Crime and Punishment (93 page)

Ilya Petrovich chortled away, thoroughly content with his own witticisms.

‘Let us assume it's caused by an immoderate thirst for enlightenment; but I mean, once a person is enlightened, that's enough. But why abuse it? Why offend decent people, the way that blackguard Zamyotov does? Why did he insult me, I ask you?
And then again there've been so many of these suicides of late – you simply have no idea. People spending the last of their money and killing themselves. Young girls and lads, old men… Even today there's been a report about some gentleman who arrived in town recently. Nil Pavlych, I say, Nil Pavlych! What's the name of that gent they say shot himself over on the St Petersburg Side this morning?’

‘Svidrigailov,’ someone replied from the other room with hoarse indifference.

Raskolnikov shuddered.

‘Svidrigailov! Svidrigailov's shot himself!’ he exclaimed.

‘What! You know the man?’

‘Yes… I do… He arrived in town recently…’

‘That's right, he did, after he lost his wife; a man of dissolute behaviour, and he suddenly went and shot himself, in such a scandalous fashion, you simply have no idea… he left a few words in his notebook to the effect that he was dying in full possession of his faculties and requested that no one be blamed for his death. It's said he had money. How is it you know him?’

‘He was a… friend of mine… My sister worked in their house as a governess…’

‘My, my, my… Then you ought to be able to tell us about him. Didn't you suspect anything?’

‘I saw him yesterday… he was… drinking… I knew nothing of this.’

Raskolnikov felt that something had fallen on top of him and was weighing him down.

‘You're looking rather pale again. We have such stuffy offices up here…’

‘Yes, it's time I was going,’ Raskolnikov muttered. ‘Forgive me for troubling you…’

‘Oh, don't mention it, you're most welcome! It's been a pleasure, and I'm glad to say it…’

Ilya Petrovich even stretched out his hand.

‘I simply wanted… to see Zamyotov…’

‘I understand, I understand, and it's been a pleasure.’

‘I'm… most glad… Goodbye, now…’ Raskolnikov smiled.

He stepped outside; he was swaying. His head was going round. He could hardly tell whether he was standing upright. He began to descend the staircase, supporting himself with his right hand against the wall. He had a vague impression of some yardkeeper, housebook in hand, giving him a shove as he made his way past him upstairs to the bureau; of some wretched little dog barking and barking somewhere on the ground floor, and of some woman throwing a rolling-pin at it and shouting. He went down to the bottom and emerged into the courtyard. There in the yard, not far from the exit, stood the pale, utterly rigid figure of Sonya, looking at him with wild, wild eyes. He came to a halt in front of her. There was an expression of pain and exhaustion on her face, something akin to despair. She clasped her hands together. A lost, ugly smile forced its way to his lips. He stood there for a moment, smiled ironically, then turned back and began to ascend the stairs to the bureau again.

Ilya Petrovich had sat down and was rummaging through some documents. In front of him stood the muzhik who had shoved against Raskolnikov on his way up the staircase.

‘Ah-h-h? You again! Left something?… But what's the matter with you?’

With lips turned pale, his gaze motionless, Raskolnikov quietly walked up to him, went right up to the desk, rested one arm on it, and tried to say something, but was unable to; all that came out were some incoherent sounds.

‘You're feeling faint, a chair! Here, sit on this chair, sit down! Water!’

Raskolnikov lowered himself onto the chair, without, however, taking his eyes off the face of the disagreeably astonished Ilya Petrovich. For a moment they both looked at each other, waiting. Water was brought.

‘I'm the person…’ Raskolnikov began.

‘Take a drink of water.’

Raskolnikov brushed the water aside and quietly, in measured tones, but distinctly, said:

‘
I
'
m the person who murdered the old civil servant
'
s widow and her sister Lizaveta that day
,
I did it with an axe
,
and I robbed them
.’

Ilya Petrovich opened his mouth. People came running from every quarter.

Raskolnikov repeated his deposition.

