Crime and Punishment (48 page)

‘Here comes the nonsense again!’ Porfiry Petrovich exclaimed. He was growing visibly animated, and kept laughing as he watched Razumikhin, which set the latter still further ablaze.

‘N-no other reasons are conceded!’ Razumikhin came back at him with fervour. ‘It's not nonsense!… I can show you the books they have: they put it all down to being “a prey to one's surroundings”
²
– and that's it! It's their favourite expression! From that it follows directly that if only society were to be organized sanely, crime would simply disappear, as there would be nothing to protest about and everyone would become virtuous, just like that. Nature isn't taken into consideration, nature is banished, nature is not supposed to exist. The way they see it, it's not mankind which, moving along a historical,
living
path of development, will finally transmute itself into a sane society, but rather a social system which, having emanated from some mathematical head, will at once reorganize the whole of mankind and in a single instant make it virtuous and free from sin, more speedily than any living process, bypassing any historical
or living path! That is why they have such an instinctive dislike of history: “It's nothing but a catalogue of outrages and follies,” they say – and it can all be explained as the result of stupidity! That's why they have such distaste for the
living
process of life: they don't want the
living soul
! The living soul demands to live, the living soul isn't obedient to the laws of mechanics, the living soul is suspicious, the living soul is reactionary! No, what they prefer are souls which can be made out of rubber, even if they do have a smell of corpse-flesh – but at any rate they're not alive, they have no will of their own, they're servile, won't rebel! And as a result they've reduced everything to brickwork and the disposition of the rooms and corridors inside a phalanstery!
³
Their phalansteries may be ready, but the human nature that would fit them is not yet ready, it wants to live, it hasn't yet completed the vital process, it's not ready for the burial-ground! It's impossible to leap over nature solely by means of logic! Logic may predict three eventualities, but there are a million of them! Snip off the entire million and reduce everything to the question of comfort – that's a very easy solution to the problem! Temptingly obvious, and one needn't even think about it! That's the main thing – that one shouldn't need to think! The whole of life's mystery can be accommodated within two printer's sheets!’

‘There he is off again, beating his drum! He needs to be kept in hand,’ Porfiry laughed. ‘Just imagine,’ he said, turning to Raskolnikov, ‘there were six of them all carrying on like that in one room last night, and he'd filled them up with punch beforehand – can you credit it? No, cousin, you're wrong: “one's surroundings” have a great deal to do with crime, I can assure you.’

‘Oh, you don't need to tell me that, but look – tell me this: a man of forty rapes a girl of ten: is it his surroundings that have compelled him to it?’

‘You know, in the strictest sense that may very possibly be true,’ Porfiry observed with an unexpectedly serious air. ‘Crimes against young girls may indeed very often be explained by reference to “surroundings”.’

Razumikhin was by this time practically frothing at the mouth.

‘All right,’ he roared, ‘shall I
prove
to you that you've got white eyelashes for the sole, exclusive reason that the Church of Ivan the Great is thirty-five sagenes
⁴
high, and prove it clearly, in exact detail, in a progressive manner with even a bit of liberal bias thrown in? If you're willing, I'm game! Is it a wager?’

‘I accept! Let him have our attention, if you please! I must say I shall be interested to hear his proof.’

‘Oh, the devil, he's always play-acting, damn him!’ Razumikhin exclaimed, leaping up and waving an arm. ‘It's not worth talking to you! I mean, he does it on purpose, you don't know him, Rodion! He did this last night, took their side, merely in order to make fools of us all! And my God, the things he was saying! And they were so pleased!… I mean, he can go on for two weeks in that fashion. Last year for some reason he took it into his head to persuade us that he was going to join a monastery: for two months he stuck to his story! It's not so long ago since he kept telling us that he'd decided to get married, that everything was ready for the wedding. He'd even had new clothes made for himself. We'd all begun to congratulate him, but there was no bride, no nothing – it was all a mirage!’

