eight o'clock, the sun was setting. It was as stifling as before, but he eagerly drank in the stinking, dusty town air. His head felt rather dizzy; a sort of savage energy gleamed suddenly in his feverish eyes. He did not know where he was going; he had one thought only: "that all this must be ended to-day, once for all, immediately; that he would not return home without it, because he would not go on living like that." How, with what to make an end? He had not an idea about it. He drove away thought; thought tortured him.

From old habit he walked towards the Hay Market. A girl of fifteen was singing a sentimental song to a barrel organ; Raskolnikov gave her five copecks. He tried to start conversations with strangers, but his manner was so strange they crossed to the other side of the street. He wandered through streets full of dram shops and eating-houses, past women in cotton dresses and goatskin shoes, past a drunken soldier, past a man dead drunk lying across the road.

"Where is it I've read," he thought, "that someone condemned to death says, 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 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! Man is a vile creature! And vile is he who calls him vile for that."

He entered the Crystal Palace, a spacious and positively clean restaurant, and found Zametov, the young head clerk from the police office, sitting alone with a newspaper. Raskolnikov sat down across from him and began taunting him about the murder case with a strange, reckless excitement. He described in detail how the murderer must have hidden the stolen goods–looked out beforehand some stone weighing a hundredweight or more, lifted it, put the jewels and money in the hollow, rolled the stone back. "And for a year or two, three maybe, I would not touch it. And, well, they could search! There'd be no trace."

"You are a madman," said Zametov, and for some reason he too spoke in a whisper. Raskolnikov's eyes were glittering. He had turned fearfully pale and his upper lip was twitching and quivering. He bent down as close as possible to Zametov, and his lips began to move without uttering a word. The terrible word trembled on his lips, like the latch on that door; in another moment it will break out.

"And what if it was I who murdered the old woman and Lizaveta?" he said suddenly–and realised what he had done.

Zametov looked wildly at him and turned white as the tablecloth. "But is it possible?" he brought out faintly. Raskolnikov looked wrathfully at him. "Own up that you believed it, yes, you did?" "Not a bit of it, I believe it less than ever now," Zametov cried hastily. "I've caught my cock-sparrow! So you did believe it before!" Raskolnikov laughed–a thin, nervous laugh. He threw money on the table and went out, trembling all over from a sort of wild hysterical sensation, in which there was an element of insufferable rapture.

On the steps he stumbled into Razumihin, who was furious. "So here you are! You ran away from your bed!" Raskolnikov told him coldly: "I'm sick to death of you all and I want to be alone." He spoke with such venomous precision that Razumihin let his hand drop. "Well, go to hell then," he said gently. But he shouted after him: "Remember, Potchinkov's house on the third storey!"

Raskolnikov went to the bridge and stood watching a woman who had thrown herself into the canal. They pulled her out, half-drowned. "Filthy," he muttered. "The water's dirty." He turned towards the police station, meaning to confess, but on the way he passed the house where the murder had been committed. Some irresistible force drew him in. He climbed the stairs and entered the empty flat on the fourth floor. The workmen had gone; the wallpaper had been stripped. He rang the bell–that same faint tinkle of tin–and rang it again, listening to the sound, remembering everything with terrible clarity. He rang a third time, savouring the hideous, agonisingly pleasant sensation. Two workmen appeared and asked what he wanted. "I want to hire the flat," he said. They led him out, suspicious. "He didn't even tell us his name," one said to the other.

At the gate he saw a crowd gathered around a man who had been run over by a carriage.

Chapter VII

It was Marmeladov–crushed under the wheels of an elegant carriage, covered in blood, his face mutilated and disfigured. The coachman was wailing: "What a misfortune! I was going quietly, not in a hurry. A drunken man can't walk straight–he fell straight under their feet!"

Raskolnikov pushed through the crowd and recognised him at once. "I know him! I know him!" he cried. "It's a government clerk, Marmeladov. He lives close by in Kozel's house. Make haste for a doctor! I will pay!" He pulled money from his pocket and showed it to the policeman. He was in violent agitation, as earnestly as if it had been his own father.

They carried the unconscious man up the dark staircase to Katerina Ivanovna's room. She had been walking to and fro as she always did, talking to herself and coughing, telling little Polenka about the happy luxurious life in her papa's house, about the shawl dance, about Prince Schegolskoy who had wanted to make her an offer. The boy sat motionless on a chair, waiting to be undressed for bed; the youngest girl stood at the screen in rags, waiting her turn.

"What is it? What are they bringing? Mercy on us!" Katerina Ivanovna cried, turning white and gasping for breath. The children were terrified; little Lida screamed and rushed to Polenka, trembling all over.

They laid Marmeladov on the sofa. Raskolnikov sent for a doctor and promised to pay. Katerina Ivanovna began undressing her husband with trembling hands. "He's not drunk–it's blood!" she cried. His chest was crushed; the right side of his body was mangled. The priest came. Marmeladov's eyes sought his wife; he tried to speak but could only produce incoherent sounds. Katerina Ivanovna stood over him with a stern, set face, tears streaming silently.

Sonia arrived–in her gaudy finery, her absurd round hat with its bright feather, her face pale and frightened beneath the paint. She stopped in the doorway, not daring to cross the threshold, looking like a stranger in her shameful, gaudy dress amid this poverty and death. Marmeladov saw her. "Sonia! Daughter! Forgive!" he cried, and tried to drag himself towards her. He fell face downward on the floor. They rushed to him. He was dead.

The children were screaming. Little Lida had hidden behind the stove, trembling. Polenka stood with her arms round her brother, both of them shaking. The room was full of people–lodgers had crowded in from the passage, pressing closer and closer to the door.

"He's got his deserts!" Katerina Ivanovna cried. But then she fell on the body, embracing it, pressing her lips to the dead face. "I've killed him!" she wailed. "He was run over because he was drunk! And where is the money? What has he got in his pockets?" She searched him–nothing.

Raskolnikov pulled the notes from his pocket and laid them in Katerina Ivanovna's hands–twenty roubles from his mother's remittance. "You have been a whole Providence to us," she whispered, seizing his hand and pressing it to her lips. Nikodim Fomitch, who had come to investigate, was much impressed.

On the stairs, little Polenka ran after him, breathless from running. "What is your name? Where do you live?" she asked, looking up at him with her big eyes, still wet with tears. He told her his name and address, and said: "Pray for me sometimes, Polenka. Say 'and for thy servant Rodion'–that's all." She threw her thin little arms around him and pressed her head to his chest, weeping softly. He stroked her hair.

Walking away, he felt suddenly that life had not died with the old woman. "Enough!" he said. "Life is real! Haven't I lived just now? My life has not yet died with that old woman! The Queen of Heaven have mercy on me! Enough, leave me in peace!" He was in a sort of ecstasy. But he did not think about where he was going. He only felt that "everything must be changed, one way or another." "I can still live. My life has not died with that old woman. Enough of you, old woman! Now for the reign of reason and light and... and will, and strength... and now we shall see! We shall try our strength!" he added defiantly, as though addressing some dark force.

He went to Razumihin's housewarming party and found everyone drunk. Razumihin walked him home, chattering about Dounia the whole way–he was hopelessly, absurdly in love. "Do you know, she is remarkable, Rodya? She is tall, well-built, strong, self-reliant... and at the same time so gentle and graceful!" On the stairs of Raskolnikov's building they saw a light in his room. His mother and sister had arrived and were waiting for him. They had been sitting there for an hour with Nastasya, who had told them about his illness.

They rushed to embrace him. He stood like a dead man, unable to lift his arms. His mother and sister clung to him, laughing and crying. Then he fell in a faint on the floor.

Part III

Chapter I

Raskolnikov sat up on the sofa and waved weakly at Razumihin to stop consoling his mother and sister. He took them both by the hand and gazed from one to the other without speaking–his expression agonisingly poignant, and at the same time something immovable, almost insane. Pulcheria Alexandrovna began to cry. Avdotya Romanovna was pale; her hand trembled in her brother's.

"Go home... with him," he said in a broken voice, pointing to Razumihin. "Good-bye till to-morrow; to-morrow everything. Is it long since you arrived?"

"This evening, Rodya," answered Pulcheria Alexandrovna. "The train was awfully late. But, Rodya, nothing would induce me to leave you now! I will spend the night here, near you..."

"Don't torture me!" he said with a gesture of irritation.

"Dounia," he continued with an effort, "I don't want that marriage, so at the first opportunity to-morrow you must refuse Luzhin, so that we may never hear his name again."

"You are not fit to talk now, perhaps; you are tired," Dounia said gently.

"You think I am delirious? No. You are marrying Luzhin for my sake. But I won't accept the sacrifice. Write a letter before to-morrow, to refuse him."

"That I can't do!" the girl cried, offended. "What right have you–"

"I am not delirious; this marriage is an infamy. Let me act like a scoundrel, but you mustn't... one is enough... and though I am a scoundrel, I wouldn't own such a sister. It's me or Luzhin! Go now."

"But you're out of your mind! Despot!" roared Razumihin. But Raskolnikov did not and perhaps could not answer. He lay down on the sofa and turned to the wall, utterly exhausted. Avdotya Romanovna looked with interest at Razumihin; her black eyes flashed; Razumihin positively started at her glance.

Pulcheria Alexandrovna stood overwhelmed. "Nothing would induce me to go," she whispered in despair to Razumihin. "I will stay somewhere here."

"You'll spoil everything," Razumihin answered in the same whisper. "He was almost beating the doctor and me this afternoon! Even the doctor gave way and left him. I remained downstairs on guard, but he dressed at once and slipped off. And he will slip off again if you irritate him, at this time of night, and will do himself some mischief."

"Oh, what are you saying!" cried Pulcheria Alexandrovna.

He escorted the ladies to their lodgings, promising to watch over Raskolnikov through the night and to bring them news first thing in the morning. He was already hopelessly in love with Avdotya Romanovna, and he knew it. "I can't help it," he thought on the stairs. "I am a drunken, noisy braggart. And she... she is an angel! She is tall, remarkably well-built, strong and self-reliant, which shows in every gesture, though it does not in the least detract from the grace and softness of her movements. In face she resembles her brother, but she might have been called beautiful. Her hair is dark brown, a little lighter than her brother's; her eyes are almost black, sparkling, proud, and at the same time sometimes, for a minute, extraordinarily soft." He was describing her to himself as though he had never seen a woman before.

