Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky (mini ebook reader .TXT) 📗

all sorts of queer people living there. And I went there about a scandalous business. It’s cheap, though …’

‘I could not, of course, find out so much about it, for I am a stranger in Petersburg myself,’ Pyotr Petrovitch replied huffily. ‘However, the two rooms are exceedingly clean, and as it is for so short a time … I have already taken a permanent, that is, our future flat,’ he said, addressing Raskolnikov, ‘and I am having it done up. And meanwhile I am myself cramped for room in a lodging 270 of 967

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with my friend Andrey Semyonovitch Lebeziatnikov, in the flat of Madame Lippevechsel; it was he who told me of Bakaleyev’s house, too …’

‘Lebeziatnikov?’ said Raskolnikov slowly, as if recalling something.

‘Yes, Andrey Semyonovitch Lebeziatnikov, a clerk in the Ministry. Do you know him?’

‘Yes … no,’ Raskolnikov answered.

‘Excuse me, I fancied so from your inquiry. I was once his guardian…. A very nice young man and advanced. I like to meet young people: one learns new things from them.’ Luzhin looked round hopefully at them all.

‘How do you mean?’ asked Razumihin.

‘In the most serious and essential matters,’ Pyotr Petrovitch replied, as though delighted at the question.

‘You see, it’s ten years since I visited Petersburg. All the novelties, reforms, ideas have reached us in the provinces, but to see it all more clearly one must be in Petersburg.

And it’s my notion that you observe and learn most by watching the younger generation. And I confess I am delighted …’

‘At what?’

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‘Your question is a wide one. I may be mistaken, but I fancy I find clearer views, more, so to say, criticism, more practicality …’

‘That’s true,’ Zossimov let drop.

‘Nonsense! There’s no practicality.’ Razumihin flew at him. ‘Practicality is a difficult thing to find; it does not drop down from heaven. And for the last two hundred years we have been divorced from all practical life. Ideas, if you like, are fermenting,’ he said to Pyotr Petrovitch, ‘and desire for good exists, though it’s in a childish form, and honesty you may find, although there are crowds of brigands. Anyway, there’s no practicality. Practicality goes well shod.’

‘I don’t agree with you,’ Pyotr Petrovitch replied, with evident enjoyment. ‘Of course, people do get carried away and make mistakes, but one must have indulgence; those mistakes are merely evidence of enthusiasm for the cause and of abnormal external environment. If little has been done, the time has been but short; of means I will not speak. It’s my personal view, if you care to know, that something has been accomplished already. New valuable ideas, new valuable works are circulating in the place of our old dreamy and romantic authors. Literature is taking a maturer form, many injurious prejudice have been 272 of 967

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rooted up and turned into ridicule…. In a word, we have cut ourselves off irrevocably from the past, and that, to my thinking, is a great thing …’

‘He’s learnt it by heart to show off!’ Raskolnikov pronounced suddenly.

‘What?’ asked Pyotr Petrovitch, not catching his words; but he received no reply.

‘That’s all true,’ Zossimov hastened to interpose.

‘Isn’t it so?’ Pyotr Petrovitch went on, glancing affably at Zossimov. ‘You must admit,’ he went on, addressing Razumihin with a shade of triumph and

superciliousness—he almost added ‘young man’—‘that there is an advance, or, as they say now, progress in the name of science and economic truth …’

‘A commonplace.’

‘No, not a commonplace! Hitherto, for instance, if I were told, ‘love thy neighbour,’ what came of it?’ Pyotr Petrovitch went on, perhaps with excessive haste. ‘It came to my tearing my coat in half to share with my neighbour and we both were left half naked. As a Russian proverb has it, ‘Catch several hares and you won’t catch one.’

Science now tells us, love yourself before all men, for everything in the world rests on self-interest. You love yourself and manage your own affairs properly and your 273 of 967

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coat remains whole. Economic truth adds that the better private affairs are organised in society—the more whole coats, so to say—the firmer are its foundations and the better is the common welfare organised too. Therefore, in acquiring wealth solely and exclusively for myself, I am acquiring, so to speak, for all, and helping to bring to pass my neighbour’s getting a little more than a torn coat; and that not from private, personal liberality, but as a consequence of the general advance. The idea is simple, but unhappily it has been a long time reaching us, being hindered by idealism and sentimentality. And yet it would seem to want very little wit to perceive it …’

‘Excuse me, I’ve very little wit myself,’ Razumihin cut in sharply, ‘and so let us drop it. I began this discussion with an object, but I’ve grown so sick during the last three years of this chattering to amuse oneself, of this incessant flow of commonplaces, always the same, that, by Jove, I blush even when other people talk like that. You are in a hurry, no doubt, to exhibit your acquirements; and I don’t blame you, that’s quite pardonable. I only wanted to find out what sort of man you are, for so many unscrupulous people have got hold of the progressive cause of late and have so distorted in their own interests everything they 274 of 967

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touched, that the whole cause has been dragged in the mire. That’s enough!’

‘Excuse me, sir,’ said Luzhin, affronted, and speaking with excessive dignity. ‘Do you mean to suggest so unceremoniously that I too …’

‘Oh, my dear sir … how could I? … Come, that’s enough,’ Razumihin concluded, and he turned abruptly to Zossimov to continue their previous conversation.

Pyotr Petrovitch had the good sense to accept the disavowal. He made up his mind to take leave in another minute or two.

