1,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: e-artnow Collections
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Masterworks of 19th-Century Russia – 3 Classic Russian Moral Novels presents an exquisite compilation that celebrates the vast and profound landscape of Russian literary brilliance. Each novel showcases the intricate and philosophical exploration of morality that dominated 19th-century Russian literature, a time when the nation grappled with profound social, religious, and existential questions. Readers are invited to navigate through a rich tapestry of narrative styles that range from intricate psychological drama to incisive social critique, drawing them into the enduring quest for truth and righteousness that characterizes Russian literary tradition. The anthology brings together titans of Russian literature—Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky—whose writings embody the fusion of historical narrative and deep moral inquiry. These authors are seminal figures in the canon, having shaped the literary landscapes not only of their own country but also of the world. Their works resonate with the movements of their time, such as Russian Realism and the intellectual currents of Orthodoxy and revolution, rendering a portrait of a society on the brink of transformation. This collection embodies a dialogue among diverse Russian voices, each contributing to a tapestry that challenges, provokes, and inspires. For the avid reader and scholar alike, this anthology is a gateway into the complexities and contradictions of human morality as explored by two of Russia's most esteemed authors. It offers an invaluable opportunity to experience the confluence of aesthetic beauty and philosophical depth, providing insight into the souls and psyches of 19th-century Russia. Readers will find themselves enlightened by the nuanced perspectives presented, fostering an appreciation for the rich heritage and enduring relevance of Russian literature.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
Ähnliche
Masterworks of 19th-Century Russia – 3 Classic Russian Moral Novels
Table of Contents
Introduction
Curatorial Vision
This collection brings together Crime and Punishment, The Death of Ivan Ilych, and The Brothers Karamazov to foreground the Russian novel as a crucible of moral inquiry. Across these works, conscience is tested against necessity, social pressure, and spiritual doubt, while suffering becomes a site of revelation rather than mere affliction. The chosen triad distills the breadth of nineteenth‑century Russian thought into intimate narrative encounters—criminal resolve, mortal awakening, and familial trial. Presented together, the novels allow readers to trace how questions of guilt, judgment, and redemption pass from the solitary self to the household and, ultimately, to the problem of faith.
The through-line uniting these books is a sustained exploration of responsibility: what one owes to others, to the law, and to a transcendent order. Each work dramatizes the collision between radical autonomy and the claims of community. Crime and Punishment interrogates instrumental reasoning and moral consequence; The Brothers Karamazov turns inquiry into a public and spiritual ordeal; The Death of Ivan Ilych compresses the entire question into the revelation that mortality clarifies value. Together, they chart the passage from calculation to conscience, from theory to lived cost, insisting that ethical knowledge must be embodied, suffered, and patiently worked through.
Our aim is to illuminate a moral arc that traverses crime, judgment, and the confrontation with death. Arranged as a triadic conversation, the volume positions Crime and Punishment as an inquiry into solitary transgression, The Death of Ivan Ilych as a concentrated reckoning with finitude, and The Brothers Karamazov as a vast meditation on familial and social responsibility. This sequence is not chronological argument but thematic scaffolding, designed to show how private motives widen into communal consequence. By placing a lucid meditation on mortality between two sprawling ethical dramas, the collection underscores how fear of death reframes freedom and duty.
This gathering differs from encountering each novel in isolation by inviting comparative attention. Read side by side, the books sharpen one another’s questions: interior confession gains dimension next to institutional judgment; public scandal acquires intimacy beside a bedside awakening. The collection encourages mapping of recurring images—rooms, doorways, courts, faces in extremis—and noticing how narrative tempo shifts from feverish interiority to spare clarity to polyphonic amplitude. The result is a composite portrait of moral life that no single work, however capacious, can wholly provide, emphasizing resonance and counterpoint rather than linear summary or reduction to a single interpretive key.
Thematic & Aesthetic Interplay
Each text answers the others by staging confession and judgment at different scales. In Crime and Punishment, pressure gathers within a conscience that seeks a rational justification; in The Brothers Karamazov, inquiry disperses across competing voices who test one another in public and private arenas; in The Death of Ivan Ilych, the verdict arises quietly from an encounter with finitude. The movement from interrogation to illumination is not linear; it oscillates, as if conscience requires both exposure and privacy. The dialogue across works teaches that truth emerges through argument, solitude, and the stern candor of mortality.
Recurring motifs knit the novels into a recognizably shared world: thresholds and closed rooms; illness and fever; legal process and social scandal; the almost tactile weight of money; the stubborn plea of compassion. Each motif carries ethical freight. A door frames the choice to enter another’s suffering; a courtroom or sickroom becomes a theater of responsibility; money measures intentions against necessity. Spiritual doubt and the allure of abstract systems collide with the claims of ordinary goodness. Across the three works, grace is neither sentimental nor automatic; it must be wrestled from error, grief, and the humility learned under limit.
Their contrasts in tone generate a dynamic conversation. Crime and Punishment is taut, fevered, and analytic, a study in consequence paced by suspenseful inquiry. The Death of Ivan Ilych is distilled and unsparing, achieving breadth through concentration and clarity. The Brothers Karamazov is capacious and polyphonic, expanding moral conflict into a drama of ideas, family, and society. These differences are complementary rather than divisive, offering multiple vantage points on responsibility and freedom. Taken together, the works inaugurate a rhythm: intensity, lucidity, vastness. The cadence itself becomes an argument about how moral understanding grows—from crisis, through insight, toward community.
Influence also travels within the selection. The Brothers Karamazov revisits problems first staged in Crime and Punishment, transforming the solitary crisis of conscience into a contested forum where voices collide, a widening of scrutiny from individual act to communal fate. The earlier novel’s psychological investigation becomes a template for larger debate, while echoes of confession, temptation, and judgment reappear in altered registers. In conversation with these pressures, The Death of Ivan Ilych offers a crucial counterpoint: it strips away spectacle to suggest that moral clarity may come not through argument alone but through facing mortality without evasions.
