Crime and Punishment

 Crime and Punishment

 Fyodor Dostoevsky

 

What do people fear most? A new step, a new word of their own 

 

But soon he seemed to sink deep in thought, or even, to be more precise, into a kind of trance, and he walked on without noticing his surroundings, nor indeed wishing to notice them. 

 

"They've got used to it. Had a little cry and got used to it. There's nothing human scum can't get used to!" He sank into thought. "But if that's not true," he suddenly exclaimed without meaning to, "if man isn't actually a scoundrel, isn't actually scum, the whole human race, I mean, then all else is new preconception, just fears that have been foisted upon us, and there are no barriers, and that's exactly how it should be!' 

 

Life be hanged, so long as our precious loved ones are happy 

 

He taunted and tortured himself with such questions, and even found some pleasure in doing so. These questions were not new, though, and they didn't come from nowhere; they were old, ancient sources of pain. They had begun tearing at his heart long before and had torn it to pieces. All his current anguish had taken root in him in the far distant past, grown and accreted, until now it had ripened and distilled into the form of a dreadful, wild, fantastical question which had worn out his heart and mind, demanding to be solved. Clearly, now was not the time for agonizing and passive suffering, for mere deliberation about the fact that the questions permitted no solution; something had to be done, the sooner the better. He had to decide at all costs on something, anything, or else... 

'or else renounce life completely!' he suddenly cried in sheer frenzy. 'Meekly accept fate as it is, once and for all and stifle everything inside me, renouncing any right to act, to live, to love!' 

'do you really understand, good sir, what it means to have nowhere left to go?' The question put to him yesterday by Marmeldov suddenly came to mind. 'For everyman must have at least somewhere he can go...' 

 

His tired eyes, accustomed to the dust of the city, to the mortar and to the massive, cramping, crushing buildings, delighted at first in the greenery and the freshness. The closeness, the stench, the drinking dens -all had been left behind. 

 

He realized what he was doing, but couldn't help himself. A terrible word twitched on his lips, like the latch on the door that time: it was on the verge of breaking loose, being released, being uttered! 

 

It was a worried, serious Razumikhin who woke some time before eight the next morning. He found himself suddenly plagued by a multitude of new and unexpected uncertainties. Never before had he imagined waking in such a state. He remembered yesterday's events down to the very last detail and realized that something out of the ordinary had happened to him, that he had absorbed an impression the like of which he had never known or knew existed. At the same time he was all too aware that the dream that had taken fire in his mind was utterly unrealistic - so unrealistic he even felt ashamed of it and hurriedly turned his attention to the other, more pressing concerns and uncertainties bestowed on him by the previous day, 'may it be forever cursed'. 

 

Still, even this pale and sullen face seemed to light up momentarily when his mother and sister walked in, though this merely lent to his features a greater intensity of torment, in place of the anguished distraction of before. The light faded quickly, but the torment remained, and Zosimov, observing and studying his patient with all the youthful enthusiasm of a doctor who has only just begun to practise, was surprised to see him react to his family's arrival not with joy but with a kind of grim, hidden resolve to endure an hour or two of torture that could be put off no longer. Later, he noticed how almost every word in the ensuing conversation seemed to touch a nerve in his patient or irritate a wound; but at the same time he was amazed by his self-control, by the new-found ability of yesterday's monomaniac to conceal his feelings, when only the day before the slightest word had been enough to drive him to the edge of fury. 

 

For Raskolnikov a strange time had begun: it was as if a fog had suddenly descended, trapping him in hopeless, oppressive isolation. Recalling this time much later, he surmised that he’d experienced, now and then, a dimming of his consciousness, and that this had continued, with a few intervals, right up to the final catastrophe. He was absolutely convinced that he'd been mistaken about many things, such as the duration and timing of certain events. At any rate, when he subsequently recalled what had happened and tried to make sense of it all, he learned a great deal about himself, guided as he now was by external information. He had, for example, mixed up one event with another, and considered a third to be the consequence of something that had happened solely in his imagination. At times, he'd been possessed by morbid, excruciating anxiety, which could even mutate into sheer panic. But he also remembered that minutes, hours and even, perhaps, days had been filled with an apathy that possesed him as if in direct contrast to his previous fear- an apathy that resembled the morbid, indifferent state occasionally experienced by the dying. On the whole it was as if, during these final days, he himself had been trying to run away from a clear and full understanding of his situation; certain crucial facts that needed to be explained there and then weighed especially heavily upon him; but how glad he would have been to cast off some of his worries and flee - even if to forget them, in such a situation as his, threatened him with total and inevitable ruin. 

 

What we've got here, sir, is a fantastical, dark deed, a modern deed, a deed of our time, when the heart of man has clouded over; when there's talk of "renewal" through bloodshed; when people preach about anything and everything from a position of comfort. What we have here are bookish dreams, sir, a heart stirred up by theories, a visible determination to take the first step, but determination of a particular kind-as if he were throwing himself off a cliff or a bell tower, and when he did get to the scene of the crime he hadn't a clue how he'd got there. Forgot to close the door behind him, but still did it, still murdered two people, in accordance with the theory. Murdered, but didn't manage to take the money, and what he did grab he hid beneath a stone  

 

Yes, he was glad, very glad, that there was no one else, that he was alone with his mother. As if, after this long and dreadful time, his heart had suddenly softened, all at once. He fell before her and kissed her feet; embracing, they wept. And she wasn't surprised and she asked no questions. She had long understood that something dreadful was happening to her son, and now the terrible moment, whatever it was, had come. 

 

Fear of aesthetics is the first sign of weakness 

 

The sun, meanwhile, was already setting. She stood sadly in front of the window and stared out- but all that could be seen through the glass was the unpainted wall of the neighboring building. 

 

In the present: pointless, purposeless anxiety; in the future: an endless sacrifice by which nothing was to be gained- this was what the world had in store for him. 

 

"And, of course, plenty of humanity's benefactors, who never inherited power but grabbed it for themselves, should also have been executed after taking their very first step. But those people coped with the step they took, which is why they are right, but I couldn't cope with mine, so I had the right to take it" 

That was the only crime he acknowledged: that he hadn't coped and had turned himself in 

[Notes] "The two basic symptoms of melancholia were exaggeration of simple events into singular and omnious occurrences, and episodes of unfounded fear", while "hypochondria was generally based on real physical complaints, with effects greatly exaggerated by the patient" ~ James L. Rice