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- Herausgeber: e-artnow Collections
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Visions of Guilt and Grace – 3 Classic Russian Realist Novels is a captivating anthology that delves deep into the human condition through the prism of Russian realism. This collection presents three landmark novels that weave through the intricacies of morality, faith, and redemption. The selected narratives, characterized by their profound exploration of guilt intertwined with grace, reflect the complex societal and psychological landscapes of 19th-century Russia. Without singling out a particular piece, the works share a remarkable diversity in narrative style, yet are unified by a shared thematic pursuit of portraying life's most profound truths. The anthology boasts the masterful storytelling of Leo Tolstoy and the philosophical depth of Fyodor Dostoevsky. These authors are iconic figures in aligning Russian literature with the broader realist movement, known for their unparalleled ability to dissect and portray the internal struggles of their characters. Through their narratives, these writers provide not only a vivid picture of their time but also a timeless introspection on the human soul. Together, they challenge readers to reflect on themes of existential despair and moral redemption, inviting a deeper engagement with the text. Readers will find Visions of Guilt and Grace an invaluable resource for exploring classic literature's rich tableau. Engaging with this anthology offers a unique opportunity to experience the power and beauty of Russian realism, providing insights into humanity's enduring complexities. As such, it becomes an essential read for those interested in the intersection of history, philosophy, and literature, assuring a rewarding exploration of the profound dialogues between these timeless works.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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Visions of Guilt and Grace – 3 Classic Russian Realist Novels
Table of Contents
Introduction
Curatorial Vision
This collection brings together Crime and Punishment, The Death of Ivan Ilych, and The Idiot to trace a single arc through Russian realism: from the extremity of guilt to the possibility of grace. Each novel interrogates moral responsibility within concrete social worlds, yet refuses easy verdicts. The focus is the troubled border where law, conscience, and compassion meet. By juxtaposing a study of criminal transgression, a meditation on ordinary mortality, and a portrait of unworldly innocence encountering society, the volume situates ethical awakening not as doctrine but as lived experience, marked by suffering, insight, and the fragile offer of renewal.
Our guiding through-line is the psychology of judgment. Crime and Punishment probes the intoxication and misery of self-justification; The Death of Ivan Ilych reorients judgment toward the authenticity of a life at its end; The Idiot exposes society’s verdict on radical goodness. Together they compose a triptych in which guilt is both social and interior, and grace appears as illumination rather than exemption. The aim is to reveal how realist form turns metaphysical questions into felt pressures: money, rooms, corridors, glances, pauses, and fevers become media of moral knowledge, carrying the reader from shock to recognition to tentative reconciliation.
The collection seeks to highlight a pattern of descent and ascent common to all three works. Each depicts consciousness under trial, descending into pain or bewilderment before discovering, however faintly, a countercurrent of mercy. Our aim is not to harmonize the novels, but to let their dissonances sharpen the question of what grace can mean amid humiliation, illness, and social scorn. By aligning these narratives, the volume foregrounds how ethical turning points are staged through silence as much as speech, through small acts and missed chances, and through the friction between private confession and the gaze of others.
Unlike encountering these novels separately, reading them within a single frame reveals crosscurrents that might otherwise remain latent. Echoes accumulate: scenes in cramped interiors answer to scenes of public exposure; moments of ecstatic insight resonate against moments of terminal clarity. The juxtaposition underscores continuity between radical wrongdoing, innocent bafflement, and ordinary dying, inviting attention to how each novel defines the cost of becoming morally awake. What emerges is not synthesis but parallax: the same ethical landscape viewed from three angles, making visible the stakes of judgment, forgiveness, and the arduous work of accepting another’s full humanity.
Thematic & Aesthetic Interplay
Across the volume, the novels speak through recurring images and pressures. Rooms are overheated, streets crowded, thresholds ominous; bodies register spiritual strain as fevers, fainting, or pain. Money functions as both necessity and temptation. Faces, especially eyes, become sites of recognition and refusal. Each work tests whether confession heals or merely exposes. In Crime and Punishment, guilt produces a hallucinatory clarity; in The Idiot, compassion endangers the innocent; in The Death of Ivan Ilych, illness strips away social performances. The shared lexicon of thresholds, illness, and gaze forms a dialogue on responsibility, pity, and the limits of understanding.
Their tonal contrasts intensify this conversation. Crime and Punishment advances with tense momentum, shadowed by dread and sudden mercy. The Idiot moves through salons and streets with a fractured brightness, where comedy coils into catastrophe. The Death of Ivan Ilych is austere, unflinching, and calm in its scrutiny. These differences establish a spectrum of moral weather: storm, glare, and winter light. The effect is cumulative rather than repetitive, as each work troubles the others’ conclusions. Experiences of law, illness, and society refract one another, suggesting that the path from guilt to grace must traverse conflicting climates of feeling.