Enduring Impact & Critical Reception
The collection remains vital because it articulates perennial questions about freedom, law, and meaning with uncommon intensity. Its psychological acuity enriches ethical reflection, while its attention to institutions—household, court, community—keeps conscience anchored in concrete life. The novels scrutinize whether suffering educates or merely wounds, and whether remorse can transform desire. By bringing these pressures into narrative, the books provide a grammar for thinking about responsibility across personal, civic, and spiritual dimensions. Their insights travel beyond the nineteenth century without losing historical texture, modeling a seriousness equal to crises of violence, illness, and the search for justice.
Critical reception has long emphasized the singular force of these works within the tradition of the novel. Crime and Punishment is widely read as a landmark investigation of guilt and rationalization. The Death of Ivan Ilych stands as a touchstone for literature that treats mortality as philosophical event rather than mere subject matter. The Brothers Karamazov is frequently regarded as an ambitious synthesis of narrative depth and speculative reach. Together, they are repeatedly cited as high points of artistic achievement, their characters and dilemmas becoming reference points for later discussions of psychology, ethics, and the possibility of spiritual renewal.
Their cultural afterlives are equally notable. The novels have inspired dramatic, cinematic, and musical interpretations, and they circulate widely in classrooms and public discourse. Quotations, scenes, and dilemmas are invoked in arguments about punishment, forgiveness, faith, and the meaning of a good life. Philosophical and theological debates repeatedly turn to these narratives as test cases, while writers across traditions adapt their strategies of confession, courtroom confrontation, and bedside revelation. Such afterlives do not exhaust the books’ significance; they attest to an unusual capacity to generate new questions, even as they continue to unsettle settled opinions about justice and mercy.
Gathered here, the three novels form an ethical laboratory for thinking about crime, death, and the possibility of transformed life. Their conversation refracts the pressures of nineteenth‑century Russia into enduring inquiries about conscience and community. Reading across them encourages patience, attentiveness to motive and consequence, and a refusal to separate private feeling from public duty. The collection’s value lies in its orchestration of difference: claustrophobic intensity, crystalline brevity, panoramic debate. Together they disclose a human drama in which responsibility is never abstract, and hope is forged through honest reckoning with error, suffering, and the hard-won courage to change.
Historical Context
Socio-Political Landscape
Mid-nineteenth-century Russia was an autocratic empire governed by the Romanov dynasty, a regime balancing rapid modernization with tight surveillance. Censorship shaped the print culture in which Crime and Punishment appeared in 1866 and The Brothers Karamazov in 1879–80, while The Death of Ivan Ilych emerged in 1886 amid debates about duty and conscience. St. Petersburg, a planned imperial capital, embodied both bureaucratic order and urban dislocation. Public controversies over poverty, drunkenness, and the moral mission of the intelligentsia filled salons and journals. These works probe that charged atmosphere, setting private spiritual crises against a backdrop of police scrutiny, administrative hierarchy, and restless social aspiration.
The Emancipation of the serfs in 1861 reconfigured landholding, labor, and class identity, unleashing expectations and disappointments that broke old loyalties without creating immediate security. Former serfs confronted debt and communal obligations; impoverished gentry struggled to preserve status; urban migrants sought precarious livelihoods. Crime and Punishment’s crowded tenements and anxious student milieu register the frictions of a society between orders, while The Brothers Karamazov stages conflicts over inheritance, authority, and intergenerational revolt. The Death of Ivan Ilych examines the career pathways of a post-reform officialdom, revealing the costs of advancement in a system that prized decorum and procedure as much as justice.
Judicial reforms of 1864 transformed Russia’s legal landscape by instituting public trials, adversarial procedure, and juries, even as political cases often remained exceptional. Investigating magistrates, prosecutors, and defense advocates entered public consciousness, and courtrooms became theaters of civic education. Crime and Punishment relies on newly professionalized investigative routines, replacing arbitrary coercion with psychological inquiry. The Brothers Karamazov culminates in a spectacle of law and rhetoric reflecting the reform era’s fascination with evidence, persuasion, and moral character. The Death of Ivan Ilych, from another vantage, exposes how dignity, status, and legal consciousness infuse private life, making law a texture of everyday existence.
Universities and reading circles multiplied after mid-century, nurturing an intelligentsia conversant with European philosophies and impatient with imperial paternalism. Student poverty, philanthropic societies, and radical discussion groups became fixtures of urban life. Censorship oscillated between thaw and clampdown, but journals remained crucial channels for serialized fiction and public debate. Crime and Punishment channels the period’s combative exchanges about poverty, crime, and reform; The Brothers Karamazov converts ideological disputes into probing moral dialogue; The Death of Ivan Ilych reflects a quieter, inward critique of ambition and propriety. All three reveal the costs of ideas lived without humility or community.
Orthodoxy, parish life, and monastic charisma coexisted with a bureaucracy that often treated faith as ornament to order. Spiritual authority and secular discipline met uneasily in households, courts, schools, and hospitals. The Brothers Karamazov foregrounds a public grappling with saintliness, doubt, and scandal, revealing how charisma attracts both devotion and suspicion. Crime and Punishment pits spiritual conscience against legal guilt, testing whether repentance can surpass punishment. The Death of Ivan Ilych, sparse yet luminous, depicts how official piety and social convention can occlude genuine compassion, forcing a late reckoning with suffering. In each, religious language becomes a vernacular for ethical crisis.
