He spent the whole of the last period of Lent and Easter Sunday laid up in hospital. Recovering, he recalled what he'd dreamt while feverish and delirious. In his sickness he'd imagined the entire world condemned to some terrible, unheard-of pestilence, advancing on Europe from deepest Asia. Everyone was to die, apart from the few, very few, who'd been chosen. New trichinae9 had appeared, microscopic beings that were entering human bodies. But these beings were spirits, endowed with intelligence and will. People who took them into their bodies immediately became possessed and went mad. But never, ever had people thought themselves as intelligent and as certain of the truth as those who had been infected. Never had they considered their verdicts, their scientific conclusions, their moral convictions and beliefs more unshakeable. Entire villages, entire towns and peoples were being infected and driven to madness. Everyone was panicking and no one could understand anyone else; each man thought that he and he alone possessed the truth, and found the sight of others a torment; he beat his breast, wept and wrung his hands. No one knew whom to bring to justice and how, couldn't agree what was bad and what was good, whom to charge and whom to acquit. People were killing one another out of meaningless spite. They mobilized entire armies, but no sooner did these armies set out than they began to tear themselves to pieces; breaking rank, the soldiers attacked, hacked, stabbed, bit and ate each other. In towns, the tocsin was sounded from dawn till dusk: everyone was summoned, but who was doing the summoning and why? No one knew and everyone was panicking. The most ordinary trades were abandoned, because every man had his own ideas, his own solutions, and agreement was impossible; agriculture ceased. Here and there people gathered in groups, agreed on something, swore not to split up - then immediately embarked on something completely different from what they themselves had just proposed, began blaming, fighting and killing each other. Fires broke out; famine broke out. Everyone and everything was perishing. The pestilence10 grew and spread, further and further. In the whole world there were only a few survivors; these were the pure and the chosen, those destined to begin a new race of people and a new life, to renew and purify the earth, but no one, anywhere, had seen these people, nor heard their words and voices.
Raskolnikov was tormented by the fact that this meaningless delirium echoed so sadly and so agonizingly in his memory; that the impression left by these fevered daydreams was taking so long to pass. It was already the second week after Easter, spring, the days warm and clear; in the prisoners' ward the windows (barred, with a guard below them) stood open. For the entire duration of his illness, Sonya had only been able to visit him twice; each time she'd had to beg for permission. Nevertheless, she came often to the hospital courtyard, especially towards evening, sometimes just to stand in the yard for a minute or two and look up at the windows of the ward, if only from afar. Once, towards evening, when he'd almost completely recovered, Raskolnikov fell asleep; waking up, he happened to go to the window and suddenly caught sight of Sonya in the distance, by the hospital gates. She was standing there as though she were waiting for something. At that moment, something seemed to pierce his heart; he shuddered and hastily retreated from the window. Sonya did not come the next day, or the day after that. He noticed how anxiously he was waiting for her. Finally, he was discharged. Entering the prison, he learned from the convicts that Sofya Semyonovna had fallen ill and was staying at home.
Deeply worried, he sent someone to find out how she was. Her illness, he was soon told, was not dangerous. Learning in her turn of his concern and distress, Sonya sent him a note in pencil, telling him that she felt a great deal better, that it was just a bit of cold and that she would come to see him at work very, very soon. When he read this note, his heart throbbed with pain.
Another clear, warm day. Early that morning, at about six, he went out to work on the river bank, in a shed where a kiln was set up for baking and pounding alabaster. Only two other workers went out with him. One of the convicts took a guard and went back with him to the fortress to fetch a tool; the other began preparing firewood and loading the kiln. Raskolnikov went outside, sat down on the logs stacked up by the shed and looked out at the broad, deserted river. A wide vista opened up from the tall bank. The sound of singing just reached him from the other side. Over there, on the sun-drenched, boundless steppe, the black dots of nomadic yurts were faintly visible. Over there was freedom; over there lived people quite unlike the ones living here; over there time itself seemed to have stopped, as if the ages of Abraham and his flocks had not yet passed. Raskolnikov sat and watched, neither moving nor looking away; his thoughts shaded into daydreams and contemplation; he wasn't thinking about anything, yet something troubled and tormented him.
