I
Siberia. On the bank of a broad, deserted river there stands a town, one of Russia’s administrative centres; in the town, 1 a fortress; in the fortress, a prison.In the prison, having already served nine months of his sentence, is the exiled 2 convict of the second categoryRodion Raskolnikov. Since the date of his crime almost eighteen months have passed.
His trial went smoothly enough. The criminal backed up his statement firmly, precisely and clearly, without muddling the circumstances, without mitigating them to his own advantage, without distorting the facts, without forgetting the slightest detail. He described the entire process of the murder, to the very end: explained the mystery of thepledge (the small bit of wood with a metal strip), which was found in the hands of the murdered old woman; gave a detailed account of how he took the victim’s keys, described those keys, described the box and what was in it; even enumerated some of the objects it contained; explained the mystery of Lizaveta’s murder; described how Kokh, and then the student, came and knocked, and repeated everything they said to each other; how he, the criminal, then ran downstairs and heard Mikolka’s and Mitka’s squeals; how he hid in an empty apartment and got back home; and in conclusion identified the stone in the yard, on Voznesensky Prospect, by the gates, beneath which the items and the purse were found.
The case, in short, could hardly have been clearer. The investigators and the judges were very surprised, though, to learn that he had hidden the purse and items beneath the stone without availing himself of them and, even more so, that not only could he not recall in any detail all the items he himself had stolen, but even misremembered how
many there were. The simple fact that he had never once opened the purse and did not even know how much money there was inside seemed improbable (the purse was found to contain three hundred and seventeen roubles in silver and three twenty-copeck pieces; after being kept so long beneath the stone, some of the largest notes at the top were severely damaged). They struggled long and hard to find out why exactly the accused was lying about this one particular circumstance, while voluntarily and truthfully pleading guilty to everything else. In the end, some (especially the psychologists among them) went so far as to admit the possibility that he really had not looked inside the purse, which was why he did not know what was in it, and, in his ignorance, had gone and buried it beneath a stone; but this immediately led them to conclude that the crime itself could only have been committed in a state of temporary insanity, as a result, so to speak, of a monomaniacal obsession with murder and robbery, with no further aims in mind or expectation of profit. Here, incidentally, they were helped by the latest fashionable 3 theory of temporary insanity,which is so frequently cited nowadays to explain certain crimes. What was more, the long history of Raskolnikov’s hypochondriac condition was attested in meticulous detail by numerous witnesses, by Doctor Zosimov, his former friends, his landlady, his maid.
All this greatly facilitated the conclusion that Raskolnikov did not really resemble an ordinary murderer, felon and robber: this was something else. To the intense irritation of all who defended this point of view, the criminal made almost no attempt to defend himself; to the crucial questions ‘What exactly could have induced him to commit homicide?’ and ‘What prompted him to carry out the robbery?’ he gave the very lucid reply, positively rude in its precision, that the cause of it all had been the squalor of his circumstances; his beggary and helplessness; his desire
to secure the first steps in his career with the help of the three thousand roubles, if not more, that he had expected to find at the victim’s home. He had managed to go through with the murder thanks to his frivolous and craven character, which, moreover, had been irritated by hardship and failure. In reply to the question of what exactly had prompted him to turn himself in, he answered frankly: heartfelt remorse. There was something almost rude about it all . . .
The sentence, however, proved more lenient than might have been expected, given the nature of the crime, perhaps precisely because the criminal not only did not wish to justify himself, but even evinced a desire to incriminate himself further. All the strange and specific circumstances of the case were taken into account. Not a single doubt was cast on the criminal’s sick and desperate condition before the perpetration of the crime. The fact that he had not availed himself of the stolen goods was partly ascribed to the effect of awakened remorse, partly to the imperfect state of his mental faculties during the perpetration of the crime. The unplanned murder of Lizaveta only served to reinforce the latter hypothesis: a man commits two murders while leaving the door open! Lastly, the timing of the confession, just when the case had become exceptionally muddled as a result of the false self- accusations of a disheartened zealot (Mikolai) and when, moreover, there was a near total absence not only of clear evidence concerning the actual offender, but even of any suspicion (Porfiry Petrovich had been as good as his word) – all this did much to ease the lot of the accused.