Military failures and victories framed reformist energy and patriotic self-scrutiny. The Crimean War’s humiliation accelerated modernization, from railroads to administration; the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78 fanned debates about Slavic solidarity and empire’s moral burdens. War taxes, conscription, and wounded veterans brought state power into intimate view, while the press magnified arguments over sacrifice and national destiny. Against this turbulent canvas, these novels probe whether suffering ennobles or corrodes, whether violence can ever cleanse, and whether a nation’s calling is measured by force, compassion, or truth. Each text situates private turmoil within the tremors of an embattled, reforming empire.
Accelerating urbanization produced new social geographies: flophouses, boarding rooms, taverns, pawnshops, and department stores. Railways stitched provinces to capitals, enabling migration and dislocation, while the state extended carceral infrastructures from city lockups to Siberian exile. Debates over poverty policy, temperance, and charity intersected with arguments about deterrence versus moral regeneration. Crime and Punishment examines the city as a moral laboratory; The Brothers Karamazov pits provincial intimacy against national publicity; The Death of Ivan Ilych follows the domestic spaces of comfort that conceal spiritual neglect. Across them, space itself becomes a register of inequality, surveillance, and the search for grace.
Intellectual & Aesthetic Currents
These works arise at the height of Russian realism, yet push beyond it into psychological and spiritual inquiry. Serialization in influential journals shaped pacing, cliffhangers, and engagement with current debates, while the novel’s capacious form allowed legal, medical, and theological discourses to intermingle. Crime and Punishment fuses fevered interiority with urban sociology; The Brothers Karamazov orchestrates a chorus of contending voices; The Death of Ivan Ilych achieves austere compression, distilling a lifetime into a moral case study. Each text refines realism into an instrument for testing conscience, dramatizing not only what happens, but how a soul reasons and resists.
Competing philosophies animated the age: utilitarian calculation, rational egoism, and positivist confidence in science confronted Orthodox personalism and a renewed language of grace. Crime and Punishment interrogates whether moral arithmetic can justify transgression and whether suffering awakens solidarity. The Brothers Karamazov stages disputations over freedom, innocence, and the scandal of evil, weighing skeptical intelligence against sacrificial love. The Death of Ivan Ilych turns from abstract certainty to the felt truth of pain, exposing the sterility of success without compassion. By giving arguments dramatic embodiment, these novels test ideas in the crucible of lived consequence.
Scientific prestige rose with medicine, statistics, and forensic practice, recasting society as a field of measurable regularities and pathological deviations. Crime and Punishment absorbs investigative method, tracing how suspicion, evidence, and confession circulate through an urban ecology. The Brothers Karamazov treats the courtroom as a laboratory of persuasion where expert discourse meets popular common sense. The Death of Ivan Ilych brings clinical routines into the drawing room, showing medicine’s authority and its limits before mortality. Rather than reject science, the texts ask what image of the person science presupposes, and whether it can honor the mystery of conscience.
Stylistically, the novels reveal contrasting paths toward moral art. Crime and Punishment leans into the grotesque, strained syntax, and agitated tempo, translating guilt into rhythm. The Brothers Karamazov cultivates dialogic breadth, letting rival moral logics test and expose one another before a community. The Death of Ivan Ilych pursues radical clarity, its sober irony dismantling self-deception with unadorned prose. Across difference, all three embrace ethical seriousness without didactic closure. Voice becomes a site of responsibility: style is conscience at work, pressuring readers to judge, forgive, and ask what a human being owes another.
Oral culture—sermons, parables, proverbs, street songs—threads through these pages, joining high theology to the languages of markets and kitchens. Liturgical cadences, jokes, and folk sayings supply an alternative measure of truth to abstract theory or bureaucratic formula. Crime and Punishment draws energy from urban slang and visionary monologue; The Brothers Karamazov harvests parable and testimony; The Death of Ivan Ilych deploys understatement that lets silence speak. The mingling of registers expands the moral range of the novels, granting authority to humble voices and reminding readers that wisdom often hides in everyday speech.
Legacy & Reassessment Across Time
Revolution in 1905 reframed these novels as x-rays of injustice and as meditations on moral renewal. Reformers saw in Crime and Punishment an indictment of urban poverty and the failures of deterrence; others stressed its insistence on conscience beyond policy. The Brothers Karamazov, with its trial and its spiritual debates, became a touchstone for questions of law’s legitimacy and the people’s voice. The Death of Ivan Ilych, terse and devastating, was read as a republican critique of careerism, counseling humility where institutions reward vanity. Political urgency sharpened ethical interpretation without exhausting it.
After 1917, official criticism often downplayed explicit religious content while elevating social analysis. Yet these novels remained canonical for their anatomy of alienation, bureaucracy, and class strain. Crime and Punishment’s city came to exemplify capitalist degradation; The Brothers Karamazov provided material for discussions of law, crowd psychology, and ideology; The Death of Ivan Ilych circulated as a study in the dehumanization of administrative life. Even within constraints, readers prized their psychological richness. Private and émigré commentary preserved the spiritual dimensions, ensuring that theological and existential questions continued to inform underground and later public readings.
World War II and its aftermath globalized reception. Amid mass violence and displacement, readers turned to Crime and Punishment for reflections on guilt and moral awakening, to The Brothers Karamazov for arguments about theodicy and freedom, and to The Death of Ivan Ilych for an unflinching account of dying and the hierarchy of values. Existentialist, personalist, and human rights discourses discovered resonances in the texts’ insistence on the dignity of the person. During the Cold War, they served as both cultural capital and spiritual counterpoint, offering images of responsibility that resisted ideological reduction.
