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Crime and Punishment

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Translated By Constance Garnett

This eBook is designed and published by Planet PDF. For more free

eBooks visit our Web site at http://www.planetpdf.com

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TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

A few words about Dostoevsky himself may help the

English reader to understand his work.

Dostoevsky was the son of a doctor. His parents were

very hard- working and deeply religious people, but so

poor that they lived with their five children in only two

rooms. The father and mother spent their evenings in

reading aloud to their children, generally from books of a

serious character.

Though always sickly and delicate Dostoevsky came

out third in the final examination of the Petersburg school

of Engineering. There he had already begun his first work,

‘Poor Folk.’

This story was published by the poet Nekrassov in his

review and was received with acclamations. The shy,

unknown youth found himself instantly something of a

celebrity. A brilliant and successful career seemed to open

before him, but those hopes were soon dashed. In 1849 he

was arrested.

Though neither by temperament nor conviction a

revolutionist, Dostoevsky was one of a little group of

young men who met together to read Fourier and

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Proudhon. He was accused of ‘taking part in conversations

against the censorship, of reading a letter from Byelinsky

to Gogol, and of knowing of the intention to set up a

printing press.’ Under Nicholas I. (that ‘stern and just

man,’ as Maurice Baring calls him) this was enough, and

he was condemned to death. After eight months’

imprisonment he was with twenty-one others taken out to

the Semyonovsky Square to be shot. Writing to his

brother Mihail, Dostoevsky says: ‘They snapped words

over our heads, and they made us put on the white shirts

worn by persons condemned to death. Thereupon we

were bound in threes to stakes, to suffer execution. Being

the third in the row, I concluded I had only a few minutes

of life before me. I thought of you and your dear ones and

I contrived to kiss Plestcheiev and Dourov, who were

next to me, and to bid them farewell. Suddenly the troops

beat a tattoo, we were unbound, brought back upon the

scaffold, and informed that his Majesty had spared us our

lives.’ The sentence was commuted to hard labour.

One of the prisoners, Grigoryev, went mad as soon as

he was untied, and never regained his sanity.

The intense suffering of this experience left a lasting

stamp on Dostoevsky’s mind. Though his religious temper

led him in the end to accept every suffering with

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resignation and to regard it as a blessing in his own case,

he constantly recurs to the subject in his writings. He

describes the awful agony of the condemned man and

insists on the cruelty of inflicting such torture. Then

followed four years of penal servitude, spent in the

company of common criminals in Siberia, where he began

the ‘Dead House,’ and some years of service in a

disciplinary battalion.

He had shown signs of some obscure nervous disease

before his arrest and this now developed into violent

attacks of epilepsy, from which he suffered for the rest of

his life. The fits occurred three or four times a year and

were more frequent in periods of great strain. In 1859 he

was allowed to return to Russia. He started a journal—

‘Vremya,’ which was forbidden by the Censorship

through a misunderstanding. In 1864 he lost his first wife

and his brother Mihail. He was in terrible poverty, yet he

took upon himself the payment of his brother’s debts. He

started another journal—‘The Epoch,’ which within a few

months was also prohibited. He was weighed down by

debt, his brother’s family was dependent on him, he was

forced to write at heart-breaking speed, and is said never

to have corrected his work. The later years of his life were

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much softened by the tenderness and devotion of his

second wife.

In June 1880 he made his famous speech at the

unveiling of the monument to Pushkin in Moscow and he

was received with extraordinary demonstrations of love

and honour.

A few months later Dostoevsky died. He was followed

to the grave by a vast multitude of mourners, who ‘gave

the hapless man the funeral of a king.’ He is still probably

the most widely read writer in Russia.

In the words of a Russian critic, who seeks to explain

the feeling inspired by Dostoevsky: ‘He was one of

ourselves, a man of our blood and our bone, but one who

has suffered and has seen so much more deeply than we

have his insight impresses us as wisdom … that wisdom of

the heart which we seek that we may learn from it how to

live. All his other gifts came to him from nature, this he

won for himself and through it he became great.’

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PART I

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Chapter I

On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young

man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place

and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K.

bridge.

He had successfully avoided meeting his landlady on

the staircase. His garret was under the roof of a high, five-

storied house and was more like a cupboard than a room.

The landlady who provided him with garret, dinners, and

attendance, lived on the floor below, and every time he

went out he was obliged to pass her kitchen, the door of

which invariably stood open. And each time he passed, the

young man had a sick, frightened feeling, which made him

scowl and feel ashamed. He was hopelessly in debt to his

landlady, and was afraid of meeting her.