Chapter II

Razumihin woke next morning troubled and ashamed. He had been drunk, had abused Dounia's fiancé out of jealousy, and made a fool of himself. "Of course," he muttered, "all these infamies can never be wiped out or smoothed over... and so it's useless even to think of it, and I must go to them in silence and do my duty... in silence, too... and not ask forgiveness." Yet as he dressed he examined his attire more carefully than usual. He washed scrupulously, debated whether to shave–decided against it, lest they think he had done it on purpose. "Let it stay as it is! What if they think that I shaved on purpose to...? They certainly would think so! Not on any account!"

"And the worst of it was he was so coarse, so dirty, he had the manners of a pothouse," he thought. "And even admitting that he knew he had some of the essentials of a gentleman... what was there in that to be proud of? Everyone ought to be a gentleman." And to set all that beside Avdotya Romanovna! "Confound it! So be it! Well, he'd make a point then of being dirty, greasy, pothouse in his manners and he wouldn't care! He'd be worse!"

He went to escort the ladies to Raskolnikov's room. On the way he told Pulcheria Alexandrovna and Dounia everything about Raskolnikov's illness, his character, the I.O.U. affair, and the landlady. He warned them not to irritate him, especially about Luzhin. "Don't ask him too much about his health; he doesn't like that." He told them about the doctor Zossimov, about the money from Vahrushin, about the new clothes. He talked without stopping, partly from nervousness, partly because he could not help himself in the presence of Avdotya Romanovna.

Dounia listened with a firm, resolute expression that struck Razumihin deeply. "Mother, you are quite pale, don't distress yourself, darling," said Dounia, caressing her, then with flashing eyes she added: "He ought to be happy at seeing you, and you are tormenting yourself so."

He found himself falling more and more under her spell. He chattered nervously, trying to conceal his feelings, but his admiration was transparent. Dounia could not help smiling at his earnestness. Pulcheria Alexandrovna watched him with growing warmth–here was a man who truly cared for her son. "How, how can I thank you!" she began, pressing Razumihin's hands. "You are our Providence!"

When they reached the landlady's door on the fourth storey, they noticed that her door was a tiny crack open and that two keen black eyes were watching them from the darkness within. When their eyes met, the door was suddenly shut with such a slam that Pulcheria Alexandrovna almost cried out.

Chapter III

Zossimov was already with Raskolnikov when they arrived. The patient was fully dressed, carefully washed and combed—almost well compared to the day before, but pale, sombre, and listless, like a wounded man or one who has undergone terrible physical suffering. His brows were knitted, his lips compressed, his eyes feverish. He spoke little and reluctantly, as though performing a duty, and there was a restlessness in his movements.

The pale, sombre face lighted up for a moment when his mother and sister entered, but this only gave it a look of more intense suffering. Zossimov, watching with the zest of a young doctor, noticed no joy—only a bitter, hidden determination to bear another hour or two of inevitable torture. Almost every word seemed to touch some sore place. Yet he marvelled at the power of controlling himself in a patient who the previous day had fallen into a frenzy at the slightest word.

"Yes, I see myself now that I am almost well," Raskolnikov said, giving his mother and sister a kiss of welcome. "In another three or four days, if he goes on like this, he will be just as before," Zossimov declared. "Your complete recovery depends solely on yourself. These fundamental causes I don't know, but they must be known to you."

"Yes, yes; you are perfectly right. I will make haste and return to the university: and then everything will go smoothly," Raskolnikov answered—and Zossimov was mystified to observe unmistakable mockery on his face.

The conversation turned to the money Raskolnikov had given the Marmeladovs. "I gave away all the money you sent me... to his wife for the funeral," he told his mother. "She's a widow now, in consumption, a poor creature... three little children, starving. But I had no right to do it, I admit." He added, with a strange edge: "To help others one must have the right to do it, or else—" He broke off, laughing.

"It is as though they were afraid of me," Raskolnikov thought, looking askance at his mother and sister. And indeed Pulcheria Alexandrovna was growing more timid the longer she kept silent. "Yet in their absence I seemed to love them so much," flashed through his mind.

Then he was suddenly overwhelmed with confusion. Again that awful sensation passed with deadly chill over his soul. It became plain to him that he had just told a fearful lie—that he would never now be able to speak freely of everything—that he would never again be able to speak of anything to anyone. The anguish of this thought was such that for a moment he almost forgot himself.

"But what are you all so dull for?" he shouted suddenly. "Do say something! What's the use of sitting like this?"

The conversation turned to Luzhin. Raskolnikov analysed Luzhin's letter with cold precision—the legal jargon, the threat to leave if Raskolnikov were present, the slander about Sonia. "He is a man of intelligence, but to act sensibly, intelligence is not enough. It all shows the man and... I don't think he has a great esteem for you."

Dounia defended her decision calmly. "I am simply marrying for my own sake, because things are hard for me. I am marrying Pyotr Petrovitch because of two evils I choose the less."

"You cannot respect Luzhin," Raskolnikov said. "You are selling yourself for money, and so in any case you are acting basely."

Raskolnikov nearly fainted at these words. "Good heavens! You have made him faint," cried Pulcheria Alexandrovna. "No, no, nonsense! It's nothing. A little giddiness–not fainting," he said. "Is it not merciless on your part to speak to me like that?" Dounia cried, losing her composure. "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. Why do you look at me like that? Why are you so pale?"

He recovered, and they agreed that Luzhin should come that evening at eight, with Raskolnikov and Razumihin both present, so the matter could be settled openly.

Chapter IV

The door opened softly and a young girl walked in, looking timidly about her. Everyone turned towards her with surprise and curiosity. At first sight Raskolnikov did not recognise her. It was Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladov–Sonia. He had seen her the night before, but in such different circumstances that his memory retained a very different image. Now she was a modestly and poorly dressed young girl, very young indeed, almost like a child, with a modest and refined manner, with a candid but somewhat frightened face. She was wearing a plain indoor dress and a shabby old-fashioned hat, but she still carried a parasol. Unexpectedly finding the room full of people, she was not so much embarrassed as completely overwhelmed with shyness, like a little child. She was even about to retreat.

"Mother," Raskolnikov said firmly and insistently, "this is Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladov, the daughter of that unfortunate Mr. Marmeladov who was run over yesterday before my eyes, and of whom I was just telling you." He introduced her deliberately, challengingly, knowing his mother and sister had read Luzhin's letter calling Sonia a girl "of notorious behaviour." He had only just been protesting against Luzhin's calumny and declaring that he had seen the girl last night for the first time, and suddenly she had walked in.

Pulcheria Alexandrovna screwed up her eyes slightly–in spite of her embarrassment before Rodya's urgent and challenging look, she could not deny herself that satisfaction. Dounia gazed gravely and intently into the poor girl's face, scrutinising her with perplexity. Sonia was so humiliated she could hardly sit down beside them–she was even about to retreat in terror, and it sent a pang to Raskolnikov's heart.

"I... I... have come for one minute. Forgive me for disturbing you," Sonia stammered. "I come from Katerina Ivanovna, and she had no one to send. Katerina Ivanovna told me to beg you... to be at the service... in the morning... at Mitrofanievsky... and then... to us... to her... to do her the honour..." Sonia stammered and ceased speaking.

"I will try, certainly, most certainly," answered Raskolnikov. He, too, stood up, and he, too, faltered and could not finish his sentence. "Please sit down," he said suddenly. "I want to talk to you. You are perhaps in a hurry, but please, be so kind, spare me two minutes."

Sonia sat down again, and again timidly she took a hurried, frightened look at the two ladies, and dropped her eyes. Raskolnikov's pale face flushed, a shudder passed over him, his eyes glowed. He asked about the funeral arrangements and whether the police had troubled her. "No, that was all right... it was too evident, the cause of death... they did not worry us... only the lodgers are angry. They want to turn us out."

Sonia looked at him with her big, wondering eyes. She could not understand why this strange young man, who seemed so ill and so unhappy, should be so kind to them. "I will come to you again," he said. "I have something to tell you." His voice was strange–there was something in it that made her tremble.

He gave her the twenty-five roubles Razumihin had left him for the Marmeladov family. Sonia was overwhelmed. "You have been a whole Providence to us," she whispered. After she left, he turned to his mother: "I bowed down to all human suffering," he said, explaining why he had given the Marmeladovs money the night before. Then he turned to Razumihin with sudden animation: "Take me to see Porfiry Petrovitch. I want to reclaim my pledges from the old pawnbroker–my father's watch and my sister's ring. They are only worth five or six roubles, but they are precious to me for the sake of the people they came from."

Chapter V

Raskolnikov was already entering the room. He came in looking as though he had the utmost difficulty not to burst out laughing again. Behind him Razumihin strode in gawky and awkward, shamefaced and red as a peony. His face and whole figure really were ridiculous at that moment and amply justified Raskolnikov's laughter. "Fool! You fiend," Razumihin roared, waving his arm which at once struck a little round table with an empty tea-glass on it. Everything was sent flying and crashing. "But why break chairs, gentlemen? You know it's a loss to the Crown," Porfiry Petrovitch quoted gaily.

Porfiry Petrovitch was wearing a dressing-gown, very clean linen, and trodden-down slippers. He was a man of about thirty-five, short, stout even to corpulence, clean-shaven, with a large round head particularly prominent at the back, and a soft, snub-nosed face of a sickly yellowish colour. His expression was vigorous and rather ironical–it would have been good-natured except for a look in the eyes, which shone with a watery, mawkish light under almost white, blinking eyelashes. Those eyes were strangely out of keeping with his somewhat womanish figure, and gave it something far more serious than could be guessed at first sight. Zametov was sitting in the corner; he rose at the visitors' entrance with a smile on his lips, though he looked with surprise at the whole scene. Zametov's unexpected presence struck Raskolnikov unpleasantly.