Late twentieth-century scholarship diversified methods: psychoanalytic, narratological, legal, and theological approaches deepened analysis of motive, voice, and norm. Crime and Punishment informed debates about restorative versus retributive justice and the psychology of confession. The Brothers Karamazov inspired work on testimony, doubt, and the ethics of persuasion. The Death of Ivan Ilych entered medical humanities, shaping practices of end-of-life care and critiques of professional detachment. New archival research and translations refined textual histories while comparative studies mapped global reception. Across disciplines, the novels remained laboratories for examining conscience in relation to institutions.
Since the 1990s, post-Soviet and global readers have revisited the trilogy of concerns—crime, death, and judgment—through lenses of memory politics, inequality, and spiritual hunger. Stage and film adaptations multiply, classrooms pair the texts with contemporary debates on carcerality, palliative care, and civic trust, and digital humanities trace their networks of metaphor and influence. New translations recalibrate tone and tempo, reopening questions of voice and ethics. Far from relics, these works illuminate present dilemmas: how to punish justly, how to die humanely, and how to hold freedom and love together in a crowded, skeptical world.
Masterworks of 19th-Century Russia – 3 Classic Russian Moral Novels
Moral Conscience, Guilt, and Redemption
Suffering, Faith, and the Search for Meaning
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Crime and Punishment
TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE
A few words about Dostoevsky himself may help the English reader to understand his work.
Dostoevsky was the son of a doctor. His parents were very hard-working and deeply religious people, but so poor that they lived with their five children in only two rooms. The father and mother spent their evenings in reading aloud to their children, generally from books of a serious character.
Though always sickly and delicate Dostoevsky came out third in the final examination of the Petersburg school of Engineering. There he had already begun his first work, “Poor Folk.”
This story was published by the poet Nekrassov in his review and was received with acclamations. The shy, unknown youth found himself instantly something of a celebrity. A brilliant and successful career seemed to open before him, but those hopes were soon dashed. In 1849 he was arrested.
Though neither by temperament nor conviction a revolutionist, Dostoevsky was one of a little group of young men who met together to read Fourier and Proudhon. He was accused of “taking part in conversations against the censorship, of reading a letter from Byelinsky to Gogol, and of knowing of the intention to set up a printing press.” Under Nicholas I. (that “stern and just man,” as Maurice Baring calls him) this was enough, and he was condemned to death. After eight months’ imprisonment he was with twenty-one others taken out to the Semyonovsky Square to be shot. Writing to his brother Mihail, Dostoevsky says: “They snapped words over our heads, and they made us put on the white shirts worn by persons condemned to death. Thereupon we were bound in threes to stakes, to suffer execution. Being the third in the row, I concluded I had only a few minutes of life before me. I thought of you and your dear ones and I contrived to kiss Plestcheiev and Dourov, who were next to me, and to bid them farewell. Suddenly the troops beat a tattoo, we were unbound, brought back upon the scaffold, and informed that his Majesty had spared us our lives.” The sentence was commuted to hard labour.
One of the prisoners, Grigoryev, went mad as soon as he was untied, and never regained his sanity.
The intense suffering of this experience left a lasting stamp on Dostoevsky’s mind. Though his religious temper led him in the end to accept every suffering with resignation and to regard it as a blessing in his own case, he constantly recurs to the subject in his writings. He describes the awful agony of the condemned man and insists on the cruelty of inflicting such torture. Then followed four years of penal servitude, spent in the company of common criminals in Siberia, where he began the “Dead House,” and some years of service in a disciplinary battalion.
He had shown signs of some obscure nervous disease before his arrest and this now developed into violent attacks of epilepsy, from which he suffered for the rest of his life. The fits occurred three or four times a year and were more frequent in periods of great strain. In 1859 he was allowed to return to Russia. He started a journal—“Vremya,” which was forbidden by the Censorship through a misunderstanding. In 1864 he lost his first wife and his brother Mihail. He was in terrible poverty, yet he took upon himself the payment of his brother’s debts. He started another journal—“The Epoch,” which within a few months was also prohibited. He was weighed down by debt, his brother’s family was dependent on him, he was forced to write at heart-breaking speed, and is said never to have corrected his work. The later years of his life were much softened by the tenderness and devotion of his second wife.
In June 1880 he made his famous speech at the unveiling of the monument to Pushkin in Moscow and he was received with extraordinary demonstrations of love and honour.
A few months later Dostoevsky died. He was followed to the grave by a vast multitude of mourners, who “gave the hapless man the funeral of a king.” He is still probably the most widely read writer in Russia.
In the words of a Russian critic, who seeks to explain the feeling inspired by Dostoevsky: “He was one of ourselves, a man of our blood and our bone, but one who has suffered and has seen so much more deeply than we have his insight impresses us as wisdom… that wisdom of the heart which we seek that we may learn from it how to live. All his other gifts came to him from nature, this he won for himself and through it he became great.”
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
PART I
CHAPTER I
On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge.
He had successfully avoided meeting his landlady on the staircase. His garret was under the roof of a high, five-storied house and was more like a cupboard than a room. The landlady who provided him with garret, dinners, and attendance, lived on the floor below, and every time he went out he was obliged to pass her kitchen, the door of which invariably stood open. And each time he passed, the young man had a sick, frightened feeling, which made him scowl and feel ashamed. He was hopelessly in debt to his landlady, and was afraid of meeting her.
This was not because he was cowardly and abject, quite the contrary; but for some time past he had been in an overstrained irritable condition, verging on hypochondria. He had become so completely absorbed in himself, and isolated from his fellows that he dreaded meeting, not only his landlady, but anyone at all. He was crushed by poverty, but the anxieties of his position had of late ceased to weigh upon him. He had given up attending to matters of practical importance; he had lost all desire to do so. Nothing that any landlady could do had a real terror for him. But to be stopped on the stairs, to be forced to listen to her trivial, irrelevant gossip, to pestering demands for payment, threats and complaints, and to rack his brains for excuses, to prevaricate, to lie—no, rather than that, he would creep down the stairs like a cat and slip out unseen.