Suddenly, there was Sonya beside him. She'd approached with barely a sound and sat down next to him. It was still very early; the morning chill had not yet softened. She was wearing her wretched, old burnous and the green shawl.11 Her face - thin, pale, pinched - still bore the signs of her illness. She gave him a warm, joyful smile but, as usual, offered her hand to him timidly.
She always offered her hand to him timidly and sometimes wouldn't offer it at all, as if scared he might reject it. He always took it with a kind of disgust, always greeted her with a kind of annoyance, and sometimes he remained stubbornly silent all the while she was with him. On occasions, she trembled before him and left in deep sorrow. But now their hands did not part; he cast her a quick, fleeting glance, said nothing and lowered his eyes to the ground. They were alone; no one could see them. The guard had turned away.
How it happened he himself did not know, but suddenly something swept him up and hurled him at her feet. He wept, hugging her knees. At first she was terrified and her whole face went numb. She leapt to her feet and looked at him, shaking all over. But there and then, in that same instant, she understood everything. Her eyes lit up with endless happiness; she'd understood, and could no longer doubt, that he loved her, loved her endlessly, and that the moment had finally come . . .
They wanted to talk, but could not. Tears were in their eyes. They were pale and thin; but in these sick, pale faces there already shone the dawn of a renewed future, of full resurrection into new life. Love had resurrected them, and the heart of each contained inexhaustible springs of life for the heart of the other.
They resolved to wait and be patient. There were seven more years to go. How much unbearable torment still lay ahead of them? How much endless happiness? But he'd been raised to life and he knew it. He felt it fully with his whole renewed being, while she - well, what was her life but his?
That evening, when the barracks had been locked for the night, Raskolnikov lay on his bunk and thought of her. During the day he even had the impression that all the convicts, his former enemies, were already looking at him differently. He even began talking to them himself, and they responded with affection. He recalled this now, but actually, wasn't it all as it should be? Shouldn't everything be different now?
It was her he thought of. He remembered how he'd kept tearing and rending her heart; remembered her pale, thin face; yet now even these memories barely tormented him: he knew with what endless love he would now redeem all her sufferings.
And anyway, what were they, all these torments of the past? Yes, all of them! Everything, even his crime, even his sentence and exile, now seemed, in this first surge, somehow alien and strange, as if it were not even him they had happened to. But he was unable, that evening, to think long and hard, to focus his mind on any one thing; besides, he couldn't have resolved anything now by conscious effort; he could only feel. Dialectics had given way to life, and something quite different had to work itself out in his conscious mind.
Under his pillow lay the Gospels.12 He picked the book up without thinking. It belonged to her, the very same book from which she had read to him about the raising of Lazarus. During his first days in prison he thought she would torture him with religion, keep on about the Gospels and ply him with books. But to his utter astonishment she hadn't once me
ntioned it, hadn't even offered him the Gospels. It was he who had asked her for the book not long before he fell sick, and she brought it to him without saying a word. He still had not opened it.
He didn't open it now, either, but a thought flashed through him: 'How can her beliefs not be my beliefs too now? Or at least her feelings, her strivings . . .'
She, too, had felt restless all day and she even fell ill again overnight. But she was so happy she was almost scared. Seven years, only seven years! At the beginning of their happiness, at certain moments, both were ready to see these seven years as seven days.13 He didn't even know that his new life was not being given to him for free, that it would still cost him dear, that it would have to be paid for with a great, future deed . . .
But here a new story begins: the story of a man's gradual renewal and gradual rebirth, of his gradual crossing from one world to another, of his acquaintance with a new, as yet unknown reality. That could be a subject for another tale - our present one has ended.
Preface to the Notes
The following abbreviations are used for the sources cited most often:
BT
Boris Tikhomirov, 'Lazar'! Gryadi von': Roman F. M. Dostoevskogo 'Prestuplenie i nakazanie' v sovremennom prochtenii: Kniga-kommentarii ['Lazarus! Come Forth': F. M. Dostoyevsky's novel Crime and Punishment Read in the Light of Its Time: A Commentary] (St Petersburg: Serebryanyi vek, 2006).
KL
Kenneth Lantz, The Dostoevsky Encyclopedia (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2004).
