Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (book club recommendations TXT) 📖

practical life. Ideas, if you like, are fermenting,” he said to Pyotr Petrovitch, “and desire for good exists, though it’s in a childish form, and honesty you may find, although there are crowds of brigands. Anyway, there’s no practicality. Practicality goes well shod.”

“I don’t agree with you,” Pyotr Petrovitch replied, with evident enjoyment. “Of course, people do get carried away and make mistakes, but one must have indulgence; those mistakes are merely evidence of enthusiasm for the cause and of abnormal external environment. If little has been done, the time has been but short; of means I will not speak. It’s my personal view, if you care to know, that something has been accomplished already. New valuable ideas, new valuable works are circulating in the place of our old dreamy and romantic authors. Literature is taking a maturer form, many injurious prejudices have been rooted up and turned into ridicule.... In a word, we have cut ourselves off irrevocably from the past, and that, to my thinking, is a great thing...”

“He’s learnt it by heart to show off!” Raskolnikov pronounced suddenly.

“What?” asked Pyotr Petrovitch, not catching his words; but he received no reply.

“That’s all true,” Zossimov hastened to interpose.

“Isn’t it so?” Pyotr Petrovitch went on, glancing affably at Zossimov. “You must admit,” he went on, addressing Razumihin with a shade of triumph and superciliousness—he almost added “young man”—“that there is an advance, or, as they say now, progress in the name of science and economic truth...”

“A commonplace.”

“No, not a commonplace! Hitherto, for instance, if I were told, ‘love thy neighbour,’ what came of it?” Pyotr Petrovitch went on, perhaps with excessive haste. “It came to my tearing my coat in half to share with my neighbour and we both were left half naked. As a Russian proverb has it, ‘Catch several hares and you won’t catch one.’ Science now tells us, love yourself before all men, for everything in the world rests on self-interest. You love yourself and manage your own affairs properly and your coat remains whole. Economic truth adds that the better private affairs are organised in society—the more whole coats, so to say—the firmer are its foundations and the better is the common welfare organised too. Therefore, in acquiring wealth solely and exclusively for myself, I am acquiring, so to speak, for all, and helping to bring to pass my neighbour’s getting a little more than a torn coat; and that not from private, personal liberality, but as a consequence of the general advance. The idea is simple, but unhappily it has been a long time reaching us, being hindered by idealism and sentimentality. And yet it would seem to want very little wit to perceive it...”

“Excuse me, I’ve very little wit myself,” Razumihin cut in sharply, “and so let us drop it. I began this discussion with an object, but I’ve grown so sick during the last three years of this chattering to amuse oneself, of this incessant flow of commonplaces, always the same, that, by Jove, I blush even when other people talk like that. You are in a hurry, no doubt, to exhibit your acquirements; and I don’t blame you, that’s quite pardonable. I only wanted to find out what sort of man you are, for so many unscrupulous people have got hold of the progressive cause of late and have so distorted in their own interests everything they touched, that the whole cause has been dragged in the mire. That’s enough!”

“Excuse me, sir,” said Luzhin, affronted, and speaking with excessive dignity. “Do you mean to suggest so unceremoniously that I too...”

“Oh, my dear sir... how could I?... Come, that’s enough,” Razumihin concluded, and he turned abruptly to Zossimov to continue their previous conversation.

Pyotr Petrovitch had the good sense to accept the disavowal. He made up his mind to take leave in another minute or two.

“I trust our acquaintance,” he said, addressing Raskolnikov, “may, upon your recovery and in view of the circumstances of which you are aware, become closer... Above all, I hope for your return to health...”

Raskolnikov did not even turn his head. Pyotr Petrovitch began getting up from his chair.

“One of her customers must have killed her,” Zossimov declared positively.

“Not a doubt of it,” replied Razumihin. “Porfiry doesn’t give his opinion, but is examining all who have left pledges with her there.”

“Examining them?” Raskolnikov asked aloud.

“Yes. What then?”

“Nothing.”

“How does he get hold of them?” asked Zossimov.

“Koch has given the names of some of them, other names are on the wrappers of the pledges and some have come forward of themselves.”

“It must have been a cunning and practised ruffian! The boldness of it! The coolness!”

“That’s just what it wasn’t!” interposed Razumihin. “That’s what throws you all off the scent. But I maintain that he is not cunning, not practised, and probably this was his first crime! The supposition that it was a calculated crime and a cunning criminal doesn’t work. Suppose him to have been inexperienced, and it’s clear that it was only a chance that saved him—and chance may do anything. Why, he did not foresee obstacles, perhaps! And how did he set to work? He took jewels worth ten or twenty roubles, stuffing his pockets with them, ransacked the old woman’s trunks, her rags—and they found fifteen hundred roubles, besides notes, in a box in the top drawer of the chest! He did not know how to rob; he could only murder. It was his first crime, I assure you, his first crime; he lost his head. And he got off more by luck than good counsel!”

“You are talking of the murder of the old pawnbroker, I believe?” Pyotr Petrovitch put in, addressing Zossimov. He was standing, hat and gloves in hand, but before departing he felt disposed to throw off a few more intellectual phrases. He was evidently anxious to make a favourable impression and his vanity overcame his prudence.

“Yes. You’ve heard of it?”

“Oh, yes, being in the neighbourhood.”

“Do you know the details?”

“I can’t say that; but another circumstance interests me in the case—the whole question, so to say. Not to speak of the fact that crime has been greatly on the increase among the lower classes during the last five years, not to speak of the cases of robbery and arson everywhere, what strikes me as the strangest thing is that in the higher classes, too, crime is increasing proportionately. In one place one hears of a student’s robbing the mail on the high road; in another place people of good social position forge false banknotes; in Moscow of late a whole gang has been captured who used to forge lottery tickets, and one of the ringleaders was a lecturer in universal history; then our secretary abroad was murdered from some obscure motive of gain.... And if this old woman, the pawnbroker, has been murdered by someone of a higher class in society—for peasants don’t pawn gold trinkets—how are we to explain this demoralisation of the civilised part of our society?”

“There are many economic changes,” put in Zossimov.