This evening, however, on coming out into the street, he became acutely aware of his fears.
“I want to attempt a thing like that and am frightened by these trifles,” he thought, with an odd smile. “Hm… yes, all is in a man’s hands and he lets it all slip from cowardice, that’s an axiom. It would be interesting to know what it is men are most afraid of. Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what they fear most…. But I am talking too much. It’s because I chatter that I do nothing. Or perhaps it is that I chatter because I do nothing. I’ve learned to chatter this last month, lying for days together in my den thinking… of Jack the Giant-killer. Why am I going there now? Am I capable of that? Is that serious? It is not serious at all. It’s simply a fantasy to amuse myself; a plaything! Yes, maybe it is a plaything.”
The heat in the street was terrible: and the airlessness, the bustle and the plaster, scaffolding, bricks, and dust all about him, and that special Petersburg stench, so familiar to all who are unable to get out of town in summer—all worked painfully upon the young man’s already overwrought nerves. The insufferable stench from the pot-houses, which are particularly numerous in that part of the town, and the drunken men whom he met continually, although it was a working day, completed the revolting misery of the picture. An expression of the profoundest disgust gleamed for a moment in the young man’s refined face. He was, by the way, exceptionally handsome, above the average in height, slim, well-built, with beautiful dark eyes and dark brown hair. Soon he sank into deep thought, or more accurately speaking into a complete blankness of mind; he walked along not observing what was about him and not caring to observe it. From time to time, he would mutter something, from the habit of talking to himself, to which he had just confessed. At these moments he would become conscious that his ideas were sometimes in a tangle and that he was very weak; for two days he had scarcely tasted food.
He was so badly dressed that even a man accustomed to shabbiness would have been ashamed to be seen in the street in such rags. In that quarter of the town, however, scarcely any shortcoming in dress would have created surprise. Owing to the proximity of the Hay Market, the number of establishments of bad character, the preponderance of the trading and working class population crowded in these streets and alleys in the heart of Petersburg, types so various were to be seen in the streets that no figure, however queer, would have caused surprise. But there was such accumulated bitterness and contempt in the young man’s heart, that, in spite of all the fastidiousness of youth, he minded his rags least of all in the street. It was a different matter when he met with acquaintances or with former fellow students, whom, indeed, he disliked meeting at any time. And yet when a drunken man who, for some unknown reason, was being taken somewhere in a huge waggon dragged by a heavy dray horse, suddenly shouted at him as he drove past: “Hey there, German hatter” bawling at the top of his voice and pointing at him—the young man stopped suddenly and clutched tremulously at his hat. It was a tall round hat from Zimmerman’s, but completely worn out, rusty with age, all torn and bespattered, brimless and bent on one side in a most unseemly fashion. Not shame, however, but quite another feeling akin to terror had overtaken him.
“I knew it,” he muttered in confusion, “I thought so! That’s the worst of all! Why, a stupid thing like this, the most trivial detail might spoil the whole plan. Yes, my hat is too noticeable…. It looks absurd and that makes it noticeable…. With my rags I ought to wear a cap, any sort of old pancake, but not this grotesque thing. Nobody wears such a hat, it would be noticed a mile off, it would be remembered…. What matters is that people would remember it, and that would give them a clue. For this business one should be as little conspicuous as possible…. Trifles, trifles are what matter! Why, it’s just such trifles that always ruin everything….”
He had not far to go; he knew indeed how many steps it was from the gate of his lodging house: exactly seven hundred and thirty. He had counted them once when he had been lost in dreams. At the time he had put no faith in those dreams and was only tantalising himself by their hideous but daring recklessness. Now, a month later, he had begun to look upon them differently, and, in spite of the monologues in which he jeered at his own impotence and indecision, he had involuntarily come to regard this “hideous” dream as an exploit to be attempted, although he still did not realise this himself. He was positively going now for a “rehearsal” of his project, and at every step his excitement grew more and more violent.
With a sinking heart and a nervous tremor, he went up to a huge house which on one side looked on to the canal, and on the other into the street. This house was let out in tiny tenements and was inhabited by working people of all kinds—tailors, locksmiths, cooks, Germans of sorts, girls picking up a living as best they could, petty clerks, etc. There was a continual coming and going through the two gates and in the two courtyards of the house. Three or four door-keepers were employed on the building. The young man was very glad to meet none of them, and at once slipped unnoticed through the door on the right, and up the staircase. It was a back staircase, dark and narrow, but he was familiar with it already, and knew his way, and he liked all these surroundings: in such darkness even the most inquisitive eyes were not to be dreaded.
“If I am so scared now, what would it be if it somehow came to pass that I were really going to do it?” he could not help asking himself as he reached the fourth storey. There his progress was barred by some porters who were engaged in moving furniture out of a flat. He knew that the flat had been occupied by a German clerk in the civil service, and his family. This German was moving out then, and so the fourth floor on this staircase would be untenanted except by the old woman. “That’s a good thing anyway,” he thought to himself, as he rang the bell of the old woman’s flat. The bell gave a faint tinkle as though it were made of tin and not of copper. The little flats in such houses always have bells that ring like that. He had forgotten the note of that bell, and now its peculiar tinkle seemed to remind him of something and to bring it clearly before him…. He started, his nerves were terribly overstrained by now. In a little while, the door was opened a tiny crack: the old woman eyed her visitor with evident distrust through the crack, and nothing could be seen but her little eyes, glittering in the darkness. But, seeing a number of people on the landing, she grew bolder, and opened the door wide. The young man stepped into the dark entry, which was partitioned off from the tiny kitchen. The old woman stood facing him in silence and looking inquiringly at him. She was a diminutive, withered up old woman of sixty, with sharp malignant eyes and a sharp little nose. Her colourless, somewhat grizzled hair was thickly smeared with oil, and she wore no kerchief over it. Round her thin long neck, which looked like a hen’s leg, was knotted some sort of flannel rag, and, in spite of the heat, there hung flapping on her shoulders, a mangy fur cape, yellow with age. The old woman coughed and groaned at every instant. The young man must have looked at her with a rather peculiar expression, for a gleam of mistrust came into her eyes again.