He begged Raskolnikov to sit down on the sofa and sat down himself on the other end, waiting with that careful and over-serious attention which is at once oppressive and embarrassing. In brief and coherent phrases Raskolnikov explained his business–the pledges–clearly and exactly, and was so well satisfied with himself that he even succeeded in taking a good look at Porfiry. Porfiry did not once take his eyes off him.

But the conversation soon turned to crime. Porfiry mentioned that he had read an article of Raskolnikov's–"On Crime"–published two months ago in a periodical. "I read it with great interest," he said. Raskolnikov had not known it was published. The article had argued that mankind is divided into two categories: ordinary people, who must live in obedience and have no right to transgress the law, serving only as material for the propagation of the species; and extraordinary people–Newtons, Napoleons–who have an inner right to step over certain obstacles if the execution of their idea demands it. The first category are, so to speak, the material that serves only for the creation of the second; the second are the people who have the gift or the talent to utter a new word. "All legislators and leaders of men, beginning from the most ancient and going on to the Lycurguses, the Solons, the Mahomets, the Napoleons, were without exception criminals, from the very fact that in making a new law they transgressed the old one," Raskolnikov had written.

"Not an official right, of course," Raskolnikov explained, "but an inner right to decide in his own conscience to overstep certain obstacles, and only in case it is essential for the practical fulfilment of his idea–sometimes, perhaps, of benefit to the whole of humanity."

Porfiry listened with intense interest, his little eyes glittering. "So you still believe in the New Jerusalem? And you believe in God? And in the raising of Lazarus?"

"I do," Raskolnikov answered.

"And did you perhaps fancy yourself to be an extraordinary man, one who has the right to transgress?" Porfiry asked with sudden directness. "I mean, one who has the right to... step over a dead body, to wade through blood?"

"If I did, I certainly should not tell you," Raskolnikov answered with defiant contempt.

Then Porfiry asked, with apparent casualness, whether Raskolnikov had noticed painters working on the second floor when he visited the pawnbroker. It was a trap–the painters had been there on the day of the murder, not on Raskolnikov's earlier visit. He had mastered the trap now and was triumphant. Raskolnikov saw through it instantly, racking every nerve, almost swooning with anxiety to conjecture where the trap lay: "No, I didn't see them, and I don't think I noticed a flat like that open. But on the fourth storey I remember now that someone was moving out of the flat opposite Alyona Ivanovna's. I remember it clearly. Some porters were carrying out a sofa and they squeezed me against the wall. But painters... no, I don't remember that there were any painters."

"Foo! I have muddled it!" Porfiry slapped himself on the forehead. "Deuce take it! This business is turning my brain!" But Raskolnikov knew the magistrate had not muddled anything. Razumihin saw through it too: "Why, it was on the day of the murder the painters were at work, and he was there three days before! What are you asking?"

"Then you should be more careful," Razumihin observed grimly.

They went out into the street gloomy and sullen, and for some steps they did not say a word. Raskolnikov drew a deep breath. "If they had had facts–real facts–they would have tried to hide their game," he told Razumihin. "They have no facts, not one. It is all mirage–all ambiguous. They try to throw me out by impudence. And perhaps Porfiry was irritated at having no facts, and blurted it out in his vexation–or perhaps he has some plan. He seems an intelligent man."

"But how could you have said you had seen the painters?" Razumihin asked.

"Because only peasants, or the most inexperienced novices deny everything flatly at examinations. If a man is ever so little developed, he will certainly try to admit all the external facts that can't be avoided, but will seek other explanations of them. Porfiry might well reckon that I should be sure to answer so."

"But he would have told you at once that the workmen could not have been there two days before!"

"Yes, that is what he was reckoning on–that I should not have time to reflect. The more cunning a man is, the simpler the trap he must be caught in. Porfiry is not such a fool as you think."

Chapter VI

On the street, a stranger suddenly appeared before Raskolnikov–a tall, stout man of about fifty with a broad, pockmarked face and small, angry eyes. He looked at Raskolnikov intently and said one word: "Murderer!" Then he turned and walked away without looking back.

Raskolnikov stood rooted to the spot. The word struck him like a thunderbolt. He followed the man for a few steps, but the stranger walked on without turning. "Who is he? What does he know?" Raskolnikov whispered. His knees were shaking. He went home and lay on his sofa in torment. Had the man been real? Did everyone know? Perhaps Porfiry had sent him. Perhaps it was all over.

He tried to think, to reason, but could not. "If that man had real evidence, would he have simply said 'murderer' and walked away? He would have gone to the police." But the doubt gnawed at him. He fell into a feverish half-sleep.

He dreamed he was back in the old woman's flat. It was evening; everything was still. He went through the passage, into the room. The old woman was sitting in a chair in the corner, bent double so that he could not see her face. "She is afraid," he thought. He softly disengaged the axe from the noose and struck the old woman on the crown of the head, once and again. But she did not stir. He bent down closer and saw that she was laughing–shaking with noiseless laughter, doing her utmost that he should not hear it. He struck with all his might, but the laughter only increased. He ran down the stairs, but everywhere, on every landing, on every staircase, there were people, all looking, all silent, all waiting... He ran and ran, and they were all around him, more and more of them, watching in silence. He tried to run but the passage was full of people, watching silently through the open doors, on the landing, on the stairs–all looking, all waiting in silence. His heart stood still, his legs would not move. He tried to scream and woke up.

He drew a deep breath–but his dream seemed strangely to persist: his door was flung open and a man whom he had never seen stood in the doorway watching him intently. A well-dressed man of about fifty, with a broad, pleasant face, almost whitish beard, and an air of condescension. He had been sitting there for ten minutes, waiting patiently. Only a big fly buzzed and fluttered against the window pane. It was unbearable at last.

"Come, tell me what you want," Raskolnikov said.

"I knew you were not asleep, but only pretending," the stranger answered oddly, laughing calmly. "Arkady Ivanovitch Svidrigaïlov, allow me to introduce myself."

Part IV

Chapter I

"Can this be still a dream?" Raskolnikov thought once more, looking carefully and suspiciously at his unexpected visitor. "Svidrigaïlov! What nonsense! It can't be!" he said aloud in bewilderment.

His visitor did not seem at all surprised at this exclamation. "I've come to you for two reasons. In the first place, I wanted to make your personal acquaintance, as I have already heard a great deal about you that is interesting and flattering; secondly, I cherish the hope that you may not refuse to assist me in a matter directly concerning the welfare of your sister, Avdotya Romanovna. For without your support she might not let me come near her now, for she is prejudiced against me."

"You reckon wrongly," interrupted Raskolnikov.

Svidrigaïlov spoke of his late wife Marfa Petrovna with casual indifference—she had died suddenly, perhaps from apoplexy after bathing on a full stomach, perhaps from a beating. "Didn't I contribute to all that calamity, morally, by irritation or something of the sort? But I came to the conclusion that that, too, was quite out of the question." He claimed to have treated Dounia honourably—"I, too, am a man, and capable of being attracted and falling in love, which does not depend on our will"—and offered to give her ten thousand roubles to help break off the marriage with Luzhin. "In proposing to the object of my passion to elope with me to America or Switzerland, I may have cherished the deepest respect for her and may have thought that I was promoting our mutual happiness!"

"It's simply that whether you are right or wrong, we dislike you," Raskolnikov said with disgust. "We don't want to have anything to do with you. We show you the door. Go out!"

Svidrigaïlov broke into a sudden laugh. "But you're—but there's no getting round you! I hoped to get round you, but you took up the right line at once!" He was laughing in the frankest way. "This is what the French call bonne guerre, the most innocent form of deception!"

Raskolnikov was repelled by the man but fascinated despite himself. Svidrigaïlov spoke of strange things—ghosts, apparitions. Marfa Petrovna had appeared to him three times since her death. The first time was the very day of the funeral: he came home from the cemetery, walked into his study, and there she was, sitting at the table. "I was so frightened that I sat down." The second time she came on the road, during a journey, and pointed out a mistake in the calendar. The third time she simply appeared in the doorway, stood there a moment, and nodded. "I am a sinful man," he said cheerfully. "But I am beginning to believe that I may see ghosts. Only the sick see them, of course—but that only proves that ghosts can appear to none but the sick, not that they don't exist."

He hinted that he and Raskolnikov had something in common—"we are birds of a feather"—though Raskolnikov rejected this with disgust. He spoke of eternity. "We always imagine eternity as something beyond our conception, something vast, vast! But why must it be vast? Instead of all that, what if it's one little room, like a bath-house in the country, black and grimy and spiders in every corner, and that's all eternity is? I sometimes fancy it like that."

"Can it be you can imagine nothing juster and more comforting than that?" Raskolnikov cried, with a feeling of anguish.

"Juster? And how can we tell, perhaps that is just, and do you know it's what I would certainly have made it," answered Svidrigaïlov, with a vague smile.

Raskolnikov felt a cold chill at this hideous answer. Svidrigaïlov raised his head, looked at him intently and suddenly burst out laughing.

Raskolnikov watched him go with a feeling of intense repulsion mixed with something else–a dark fascination he could not explain. This man knew something about him, or guessed something. And yet there was a strange freedom in Svidrigaïlov's manner, a carelessness about consequences, that was almost enviable. He lived without conscience, without remorse, without the torment that was eating Raskolnikov alive.

"I told you we should become friends, I foretold it," Svidrigaïlov said as he left. "Well, here we have. And you will see what an accommodating person I am."

Chapter II

It was nearly eight o'clock. The two young men hurried to Bakaleyev's to arrive before Luzhin. "Why, who was that?" asked Razumihin, meaning Svidrigaïlov. Raskolnikov told him briefly–the landowner in whose house Dounia had been insulted, whose wife had just died. "He is very strange, and is determined on doing something. We must guard Dounia from him." "Guard her! What can he do to harm Avdotya Romanovna?" "I don't know. But we must guard her."

In the corridor they came upon Luzhin; he had arrived punctually at eight. All three went in together without greeting or looking at one another. Pulcheria Alexandrovna came forward to greet him; Dounia was welcoming her brother. Pyotr Petrovitch walked in and quite amiably, though with redoubled dignity, bowed to the ladies. They all sat down at the round table where a samovar was boiling. Dounia and Luzhin were facing one another on opposite sides.