Quite unexpectedly, other circumstances also emerged that greatly favoured the defendant. The former student Razumikhin managed to exhume some information enabling him to prove that the criminal Raskolnikov, during his time at university, spent all he had on helping a poor, consumptive fellow student and supported him almost
single-handedly for half a year. When his friend died, Raskolnikov took care of his old invalid father (whom his friend had supported and fed, by his own labour, ever since his early teens), eventually placed the old man in a hospital and, when he died too, arranged his burial. All this had a favourable influence on how Raskolnikov’s fate was decided. Meanwhile, the widow Zarnitsyna, Raskolnikov’s former landlady and the mother of his dead fiancée, testified that when they were still living at the previous address, at the Five Corners, Raskolnikov had pulled two small children out of a burning apartment, at night, and was himself burned in the process. This fact was thoroughly investigated and reasonably well attested by numerous witnesses. In short, it all ended with the criminal being sentenced to only eight years hard labour, second category, in view of his voluntary confession and other mitigating circumstances.
Raskolnikov’s mother fell ill at the very beginning of the trial. Dunya and Razumikhin deemed it appropriate to take her away from Petersburg until it was over. Razumikhin chose a town on the railway line, a short distance away, in order to keep a close eye on all the developments at the trial, while seeing Avdotya Romanovna as often as possible.
Pulkheria Alexandrovna was suffering from a rather strange, nervous sickness, accompanied by something resembling insanity, at least in part. When Dunya returned from seeing her brother for the last time, she found her mother very ill indeed, feverish and delirious. That same evening she and Razumikhin agreed what they would say to her when she asked about Raskolnikov, and even concocted a long story about how Raskolnikov had left for some far- flung place, near the Russian border, on a private mission that would finally bring him both fame and fortune. But they were shocked that Pulkheria Alexandrovna never asked about any of this, neither then nor later. On the contrary, she herself came out with a long story about her
son’s sudden departure, tearfully describing how he had come to say goodbye to her and hinting as she did so that she alone was privy to many very important and mysterious circumstances and that Rodya had many very powerful enemies, to the point that he had been forced into hiding.
As for his future career, she was certain it would prove quite brilliant, once certain hostile circumstances had passed; she assured Razumikhin that with time her son would even become a statesman, as his article and brilliant literary gifts indicated so clearly. She could barely put the article down; she even read it out loud and all but slept with it. Yet the question ‘Where’s Rodya?’ hardly ever escaped her lips, though it was perfectly obvious that everyone was avoiding the subject in her presence – which in itself should have aroused her suspicions. Eventually, Pulkheria Alexandrovna’s peculiar silence on certain points began to frighten the others. For example, she wouldn’t even complain that he hadn’t sent a single letter, whereas before, in her little town, it was the hope that a letter from darling Rodya might be on its way that kept her going. This last circumstance was simply inexplicable and worried Dunya deeply; her mother, it occurred to her, probably had some dreadful foreboding about Rodya’s fate and feared to ask too many questions, lest she learn something even more dreadful. In any case, Dunya could see quite clearly that Pulkheria Alexandrovna was not in her right mind.
