Crime and Punishment | Page 4

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 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
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."

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

CHAPTER I
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PART I

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 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,