A moment's silence followed. Pyotr Petrovitch had come with the feelings of a benefactor who is about to reap the fruits of his good deeds and to hear agreeable flattery. Luzhin deliberately drew out a cambric handkerchief reeking of scent and blew his nose with the air of a benevolent man who felt himself slighted, and was firmly resolved to insist on an explanation. In the passage the idea had occurred to him to keep on his overcoat and walk away, and so give the two ladies a sharp and emphatic lesson. But he could not bring himself to do this.

He tried to justify himself, but his pomposity and self-importance were transparent. He complained that his letter had been disregarded, that he had been insulted by Raskolnikov. When Raskolnikov calmly exposed his manipulations–how he had tried to set the family against each other, how he had deliberately chosen a bride from poverty so she would be grateful, how he had told Pulcheria Alexandrovna that Raskolnikov had given money to "a girl of notorious behaviour"–Luzhin lost his composure entirely. He turned crimson and spluttered.

Dounia spoke with devastating calm: "Pyotr Petrovitch, I must tell you plainly that the matter which has brought you here is now settled. I refuse you and I beg you to leave us."

Luzhin was thunderstruck. "Do you mean to say that I am not good enough for you?" he cried. He tried to argue, to threaten, to remind them of the expenses he had incurred–the flat he had redecorated, the furniture he had ordered. "Let me tell you that I could, I could have made a better choice!" But Dounia was immovable. He left without finishing his speech, squeezing between the table and the chair, lifting his hat to the level of his shoulders to avoid crushing it as he stooped to go out of the door. Even the curve of his spine was expressive of the horrible insult he had received. He nursed a deep hatred–particularly against Raskolnikov–and was already plotting revenge. On the stairs he still believed it could be set right; he did not yet know that it was over forever.

Chapter III

After Luzhin's departure, the room was filled with relief and excitement. Razumihin was beside himself with joy. They discussed plans for the future; Razumihin proposed a publishing venture in which Raskolnikov could be a partner.

Razumihin had it all worked out–they would begin with translations, build up capital, and eventually Raskolnikov would become a full partner. "We shall have our own printing press, and the great thing is we shall know what to translate. We shall be translating and publishing and learning at the same time!" Dounia's eyes shone; even Pulcheria Alexandrovna was carried away by his enthusiasm. "What you say is very interesting, Dmitri Prokofitch," she said.

But Raskolnikov grew suddenly cold and distant. He told his mother and sister he needed to be alone for a time—perhaps a long time. "If you love me, give me up... otherwise I shall begin to hate you, I feel it. Good-bye." His mother was terrified. Dounia followed him to the door. "You are not doing this with any evil intention, Rodya?" she asked. "No, but go now," he said.

He went straight to Sonia's room—a large, irregularly shaped room with three windows looking onto the canal, exceedingly low-pitched, like a barn. The yellow, scratched wallpaper was black in the corners. There was scarcely any furniture: a bedstead without curtains, a chair, a plain deal table covered with a blue cloth, a small wooden chest of drawers looking lost in a desert. It must have been damp and full of fumes in winter. There was every sign of poverty.

"It's you! Good heavens!" Sonia cried weakly, standing rooted to the spot, completely disconcerted, apparently frightened by his unexpected visit. The colour rushed to her pale face and tears came into her eyes.

"How thin you are! What a hand! Quite transparent, like a dead hand," he said, taking her hand. She smiled faintly. "I have always been like that."

He told her about Katerina Ivanovna's situation and promised to come again tomorrow. "I have something to tell you," he said. "I've come to you for the last time. I may perhaps not see you again." She looked at him with frightened eyes.

Chapter IV

The next day Raskolnikov went straight to the house on the canal bank where Sonia lived. He found the entrance to the dark and narrow staircase, mounted to the second floor, and came out into a gallery that ran round the whole second storey over the yard. Sonia's door was three paces from him.

"It's you! Good heavens!" Sonia cried weakly. She was sitting with her elbows on the table and her face in her hands, but seeing Raskolnikov she got up at once and came to meet him as though she were expecting him. "What would have become of me but for you?" she said quickly.

He sat down at the table. She stood facing him, two steps away, just as she had done the day before. He looked round the room—the same poverty, the same irregularly shaped barn of a room, the yellow scratched wallpaper black in the corners. On the chest of drawers lay a book. He picked it up—it was the New Testament in Russian translation. It was old and worn.

"Where did you get this?" he called to her across the room. She was standing in the same place, three steps from the table.

"It was brought me," she answered, as though unwillingly, not looking at him.

"Who brought it?"

"Lizaveta brought it. I asked her to." "Lizaveta! How strange!" he thought.

He made her read to him the raising of Lazarus. She opened the book with trembling hands and found the passage. "It was the fourth day after the death of Lazarus," she began. Her voice rang out like a bell in the silent room. She was reluctant at first—"Why? You don't believe, do you?"—but he insisted. She found the passage in the Gospel of St. John, Chapter XI, and began reading in a firm, ringing voice, trembling and glowing as though she were seeing it before her eyes. "Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live." The candle-end flickered in the battered candlestick, dimly lighting the room where the murderer and the harlot had come together over the eternal book.

"That's all about the raising of Lazarus," she whispered, and stood motionless, turning aside, not daring to raise her eyes to him. The dying flame of the candle-end dimly lighted the room where the murderer and the harlot had come together so strangely over the reading of the eternal book. Five minutes or more passed.

"I came to you for a reason," Raskolnikov said at last, and his face suddenly changed. "I have forsaken everyone. You are all I have left. Let us go together. I've come to you. We are both accursed—let us go together."

His eyes glittered. "He is almost like a madman," Sonia thought.

"Go where?" she asked in alarm, and she involuntarily stepped back.

"How do I know? I only know it's the same road. I know that for certain—and that's all. One aim!"

She looked at him and understood nothing. She only knew that he was terribly, infinitely unhappy. He looked round the room once more. "You rent this room from the Kapernaumovs? They live there, through that door?" "Yes..." "They are very good people, very kind," answered Sonia, who still seemed bewildered. "And they are very kind and the children, too, often come to see me."

"Your father told me, then. He told me all about you... and how you went out at six o'clock and came back at nine and how Katerina Ivanovna knelt down by your bed." Sonia was confused. "I seemed to see him yesterday," she whispered timidly.

"Whom?"

"Father. I was walking in the street, out there, just by this house, at ten o'clock, and he seemed to be walking in front of me. It looked just like him. I wanted to go to Katerina Ivanovna..."

He spoke of power, of freedom, of breaking what must be broken—"Freedom and power, and above all, power! Over all trembling creation and all the ant-heap! That's the goal, remember that!" He told her he would come tomorrow and tell her who killed Lizaveta.

Sonia stared at him in terror. "Why, do you know who killed her?" she asked, chilled with horror. "I know and will tell... you, only you. I have chosen you out." He left, and she spent the night in fever and delirium, dreaming of Polenka, Katerina Ivanovna, Lizaveta, and him—him with pale face, with burning eyes, kissing her feet, weeping.

Unknown to either of them, Svidrigaïlov had been listening through the thin wall from the next room. He lodged at Madame Resslich's, just on the other side. He had brought a chair so he might listen in comfort.

Chapter V

The next morning, Raskolnikov went to see Porfiry Petrovitch at the police station, ostensibly about his pledges. He was kept waiting ten minutes–no guard, no watch. He stood in the waiting-room, and people who apparently had nothing to do with him were continually passing to and fro. "If that man of yesterday had seen everything, they would not have let him stand and wait like that." The conviction grew stronger that the phantom of yesterday had seen nothing, knew nothing. But he was suddenly aware that he was trembling–and felt a rush of indignation at the thought that he was trembling with fear at facing that hateful Porfiry Petrovitch. What he dreaded above all was meeting that man again; he hated him with an intense, unmitigated hatred and was afraid his hatred might betray him. His indignation was such that he ceased trembling at once. He made ready to go in with a cold and arrogant bearing and vowed to himself to keep as silent as possible, to watch and listen and for once at least to control his overstrained nerves.

He found Porfiry Petrovitch alone in his study. Porfiry met him with an apparently genial air, but there were signs of awkwardness, as though he had been thrown out of his reckoning. "In our domain," he began, holding out both hands–but drew one back in time. "He held out both hands to me, but he did not give me one–he drew it back in time," struck Raskolnikov suspiciously. They watched each other; when their eyes met, quick as lightning they looked away.

The magistrate talked and talked–circling, probing, hinting–with that perpetual air of mockery, his fat round figure rolling from one side of the room to the other like a ball, making dashes towards the window, the bureau and the table, at one moment avoiding Raskolnikov's suspicious glance, then again standing still and looking him straight in the face. He spoke at length, circling and circling. "You see, Rodion Romanovitch, in our work we have to deal with all sorts of people. Some are clever, some are stupid, some are cunning, some are simple. And the clever ones are the most interesting, because they think they can outwit us. But you know what? The clever ones always make the same mistake. They think too much. They overthink everything. And that's how we catch them–not by their stupidity, but by their cleverness." He laughed his soft, fat laugh.

He spoke of criminal psychology, of how murderers sometimes give themselves away, of how the mind plays tricks on a man who has committed a crime. "I regard you as a most honourable man, with elements of magnanimity even," he said, "though I don't agree with all your convictions."

The tension built to an unbearable pitch. Raskolnikov felt his uneasiness growing to monstrous proportions. "It's bad, it's bad!" he thought. "I shall say too much again." His nerves were quivering, his emotion increasing. He felt that at any moment he might either confess or explode. Porfiry seemed to be building towards something, circling closer and closer, like a cat playing with a mouse.

Just when the tension became absolutely unbearable–the door burst open and the painter Nikolay was brought in, very pale, staring straight before him as though seeing nothing. He strode into the room with a determined gleam in his eyes, but his face was white as a sheet. He fell on his knees. "I am guilty! I am the murderer!" he cried.