This was not because he was cowardly and abject, quite

the contrary; but for some time past he had been in an

overstrained irritable condition, verging on hypochondria.

He had become so completely absorbed in himself, and

isolated from his fellows that he dreaded meeting, not only

his landlady, but anyone at all. He was crushed by poverty,

but the anxieties of his position had of late ceased to weigh

upon him. He had given up attending to matters of

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practical importance; he had lost all desire to do so.

Nothing that any landlady could do had a real terror for

him. But to be stopped on the stairs, to be forced to listen

to her trivial, irrelevant gossip, to pestering demands for

payment, threats and complaints, and to rack his brains for

excuses, to prevaricate, to lie—no, rather than that, he

would creep down the stairs like a cat and slip out unseen.

This evening, however, on coming out into the street,

he became acutely aware of his fears.

‘I want to attempt a thing like that and am frightened by

these trifles,’ he thought, with an odd smile. ‘Hm … yes,

all is in a man’s hands and he lets it all slip from cowardice,

that’s an axiom. It would be interesting to know what it is

men are most afraid of. Taking a new step, uttering a new

word is what they fear most…. But I am talking too

much. It’s because I chatter that I do nothing. Or perhaps

it is that I chatter because I do nothing. I’ve learned to

chatter this last month, lying for days together in my den

thinking … of Jack the Giant-killer. Why am I going

there now? Am I capable of that? Is that serious? It is not

serious at all. It’s simply a fantasy to amuse myself; a

plaything! Yes, maybe it is a plaything.’

The heat in the street was terrible: and the airlessness,

the bustle and the plaster, scaffolding, bricks, and dust all

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about him, and that special Petersburg stench, so familiar

to all who are unable to get out of town in summer—all

worked painfully upon the young man’s already

overwrought nerves. The insufferable stench from the pot-

houses, which are particularly numerous in that part of the

town, and the drunken men whom he met continually,

although it was a working day, completed the revolting

misery of the picture. An expression of the profoundest

disgust gleamed for a moment in the young man’s refined

face. He was, by the way, exceptionally handsome, above

the average in height, slim, well-built, with beautiful dark

eyes and dark brown hair. Soon he sank into deep

thought, or more accurately speaking into a complete

blankness of mind; he walked along not observing what

was about him and not caring to observe it. From time to

time, he would mutter something, from the habit of

talking to himself, to which he had just confessed. At these

moments he would become conscious that his ideas were

sometimes in a tangle and that he was very weak; for two

days he had scarcely tasted food.

He was so badly dressed that even a man accustomed to

shabbiness would have been ashamed to be seen in the

street in such rags. In that quarter of the town, however,

scarcely any shortcoming in dress would have created

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surprise. Owing to the proximity of the Hay Market, the

number of establishments of bad character, the

preponderance of the trading and working class population

crowded in these streets and alleys in the heart of

Petersburg, types so various were to be seen in the streets

that no figure, however queer, would have caused

surprise. But there was such accumulated bitterness and

contempt in the young man’s heart, that, in spite of all the

fastidiousness of youth, he minded his rags least of all in

the street. It was a different matter when he met with

acquaintances or with former fellow students, whom,

indeed, he disliked meeting at any time. And yet when a

drunken man who, for some unknown reason, was being

taken somewhere in a huge waggon dragged by a heavy

dray horse, suddenly shouted at him as he drove past: ‘Hey

there, German hatter’ bawling at the top of his voice and

pointing at him—the young man stopped suddenly and

clutched tremulously at his hat. It was a tall round hat

from Zimmerman’s, but completely worn out, rusty with

age, all torn and bespattered, brimless and bent on one side

in a most unseemly fashion. Not shame, however, but

quite another feeling akin to terror had overtaken him.

‘I knew it,’ he muttered in confusion, ‘I thought so!

That’s the worst of all! Why, a stupid thing like this, the

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CrimeandPunishmentFyodorDostoevskyTranslatedByConstanceGarnettThiseBookisdesignedandpublishedbyPlanetPDF.FormorefreeeBooksvisitourWebsiteathttp://www.planetpdf.comCrimeandPunishment2of967TRANSLATOR’SPREFACEAfewwordsaboutDostoevskyhimselfmayhelptheEnglishreadertounderstandhiswork.Dostoevskywasthesono...

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