‘You've got it wrong again! I had the clothes made earlier. It was the new clothes that gave me the idea of leading you all up the garden path.’

‘So you're really quite a play-actor?’ Raskolnikov asked, casually.

‘Why? Don't I look like one? Just you wait, I'll lead you up there, too – ha, ha, ha! No, look, sir, I'll be perfectly frank with you. The fact is that while we were talking about all that stuff just now, crime, one's surroundings, young girls, I suddenly remembered a certain little article – it's been of constant interest to me, actually – you wrote, “On Crime”, or something, it was called… I can't remember the title now. I had the pleasure of reading it two months ago in the
Periodical Leader
.’

‘An article by me? In the
Periodical Leader
?’ Raskolnikov asked in surprise. ‘It's true, I did write one about six months ago, after I left the university. It was a review of a book, but I wrote it for the newspaper
The Weekly Leader
, not for the
Periodical
.’

‘Well, the
Periodical
is where it ended up.’

‘But I mean, the
Weekly Leader
went out of circulation, that's why it was never printed…’

‘That's true, sir; but when it went out of circulation, the
Weekly Leader
was incorporated into the
Periodical Leader
, and so two months ago your article appeared in the
Periodical Leader
. Didn't you know?’

Raskolnikov really did know nothing about it.

‘For goodness’ sake, why, you can request payment for that article! What a peculiar character you are! You live such a cloistered existence that you don't have the faintest notion about matters that concern you personally. I mean, it's a fact, sir.’

‘Bravo, Rodya! I didn't know about it either!’ Razumikhin exclaimed. ‘I'm going to go down to the reading-room today and ask for the issue! Two months ago, you say? What date? Oh, it doesn't matter, I'll find out! There's a nice thing! He won't even tell me!’

‘But how did you know the article was by me? There was nothing but an initial at the bottom of it.’

‘Oh, I found out by chance, just the other day, actually. Through the editor; he's an acquaintance of mine… I was
very
interested.’

‘Let's see now, my article was about the psychological state of a criminal's mind throughout the entire process of committing his crime, wasn't it?’

‘Yes, sir, and you insisted that the enactment of a crime is invariably accompanied by illness. Most, most original, but… that wasn't actually the part of your little article that interested me so much, it was rather a certain idea that you introduced at the end of the piece, but which you unfortunately alluded to only in passing, obscurely… In short, if you remember, you made a certain allusion to the idea that there may exist in the world certain persons who are able… or rather, who are not only able, but have a perfect right to commit all sorts of atrocities and crimes, and that it's as if the law did not apply to them.’

Raskolnikov smiled ironically at this crass and intentional distortion of his idea.

‘What? What on earth? A right to crime? Not because of “the
influence of one's surroundings”, I hope?’ Razumikhin inquired with a certain alarm.

‘No, no, it has nothing to do with that,’ Porfiry replied. ‘The whole point of his article is that the human race is divided into the “ordinary” and the “extraordinary”. The ordinary must live in obedience and do not have the right to break the law, because, well, because they're ordinary, you see. The extraordinary, on the other hand, have the right to commit all sorts of crimes and break the law in all sorts of ways precisely because they're extraordinary. That's more or less what you wrote, isn't it, if I'm not mistaken?’

‘What the devil! This can't be right!’ Razumikhin muttered in bewilderment.

Raskolnikov gave his ironic smile again. He had at once realized what was going on and towards what he was being pushed; he went over the article in his mind. He decided to accept the challenge.