Porfiry was astonished–genuinely astonished. "He is not wanted! Take him away! Let him wait!" he shouted, rushing to the door. But Nikolay sank on his knees. "Forgive me!" he cried. "I killed them. I killed the old woman and her sister with an axe." He repeated his confession stubbornly, with a strange, fixed determination. In the confusion, Raskolnikov slipped away, his heart pounding.

Chapter VI

On the stairs he met the stranger who had called him "murderer" the day before. The man bowed to the ground, touching it with his finger. "Forgive me for my evil thoughts and my slander," he said. He explained that he had been in the next room at Porfiry's office. "I informed him of everything, just as it happened, and he began skipping about the room and punching himself on the chest. And when Nikolay was brought, he let me out as soon as you were gone. 'I shall send for you again and question you,' he said."

"May God forgive you," Raskolnikov answered. The man bowed again, turned slowly, and went out.

He went down the stairs with a new feeling. The stranger's apology, Nikolay's confession–these were signs that the net was loosening, that there was still time, still a chance. And yet even as he felt this relief, he knew it was false. Porfiry had not been deceived by Nikolay's confession. Porfiry knew. The game was not over; it had merely entered a new phase.

"It all cuts both ways now," Raskolnikov repeated to himself, and went out more confident than ever. "Now we'll make a fight for it," he said with a malicious smile as he went down the stairs. His malice was aimed at himself; with shame and contempt he recollected his cowardice.

Part V

Chapter I

The morning after his rejection brought sobering influences to Pyotr Petrovitch Luzhin. The black snake of wounded vanity had been gnawing at his heart all night. He looked in the mirror, afraid he had jaundice, but his noble, clear-skinned countenance which had grown fattish of late was unimpaired, and for an instant he was comforted by the conviction that he would find another bride–perhaps even a better one. But coming back to the sense of his present position, he turned aside and spat vigorously, which excited a sarcastic smile in Lebeziatnikov, the young progressive with whom he was staying.

For many years he had brooded in profound secret over the image of a girl–virtuous, poor, very young, very pretty, one who had suffered much and was completely humbled before him, one who would all her life look on him as her saviour, worship him, admire him and only him. In Dounia he had found even more than he dreamed of–beauty, education, breeding superior to his own. And now everything was in ruins. This sudden horrible rupture affected him like a clap of thunder. The thought of Dounia sent a voluptuous pang through his heart. He endured anguish at that moment, and if it had been possible to slay Raskolnikov instantly by wishing it, Pyotr Petrovitch would promptly have uttered the wish. "It was my mistake, too, not to have given them money," he thought. "I meant to keep them without a penny so that they should turn to me as their providence, and look at them!"

Moreover, all that morning one unpleasantness followed another. He even found a hitch awaiting him in his legal case in the senate. He was particularly irritated by the owner of the flat which had been taken in view of his approaching marriage and was being redecorated at his own expense; the owner, a rich German tradesman, would not entertain the idea of breaking the contract and insisted on the full forfeit money. In the same way the upholsterers refused to return a single rouble of the instalment paid for the furniture. "Am I to get married simply for the sake of the furniture?" he ground his teeth. And at the same time he had a gleam of desperate hope: "Can all that be really so irrevocably over? Is it no use to make another effort?"

Lebeziatnikov, his young roommate, was a useful fool–a thin, scrofulous little man who worked in some government office and had strikingly flaxen hair and mutton-chop whiskers of which he was very proud. He was one of that vast and varied legion of dullards, half-animate abortions, conceited half-educated coxcombs who attach themselves to the idea most in fashion only to vulgarise it at once. He talked endlessly about the commune, about the abolition of marriage, about the rights of women–and Luzhin encouraged him, finding him useful as a witness.

Luzhin conceived a plan to disgrace Sonia and, through her, Raskolnikov: he would plant money on her and accuse her of theft publicly, proving to Dounia that her brother consorted with thieves and prostitutes. If it worked, it might even win Dounia back–she would see that her brother was a scoundrel, and turn to Luzhin as her only protector.

He called Sonia to his room on a pretext, gave her ten roubles ostensibly from charity for Katerina Ivanovna–"from me personally, as a mark of sympathy"–and while she was distracted, thanking him with tears in her eyes, slipped a hundred-rouble note into her pocket. Lebeziatnikov, who was in the room, noticed something odd about the transaction–Luzhin's hand seemed to linger near Sonia's pocket–but said nothing at the time, not understanding what he had seen.

Chapter II

The memorial dinner at Katerina Ivanovna's was a grotesque, pitiful affair. She had spent almost all the money Raskolnikov had given her on food and drink–on a proper dinner with real food and real vodka. She had invited the most wretched lodgers, most of whom came only to eat and mock. The better sort of people she had hoped for did not appear; the landlady Amalia Ivanovna, whom she had not invited, came anyway and took a seat of honour, which infuriated Katerina Ivanovna beyond measure.

Katerina Ivanovna quarrelled with her furiously, boasting of her noble family, her father who had been almost a governor, the shawl dance she had performed at her school graduation before the governor and other personages, for which she had been presented with a gold medal. "That gold medal... well, the medal of course was sold–long ago," she admitted, but the certificate of merit was still in her trunk. She insisted that Amalia Ivanovna's father had been nothing but a drunken German who hid in a cupboard, and the landlady screamed back that her father "aus Berlin was a very, very important man and walked about with both hands in his pockets!"

The guests grew drunk and disorderly. One man began singing; another fell asleep in his soup. A third started telling indecent stories. The wretched lodgers who did come ate greedily and left without thanking her. Katerina Ivanovna's consumptive flush deepened; she coughed and pressed her hands to her chest, but she would not give in. She kept up a running commentary on the guests, on the food, on her own noble origins, growing more and more excited, more and more incoherent.

"You see this dish?" Katerina Ivanovna cried, pointing to the remains of the funeral rice. "It cost me a rouble and a half! And that drunken creature has eaten it all! And the landlady–look at her sitting there like a stuffed figure! She wasn't even invited!" She turned to Amalia Ivanovna: "I invited you as a woman of sense, to preside over the table, and instead of that you sit there like a stuffed figure!" The landlady turned crimson. "I did not invite you! I did not invite you! You came yourself!" "I came because I am the landlady and it is my duty to look after things!" "Your duty! Your duty is to respect your lodgers, not to spy on them!"

Raskolnikov sat in the corner, watching it all with a strange, detached interest. The whole dinner was a torment of wounded pride and desperate pretension–and yet there was something touching in it, something of that same indomitable spirit that would not surrender even in the face of death. Sonia sat quietly, her eyes cast down, waiting for what she knew must come.

Chapter III

At the height of the dinner, Luzhin appeared in the doorway–stiff, dignified, with a resolute and severe expression. He stood for a moment scanning the company with a deliberate and offensive stare. Silence fell. He announced that a hundred-rouble note had disappeared from his room, and that he had reason to believe Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladov had taken it.

Sonia, white as a sheet, jumped up from her seat. "I didn't take it! I don't know anything about it!" she cried in a trembling voice. "He gave me ten roubles, Katerina Ivanovna knows, she was there–God knows I didn't take it!" She was shaking all over, her eyes dilated with horror.

"I can bring witnesses that you were alone in my room," Luzhin said coldly. "The ten roubles I gave you from my table with my own hands, in the presence of a witness, as a contribution to your family. Will you allow your pockets to be searched, or must I ask the police?"

Katerina Ivanovna flew at Luzhin in a frenzy. "Search her! Search her at once! She has never stolen anything!" She seized Sonia and began turning out her pockets–and from the right pocket a folded hundred-rouble note fell out onto the floor. A roar went up from the crowd. Sonia stood motionless, as though turned to stone.

"Thief!" screamed Amalia Ivanovna. "Police!"

But Lebeziatnikov, who had been watching with growing agitation, suddenly stepped forward. "Pyotr Petrovitch! That is a mean and wicked action!" he cried. "I saw it–I saw it with my own eyes! You slipped that note into her pocket yourself when she was leaving your room! I saw you do it, though at the time I did not understand what you were doing! I remember it now, I remember it clearly!"

Luzhin turned pale and bit his lip. "This is a conspiracy!" he cried. "This is a plot against me! This scoundrel"–he pointed at Raskolnikov–"has put you up to this!" But Lebeziatnikov was firm. "I saw it with my own eyes, Pyotr Petrovitch. I am ready to take my oath on it. I remember now how you stood by the table and how your hand moved towards her pocket. I remember it distinctly!"

Raskolnikov confirmed it, explaining Luzhin's motive–revenge against him through Sonia, to prove to Dounia that her brother kept company with thieves. "You are a calculating and malicious man. You wanted to show my mother and sister that I was giving their last money to a woman of notorious behaviour, and so to set them against me. You counted on the effect it would produce, and you came here to make a scene."

Luzhin was driven out in disgrace, blustering and threatening, his face distorted with fury. "You will answer for this! In court! In court!" he shouted from the doorway. Katerina Ivanovna, in a frenzy of vindication, embraced Sonia and kissed her before everyone. "I knew it, I knew you were innocent!" she cried. Then she turned on the landlady, and the quarrel exploded into a final, irrevocable rupture. Amalia Ivanovna ordered them out of the lodging that very day. "Clear out of my rooms! This instant! Out!"

Katerina Ivanovna, throwing over her head that green shawl which Marmeladov had mentioned, squeezed her way through the disorderly crowd and ran into the street, wailing and tearful, with a vague intention of going at once somewhere to find justice. Polenka with the two little ones crouched, terrified, on the trunk in the corner, waiting for her mother to come back.

Chapter IV

Raskolnikov went to Sonia's room. She was sitting with her elbows on the table and her face in her hands, but seeing him she got up at once and came to meet him as though she had been expecting him. Evidently she was in haste to say this to him. It was what she had been waiting for. "What would have become of me but for you?" she said quickly.

He sat down and felt his voice trembling. He began circling around the subject, asking her hypothetical questions—if she had known Luzhin's intentions beforehand, if it had depended on her decision whether Luzhin should go on living and doing wicked things or Katerina Ivanovna should die, how would she decide?

