Sonia wrote simply that he had at first shown no inter-est in her visits, had almost been vexed with her indeed for
coming, unwilling to talk and rude to her. But that in the end these visits had become a habit and almost a necessity for him, so that he was positively distressed when she was ill for some days and could not visit him. She used to see him on holidays at the prison gates or in the guard-room, to which he was brought for a few minutes to see her. On working days she would go to see him at work either at the workshops or at the brick kilns, or at the sheds on the banks of the Irtish.
About herself, Sonia wrote that she had succeeded in making some acquaintances in the town, that she did sew-ing, and, as there was scarcely a dressmaker in the town, she was looked upon as an indispensable person in many houses. But she did not mention that the authorities were, through her, interested in Raskolnikov; that his task was lightened and so on.
At last the news came (Dounia had indeed noticed signs of alarm and uneasiness in the preceding letters) that he held aloof from everyone, that his fellow prisoners did not like him, that he kept silent for days at a time and was be-coming very pale. In the last letter Sonia wrote that he had been taken very seriously ill and was in the convict ward of the hospital.
II
He was ill a long time. But it was not the horrors of pris-on life, not the hard labour, the bad food, the shaven
head, or the patched clothes that crushed him. What did he care for all those trials and hardships! he was even glad of the hard work. Physically exhausted, he could at least reck-on on a few hours of quiet sleep. And what was the food to him—the thin cabbage soup with beetles floating in it? In the past as a student he had often not had even that. His clothes were warm and suited to his manner of life. He did not even feel the fetters. Was he ashamed of his shaven head and parti-coloured coat? Before whom? Before Sonia? Sonia was afraid of him, how could he be ashamed before her? And yet he was ashamed even before Sonia, whom he tortured because of it with his contemptuous rough manner. But it was not his shaven head and his fetters he was ashamed of: his pride had been stung to the quick. It was wounded pride that made him ill. Oh, how happy he would have been if he could have blamed himself! He could have borne any-thing then, even shame and disgrace. But he judged himself severely, and his exasperated conscience found no par-ticularly terrible fault in his past, except a simple blunder which might happen to anyone. He was ashamed just be-cause he, Raskolnikov, had so hopelessly, stupidly come to grief through some decree of blind fate, and must humble
himself and submit to ‘the idiocy’ of a sentence, if he were anyhow to be at peace.
Vague and objectless anxiety in the present, and in the future a continual sacrifice leading to nothing—that was all that lay before him. And what comfort was it to him that at the end of eight years he would only be thirty-two and able to begin a new life! What had he to live for? What had he to look forward to? Why should he strive? To live in order to exist? Why, he had been ready a thousand times before to give up existence for the sake of an idea, for a hope, even for a fancy. Mere existence had always been too little for him; he had always wanted more. Perhaps it was just because of the strength of his desires that he had thought himself a man to whom more was permissible than to others.
And if only fate would have sent him repentance—burn-ing repentance that would have torn his heart and robbed him of sleep, that repentance, the awful agony of which brings visions of hanging or drowning! Oh, he would have been glad of it! Tears and agonies would at least have been life. But he did not repent of his crime.
At least he might have found relief in raging at his stu-pidity, as he had raged at the grotesque blunders that had brought him to prison. But now in prison, in freedom he thought over and criticised all his actions again and by no means found them so blundering and so grotesque as they had seemed at the fatal time.
‘In what way,’ he asked himself, ‘was my theory stupider than others that have swarmed and clashed from the begin-ning of the world? One has only to look at the thing quite
independently, broadly, and uninfluenced by commonplace ideas, and my idea will by no means seem so … strange. Oh, sceptics and halfpenny philosophers, why do you halt half-way!’
‘Why does my action strike them as so horrible?’ he said to himself. ‘Is it because it was a crime? What is meant by crime? My conscience is at rest. Of course, it was a legal crime, of course, the letter of the law was broken and blood was shed. Well, punish me for the letter of the law … and that’s enough. Of course, in that case many of the benefac-tors of mankind who snatched power for themselves instead of inheriting it ought to have been punished at their first steps. But those men succeeded and so they were right and I didn’t, and so I had no right to have taken that step.’
It was only in that that he recognised his criminality, only in the fact that he had been unsuccessful and had con-fessed it.
He suffered too from the question: why had he not killed himself? Why had he stood looking at the river and pre-ferred to confess? Was the desire to live so strong and was it so hard to overcome it? Had not Svidrigaïlov overcome it, although he was afraid of death?
In misery he asked himself this question, and could not understand that, at the very time he had been standing looking into the river, he had perhaps been dimly conscious of the fundamental falsity in himself and his convictions. He didn’t understand that that consciousness might be the promise of a future crisis, of a new view of life and of his future resurrection.
He preferred to attribute it to the dead weight of instinct which he could not step over, again through weakness and meanness. He looked at his fellow prisoners and was amazed to see how they all loved life and prized it. It seemed to him that they loved and valued life more in prison than in free-dom. What terrible agonies and privations some of them, the tramps for instance, had endured! Could they care so much for a ray of sunshine, for the primeval forest, the cold spring hidden away in some unseen spot, which the tramp had marked three years before, and longed to see again, as he might to see his sweetheart, dreaming of the green grass round it and the bird singing in the bush? As he went on he saw still more inexplicable examples.
In prison, of course, there was a great deal he did not see and did not want to see; he lived as it were with down-cast eyes. It was loathsome and unbearable for him to look. But in the end there was much that surprised him and he began, as it were involuntarily, to notice much that he had not suspected before. What surprised him most of all was the terrible impossible gulf that lay between him and all the rest. They seemed to be a different species, and he looked at them and they at him with distrust and hostility. He felt and knew the reasons of his isolation, but he would never have admitted till then that those reasons were so deep and strong. There were some Polish exiles, political prisoners, among them. They simply looked down upon all the rest as ignorant churls; but Raskolnikov could not look upon them like that. He saw that these ignorant men were in many re-spects far wiser than the Poles. There were some Russians
who were just as contemptuous, a former oficer and two seminarists. Raskolnikov saw their mistake as clearly. He was disliked and avoided by everyone; they even began to hate him at last—why, he could not tell. Men who had been far more guilty despised and laughed at his crime.
‘You’re a gentleman,’ they used to say. ‘You shouldn’t hack about with an axe; that’s not a gentleman’s work.’
The second week in Lent, his turn came to take the sacra-ment with his gang. He went to church and prayed with the others. A quarrel broke out one day, he did not know how. All fell on him at once in a fury.
‘You’re an infidel! You don’t believe in God,’ they shouted. ‘You ought to be killed.’
He had never talked to them about God nor his belief, but they wanted to kill him as an infidel. He said nothing. One of the prisoners rushed at him in a perfect frenzy. Ras-kolnikov awaited him calmly and silently; his eyebrows did not quiver, his face did not flinch. The guard succeeded in intervening