‘No, that's not quite what I wrote,’ he began in a modest, unassuming tone. ‘Actually, I will admit that you've given an almost correct account of my idea, even a completely correct one, if you like… (He seemed to take pleasure in agreeing that it was completely correct.) The only point of difference is that I don't at all insist that extraordinary people are in all circumstances unfailingly bound and obliged to commit “all sorts of atrocities”, as you put it. Indeed, I don't even think that an article which said that would be allowed into print. No, all I did was quite simply to allude to the fact that an “extraordinary” person has a right… not an official right, of course, but a private one, to allow his conscience to step across
⁵
certain… obstacles, and then only if the execution of his idea (which may occasionally be the salvation of all mankind) requires it. You say that my article is obscure; I am prepared to explain it to you, to the best of my ability. I think I may not be mistaken in supposing that that is what you would like me to do; by all means, sir. It is my view that if the discoveries of Kepler and Newton could not on any account, as a result of certain complex factors, have become known to people other than by means of sacrificing the life of one person, the lives of ten, a hundred or
even more persons, who were trying to interfere with those discoveries or stand as an obstacle in their path, then Newton would have had the right, and would even have been obliged… to
get rid of
those ten or a hundred persons, in order to make his discoveries known to all mankind. From this it does not, of course, follow that Newton had the right to kill anyone and everyone he wanted to, or go stealing at the market every day. Furthermore, as I remember it, I went on to develop the idea that all the… well, for example, all the law-makers and guiding spirits of mankind, starting with the most ancient ones, and continuing with the Lycurguses, the Solons, the Mahomets, the Napoleons and so on, were all every one of them criminals, if only by the fact that, in propounding a new law, they were thereby violating an old one that was held in sacred esteem by society and had been inherited from the ancestors; and, of course, they did not shrink from bloodshed, if blood (sometimes entirely innocent and shed in valour for the ancient law) was something that could in any way help them. It is in fact worth noting that the majority of those benefactors and guiding spirits of mankind were particularly fearsome blood-letters. In short, I argued that all people – not only the great, but even those who deviate only marginally from the common rut, that's to say who are only marginally capable of saying something new, are bound, by their very nature, to be criminals – to a greater or lesser degree, of course. Otherwise they would find it hard to get out of the rut, and it goes without saying that, again because of their nature, they could not possibly agree to remain in it, and indeed, in my view, they have a positive duty not to agree to remain in it. As you will perceive, there's nothing particularly new in my argument so far. All this has been printed and read a thousand times. As for my division of people into the ordinary and the extraordinary, I agree that it is somewhat arbitrary, but after all, I don't insist on precise figures. It's only my central idea that I place my faith in. That idea consists in the notion that, by the law of their nature, human beings
in general
may be divided into two categories: a lower one (that of the ordinary), that is to say raw material which serves exclusively to bring into being more like itself, and another group of people who posses
a gift or a talent for saying
something new
, in their own milieu. There are within these categories infinite subdivisions, of course, but the distinguishing features of each are quite clearly marked: the people of the first category, the raw material, that is, are in general conservative by nature, sedate, live lives of obedience and like to be obeyed. In my view, they have a duty to be obedient, as that is their function, and there is really nothing about this that is degrading to them. The second category all break the law, are destroyers, or have a tendency that way, depending on their abilities. The crimes of these people are, of course, relative and multifarious; for the most part what they are demanding, in highly varied forms, is the destruction of the present reality in the name of one that is better. But if such a person finds it necessary, for the sake of his idea, to step over a dead body, over a pool of blood, then he is able within his own conscience to give himself permission to do so – always having regard to the nature of the idea and its dimensions – note that. It's in this sense alone that I speak in my article of their right to crime. (You'll remember that we started off with the discussion of a legal question.) Actually, there's no need to get particularly alarmed about this, you know: the masses are almost never prepared to acknowledge them this right, they flog them or hang them (more or less), thereby quite correctly exercising their conservative function, the only slightly odd thing being that in subsequent generations those same masses put on a pedestal the people they've flogged or executed and pay homage to them (more or less). Those of the first category are always the lords of the present, while those of the second category are the lords of the future. The first conserve the world and increase its population; the second move the world and lead it towards a goal. Both the one and the other have a completely equal right to exist. In short, the way I see it, everyone possesses equal rights, and –
vive la guerre éternelle
– until the New Jerusalem, of course!’