"Why do you ask about what could not happen?" Sonia said reluctantly. "But I can't know the Divine Providence."

He looked at her and suddenly understood: her power lay not in reason but in something else entirely. He stood up and approached her. His face was pale and distorted; his lips twitched.

"I have come to tell you who killed Lizaveta," he said.

Sonia turned white. She looked at him with terrible understanding. A shudder of horror ran through her whole body.

He was looking at her and suddenly noticed that she was trembling all over, just as she had done once before, when he had come to her for the first time. "Guess," he said, looking at her with a distorted smile.

A wave of terror swept over her. "No, no! Don't tell me!" she whispered.

"You know already," he said.

She seized his hands and pressed them tight, staring into his face. Her eyes were dilated with horror. She looked at him for a long time, as though trying to make sure of something, as though she knew already. "You?" she whispered at last.

"Yes, it was I who killed the old pawnbroker woman and her sister Lizaveta with an axe and robbed them."

Sonia fell back on the bed as though she had been struck. But a moment later she rushed to him, seized his hands, and looked into his face with infinite pity. "What have you done to yourself?" she cried. She flung her arms round him and held him tight. "There is no one—no one in the whole world now so unhappy as you!"

Something that had not been in his heart for a long time softened it at once. He did not resist it; two tears rolled from his eyes and hung on his eyelashes.

"Then you won't leave me, Sonia?" he asked, looking at her almost with hope.

She was weeping. "I'll follow you to Siberia! I'll follow you everywhere! Oh, my God! Oh, how miserable I am! Why, why didn't I know you before! Why didn't you come before? Oh, dear!" "No, no, never!" she cried.

He tried to explain his theory—that he had wanted to prove he was an extraordinary man, a Napoleon, who had the right to step over obstacles. "I wanted to find out whether I was a louse like everybody else, or a man. Whether I can step over barriers or not. Whether I am a trembling creature or whether I have the right."

"But you murdered! You murdered!" Sonia cried.

"I murdered myself, not her! I crushed myself once for all, for ever. It was the devil that killed that old woman, not I." He buried his face in his hands.

"But you are talking strangely. I don't understand," Sonia whispered.

"I only wanted to dare, Sonia, that was the whole reason! I wanted to find out then, and find out quickly, whether I was a louse like everybody else or a man. Whether I can step over barriers or not. Whether I am a trembling creature or whether I have the right..."

"To kill? The right to kill?" Sonia clasped her hands.

"Ach, Sonia!" he cried irritably. "I only wanted to prove one thing—that the devil led me on then, and he showed me after that I had not the right to take that path, because I am just such a louse as all the rest. He was mocking me and here I've come to you! Welcome your guest! If I were not a louse, should I have come to you?"

"And you were hungry! You did it to help your mother? Yes?"

"No, Sonia, no," he muttered. "I was not so hungry... I did want to help my mother, but... that's not the real reason either. Don't torment me, Sonia!" He was in agony. "I know it all now. Understand me: perhaps by the same road I should never have committed a murder again. I wanted to find out something else; it was something else led me on. I wanted to find out then and quickly whether I was a louse like everybody else or a man. And it turns out that I am a louse.

"Then it was not the old woman I killed, I killed myself," he said at last, looking at her. "But I did kill the old woman too! It was the devil that killed her, not I. Enough, Sonia, enough! Let me be," he cried in a sudden spasm of anguish. "Let me be!"

He leaned his elbows on his knees and squeezed his head in his hands as in a vice. "

Sonia told him what he must do. She was weeping, but her voice was firm: "Go at once, this very minute, stand at the crossroads, bow down, first kiss the earth which you have defiled, and then bow down to all the world and say to all men aloud, 'I am a murderer!' Then God will send you life again."

He looked at her with wild eyes. "You mean prison, Sonia? You mean I must give myself up?"

"You must accept suffering and achieve atonement through it—that is what you must do."

He left, promising nothing. But something had shifted in him.

Chapter V

Katerina Ivanovna, driven from her lodgings after the scandal with the landlady, had gone mad in the streets. Throwing over her head that green shawl which Marmeladov had mentioned to Raskolnikov, she ran out wailing and tearful, with a vague intention of going somewhere to find justice. She dragged her children out and made them sing and dance for money on the pavement, coughing blood, her consumptive face blazing. She dressed the children in makeshift costumes–a turban on one, a red fez on another–and beat them when they cried. "They don't understand! They don't understand!" she screamed. A crowd gathered, laughing and pitying. Policemen appeared. "It's not your business!" she shrieked at them. "I have a right! Everyone has a right to walk in the streets!"

She fell on the pavement, blood pouring from her throat in a great stream. They carried her to Sonia's room, where she lay on the sofa, her face distorted, her breathing coming in terrible gasps. The priest came, but she refused him. "There is no need of a priest! I have no sins! God must forgive me without that! He knows how I have suffered! And if He won't forgive me, I don't care!" She tried to speak again, but blood choked her. She died with her eyes open, staring at them all with a stern, reproachful expression, as though she were still demanding justice.

Svidrigaïlov appeared and drew Raskolnikov aside. "I will undertake all the arrangements, the funeral and that. I will put those two little ones and Polenka into some good orphan asylum, and I will settle fifteen hundred roubles to be paid to each on coming of age, so that Sofya Semyonovna need have no anxiety about them. And I will pull her out of the mud too, for she is a good girl, isn't she?"

"What is your motive for such benevolence?" Raskolnikov asked.

"She wasn't a louse, you know," Svidrigaïlov said, pointing to the corner where the dead woman lay, "was she, like some old pawnbroker woman?" He said this with an air of gay, winking slyness, keeping his eyes fixed on Raskolnikov.

Raskolnikov stepped back quickly and looked wildly at Svidrigaïlov. He had turned white and cold, hearing his own phrases, spoken to Sonia, thrown back at him by this smiling stranger.

"How do you know?" he whispered, hardly able to breathe.

"Why, I lodge here at Madame Resslich's, the other side of the wall. Here is Kapernaumov, and there lives Madame Resslich, an old and devoted friend of mine. I am a neighbour."

"You?"

"Yes," continued Svidrigaïlov, shaking with laughter. "I assure you on my honour, dear Rodion Romanovitch, that you have interested me enormously. I told you we should become friends, I foretold it. Well, here we have. And you will see what an accommodating person I am. You'll see that you can get on with me!"

Part VI

Chapter I

A strange period began for Raskolnikov: it was as though a fog had fallen upon him and wrapped him in a dreary solitude from which there was no escape. Recalling that period long after, he believed that his mind had been clouded at times, and that it had continued so, with intervals, till the final catastrophe. He was convinced that he had been mistaken about many things at that time. He had mixed up incidents and explained events as due to circumstances which existed only in his imagination. At times he was a prey to agonies of morbid uneasiness amounting to panic. But he remembered, too, moments, hours, perhaps whole days, of complete apathy, which came upon him as a reaction from his previous terror and might be compared with the abnormal insensibility sometimes seen in the dying. He seemed to be trying in that latter stage to escape from a full and clear understanding of his position. Certain essential facts which required immediate consideration were particularly irksome to him. How glad he would have been to be free from some cares, the neglect of which would have threatened him with complete, inevitable ruin.

He was particularly worried about Svidrigaïlov. From the time of Svidrigaïlov's too menacing and unmistakable words in Sonia's room at the moment of Katerina Ivanovna's death, the normal working of his mind seemed to break down. But although this new fact caused him extreme uneasiness, Raskolnikov was in no hurry for an explanation of it. At times, finding himself in a solitary and remote part of the town, in some wretched eating-house, sitting alone lost in thought, hardly knowing how he had come there, he suddenly thought of Svidrigaïlov. He recognised suddenly, clearly, and with dismay that he ought at once to come to an understanding with that man and to make what terms he could. Walking outside the city gates one day, he positively fancied that they had made an appointment to meet there.

During those days he went two or three times to see Sonia. She received him in bewilderment, even with dismay, and he could see that she was longing to ask him something. He was cruel to her, and she bore it in silence. Once he told her roughly that he might have to go away. She turned pale but said nothing.

He went to see Razumihin once. Razumihin was full of plans for the publishing venture, full of hope and energy. He talked about Dounia with shining eyes. Raskolnikov listened in silence, and Razumihin suddenly felt uneasy. "What's the matter with you, Rodya? You look as though you were going to your own funeral." "Perhaps I am," Raskolnikov answered, and smiled strangely.

Another time he woke up before daybreak lying on the ground under some bushes and could not at first understand how he had come there.

Chapter II

Porfiry Petrovitch came to Raskolnikov's room for the last time. He entered without knocking, sat down on a chair, and lit a cigarette. "Ah these cigarettes!" he ejaculated. "They are pernicious, positively pernicious, and yet I can't give them up!" He paused. "I've come to have it out with you, Rodion Romanovitch, my dear fellow! I owe you an explanation and must give it to you," he said with a slight smile, just patting Raskolnikov's knee. But almost at the same instant a serious and careworn look came into his face; to Raskolnikov's surprise, he saw a touch of sadness in it.

"A strange scene passed between us last time we met, Rodion Romanovitch," Porfiry began. "I behaved unfairly to you. I feel it. You remember how we parted? Your nerves were unhinged and your knees were shaking, and my nerves were unhinged and my knees were shaking."

Porfiry spoke without pretence, telling Raskolnikov plainly that he did not believe Nikolay's confession–the painter was a religious fanatic, one of those who wanted to "take suffering upon himself." He was a sectarian, influenced by the old convict faith. "Do you know what 'taking suffering' means among some of them? It's not suffering for anybody's benefit, but simply 'one must suffer.' To accept suffering, that is, and if it comes from the authorities, so much the better." Nikolay had confessed out of a need for suffering, not from guilt.

"I like you and genuinely wish you well," Porfiry said. He advised Raskolnikov to confess voluntarily–it would go better for him. "Life will bring you through. You need fresh air, fresh air, fresh air! What you need now is fresh air! You are still young, thank God. What do you want? You want fresh air, fresh air, fresh air!"

"So who do you think killed them?" Raskolnikov asked, his lips white and trembling.