PSS
The annotations to Crime and Punishment supplied in Volume 7 of the Soviet-era Academy of Sciences edition of Dostoyevsky's complete works: F. M. Dostoyevsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972-90), vol. 7 (1973).
SB
S. V. Belov, Roman F. M. Dostoevskogo 'Prestuplenie i nakazanie': Kommentarii [F. M. Dostoyevsky's Novel Crime and Punishment: A Commentary] (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1979; rev. edn. 1985).
All biblical quotations in the Notes are given in the King James Version.
Notes
PART ONE
1. S----y Lane . . . K----n Bridge: The partial or total concealment of place names, characteristic of much Russian nineteenth-century fiction, is employed inconsistently and enigmatically in Crime and Punishment. In these notes only the most important (and least ambiguous) of these concealed locations will be deciphered. According to Dostoyevsky's second wife, Anna Grigoryevna, the locations in question here are Stolyarnyi Lane and Kokushkin Bridge in the crowded district of St Petersburg around Haymarket Square (on the topography of Crime and Punishment, see Introduction, II). Indeed, it is possible that Dostoyevsky imagined his protagonist living in the same building where he himself rented an apartment while working on the novel, on the corner of Stolyarnyi Lane and what is now Kaznacheiskaya Street. Another strong possibility is the building at the corner of Stolyarnyi and Grazhdanskaya Street. Vistors to St Petersburg will find memorial plaques at both these addresses (BT).
2. hypochondria: Closely allied with melancholia in the medical discourse of the time; indeed, Dostoyevsky diagnosed himself as having been 'melancholic and hypochondriac' as a young man. 'The two basic symptoms of melancholia were exaggeration of simple events into singular and ominous occurrences, and episodes of unfounded fear', while 'hypochondria was generally based on real physical complaints, with effects greatly exaggerated by the patient', wrote the late James L. Rice. 'Today Dostoevsky's hypochondria and melancholia might be diagnosed as different degrees of depression', Rice, Dostoevsky and the Healing Art (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Ardis, 1985), pp. 114-15.
3. a new word: The Russian expression skazat' novoe slovo, meaning 'to say something new' (in, for example, a branch of science), is more idiomatic than its literal English equivalent ('to utter a new word'), which has been retained here and throughout the text for its various connotations, especially as regards the prevalent contrast between 'words' and 'deeds'. Dostoyevsky himself was of the view that Russia had produced three indisputable geniuses who had said 'a new word': Mikhail Lomonosov (1711-65), Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) and, 'in part', Nikolai Gogol (1809-52); see the entry on Pushkin in KL.
4. King Pea: Tsar Gorokh (literally, 'Tsar Pea') has his wife's head chopped off in a famous folktale, though he is also remembered as the 'Good Tsar Gorokh' who reigned over an idealized Russia. A striking oxymoron, 'Tsar Pea' eventually came to stand for something silly or nonsensical (SB); yet, as often in Dostoyevsky, the use of a familiar image or phrase hides depths of meaning and allusion. In an article of 1981 J. L. Rice noted that the very name 'Tsar Gorokh' is 'a perfect, ironic representation of Raskolnikov's grandiosely unbalanced Napoleonic ambition'; the essay is collected in Rice, Who Was Dostoevsky? (Oakland, California: Berkeley Slavic Specialties, 2011).
5. a top hat, a Zimmerman: The merchant Karl Zimmerman owned a hat factory as well as a shop on the fashionable Nevsky Prospect (BT). This episode introduces for the first time the voice of the 'common people' (narod), whose interventions will offer a chorus-like commentary on Raskolnikov's actions and fate.
6. the Ditch . . . ----a Street: On all but one occasion throughout the novel the Yekaterinsky (Catherine) Canal, known since 1923 as the Griboyedov Canal, is referred to not by the impressive, foreign-sounding word kanal, but by the pejorative kanava (ditch). A filthy, sewer-like waterway at the time of the novel's composition, the Ditch is at the heart of its topography; ----a Street is probably Srednyaya Podyacheskaya Street. Here and throughout I follow Boris Tikhomirov's decoding of the novel's topography.
7. courtyards: The easily accessible, communicating courtyards characteristic of St Petersburg have arch-like gateways at both ends - well-suited for criminal purposes. Raskolnikov's own courtyard, by contrast, appears to be an example of the high, self-enclosed yard commonly compared by Petersburgers to a 'well'.
