Crime and Punishment
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| living process of life; they don’t want a living soul! The living
soul demands life, the soul won’t obey the rules of mechan- ics, the soul is an object of suspicion, the soul is retrograde! But what they want though it smells of death and can be made of India-rubber, at least is not alive, has no will, is servile and won’t revolt! And it comes in the end to their re- ducing everything to the building of walls and the planning of rooms and passages in a phalanstery! The phalanstery is ready, indeed, but your human nature is not ready for the phalanstery—it wants life, it hasn’t completed its vital process, it’s too soon for the graveyard! You can’t skip over nature by logic. Logic presupposes three possibilities, but there are millions! Cut away a million, and reduce it all to the question of comfort! That’s the easiest solution of the problem! It’s seductively clear and you musn’t think about it. That’s the great thing, you mustn’t think! The whole se- cret of life in two pages of print!’ ‘Now he is off, beating the drum! Catch hold of him, do!’ laughed Porfiry. ‘Can you imagine,’ he turned to Raskol-
Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com nikov, ‘six people holding forth like that last night, in one room, with punch as a preliminary! No, brother, you are wrong, environment accounts for a great deal in crime; I can assure you of that.’ ‘Oh, I know it does, but just tell me: a man of forty vio- lates a child of ten; was it environment drove him to it?’ ‘Well, strictly speaking, it did,’ Porfiry observed with noteworthy gravity; ‘a crime of that nature may be very well ascribed to the influence of environment.’ Razumihin was almost in a frenzy. ‘Oh, if you like,’ he roared. ‘I’ll prove to you that your white eyelashes may very well be ascribed to the Church of Ivan the Great’s being two hundred and fifty feet high, and I will prove it clearly, exactly, progressively, and even with a Liberal tendency! I undertake to! Will you bet on it?’ ‘Done! Let’s hear, please, how he will prove it!’ ‘He is always humbugging, confound him,’ cried Razu- mihin, jumping up and gesticulating. ‘What’s the use of talking to you? He does all that on purpose; you don’t know him, Rodion! He took their side yesterday, simply to make fools of them. And the things he said yesterday! And they were delighted! He can keep it up for a fortnight together. Last year he persuaded us that he was going into a monas- tery: he stuck to it for two months. Not long ago he took it into his head to declare he was going to get married, that he had everything ready for the wedding. He ordered new clothes indeed. We all began to congratulate him. There was no bride, nothing, all pure fantasy!’ ‘Ah, you are wrong! I got the clothes before. It was the Crime and Punishment
new clothes in fact that made me think of taking you in.’ ‘Are you such a good dissembler?’ Raskolnikov asked carelessly. ‘You wouldn’t have supposed it, eh? Wait a bit, I shall take you in, too. Ha-ha-ha! No, I’ll tell you the truth. All these questions about crime, environment, children, recall to my mind an article of yours which interested me at the time. ‘On Crime’ … or something of the sort, I forget the title, I read it with pleasure two months ago in the Periodi-
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