"Why, you, Rodion Romanovitch! You killed them," Porfiry answered quietly, almost with sorrow. He said it simply, as though stating a fact long known to both of them.

Raskolnikov leapt up from the sofa. "It's not I!" he whispered.

"Yes, it is you, Rodion Romanovitch, it is you," Porfiry repeated gently but firmly. "You committed the murder." He explained that he had been watching, studying, piecing together every detail. "And then your article came into my hands, and I read it by candlelight, and I trembled."

He paused and looked at Raskolnikov with genuine feeling. "I know you don't believe me. But I am speaking the truth. I have thought about you a great deal, Rodion Romanovitch. You are still young, you have your whole life before you. What are you? A young man who has lost his way. You have a theory, a beautiful theory, but it has led you astray. You are not a Napoleon, Rodion Romanovitch. You are a man who has made a terrible mistake, and now you must pay for it. But the payment need not destroy you."

"Make up your mind to take your suffering. I know that it's not easy to believe, but give yourself up to life directly, without deliberation; don't be uneasy–it will carry you straight to the shore and set you on your feet. What shore? How can I tell? I only believe that you have much life before you." He promised that if Raskolnikov confessed within forty-eight hours, he would do everything in his power to make the sentence lighter. "I am not your enemy, believe me." Then he left, pausing at the door. "One more thing: don't put it off too long. Time does not wait."

Chapter III

Raskolnikov sought out Svidrigaïlov. He hurried to his lodgings, not knowing himself what he hoped from that man, but feeling that Svidrigaïlov had some hidden power over him. He found him in a tavern, sitting at a dirty little table, drinking champagne. Svidrigaïlov was glad to see him–"I told you we should come together," he said.

He spoke with cynical frankness about his past–his debts, his dead wife, his taste for very young girls. He had been in prison for debt; Marfa Petrovna had bought him out and married him, keeping him on a short leash for years with a document she held over him. "She was a good woman in her way," he said, "but she kept that document like a sword over my head."

He hinted at dark things–a servant named Philip who had hanged himself in his house ("a mystic subject," Svidrigaïlov called him), a deaf-and-dumb girl of fifteen who had drowned herself in a pond–but always with that air of cheerful indifference that made Raskolnikov's skin crawl. He told stories of his debauchery in Petersburg with relish–the dancing saloons, the young girls. "The peasants have vodka, the educated young people waste themselves in impossible dreams, and all the rest give themselves up to debauchery. From the first hour the town reeked of its familiar odours."

"We are birds of a feather," Svidrigaïlov told him, leaning back in his chair with a glass of champagne. "You killed an old woman for a theory; I pursue my pleasures. What's the difference? We both stepped over." He scrutinised Raskolnikov with some surprise. "If you come to that, you are a thorough cynic yourself. You've plenty to make you so. You can understand a great deal... and you can do a great deal too."

Raskolnikov was revolted. "Stop! Enough of your vile, nasty anecdotes, depraved, vile, sensual man!" he cried. But he could not break free. Svidrigaïlov held the power of his secret, and besides, there was something in the man that drew him–some dark kinship he could not deny.

Svidrigaïlov laughed heartily. "I say, but I am drunk, assez causé," he said. "It's been a pleasure." "I should rather think it must be a pleasure!" cried Raskolnikov. "No doubt it is a pleasure for a worn-out profligate to describe such adventures with a monstrous project of the same sort in his mind!"

"I sincerely regret not having had more talk with you," Svidrigaïlov said as they left the tavern. "But I shan't lose sight of you. Only wait a bit."

Chapter IV

Svidrigaïlov continued his stories. He told Raskolnikov about his first days back in Petersburg–the dancing saloons, the low haunts. "I chanced to be in a frightful den," he said, "and there was a cancan such as I never saw in my day. A little girl of thirteen, nicely dressed, dancing with a specialist in that line. Her mother was sitting on a chair by the wall. The girl was ashamed, blushed, at last felt insulted, and began to cry." He described how he had befriended the mother and daughter, offered to assist in the girl's education in French and dancing. "My offer was accepted with enthusiasm as an honour–and we are still friendly."

"Stop! Enough of your vile, nasty anecdotes!" Raskolnikov cried.

He laughed openly. "But you know I shall tell you these things on purpose, for the pleasure of hearing your outcries!" "I dare say. I can see I am ridiculous myself," muttered Raskolnikov angrily. "Schiller, you are a regular Schiller!" Svidrigaïlov laughed.

He revealed that he was now engaged to a girl of sixteen–the daughter of a poor family, with a round, fresh little face and a timid, childish laugh. The family was destitute; the mother was a widow, ill and foolish, with an older son who was a cripple. They regarded Svidrigaïlov's offer as a miracle of good fortune. He had already given them money and settled the arrangements. "She turns red like a sunset when I kiss her," he said. "I like that. You know, in these families, a girl is told from childhood that she must be grateful to her future husband."

He also revealed that Dounia had agreed to meet him alone, to hear what he had to say about her brother. He had written her a letter explaining that Raskolnikov had visited Sonia and that he, Svidrigaïlov, knew a great secret about her brother's future. Raskolnikov was alarmed. "You dare not! I am positive that you have not given up your designs on my sister!" Svidrigaïlov smiled. "What a fellow! I purposely refrained from referring to your affair, though I am devoured by curiosity." He told Raskolnikov he was going home to get some money, then to spend the evening at the Islands. Raskolnikov resolved to follow him and not let Dounia out of his sight.

Chapter V

Raskolnikov followed Svidrigaïlov through the streets. "What's this?" Svidrigaïlov cried, turning round. "I thought I said–" They stood for a minute facing each other, as though measuring their strength. "From all your half tipsy stories," Raskolnikov observed harshly, "I am positive that you have not given up your designs on my sister, but are pursuing them more actively than ever. I have learnt that my sister received a letter this morning." "It means that I am not going to lose sight of you now," Raskolnikov answered.

Svidrigaïlov went to his lodgings. Raskolnikov went to Sonia's, but she was not at home–she had gone to place the Marmeladov children in an orphanage, using Svidrigaïlov's money. He waited in agony, then learned that Dounia had indeed gone to Svidrigaïlov's lodgings.

Inside, Svidrigaïlov locked the door and told Dounia the truth: her brother was a murderer. He had overheard the confession through the wall. He showed her the proof–he knew every detail of the confession. "Your brother killed the old pawnbroker woman and her sister Lizaveta with an axe," he said. "I heard him confess it to Sofya Semyonovna through the wall." Dounia turned white. "I don't believe it! It's a lie! It's impossible!" she cried. "It is not a lie, Avdotya Romanovna. He told Sofya Semyonovna everything–how he did it, why he did it. I heard every word."

He offered to save Raskolnikov–to help him escape abroad, to arrange everything–if Dounia would consent to be his. "I love you infinitely," he said. "Let me kiss the hem of your dress. I can't bear the rustling of it. Tell me to do anything; I'll do it. I'll do the impossible. Whatever you believe in, I'll believe in too. I'll do anything–anything!"

Dounia sprang up from her chair, her eyes blazing with indignation. "Open the door at once! Let me out! You are a wretch!" When he refused, she backed away to the wall, her eyes blazing. She drew a revolver from her pocket and fired. The bullet grazed Svidrigaïlov's scalp and lodged in the wall. He stood still, laughed softly. "A miss! Shall I wait while you load again?" He took a step towards her. She fired again–a misfire. The cap snapped but the charge did not go off. She threw the revolver down.

Svidrigaïlov picked it up. A weight seemed to have rolled from his heart–and it was not merely the weight of the fear of death. It was the deliverance from another feeling, darker and more bitter, which he could not himself have defined.

"You don't love me!" he whispered. He saw it in her eyes–not hatred, which might have turned to love, but something worse: cold contempt, a shudder of loathing. She would never love him. Not now, not ever. A strange smile contorted his face–a pitiful, sad, weak smile, a smile of despair. He took a step back, paused, and drew the key from his pocket. "Take it! Make haste!" Dounia snatched the key, unlocked the door, and fled down the stairs like a madwoman.

Svidrigaïlov stood alone for a long time, lost in thought. He examined the revolver. There were two charges left. He thought a moment, put it in his pocket, took his hat, and went out.

Chapter VI

He spent that evening going from one low haunt to another. He drank, but the wine had no effect on him. He went to Sonia and gave her three thousand roubles in bonds–for herself and the children. "You will need it, for you are going to follow Rodion Romanovitch to Siberia. That's settled, isn't it?" Sonia looked at him wildly. "How do you know? How do you know that?" she whispered. "Ah, Sofya Semyonovna, what does it matter, so long as the money is there?" He told her about the orphanage arrangements for the children. He paused. "You know, Sofya Semyonovna, it would be a good thing if you were to go to him now. He needs you. Tell him I said so." Sonia looked at him with wide, frightened eyes. "And tell Rodion Romanovitch from me that I asked to be remembered to him."

He visited his young fiancée's family and left them fifteen thousand roubles, telling them the engagement was off. The mother wept and wrung her hands; the girl looked at him with her round, wondering eyes, not understanding. He kissed the girl on the forehead and went out.

Then he took a room in a wretched hotel near the river–the Adrianople. The room was tiny, stifling, under the stairs, with a locked door and a candle guttering on the table. He lay on the bed but could not sleep. Thoughts came in fragments, disconnected, incoherent. He got up, wrapped himself in a blanket, and opened the window. The rain was driving in. He closed it again.

He was tormented by nightmares. In one, he found a little girl of five, soaked and shivering, weeping and lost. He took her to his room, laid her on the bed, covered her up. She fell asleep at once. But as he watched, her face changed–her cheeks flushed crimson, her eyelashes fluttered, and she opened her eyes, which looked at him with a burning, shameless stare. It was not a child's face; it was the face of a depraved woman, brazen and inviting. She was laughing, laughing openly, stretching out her arms to him. "Accursed creature!" he cried, raising his hand. He woke in horror and disgust.

He sat on the bed, shivering. "Perhaps there are spiders there, too," he thought suddenly, and shuddered. He remembered his own words about eternity–"one little room, like a bath-house in the country, black and grimy and spiders in every corner." He laughed bitterly. "And that's all eternity is."