“Raskolnikov, a student, I came here a month ago,” the young man made haste to mutter, with a half bow, remembering that he ought to be more polite.
“I remember, my good sir, I remember quite well your coming here,” the old woman said distinctly, still keeping her inquiring eyes on his face.
“And here… I am again on the same errand,” Raskolnikov continued, a little disconcerted and surprised at the old woman’s mistrust. “Perhaps she is always like that though, only I did not notice it the other time,” he thought with an uneasy feeling.
The old woman paused, as though hesitating; then stepped on one side, and pointing to the door of the room, she said, letting her visitor pass in front of her:
“Step in, my good sir.”
The little room into which the young man walked, with yellow paper on the walls, geraniums and muslin curtains in the windows, was brightly lighted up at that moment by the setting sun.
“So the sun will shine like this then too!” flashed as it were by chance through Raskolnikov’s mind, and with a rapid glance he scanned everything in the room, trying as far as possible to notice and remember its arrangement. But there was nothing special in the room. The furniture, all very old and of yellow wood, consisted of a sofa with a huge bent wooden back, an oval table in front of the sofa, a dressing-table with a looking-glass fixed on it between the windows, chairs along the walls and two or three half-penny prints in yellow frames, representing German damsels with birds in their hands—that was all. In the corner a light was burning before a small ikon. Everything was very clean; the floor and the furniture were brightly polished; everything shone.
“Lizaveta’s work,” thought the young man. There was not a speck of dust to be seen in the whole flat.
“It’s in the houses of spiteful old widows that one finds such cleanliness,” Raskolnikov thought again, and he stole a curious glance at the cotton curtain over the door leading into another tiny room, in which stood the old woman’s bed and chest of drawers and into which he had never looked before. These two rooms made up the whole flat.
“What do you want?” the old woman said severely, coming into the room and, as before, standing in front of him so as to look him straight in the face.
“I’ve brought something to pawn here,” and he drew out of his pocket an old-fashioned flat silver watch, on the back of which was engraved a globe; the chain was of steel.
“But the time is up for your last pledge. The month was up the day before yesterday.”
“I will bring you the interest for another month; wait a little.”
“But that’s for me to do as I please, my good sir, to wait or to sell your pledge at once.”
“How much will you give me for the watch, Alyona Ivanovna?”
“You come with such trifles, my good sir, it’s scarcely worth anything. I gave you two roubles last time for your ring and one could buy it quite new at a jeweler’s for a rouble and a half.”
“Give me four roubles for it, I shall redeem it, it was my father’s. I shall be getting some money soon.”
“A rouble and a half, and interest in advance, if you like!”
“A rouble and a half!” cried the young man.
“Please yourself”—and the old woman handed him back the watch. The young man took it, and was so angry that he was on the point of going away; but checked himself at once, remembering that there was nowhere else he could go, and that he had had another object also in coming.
“Hand it over,” he said roughly.
The old woman fumbled in her pocket for her keys, and disappeared behind the curtain into the other room. The young man, left standing alone in the middle of the room, listened inquisitively, thinking. He could hear her unlocking the chest of drawers.
“It must be the top drawer,” he reflected. “So she carries the keys in a pocket on the right. All in one bunch on a steel ring…. And there’s one key there, three times as big as all the others, with deep notches; that can’t be the key of the chest of drawers… then there must be some other chest or strong-box… that’s worth knowing. Strong-boxes always have keys like that… but how degrading it all is.”
The old woman came back.
“Here, sir: as we say ten copecks the rouble a month, so I must take fifteen copecks from a rouble and a half for the month in advance. But for the two roubles I lent you before, you owe me now twenty copecks on the same reckoning in advance. That makes thirty-five copecks altogether. So I must give you a rouble and fifteen copecks for the watch. Here it is.”
“What! only a rouble and fifteen copecks now!”
“Just so.”
The young man did not dispute it and took the money. He looked at the old woman, and was in no hurry to get away, as though there was still something he wanted to say or to do, but he did not himself quite know what.
“I may be bringing you something else in a day or two, Alyona Ivanovna—a valuable thing—silver—a cigarette-box, as soon as I get it back from a friend…” he broke off in confusion.
“Well, we will talk about it then, sir.”
“Good-bye—are you always at home alone, your sister is not here with you?” He asked her as casually as possible as he went out into the passage.
“What business is she of yours, my good sir?”
“Oh, nothing particular, I simply asked. You are too quick…. Good-day, Alyona Ivanovna.”