‘I trust our acquaintance,’ he said, addressing Raskolnikov, ‘may, upon your recovery and in view of the circumstances of which you are aware, become closer

… Above all, I hope for your return to health …’

Raskolnikov did not even turn his head. Pyotr

Petrovitch began getting up from his chair.

‘One of her customers must have killed her,’ Zossimov declared positively.

‘Not a doubt of it,’ replied Razumihin. ‘Porfiry doesn’t give his opinion, but is examining all who have left pledges with her there.’

‘Examining them?’ Raskolnikov asked aloud.

‘Yes. What then?’

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‘Nothing.’

‘How does he get hold of them?’ asked Zossimov.

‘Koch has given the names of some of them, other names are on the wrappers of the pledges and some have come forward of themselves.’

‘It must have been a cunning and practised ruffian! The boldness of it! The coolness!’

‘That’s just what it wasn’t!’ interposed Razumihin.

‘That’s what throws you all off the scent. But I maintain that he is not cunning, not practised, and probably this was his first crime! The supposition that it was a calculated crime and a cunning criminal doesn’t work. Suppose him to have been inexperienced, and it’s clear that it was only a chance that saved him—and chance may do anything.

Why, he did not foresee obstacles, perhaps! And how did he set to work? He took jewels worth ten or twenty roubles, stuffing his pockets with them, ransacked the old woman’s trunks, her rags—and they found fifteen hundred roubles, besides notes, in a box in the top drawer of the chest! He did not know how to rob; he could only murder. It was his first crime, I assure you, his first crime; he lost his head. And he got off more by luck than good counsel!’

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‘You are talking of the murder of the old pawnbroker, I believe?’ Pyotr Petrovitch put in, addressing Zossimov.

He was standing, hat and gloves in hand, but before departing he felt disposed to throw off a few more intellectual phrases. He was evidently anxious to make a favourable impression and his vanity overcame his prudence.

‘Yes. You’ve heard of it?’

‘Oh, yes, being in the neighbourhood.’

‘Do you know the details?’

‘I can’t say that; but another circumstance interests me in the case— the whole question, so to say. Not to speak of the fact that crime has been greatly on the increase among the lower classes during the last five years, not to speak of the cases of robbery and arson everywhere, what strikes me as the strangest thing is that in the higher classes, too, crime is increasing proportionately. In one place one hears of a student’s robbing the mail on the high road; in another place people of good social position forge false banknotes; in Moscow of late a whole gang has been captured who used to forge lottery tickets, and one of the ringleaders was a lecturer in universal history; then our secretary abroad was murdered from some obscure motive of gain…. And if this old woman, the pawnbroker, has 277 of 967

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been murdered by someone of a higher class in society—

for peasants don’t pawn gold trinkets— how are we to explain this demoralisation of the civilised part of our society?’

‘There are many economic changes,’ put in Zossimov.

‘How are we to explain it?’ Razumihin caught him up.

‘It might be explained by our inveterate impracticality.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘What answer had your lecturer in Moscow to make to the question why he was forging notes? ‘Everybody is getting rich one way or another, so I want to make haste to get rich too.’ I don’t remember the exact words, but the upshot was that he wants money for nothing, without waiting or working! We’ve grown used to having everything ready-made, to walking on crutches, to having our food chewed for us. Then the great hour struck,[*]

and every man showed himself in his true colours.’

[*] The emancipation of the serfs in 1861 is meant.—

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE.

‘But morality? And so to speak, principles …’

‘But why do you worry about it?’ Raskolnikov

interposed suddenly. ‘It’s in accordance with your theory!’

‘In accordance with my theory?’

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‘Why, carry out logically the theory you were

advocating just now, and it follows that people may be killed …’

‘Upon my word!’ cried Luzhin.

‘No, that’s not so,’ put in Zossimov.

Raskolnikov lay with a white face and twitching upper lip, breathing painfully.

‘There’s a measure in all things,’ Luzhin went on superciliously. ‘Economic ideas are not an incitement to murder, and one has but to suppose …’

‘And is it true,’ Raskolnikov interposed once more suddenly, again in a voice quivering with fury and delight in insulting him, ‘is it true that you told your fiancée …

within an hour of her acceptance, that what pleased you most … was that she was a beggar … because it was better to raise a wife from poverty, so that you may have complete control over her, and reproach her with your being her benefactor?’

‘Upon my word,’ Luzhin cried wrathfully and irritably, crimson with confusion, ‘to distort my words in this way!

Excuse me, allow me to assure you that the report which has reached you, or rather, let me say, has been conveyed to you, has no foundation in truth, and I … suspect who

… in a word … this arrow … in a word, your mamma …

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She seemed to me in other things, with all her excellent qualities, of a somewhat high-flown and romantic way of thinking…. But I was a thousand miles from supposing that she would misunderstand and misrepresent things in so fanciful a way…. And indeed … indeed …’

‘I tell you what,’ cried Raskolnikov, raising himself on his pillow and fixing his piercing, glittering eyes upon him, ‘I tell you what.’

‘What?’ Luzhin stood still, waiting with a defiant and offended face. Silence lasted for some seconds.

‘Why, if ever again … you dare to mention a single word … about my mother … I shall send you flying downstairs!’

‘What’s the matter with you?’ cried Razumihin.

‘So that’s how it is?’ Luzhin