Once or twice, though, she herself broached topics that made it impossible, when replying, not to mention Rodya’s exact whereabouts; and when these replies inevitably proved unsatisfactory and suspicious, she would suddenly become extraordinarily sad, sullen and silent, and would remain in that state for a very long time. Dunya finally realized how hard it was to keep lying and making things up, and decided it would be better simply to say nothing at all on certain points; but it was becoming ever more obvious that her poor mother suspected something
dreadful. Dunya remembered her brother saying that Mother had heard her raving the night before that last, fateful day, after her row with Svidrigailov: might she have caught something? Often, sometimes after several days and even weeks of sullen, gloomy silence and wordless tears, the ailing woman would become almost hysterically animated and suddenly start talking, with barely a pause, about her son, her hopes, the future . . . Her fantasies could be very strange indeed. They humoured her and encouraged her, and she herself, perhaps, could see very well that she was being encouraged and merely humoured, but still she went on talking . . .
The sentence followed five months after the criminal’s confession. Razumikhin went to see him in prison whenever he could. Sonya did the same. Then, finally, came the hour of parting. Dunya swore to her brother that it was not forever; Razumikhin did the same. A plan had lodged itself firmly in Razumikhin’s hot, young head: to try, over the next three to four years, to lay at least the foundations of their future income, to put at least a certain amount of money aside and move to Siberia, where the soil was rich in every sense of the word, and where workers, people and capital were in short supply; to set up home there, in the very same town where Rodya would be, and . . . to begin a new life all together. Saying goodbye, they were all in tears.
During the last few days Raskolnikov had been very pensive, kept asking about his mother and worried about her constantly. In fact, he tormented himself so much about her that Dunya became alarmed. Learning in detail about his mother’s morbid mood, he became very gloomy. For some reason he was always especially untalkative with Sonya. With the help of the money left to her by Svidrigailov, Sonya had been ready and waiting, for some time now, to follow the party of convicts with which he would be sent. Not a word had been said about this between herself and Raskolnikov; but both knew that this
was how it would be. At the final leave-taking he smiled strangely at the passionate assurances given by his sister and Razumikhin about the happy life ahead of them after his release, and predicted that his mother’s illness would soon end in disaster. Finally, he and Sonya left.
Two months later, Dunechka and Razumikhin were married. The wedding was a sad, quiet affair. Among the guests were Porfiry Petrovich and Zosimov. Throughout this period Razumikhin bore a look of unshakeable resolve.
Dunya was unquestioning in her faith that he would carry out all his intentions, and how could she not be? There was no mistaking his iron will. He also began attending university lectures again, so as to complete his studies.
Both were constantly hatching plans for the future, and both were set on moving to Siberia in five years’ time. Until then, they were counting on Sonya . . .
Pulkheria Alexandrovna gladly gave her blessing to her daughter’s marriage; but after the wedding she seemed to become even sadder and more preoccupied. To offer her at least a moment’s relief, Razumikhin told her, among other things, about the student and his decrepit father, about how Rodya was burned and even fell ill after rescuing two infants the previous year. Both these facts brought Pulkheria Alexandrovna’s already unsettled mind to a pitch of near ecstasy. She couldn’t stop talking about them, even with strangers in the street (though Dunya accompanied her everywhere). On the omnibus, in shops, wherever she could grab anyone’s attention, she would steer the conversation to her son, to his article, to how he helped a student, was burned in a fire, etcetera. Dunechka couldn’t think how to restrain her. Leaving aside all the dangers of such an ecstatic, morbid state of mind, there was the disastrous possibility of someone mentioning the name Raskolnikov in connection with the trial and talking about it. Pulkheria Alexandrovna even found out the address of the mother of the two infants rescued in the fire and was
determined to go and see her. Eventually, her anxiety reached extreme proportions. Sometimes she would suddenly start crying, often she would fall ill and start raving. One morning she announced that, according to her calculations, Rodya should soon be arriving; that she remembered how, when saying goodbye to her, he himself mentioned that they should expect him back in precisely nine months’ time. She began tidying up the apartment and preparing for the reunion, decorating the room set aside for him (her own), dusting off the furniture, washing and hanging new curtains, etcetera. Dunya was alarmed, but said nothing and even helped her prepare the room for her brother. After a restless day of ceaseless fantasies, joyous daydreams and tears, she fell ill overnight; the next morning she was already running a fever and raving, began shaking and shivering. Two weeks later she died. In her delirium, words slipped out to suggest that she suspected far more about her son’s dreadful fate than they had even thought possible.