Raskolnikov went out in complete confusion. This confusion became more and more intense. As he went down the stairs, he even stopped short, two or three times, as though suddenly struck by some thought. When he was in the street he cried out, “Oh, God, how loathsome it all is! and can I, can I possibly…. No, it’s nonsense, it’s rubbish!” he added resolutely. “And how could such an atrocious thing come into my head? What filthy things my heart is capable of. Yes, filthy above all, disgusting, loathsome, loathsome!—and for a whole month I’ve been….” But no words, no exclamations, could express his agitation. The feeling of intense repulsion, which had begun to oppress and torture his heart while he was on his way to the old woman, had by now reached such a pitch and had taken such a definite form that he did not know what to do with himself to escape from his wretchedness. He walked along the pavement like a drunken man, regardless of the passers-by, and jostling against them, and only came to his senses when he was in the next street. Looking round, he noticed that he was standing close to a tavern which was entered by steps leading from the pavement to the basement. At that instant two drunken men came out at the door, and abusing and supporting one another, they mounted the steps. Without stopping to think, Raskolnikov went down the steps at once. Till that moment he had never been into a tavern, but now he felt giddy and was tormented by a burning thirst. He longed for a drink of cold beer, and attributed his sudden weakness to the want of food. He sat down at a sticky little table in a dark and dirty corner; ordered some beer, and eagerly drank off the first glassful. At once he felt easier; and his thoughts became clear.
“All that’s nonsense,” he said hopefully, “and there is nothing in it all to worry about! It’s simply physical derangement. Just a glass of beer, a piece of dry bread—and in one moment the brain is stronger, the mind is clearer and the will is firm! Phew, how utterly petty it all is!”
But in spite of this scornful reflection, he was by now looking cheerful as though he were suddenly set free from a terrible burden: and he gazed round in a friendly way at the people in the room. But even at that moment he had a dim foreboding that this happier frame of mind was also not normal.
There were few people at the time in the tavern. Besides the two drunken men he had met on the steps, a group consisting of about five men and a girl with a concertina had gone out at the same time. Their departure left the room quiet and rather empty. The persons still in the tavern were a man who appeared to be an artisan, drunk, but not extremely so, sitting before a pot of beer, and his companion, a huge, stout man with a grey beard, in a short full-skirted coat. He was very drunk: and had dropped asleep on the bench; every now and then, he began as though in his sleep, cracking his fingers, with his arms wide apart and the upper part of his body bounding about on the bench, while he hummed some meaningless refrain, trying to recall some such lines as these:
“His wife a year he fondly loved His wife a—a year he—fondly loved.”
Or suddenly waking up again:
“Walking along the crowded row He met the one he used to know.”
But no one shared his enjoyment: his silent companion looked with positive hostility and mistrust at all these manifestations. There was another man in the room who looked somewhat like a retired government clerk. He was sitting apart, now and then sipping from his pot and looking round at the company. He, too, appeared to be in some agitation.
CHAPTER II
Raskolnikov was not used to crowds, and, as we said before, he avoided society of every sort, more especially of late. But now all at once he felt a desire to be with other people. Something new seemed to be taking place within him, and with it he felt a sort of thirst for company. He was so weary after a whole month of concentrated wretchedness and gloomy excitement that he longed to rest, if only for a moment, in some other world, whatever it might be; and, in spite of the filthiness of the surroundings, he was glad now to stay in the tavern.
The master of the establishment was in another room, but he frequently came down some steps into the main room, his jaunty, tarred boots with red turn-over tops coming into view each time before the rest of his person. He wore a full coat and a horribly greasy black satin waistcoat, with no cravat, and his whole face seemed smeared with oil like an iron lock. At the counter stood a boy of about fourteen, and there was another boy somewhat younger who handed whatever was wanted. On the counter lay some sliced cucumber, some pieces of dried black bread, and some fish, chopped up small, all smelling very bad. It was insufferably close, and so heavy with the fumes of spirits that five minutes in such an atmosphere might well make a man drunk.
There are chance meetings with strangers that interest us from the first moment, before a word is spoken. Such was the impression made on Raskolnikov by the person sitting a little distance from him, who looked like a retired clerk. The young man often recalled this impression afterwards, and even ascribed it to presentiment. He looked repeatedly at the clerk, partly no doubt because the latter was staring persistently at him, obviously anxious to enter into conversation. At the other persons in the room, including the tavern-keeper, the clerk looked as though he were used to their company, and weary of it, showing a shade of condescending contempt for them as persons of station and culture inferior to his own, with whom it would be useless for him to converse. He was a man over fifty, bald and grizzled, of medium height, and stoutly built. His face, bloated from continual drinking, was of a yellow, even greenish, tinge, with swollen eyelids out of which keen reddish eyes gleamed like little chinks. But there was something very strange in him; there was a light in his eyes as though of intense feeling—perhaps there were even thought and intelligence, but at the same time there was a gleam of something like madness. He was wearing an old and hopelessly ragged black dress coat, with all its buttons missing except one, and that one he had buttoned, evidently clinging to this last trace of respectability. A crumpled shirt front, covered with spots and stains, protruded from his canvas waistcoat. Like a clerk, he wore no beard, nor moustache, but had been so long unshaven that his chin looked like a stiff greyish brush. And there was something respectable and like an official about his manner too. But he was restless; he ruffled up his hair and from time to time let his head drop into his hands dejectedly resting his ragged elbows on the stained and sticky table. At last he looked straight at Raskolnikov, and said loudly and resolutely:
“May I venture, honoured sir, to engage you in polite conversation? Forasmuch as, though your exterior would not command respect, my experience admonishes me that you are a man of education and not accustomed to drinking. I have always respected education when in conjunction with genuine sentiments, and I am besides a titular counsellor in rank. Marmeladov—such is my name; titular counsellor. I make bold to inquire—have you been in the service?”
“No, I am studying,” answered the young man, somewhat surprised at the grandiloquent style of the speaker and also at being so directly addressed. In spite of the momentary desire he had just been feeling for company of any sort, on being actually spoken to he felt immediately his habitual irritable and uneasy aversion for any stranger who approached or attempted to approach him.