Motifs echo and evolve. Dreams erupt as moral laboratories, staging impossible alternatives while deepening responsibility rather than relieving it. Stairs and doorways carry psychological weight, implying danger, change, or belated return. Laughter often wounds before it humanizes. Time itself becomes a motif: fever-time, bureaucratic time, festival time, and deathbed time reshape the self. In Dostoevsky’s works, multiple voices collide and argue within the same scene; Tolstoy’s narration fuses outward observation with inward eddying thought. Together these strategies reveal how realist art can make interior conversion visible through gesture, rhythm, and setting, not by pronouncement but by patient unveiling.
Influence circulates less as quotation than as shared problem. The Idiot posits a figure of radical compassion whose vulnerability exposes society’s failures, a challenge that resonates with the moral reorientation in The Death of Ivan Ilych. Crime and Punishment’s fevered scrutiny of culpability opens a path toward the quieter, terminal clarity Tolstoy investigates. Readers have long noticed how these works, taken together, seem to answer one another: transgression, innocence, and mortality form a cycle rather than isolated episodes. The conversation remains suggestive, not programmatic, inviting reflection on whether grace arrives through suffering, through love, or through truth-telling at the end.
Enduring Impact & Critical Reception
These novels remain vital because they insist that moral life is inseparable from concrete circumstances and inward struggle. Contemporary cultures still debate punishment, care, and the claims of compassion; these works provide enduring case studies in how responsibility is formed, evaded, and finally embraced. Their attention to psychological depth and social texture continues to shape classrooms, stages, and screens, and their urgency has not diminished with time. Rather than offering consoling answers, they offer rigorous attention to what a human life owes others, making the passage from guilt to grace both imaginable and demanding, both personal and communal.
Their reception has long been marked by recognition of distinctive achievements: the psychological intensity of Crime and Punishment, the ethical clarity and understatement of The Death of Ivan Ilych, and the daring tenderness of The Idiot. Debates have centered on whether redemption is plausible within earthly institutions, and whether innocence can survive the pressures of social performance. Across decades of discussion, these books have anchored conversations about realism’s capacity to reveal the soul without abandoning the street. The result is a durable consensus that they sit near the core of modern narrative art while continuing to provoke fresh disagreement.
Their cultural afterlives have been abundant, spanning stage, film, and other arts, as well as conversation in philosophy, psychology, and theology. Characters and episodes from these novels have become shorthand for crises of conscience, the scandal of goodness, and the revelation of mortality. Public discourse continues to invoke them when asking how societies punish, what compassion costs, and what it means to die truthfully. Such afterlives attest to a capacity for renewal: each generation finds in these works new angles on responsibility and grace, a vocabulary for speaking about failure and recovery with seriousness rather than sentimentality.
Gathered as Visions of Guilt and Grace, the novels offer a portable map of moral experience: crime’s delirium, innocence’s peril, and dying’s candor. Their continued importance lies less in historical curiosity than in their ability to discipline attention, to slow perception until the overlooked becomes decisive. The collection underscores that realism’s power comes from fidelity to experience and from the courage to imagine change within it. Each book reveals that clarity can arrive through suffering yet remain open-ended, asking for sustained practice rather than sudden salvation. That durable invitation ensures their relevance in private reflection and public conversation.
Historical Context
Socio-Political Landscape
These works were conceived amid the turbulence of imperial Russia from the 1850s through the 1880s, a period when autocracy confronted defeat, reform, and reaction. The aftermath of the Crimean War exposed administrative weakness and urban deprivation, as Saint Petersburg swelled with migrants and precarious labor. Within this climate, Crime and Punishment and The Idiot scrutinize a capital city where state power and private desperation intersect, while The Death of Ivan Ilych contemplates the respectable interiors of late‑imperial bureaucracy. Across the spectrum—from boarding houses to court chambers—the social order appears both entrenched and brittle, prompting moral inquiry into guilt, suffering, and the possibility of grace.
The Great Reforms initiated under Alexander II transformed the legal and social landscape. Emancipation redefined land, labor, and status; new local assemblies expanded limited self‑government; and the 1864 judicial reform introduced professionalized courts and trial by jury. This juridical modernity frames public debates about justice and responsibility that reverberate through Crime and Punishment and structure the career and milieu in The Death of Ivan Ilych. The reforms also widened literacy and periodical culture, complicating the intelligentsia’s role as moral arbiters. Yet the reforms’ uneven implementation—particularly in cities—left many trapped between old hierarchies and new expectations, a tension the anthology tracks at intimate scale.