Raskolnikov did not learn about his mother’s death for some time, even though correspondence with Petersburg had been established from the very beginning of his confinement in Siberia. It was arranged through Sonya, who wrote a punctual letter to Petersburg once a month, addressing it to Razumikhin, and once a month received a punctual reply. At first her letters struck Dunya and Razumikhin as a little dry and unsatisfactory; but in the end both came to the conclusion that there could be no better way of writing them, because from them the fullest and most precise picture began to emerge of the fate of their unfortunate brother. Sonya’s letters were filled with the most ordinary reality, with the simplest and clearest description of all the conditions of Raskolnikov’s life in penal servitude. There was nothing here about her hopes, no conjectures about the future, no account of her own feelings. Instead of attempts to explain his mental state and
his whole inner life, there were facts and facts alone: his own words, detailed reports about the state of his health, accounts of what he wanted at their last meeting, what he asked for, what instructions he gave her, and so on. All these reports were set out in the minutest detail. In the end, the image of the unfortunate brother emerged all by itself, precisely and clearly delineated; here, there could be no scope for error: just one true fact after another.
But Dunya and her husband could draw scant comfort from these reports, especially at the beginning. Sonya kept writing that he was always sullen, untalkative and barely interested in the news she passed on to him whenever she received a letter; that he would sometimes ask about Mother; and that when, seeing that he was already guessing the truth, she finally told him about her death, she found, to her astonishment, that even this did not appear to affect him greatly, or so it seemed from the outside. She wrote, among other things, that however self-absorbed he might have become and however much he might have closed himself off from everyone, his attitude towards his new life was straightforward and simple; he understood his situation perfectly well, expected no sudden improvements, entertained no frivolous hopes (as others in his situation are so prone to do) and found almost nothing to surprise him about his new surroundings, which were so different from anything he had known before. His health, she wrote, was satisfactory. He would go out to work without trying to shirk it and without going out of his way to find more. He barely noticed the food, but it was so bad, except on Sundays and holidays, that in the end he willingly took some money from Sonya to make his own tea once a day; as for everything else, he asked her not to go to any trouble, assuring her that all this concern for him only served to annoy him. Sonya added that he lived in a dormitory with everyone else; that she had not seen the barracks from the inside, but inferred that they were cramped, horrid and
unhealthy; that he slept on a plank bed, spreading thick felt beneath him, and refused to try anything else. But it was not on account of any preconceived plan or intention that he lived in this coarse and beggarly way; no, it was simply because of his inattentive, indifferent attitude to his own fate. Sonya wrote quite bluntly that not only did he show no interest in her visits, especially at the beginning, he even became almost annoyed with her, was untalkative and even rude; in the end, though, these meetings became a habit for him and almost a need, to the point that he became quite despondent when she was taken ill for a few days and was unable to visit. They saw each other on rest days at the prison gates or in the guardhouse, where he would be summoned to her for a few minutes; on weekdays, when he was out working, she would come to find him in the workshops or at the brick factories or in the sheds on the bank of the Irtysh. As for her own news, Sonya informed them that she had even managed to make some acquaintances and patrons in the town; that she had taken up sewing and that since there was barely a single seamstress in the whole town she had become indispensable in many homes; the only thing she omitted was that through her Raskolnikov, too, had come under the authorities’ protection, his workload had been lightened, and so on. Eventually (after Dunya detected a particular note of anxiety and alarm in Sonya’s most recent letters), news arrived that he was shunning everyone, that the convicts in the prison had not taken kindly to him, that he was silent for days at a time and was becoming very pale.
Suddenly, in her last letter, Sonya wrote that he had fallen very seriously ill and was laid up in hospital, in the convict ward . . .