“A student then, or formerly a student,” cried the clerk. “Just what I thought! I’m a man of experience, immense experience, sir,” and he tapped his forehead with his fingers in self-approval. “You’ve been a student or have attended some learned institution!… But allow me….” He got up, staggered, took up his jug and glass, and sat down beside the young man, facing him a little sideways. He was drunk, but spoke fluently and boldly, only occasionally losing the thread of his sentences and drawling his words. He pounced upon Raskolnikov as greedily as though he too had not spoken to a soul for a month.
“Honoured sir,” he began almost with solemnity, “poverty is not a vice, that’s a true saying. Yet I know too that drunkenness is not a virtue, and that that’s even truer. But beggary, honoured sir, beggary is a vice. In poverty you may still retain your innate nobility of soul, but in beggary—never—no one. For beggary a man is not chased out of human society with a stick, he is swept out with a broom, so as to make it as humiliating as possible; and quite right, too, forasmuch as in beggary I am ready to be the first to humiliate myself. Hence the pot-house! Honoured sir, a month ago Mr. Lebeziatnikov gave my wife a beating, and my wife is a very different matter from me! Do you understand? Allow me to ask you another question out of simple curiosity: have you ever spent a night on a hay barge, on the Neva?”
“No, I have not happened to,” answered Raskolnikov. “What do you mean?”
“Well, I’ve just come from one and it’s the fifth night I’ve slept so….” He filled his glass, emptied it and paused. Bits of hay were in fact clinging to his clothes and sticking to his hair. It seemed quite probable that he had not undressed or washed for the last five days. His hands, particularly, were filthy. They were fat and red, with black nails.
His conversation seemed to excite a general though languid interest. The boys at the counter fell to sniggering. The innkeeper came down from the upper room, apparently on purpose to listen to the “funny fellow” and sat down at a little distance, yawning lazily, but with dignity. Evidently Marmeladov was a familiar figure here, and he had most likely acquired his weakness for high-flown speeches from the habit of frequently entering into conversation with strangers of all sorts in the tavern. This habit develops into a necessity in some drunkards, and especially in those who are looked after sharply and kept in order at home. Hence in the company of other drinkers they try to justify themselves and even if possible obtain consideration.
“Funny fellow!” pronounced the innkeeper. “And why don’t you work, why aren’t you at your duty, if you are in the service?”
“Why am I not at my duty, honoured sir,” Marmeladov went on, addressing himself exclusively to Raskolnikov, as though it had been he who put that question to him. “Why am I not at my duty? Does not my heart ache to think what a useless worm I am? A month ago when Mr. Lebeziatnikov beat my wife with his own hands, and I lay drunk, didn’t I suffer? Excuse me, young man, has it ever happened to you… hm… well, to petition hopelessly for a loan?”
“Yes, it has. But what do you mean by hopelessly?”
“Hopelessly in the fullest sense, when you know beforehand that you will get nothing by it. You know, for instance, beforehand with positive certainty that this man, this most reputable and exemplary citizen, will on no consideration give you money; and indeed I ask you why should he? For he knows of course that I shan’t pay it back. From compassion? But Mr. Lebeziatnikov who keeps up with modern ideas explained the other day that compassion is forbidden nowadays by science itself, and that that’s what is done now in England, where there is political economy. Why, I ask you, should he give it to me? And yet though I know beforehand that he won’t, I set off to him and…”
“Why do you go?” put in Raskolnikov.
“Well, when one has no one, nowhere else one can go! For every man must have somewhere to go. Since there are times when one absolutely must go somewhere! When my own daughter first went out with a yellow ticket, then I had to go… (for my daughter has a yellow passport),” he added in parenthesis, looking with a certain uneasiness at the young man. “No matter, sir, no matter!” he went on hurriedly and with apparent composure when both the boys at the counter guffawed and even the innkeeper smiled—“No matter, I am not confounded by the wagging of their heads; for everyone knows everything about it already, and all that is secret is made open. And I accept it all, not with contempt, but with humility. So be it! So be it! ‘Behold the man!’ Excuse me, young man, can you…. No, to put it more strongly and more distinctly; not can you but dare you, looking upon me, assert that I am not a pig?”
The young man did not answer a word.
“Well,” the orator began again stolidly and with even increased dignity, after waiting for the laughter in the room to subside. “Well, so be it, I am a pig, but she is a lady! I have the semblance of a beast, but Katerina Ivanovna, my spouse, is a person of education and an officer’s daughter. Granted, granted, I am a scoundrel, but she is a woman of a noble heart, full of sentiments, refined by education. And yet… oh, if only she felt for me! Honoured sir, honoured sir, you know every man ought to have at least one place where people feel for him! But Katerina Ivanovna, though she is magnanimous, she is unjust…. And yet, although I realise that when she pulls my hair she only does it out of pity—for I repeat without being ashamed, she pulls my hair, young man,” he declared with redoubled dignity, hearing the sniggering again—“but, my God, if she would but once…. But no, no! It’s all in vain and it’s no use talking! No use talking! For more than once, my wish did come true and more than once she has felt for me but… such is my fate and I am a beast by nature!”
“Rather!” assented the innkeeper yawning. Marmeladov struck his fist resolutely on the table.
“Such is my fate! Do you know, sir, do you know, I have sold her very stockings for drink? Not her shoes—that would be more or less in the order of things, but her stockings, her stockings I have sold for drink! Her mohair shawl I sold for drink, a present to her long ago, her own property, not mine; and we live in a cold room and she caught cold this winter and has begun coughing and spitting blood too. We have three little children and Katerina Ivanovna is at work from morning till night; she is scrubbing and cleaning and washing the children, for she’s been used to cleanliness from a child. But her chest is weak and she has a tendency to consumption and I feel it! Do you suppose I don’t feel it? And the more I drink the more I feel it. That’s why I drink too. I try to find sympathy and feeling in drink…. I drink so that I may suffer twice as much!” And as though in despair he laid his head down on the table.