Siberia. On the bank of a wide, lonely river there is a town, one of Russia's administrative centres; in the town there is a fortress, in the fortress a prison. In the prison there is a penal exile of the second category, Rodion Raskolnikov. Since the day he committed his crime almost one and a half years have passed.

The legal processing of this case went through without much difficulty. The criminal backed up his deposition with firmness, precision and clarity, neither confusing any of the circumstances nor making any attempt to soften them in his favour, distorting no facts and leaving out not the slightest detail. He described the entire plan of the murder right down to the smallest minutiae: cleared up the mystery of the ‘pledge’ (the small flat piece of wood with the metal flange) that was found in the hands of the murdered old woman; narrated in detail how he had removed the keys from the dead woman's person, described those keys, described the trunk and what had filled it; even enumerated some of the individual items it had contained; cleared up the riddle of Lizaveta's murder; recounted how Koch had come up the stairs and knocked, followed by the student, describing everything they had said to each other; how he, the criminal, had then run down the stairs and heard the shouting of Mikolka and Mitka; how he had hidden in the empty apartment and then gone back to his own lodgings, and in conclusion gave the whereabouts of the block near the gate in the yard on Voznesensky Prospect, under which the goods and the purse were found. In short, the case was cut and dried. The investigators and the
judges were, it must be said, very surprised that he should have hidden the purse and the goods under the block without availing himself of them, and even more so that not only was he unable to remember the details of any of the goods he had stolen, but was even mistaken as to their number. In particular, the fact that he had never once opened the purse and did not even know how much money it contained, seemed difficult to believe (the purse had turned out to contain 317 silver roubles and three twenty-copeck pieces; because of the long time they had spent under the block some of the banknotes on top, which bore the largest denominations, had suffered severe water damage). Much time was spent in attempting to discover why it was that the defendant should be lying about this one thing, while he had voluntarily and truthfully confessed to everything else. At last one or two members of the panel (especially the psychologists) actually admitted the possibility that he really had never looked inside the purse, and so had not known what it contained, and that in this state of ignorance he had put it under the block, but at that point it was concluded that the crime itself could only have been committed in a state of some temporary disturbance of the mind, as it were, under the influence of some dangerous monomania involving murder and robbery for murder and robbery's sake, without ulterior motive or thought of gain. This decision happened to coincide with the arrival of the latest fashionable theory of temporary insanity, the application of which to certain criminals is so frequently the object of such effort in our time. What was more, precise testimony to Raskolnikov's inveterate hypochondria was adduced by many of the witnesses, among them Dr Zosimov, Raskolnikov's ex-student colleagues, his landlady and serving-maid. All this did much to reinforce the conclusion that Raskolnikov was not at all the usual kind of murderer, brigand and robber, and that here they were faced with something rather different. To the great annoyance of those who supported this opinion, the criminal made practically no attempt to defend himself; in response to the final and deciding questions as to what had induced him to murder and what had made him commit robbery, he replied quite succinctly, with the most brutal precision, that the cause
of the whole thing had been his rotten social position, his poverty and helplessness, and his desire to secure the first steps of his career with the help of at least three thousand roubles, which he had counted on finding in the home of the murdered woman. As for the murder, he had embarked upon it as a result of his frivolous and cowardly nature, which had, moreover, been overwrought by deprivation and failure. To the question as to what had prompted him to turn himself in, he replied bluntly that it had been genuine remorse. All this was almost indecent…

The sentence, however, turned out to be more lenient than might have been supposed, given the crime that had been committed, and this may have been for the reason that not only did the criminal make no attempt to justify himself – he seemed even to display a wish to incriminate himself further. All the strange and unusual circumstances of the case were taken into account. As to the criminal's ill and impoverished condition before he had committed his crime there was not the slightest doubt. The fact that he had not availed himself of the proceeds of the robbery was put down in part to the influence of awakening remorse, and in part to an impaired condition of his mental faculties during the enactment of the crime. The fact of Lizaveta's unexpected murder merely served as an example to reinforce this latter supposition: a man commits two murders yet forgets the door is open! And to cap it all, he turns himself in at the very point when the case has grown extraordinarily complicated as a result of the false self-incrimination of a depressed fanatic (Nikolai), and this at a time when not only is there no clear evidence against the real criminal, but there is hardly any suspicion of his guilt (Porfiry Petrovich fully kept his promise). All of this played a decisive role in softening the fate of the accused man.