8. caretakers: In Tsarist Russia the dvornik (literally, 'yard-man') was responsible not just for keeping courtyards swept and tidy, but for maintaining order in the buildings themselves and reporting any malfeasance to the police.
9. father: The word batyushka, a now old-fashioned term of address that is both respectful and familiar, literally means 'little father' and has a broad scope of reference that includes priests and tsars. In view of the centrality of the theme of paternity (and family ties in general) to Crime and Punishment, the literal meaning has been retained, here and subsequently.
10. two nice little notes: Two one-rouble banknotes, yellow in colour.
11. ten copecks a rouble each month: Until 1864 a strict limit was imposed on the interest that could be charged on loans, but from 1865, when Dostoyevsky began work on the novel, this no longer applied, and the writer was quick to seize on this further symptom of a new capitalist order. 'The usurer Alyona Ivanovna [...] was an essentially new phenomenon of Petersburg life' (BT).
12. tradesman: The 'tradesmen' - also sometimes translated, with etymological accuracy, as 'townsmen' (meshchane) - were the lowest urban estate, later famous as the 'petty bourgeoisie'.
13. All year long . . . love of old: A variation of a popular song about the adventures of a village lad in the capital, transposed from Nevsky Prospect to the less glamorous district in which Crime and Punishment unfolds (BT).
14. titular counsellor: A lowly position in the civil service, ninth in the fourteen-grade 'Table of Ranks' instituted by Peter the Great.
15. former student: This phrase, unusual in English, defined the bearer's official status until he found employment.
16. political economy: A reference to the theories of Adam Smith (1723-90), Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) and others. Protracted polemics were waged on this issue in the Russian literary journals in 1862, not least in Time, the journal run by Dostoyevsky and his brother (BT). In his Letters from France and Italy (1855) the exile Alexander Herzen
(1812-70) described political economy as an 'abstract science of wealth' that treated people as 'organic machines' and society as a 'factory'. Dostoyevsky would have agreed, though here, as often, he appears to be criticizing not just foreign ideas themselves but their caricatured reception on Russian soil.
17. yellow ticket: The medical certificate given to prostitutes in exchange for their passport was commonly referred to as the 'yellow ticket', owing to its colour. This certificate gave prostitutes the right to work, while also enabling the state to track their changes of address and state of health. (BT) 18. Behold the Man!: The words of Pontius Pilate when Jesus came before him wearing a crown of thorns (John 19:5). In addition to direct quotation, Marmeladov's speech throughout this chapter is littered with biblical allusions, sometimes couched in the high style of Old Church Slavonic. The 'wagging of heads', for example, occurs in both the Psalms and Matthew's Gospel, while the phrase 'all that was hidden is made manifest' is closely modelled on verses in Mark (4:22) and Luke (8:17).
19. chilly little corner: The letting of 'corners' rather than entire rooms to impecunious tenants was a characteristic feature of mid-nineteenth-century St Petersburg. It was also the subject of a memorable sketch by the celebrated poet Nikolai Nekrasov (1821-78) entitled 'The Petersburg Corners' and included in Nekrasov's anthology The Physiology of St Petersburg (1845, in two volumes), recently translated by Thomas Gaiton Marullo. The sketch begins with a notice pinned to the gate of a house: 'FER [sic] RENT: KORNER [sic] TO LET, SECOND YARD, CELLAR'. The narrator goes in to find a cellar room crowded with colourful tenants, including new arrivals from the villages looking for work and a disgraced former teacher in a green coat, dismissed from his job for excessive drinking. The teacher bears a striking resemblance in biography, appearance and gestures to Dostoyevsky's Marmeladov: 'the green man presented a sharp picture to the eye. He was not unlike an actor who has carried some favourite and well-learned role into life. His movements were comic to the point of caricature, inevitable for a man unsteady on his legs. There was also something staid about them, though, akin to a feeling of personal dignity and worth. [...] There was a certain incoherence in the green man that made him extremely funny'; quoted from Petersburg: The Physiology of a City, trans. Thomas Gaiton Marullo (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2009), pp. 131, 145.