Such suffering and terror were what Christ spoke of.7 No, a human being should not be treated like that!’ Although he could not have put all this into words as the prince had done, the valet understood, if not all of it, then the main point, and this was even visible in his features, which showed that he was moved.
Alyoshka, and press you to my heart until I crushed you, for in all the world … I really … re-al-ly … (understand?) … love only you! He spoke this last line almost in a sort of ecstasy. Only you, and also one other, a ‘low woman’ I’ve fallen in love with and it was the end of me. But to fall in love does not mean to love. One can fall in love and still hate. Remember that! I say it now while there’s still joy in it. Sit down here at the table, I’ll be right beside you, and I’ll look at you and go on talking.
But here I should imagine the most terrible part of the whole punishment is, not the bodily pain at all—but the certain knowledge that in an hour, then in ten minutes, then in half a minute, then now—this very instant—your soul must quit your body and that you will no longer be a man—and that this is certain, certain!
He stood hesitating in the gateway. To go into the street, to go a walk for appearance’ sake was revolting; to Crime and Punishment 139 of 967 go back to his room, even more revolting. ‘And what a chance I have lost for ever!’ he muttered, standing aimlessly in the gateway, just opposite the porter’s little dark room, which was also open. Suddenly he started. From the porter’s room, two paces away from him, something shining under the bench to the right caught his eye…. He looked about him—nobody. He approached the room on tiptoe, went down two steps into it and in a faint voice called the porter. ‘Yes, not at home! Somewhere near though, in the yard, for the door is wide open.’ He dashed to the axe (it was an axe) and pulled it out from under the bench, where it lay between two chunks of wood; at once, before going out, he made it fast in the noose, he thrust both hands into his pockets and went out of the room; no one had noticed him! ‘When reason fails, the devil helps!’ he thought with a strange grin. This chance raised his spirits extraordinarily.
Und endlich, glaube ich, sind wir schon äußerlich so verschieden...aus vielen Gründen...daß wir am Ende nicht allzuviel Berührungspunkte haben können; aber wissen Sie, an diesen letzten Gedanken glaube ich selbst nicht recht, denn sehr oft scheint es nur so, als wären keine Berührungspunkte vorhanden, in Wirklichkeit sind sie aber da...Das kommt von der Trägheit der Menschen, weil sie sich gegenseitig nach dem bloßen Augenschein einordnen und nichts finden können...
after doing a good deed, assured me that all the credit belonged to me and that those many people who nowadays taught and preached that the individual good deed was of no significance were wrong. I was also very anxious to talk for a while. ‘Whoever attacks individual ‘charity’, I began, attacks the nature of man and despises his personal dignity. But the organization of ‘public charity’ and the question of personal freedom are two different questions and are not mutually exclusive. Individual kindness will always remain, because it is a need of the personality, a living need for the direct influence of one personality on another.
Our budding, still timid press has all the same rendered some service to society, for without it we should never have learned, in any measure of fullness, of those horrors of unbridled will and moral degradation that it ceaselessly reports in its pages, to everyone, not merely to those who attend the sessions of the new open courts granted us by the present reign.
how an intention becomes reality, how theory is enfleshed, how abstract reasoning ends in a sensitive, compassionate man slipping in ‘sticky, warm blood’. What state of mind is needed for this to happen? Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) responded to this quandary in his late essay ‘Why Do People Stupefy Themselves?’ (1890), where he sought to explain the state of mental automatism in which Raskolnikov carried out his crime. But Tolstoy, an aggressive teetotaller by this stage in his life, was surely exaggerating when he implies that the glass of beer Raskolnikov consumes at the end of the first chapter ‘silences the voice of conscience’. Raskolnikov’s utter passivity, which makes him succumb to ‘ideas in the air’ and to gamble everything on one desperate act, reaches back far further than the glass of beer, deeper even than the question of ‘conscience’. Nor can it be reduced to the verdict of insanity, as Raskolnikov himself is aware (even when others are not). This passivity is a state of spiritual death and it is this that enables the crime.