In addition to this, there also appeared, quite unexpectedly, certain other circumstances that acted powerfully in the defendant's favour. The former student Razumikhin dug up from somewhere the information, supporting it with proof, that the criminal Raskolnikov had, during the period of his attendance at the university, helped with the last of his resources a certain
poor and consumptive student colleague of his acquaintance, having more or less kept him alive for a six-month spell. Not only that, but following his death he had looked after the old and enfeebled father – now left among the living – of his deceased colleague (who had supported and sustained his father by his own labour very nearly from the age of thirteen), had, what was more, found the old man a place in a hospital, and when he too had died had arranged his funeral. All this information exercised a certain favourable influence on the decision of Raskolnikov's fate. Then again, no less a person than his former landlady the widow Zarnitsyna, the mother of his deceased fiancée, testified that when he had been living in another building at Five Corners Raskolnikov had, during a fire in the middle of the night, dragged two small children to safety from one of the apartments that was already in flames, and had suffered burns as a result. This piece of evidence was thoroughly investigated and rather well supported by the testimony of many of the witnesses. In short, the upshot was that the criminal was sentenced to penal servitude of the second category for a period of only eight years in all, in recognition of his having turned himself in and in view of certain circumstances that had reduced his guilt.

Right at the start of the trial Raskolnikov's mother became ill. Dunya and Razumikhin found a means of getting her out of St Petersburg for the entire duration of the trial. Razumikhin selected a town situated on the railway and within easy reach of St Petersburg, so he would have an opportunity of keeping a proper eye on all the details of the trial and at the same time be able to see Avdotya Romanovna as frequently as possible. Pulkheria Aleksandrovna's illness was of some strange, nervous kind and was accompanied by something close to insanity – if not complete, then at least partial. Dunya, on returning from her last meeting with her brother, had found her mother thoroughly ill, with a fever and delirium. That very evening she had come to an agreement with Razumikhin as to what they should tell her mother in response to her questions about her brother, and had even invented with him a whole story about Raskolnikov's departure for some distant spot on the frontiers of Russia on a certain private errand that would eventually
bring him both money and fame. They were, however, struck by the fact that neither on that occasion nor on subsequent ones did Pulkheria Aleksandrovna ask any questions at all. Quite the reverse: she herself was full of some story about her son's sudden departure; with tears she described to them how he had come to say farewell to her; let it be known as she did so, by means of hints, that she alone was privy to a great number of very important and mysterious circumstances and that Rodya had a great many powerful enemies, making it positively essential for him to go into hiding. With regard to his future career, it seemed to her it would be brilliant and assured, once certain hostile circumstances had been got out of the way; she made it quite plain to Razumikhin that she considered her son would in time become a statesman, something that was proven by his article and his dazzling literary talent. This article was something that she read constantly, sometimes even reading it out loud, very nearly sleeping with it at her side; yet for all that she almost never asked where exactly Rodya was now, even in spite of the fact that they all too obviously avoided mentioning the subject to her – which alone ought to have alerted her suspicion. In the end they began to be frightened by the strange silence of Pulkheria Aleksandrovna on certain points. For example, she never even complained about not getting any letters from him, while earlier, when living in her little town, she had done nothing but live in the hope and expectation of the speedy receipt of a letter from her adored Rodya. This latter circumstance really seemed to defy explanation and caused Dunya no end of worry; she had been visited by the idea that her mother must have had a premonition of something dreadful that awaited her son and was afraid to ask any questions, lest she should discover something even more dreadful. Whatever the truth of the matter, Dunya clearly perceived that Pulkheria Aleksandrovna was not in a sound condition of mind.