Urbanization produced districts of overcrowded rooms, pawnshops, and marginal work, provoking official concern over disorder and crime. Policing expanded alongside informal surveillance exercised by landlords, clerks, and neighbors. Crime and Punishment addresses the moral and legal debates catalyzed by these conditions, exploring how poverty and ideology test responsibility. The Idiot, moving among salons and lodging houses, reveals a city where compassion and cruelty can turn on a rumor. Even without dwelling on penal exile or spectacle, the books register a legal state that both punishes and moralizes, and a public fascinated by transgression, confession, and redemption.
Orthodoxy remained entwined with the state, yet spiritual life was increasingly contested by secular ideologies and pragmatic careerism. This friction animates the religious vocabulary of guilt and forgiveness that courses through the anthology, even when characters struggle to articulate faith. Crime and Punishment probes the conscience as a battlefield between rational self‑justification and the yearning for absolution. The Idiot introduces an ethic of humility that clashes with worldly calculation. The Death of Ivan Ilych confronts the spiritual poverty of decorous success. In each case, imperial institutions provide the outer frame, but existential trial occurs in the soul’s court of appeal.
Monetization reshaped daily life: credit expanded, rents rose, and new consumer goods circulated through shops and markets. Social aspiration hardened into ritualized respectability, with furnishings, uniforms, and etiquette signaling rank. The Death of Ivan Ilych anatomizes the bureaucratic and domestic codes of late‑imperial officialdom, while The Idiot exposes how money and status manipulate intimacy and marriage prospects. Crime and Punishment situates moral choice amid ledgers and IOUs, suggesting that economic calculation can obscure ethical reckoning. Together, the works illuminate a society where cash and conscience collide, and where the language of utility competes with a vocabulary of mercy.
Print culture accelerated through thick journals and expanding newspaper circulation, even as censorship flexed unpredictably. Serialization shaped the pacing and public reception of Crime and Punishment and The Idiot, inviting readers to debate motives and morals in real time. Editorial pressures and watchful censors nudged authors toward indirection, irony, and psychological depth rather than open polemic. The Death of Ivan Ilych, published later, reflects a climate where official decorum coexisted with private disquiet. Across the trio, the press becomes both a mirror and a constraint, generating an audience attuned to scandal while forcing writers to encode critique within character and scene.
Foreign pressures and imperial campaigns sharpened domestic anxieties about national purpose and moral fiber. Military reforms sought to avert embarrassments witnessed earlier in the century, while public rhetoric alternated between triumphalism and self‑reproach. The Idiot’s fragile idealism and Crime and Punishment’s torment over moral authority echo a society measuring itself against imagined European standards and ancestral faith. By the time The Death of Ivan Ilych appeared, imperial self‑confidence masked a deeper crisis of meaning among professionals and officials. The geopolitical horizon thus forms a muted backdrop: public victories and defeats refract inward, into questions of conscience, suffering, and responsibility.
Intellectual & Aesthetic Currents
Russian Realism, as practiced by the authors in this volume, rejected ornament for moral scrutiny and social precision. Crime and Punishment and The Idiot intensify realism with psychological pressure, capturing alienation, shame, compassion, and delirium without abandoning concrete detail. The Death of Ivan Ilych condenses realism into a devastating anatomy of habit and denial. Rather than a single school, the texts model intersecting approaches: the ethical case study, the tragicomedy of manners, and the spiritual probe. The result is a realism simultaneously panoramic and interior, testing whether truthful representation can also heal, or whether it must first expose wounds.
Philosophical currents of the 1860s and 1870s—skepticism toward tradition, faith in calculation and expediency, and confidence in material progress—animate the conflicts at the heart of Crime and Punishment. The notion that human motives could be rationalized and hierarchized collides with the stubborn reality of conscience and empathy. The Idiot, by contrast, stages an experiment: what happens when radical compassion enters a society governed by prudence and pride? The Death of Ivan Ilych interrogates whether a life arranged by propriety and advancement can satisfy the deepest human needs. Across the anthology, instrumentality meets grace, and the encounter is not bloodless.
The Idiot adapts a venerable cultural figure—the innocent sufferer whose weakness reveals others’ strength or lack thereof—into a modern setting of gossip, credit, and flirtation. The work explores how beauty, illness, and kindness unsettle circles that prize calculation and decorum. This aesthetic of vulnerability resonates with Crime and Punishment, where genuine pity threatens the armor of self‑justification. The Death of Ivan Ilych strips away the ornamental to test whether clarity can be born from pain. In each, the interplay between tenderness and ridicule drives a critique of worldly sagacity, turning realism toward a theology of ordinary encounters.
