CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

"He felt utterly broken: darkness and confusion were in his soul...He longed to forget himself altogether, to forget everything, and then to wake up and begin life anew..... The hopelessness, the hideousness, and the absurdity of it...so empty was his heart. A gloomy sensation of agonizing, everlasting solitude and remoteness, took conscious form in his soul..Something was happening to him entirely new, sudden and unknown. It was not that he understood, but he felt clearly with all the intensity of sensation... He felt as if a nail were being driven into his skull... But a sort of blankness, even dreaminess had begun by degrees to take possession of him... It left him strangely cold; this gorgeous picture was for him blank and lifeless. He wondered every time at his somber and enigmatic impression, and mistrusting himself, put off finding the explanation of it. He vividly recalled those old doubts and perplexities, and it seemed to him that it was no mere chance that he recalled them now. It struck him as strange and grotesque... He gazed mechanically at the last pink flush of sunset, at the row of houses growing dark in the gathering twilight... He felt as though he were flying upwards, and everything were vanishing from his sight... Terror gripped his heart like ice, tortured him and numbed him....He was lying on his back, still dazed from his recent oblivion. Fearful, despairing cries rose shrilly from the street, sounds which he heard every night, indeed, under his window after two o'clock. They woke him up now...


A strange period began for Raskolinikov: it was as though a fog had fallen upon him and wrapped him in a dreary solitude from which there was no escape. Recalling that period long after, he believed that his mind had been clouded at times, and that it had continued so, with intervals until the final catastrophe.. At times he was a prey to agonies of morbid uneasiness, amounting sometimes to panic,... the normal working of his mind seemed to break down... He felt very miserable. If it had been possible to escape to some solitude, he would have thought himself lucky, even if he had to spend his whole life there. But although he had almost always been by himself of late, he had never been able to feel alone... but the lonelier the place was, the more he seemed to be aware of an uneasy presence near him... in busy thoroughfares, there he felt easier and even more solitary... there was something requiring immediate decision, but it was something he could not clearly understand or put into words. It was a hopeless tangle........ He wandered aimlessly. The sun was setting. A special form of misery had begun to oppress him of late. There was nothing poignant, nothing acute about it; but there was a feeling of permanence, of eternity about it; it brought a foretaste of hopeless years of this cold leaden misery, a foretaste of an eternity 'on a square yard of space.' Towards evening this sensation usually began to weigh on him more heavily.

Ah, don't disdain life!... you are not hopelessly base. I consider you one of those men who would stand and smile at their torturer while he cuts their entrails out, if only they have found faith or God. Find it and you will live. You have long needed a change of air. Suffering, too, is a good thing... fling yourself straight into life without deliberation; don't be afraid-- the flood will bear you to the land and set you safe on your feet again.. You ought to thank God, perhaps. How do you know? perhaps God is saving you for something. But keep a good heart and have less fear... You must fulfill the demands of justice... But you've ceased to believe in your theory already, what will you run away with? And what will you do in hiding? It would be hateful and difficult for you... If you ran away, you'd come back to yourself... I am convinced that you will decide to take your suffering. You don't believe my words now, but you'll come to it of yourself. For suffering, Rodion Romanovitch, is a great thing.

He was conscious of immense moral fatigue.. Oh how sick he was of it all!... "