He got up, put on his wet overcoat, felt in his pocket for the revolver, and went out into the fog and the rain. The Neva had risen during the night; the water was cold and dirty. A milky, thick fog hung over the city. He walked slowly, deliberately, as though he had all the time in the world. He walked to a large building with a watchtower. A small man in a copper Achilles helmet was standing at the closed gate, wrapped in a grey soldier's coat, shivering with cold.

"What do you want here?" the watchman asked, looking him over.

"Nothing, brother. Good morning."

"This isn't the place."

"I am going to foreign parts, brother."

"To foreign parts?"

"To America." He put the revolver to his right temple. The watchman stared. "I say, this is not the place for that!"

"This is the place. It's all the same." He pulled the trigger.

Chapter VII

The same day, about seven o'clock in the evening, Raskolnikov went to his mother's and sister's lodging—the lodging in Bakaleyev's house. He went in at the gate and up the stairs slowly, as though still hesitating. But nothing would have turned him back.

His mother was overjoyed to see him. She had been expecting him all day. Dounia was there too. His mother sat beside him, trembling and weeping with joy, holding his hand, kissing it. He knelt before her and kissed her feet. "I have come to assure you that I have always loved you," he said. "I have come to tell you plainly that though you will be unhappy, you must believe that your son loves you now more than himself. All that you thought about me—that I am cruel and heartless—is not true. I have never ceased to love you." She held him, trembling, pressing him to her heart. "Rodya, my darling, my first-born, you are just as you were when you were little, when you used to come to me and hug me and kiss me. When your father was living, we were happy just having you with us, and when I buried your father, how often we wept together at his grave!"

He looked at her–this old woman who had given him everything, who had starved herself to send him money, who had sacrificed her daughter for his sake. And he had repaid her with silence, with coldness, with crime. The weight of it was almost more than he could bear.

She was praying for him. She showed him a letter she had begun writing to him. "I began writing to you three days ago, but I couldn't finish it. I kept thinking you would come yourself." She was trembling with joy and anxiety.

"Mother, whatever happens, whatever you hear about me, will you love me just as you do now?" he asked.

"Rodya, Rodya, what is the matter? How can you ask me? Who will tell me anything about you? I shan't believe anybody, I shall drive them away."

He went to Dounia. She was waiting for him, pale and agitated. "Brother, what are you going to do?" she asked.

"I am going to give myself up," he said.

She embraced him, weeping. "Isn't this half your expiation already—that you are going to face this great suffering?"

"Suffering? Whose? Mine?" he cried. "I am going because I am a coward and a wretch, not because of any conviction. I don't even know whether I shall stand at the crossroads and confess." But even as he said it, tears were streaming down his face.

"Go to Sonia," Dounia whispered. "She needs you."

Chapter VIII

When he went into Sonia's room, it was already getting dark. All day Sonia had been waiting for him in terrible anxiety. She was sitting in her shabby dress and old hat, her face pale and agitated. She looked at him silently, as though she already knew everything.

She took from the drawer a cypress-wood cross—Lizaveta's cross. She and Lizaveta had exchanged crosses; they had been friends. "We will go to suffer together," Sonia said, "and together we will bear our cross." She put it round his neck. He was about to say something, but checked himself. "Is this the symbol of my taking suffering on myself?" he thought. He almost smiled. But he took the cross.

"And now I'll go," he said. He had meant to go straight to the police station, but on the way his legs carried him to the Hay Market. At the crossroads he remembered Sonia's words: "Go to the crossroads, bow down to the people, kiss the earth, for you have sinned against it too, and say aloud to the whole world, 'I am a murderer!'"

He knelt down in the middle of the square. He bowed to the earth. He kissed the filthy earth with bliss and rapture. A roar of laughter rose from the crowd around him. "He's drunk!" someone said. "He's bowing down to all the earth," said another. "He's saying goodbye to his children and his country." The word "murderer" died on his lips. He could not say it.

He raised himself and saw Sonia. She was standing a little way off, half hidden behind a wooden booth, following him on his last journey, pale and horror-stricken, looking at him wildly. In that moment he felt and knew, once for all, that she was with him for ever and would follow him to the ends of the earth.

He went to the police station. His legs carried him there almost mechanically. Ilya Petrovitch, the explosive lieutenant, was chattering about something—about a man who had shot himself that morning. "Svidrigaïlov," Raskolnikov heard. He tried to speak but could not get the words out. He turned and went out. On the stairs he saw Sonia, pale as death, looking at him with a wild expression. He stood still before her. There was a look of poignant agony, of despair, in her face. She clasped her hands. His lips worked in an ugly, meaningless smile. He stood still a minute, grinned, and went back to the police office.

Ilya Petrovitch had sat down and was rummaging among some papers. Raskolnikov walked right to the table, leaned his hand on it, tried to say something, but could not; only incoherent sounds were audible.

"You are feeling ill? A chair! Here, sit down! Some water!"

Raskolnikov refused the water with his hand, and softly and brokenly, but distinctly said:

"It was I killed the old pawnbroker woman and her sister Lizaveta with an axe and robbed them."

Ilya Petrovitch opened his mouth. People ran up on all sides. Raskolnikov repeated his statement.

Epilogue

I

Siberia. On the banks of a broad solitary river stands a town, one of the administrative centres of Russia; in the town there is a fortress; in the fortress there is a prison. In the prison the second-class convict Rodion Raskolnikov has been confined for nine months. Almost a year and a half has passed since his crime.

His trial had gone smoothly. The criminal adhered exactly, firmly, and clearly to his statement. He did not confuse nor misrepresent the facts, nor soften them in his own interest, nor omit the smallest detail. He explained the hiding of the purse under the stone without even having looked at its contents—a detail that struck the lawyers as incredible and helped establish that his mental faculties had been temporarily deranged. There turned out to be three hundred and seventeen roubles and sixty copecks in the purse; some of the notes lying uppermost had suffered from the damp. They were a long while trying to discover why the accused should tell a lie about this when about everything else he had made a truthful confession. Finally some lawyers admitted it was possible he had really not looked into the purse, and drew the deduction that the crime could only have been committed through temporary mental derangement, through homicidal mania, without object or the pursuit of gain.

The sentence was unexpectedly light: eight years of penal servitude in the second class, owing to his voluntary confession, his poverty, his illness, and the fact that he had not made use of the stolen goods. It was established that he had given money to the Marmeladov family, had rescued two children from a burning house years before and been burnt in doing so, and had supported a sick fellow student and his decrepit old father for six months until both died.

His mother fell ill during the trial. Dounia and Razumihin got her out of Petersburg; she never fully understood what had happened—they told her Rodya had gone abroad on business. She fell into a strange illness, a sort of derangement, and died, calling for her son. Dounia married Razumihin; their wedding was quiet and sad. Porfiry Petrovitch and Zossimov were among the guests. Razumihin had plans. He was determined to move to Siberia within two years, to settle in the town where Raskolnikov was imprisoned, and to begin a new life there. He had already begun saving money. "We shall all live together," he told Dounia. "You and I and Rodya, when he comes out." Dounia smiled through her tears. She believed in him absolutely.

Sonia followed him there at once, settling in the town near the prison, writing to Dounia regularly. She found sewing work and made herself indispensable to many families, though she did not mention that through her the authorities took an interest in Raskolnikov and his task was lightened.

II

In prison, Raskolnikov was sullen and unsociable. He was ill for a long time after his arrival. He did not repent. What tormented him was not guilt but wounded pride—shame that he, Raskolnikov, had come to grief so blindly, hopelessly, and stupidly, and must submit to the "meaninglessness" of a sentence. "Why does my action strike them as so horrible?" he asked himself. "Because it was a crime? What is meant by crime? My conscience is at rest." He could not understand why, at the moment when he stood at the crossroads, he had felt such bliss.

The other convicts did not like him. They avoided him, distrusted him. "You are a gentleman," they said. "You shouldn't have gone to work with an axe; it's not a gentleman's work." They even attacked him once in church, shouting: "You're an atheist! You don't believe in God! You ought to be killed!" He was bewildered by their hatred. But they loved Sonia, who came to see him at the prison gates. They called her "Little mother Sofya Semyonovna" and took off their caps to her.

He was cruel to Sonia. He treated her visits with contempt and silence. She bore it all without complaint, asking nothing, accepting everything.

Then Sonia fell ill and could not come for a time. He was miserable, anxious, and sent to inquire about her every day. When he learned she was recovering, his heart felt suddenly lighter.

One morning, early in spring—the second week after Easter—he was sitting on the riverbank, gazing at the wide, deserted steppe. From the high bank a broad landscape opened before him. On the further bank, nomads' tents were faintly visible. There freedom was, there other people lived, utterly unlike those here; there time itself seemed to stand still, as though the age of Abraham and his flocks had not passed.

Sonia came and sat down beside him. She held out her hand timidly. He took it and did not let go. Something seemed to seize him and fling him at her feet. He wept and threw his arms round her knees. She understood at once that he loved her—loved her infinitely—and that at last the moment had come.

They wanted to speak but could not; tears stood in their eyes. They were both pale and thin; but those sick pale faces were bright with the dawn of a new future, of a full resurrection into a new life. They were renewed by love; the heart of each held infinite sources of life for the heart of the other.

He knew that he would have to pay dearly for this happiness. It could not be bought cheaply, it must be paid for with great and heroic effort in the future. Seven years of penal servitude still lay before him. But he had risen again, and he knew it; he felt it in all his being. And she—she lived only in his life.

That evening, when the prison gates were locked, he lay on his plank bed and thought of her. He even fancied that all the convicts, who had been his enemies, looked at him differently now.

Under his pillow lay the New Testament. He picked it up mechanically. It was hers; it was the book from which she had read to him about the raising of Lazarus. "Can her convictions not be mine now? Her feelings, her aspirations at least..."

But that is the beginning of a new story—the story of the gradual renewal of a man, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his passing from one world into another, of his initiation into a new unknown life. That might be the subject of a new story, but our present story is ended.