Scientific and professional discourses reshape the narrative horizons of the anthology. Expanding medical practice introduced a clinical language that The Death of Ivan Ilych subjects to ethical scrutiny, while popularized psychology and criminology inflect the fevered introspection of Crime and Punishment. The new legal order—procedures, depositions, and interrogations—becomes both backdrop and structuring device. The Idiot registers the period’s fascination with diagnosis but redirects it toward moral perception: who truly sees another person? These works absorb modern expertise without surrendering the mystery of personhood, suggesting that data and protocols cannot exhaust the drama of conscience.
Formal innovation deepens the ethical ambit of these texts. Confessional monologue, interior discourse, and dialogic clashes allow multiple moral grammars to sound at once. Crime and Punishment layers dream, delirium, and argument to test ideas under pressure. The Idiot alternates salon brilliance with awkward candor, choreographing misrecognition and grace. The Death of Ivan Ilych juxtaposes official euphemism with a private reckoning that strips language to its essentials. Realism here is not mere surface fidelity; it is an experiment in voice and perspective, a means to stage trial, appeal, and, at times, the faint intimation of absolution.
Legacy & Reassessment Across Time
As the nineteenth century closed and revolution loomed, readers increasingly treated Crime and Punishment as a social X‑ray, probing poverty, police procedure, and radical ideas. After 1917, ideological frameworks encouraged interpretations that emphasized class antagonism and the critique of bureaucratic complacency visible in The Death of Ivan Ilych. The Idiot’s ethic of compassion, though suspect to some for its spiritual overtones, persisted as a touchstone for debates about moral exemplarity. Even amid shifting orthodoxies, the trilogy’s psychological acuity protected it: these books could be read as studies of motivation and institutional pressure, as much as meditations on sin and grace.
Twentieth‑century canonization brought curricular stability and waves of adaptation across stage and screen. Directors and actors discovered in Crime and Punishment a laboratory for suspense and confession; The Idiot offered a tragic pageant of misrecognition; The Death of Ivan Ilych provided a compact meditation on mortality fit for chamber staging. Educational syllabi often foregrounded social diagnosis, yet extracurricular reading circles kept alive more theological and existential emphases. With each new performance or edition, the works were re‑timed to contemporary tempos—urban dread, bureaucratic absurdity, or private anguish—confirming their capacity to absorb, and critique, successive eras’ anxieties.
Translation history decisively shaped global reception. The Unabridged Garnett Translation of Crime and Punishment introduced Anglophone audiences to a sinuous, humane idiom that emphasized psychological shading and moral tenderness alongside tension. The Unabridged Eva Martin Translation of The Idiot preserved a period cadence and clarity that helped readers navigate its tonal oscillations. The Death of Ivan Ilych, in turn, circulated widely in English in forms attentive to its austere precision. These versions conditioned generations to hear compassion and irony in particular registers, guiding emphasis toward conscience, interior struggle, and the redemptive or corrosive uses of language.
Late twentieth‑century scholarship reframed the anthology through new lenses. Law‑and‑literature studies treated Crime and Punishment and The Death of Ivan Ilych as casebooks on judgment, procedure, and legitimacy. Medical humanities turned to the bedside drama of The Death of Ivan Ilych to ask how language can soothe or wound. Ethics and theology found in The Idiot and Crime and Punishment sustained inquiries into forgiveness and responsibility. Cognitive approaches spotlighted attention, rumination, and affect, while urban studies traced the moral geography of Saint Petersburg. Rather than displace earlier readings, these fields layered fresh vocabularies onto enduring questions.
In the twenty‑first century, readers confront renewed concerns—inequality, authoritarian habits, social atomization, information overload—that return the anthology’s dilemmas to the present tense. Crime and Punishment speaks to debates over punishment, rehabilitation, and the psychology of justification. The Death of Ivan Ilych has become a touchstone in ethics courses, clinical training, and discussions of end‑of‑life care. The Idiot challenges performative cynicism, testing whether vulnerability can survive spectacle. Digital cultures have rediscovered the serial pulse of nineteenth‑century publication, while censorship controversies echo older constraints. Across shifting contexts, guilt and grace remain living categories, not metaphors but choices.
Visions of Guilt and Grace – 3 Classic Russian Realist Novels
Conscience, Crime, and Moral Reckoning
Compassion, Redemption, and Spiritual Grace
The Unabridged Garnett Translation) (Fyodor Dostoevsky
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.”
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.
