Part One · I
In early July, during an extraordinarily hot spell, toward evening, a young man stepped out of the tiny room he rented from tenants in S—— Lane into the street and slowly, as if undecided, set off toward K—— Bridge.
He had managed to avoid meeting his landlady on the stairs. His tiny room was tucked under the very roof of a tall five-story building and was more like a closet than a place to live. His landlady, from whom he rented this room with dinner and service included, occupied a separate apartment one flight down, and every time he went out into the street he could not avoid passing her kitchen, whose door almost always stood wide open onto the stairs. And every time he passed it, the young man felt a kind of sick, cowardly sensation that he was ashamed of and that made him wince. He was in debt to his landlady up to his ears and was afraid of meeting her.
It was not that he was so cowardly and downtrodden, quite the contrary, in fact; but for some time he had been in an irritable, overstrained state that resembled hypochondria. He had become so absorbed in himself and so cut off from everyone that he was afraid of meeting anyone at all, not only his landlady. He was crushed by poverty; but lately even his straitened circumstances had ceased to weigh on him. He had stopped attending to his practical affairs altogether and had no wish to attend to them. In fact he was not afraid of any landlady, whatever she might be plotting against him. But to stop on the stairs, to listen to all sorts of drivel about all that everyday rubbish that was no concern of his, all that pestering about payment, the threats, the complaints, and on top of it to have to wriggle, apologize, lie himself—no, better to slip down the stairs somehow like a cat and steal away unseen.
This time, however, once he was out in the street, his fear of running into the woman he owed startled even him.
“What a thing I mean to attempt, and at the same time what trifles I’m afraid of!” he thought with a strange smile. “Hm… yes… everything is in a man’s hands, and he lets it all slip right past his nose, purely out of cowardice… that’s an axiom by now… I wonder what people fear most? A new step, a new word of their own, that’s what they fear most of all… But then I talk too much. That’s why I do nothing, because I talk. Or perhaps it’s like this: I talk because I do nothing. It’s this last month I’ve learned to talk, lying in a corner for days on end and thinking… about the days of King Pea. Well, why am I going now? Am I really capable of that? Is that really serious? It isn’t serious at all. I’m just amusing myself with a fantasy; playthings! Yes, playthings, if you like!”
The heat in the street was terrible, and on top of it the closeness, the crush, lime everywhere, scaffolding, bricks, dust, and that peculiar summer stench so familiar to every Petersburger who cannot afford to rent a dacha—all of it at once jarred unpleasantly on the young man’s already overwrought nerves. The unbearable stench from the taverns, of which there are an especially great number in this part of town, and the drunks he kept running into at every turn, although it was a working day, completed the repulsive and dismal coloring of the picture. A feeling of the deepest loathing flickered for an instant across the young man’s fine features. He was, by the way, remarkably good-looking, with beautiful dark eyes and dark brown hair, taller than average, slim and well built. But soon he sank into what seemed deep thought, or, to put it more exactly, into a kind of oblivion, and walked on no longer noticing his surroundings, and not wishing to notice them either. Only now and then did he mutter something to himself, from that habit of monologue he had just admitted to himself. Even now he was aware himself that his thoughts were sometimes getting muddled and that he was very weak: for two days now he had eaten almost nothing at all.
He was so badly dressed that another man, even one used to it, would have been ashamed to go out in the street by day in such rags. The neighborhood, however, was such that it was hard to surprise anyone here with your clothes. The nearness of the Haymarket, the abundance of certain establishments, and, above all, the population of guild workers and craftsmen crowded into these streets and lanes in the middle of Petersburg sometimes speckled the general panorama with such characters that it would have been strange to be surprised at meeting any figure at all. But so much spiteful contempt had already accumulated in the young man’s soul that, for all his touchiness, sometimes a very youthful touchiness, he was least of all ashamed of his rags in the street. It was another matter when he met certain acquaintances or former comrades, whom in general he did not like to meet… And yet when a drunk, who for some unknown reason was being carted down the street just then, to some unknown destination, in an enormous wagon drawn by an enormous dray horse, suddenly shouted at him as he went by, “Hey, you, German hatter!” and began bawling at the top of his lungs, pointing at him—the young man suddenly stopped and clutched convulsively at his hat. It was a tall round hat from Zimmermann’s, but already worn out, gone completely rusty, all holes and stains, without a brim, and crumpled over to one side at the most hideous angle. But it was not shame that seized him; it was quite a different feeling, something even like fright.
“I knew it!” he muttered in confusion. “I thought so! This is the worst of all! Some stupid thing like this, some utterly trivial little detail, can ruin the whole plan! Yes, the hat is too noticeable… It’s ridiculous, and so it’s noticeable… With my rags I absolutely need a cap, even some old pancake of a thing, not this monstrosity. Nobody wears hats like this, they’ll spot it a verst1 off and remember it… the main thing is, they’ll remember it afterward, and there’s your evidence. Here you have to be as inconspicuous as possible… Details, details are the main thing!… It’s just these details that always ruin everything…”
He did not have far to go; he even knew how many steps it was from the gate of his building: exactly seven hundred and thirty. He had counted them once, when he had got very carried away by his dreaming. At the time he had not yet believed in these dreams himself and had only been goading himself with their hideous but seductive audacity. Now, though, a month later, he was beginning to see things differently and, in spite of all his taunting monologues about his own impotence and indecision, had somehow, almost against his will, grown used to regarding the “hideous” dream as an enterprise already, though he still did not trust himself. He was even on his way now to make a rehearsal of his enterprise, and with every step his agitation grew stronger and stronger.
With a sinking heart and a nervous trembling he approached an enormous building that faced the canal on one side and —— Street on the other. The building was made up entirely of small apartments and was inhabited by every sort of working people—tailors, locksmiths, cooks, Germans of various kinds, girls living on their own, petty clerks, and so on. People coming and going kept darting in and out under both gateways and across both courtyards. Three or four caretakers worked there. The young man was very pleased not to meet any of them, and slipped unnoticed straight from the gateway to the right, onto the stairs. The staircase was dark and narrow, a “back” staircase, but he already knew all this and had studied it, and he liked the whole setting: in such darkness even a curious glance was no danger. “If I’m this afraid now, what would it be like if it somehow ever really came to the deed itself?…” he thought involuntarily as he climbed to the fourth floor. Here his way was blocked by porters, retired soldiers, who were carrying furniture out of one of the apartments. He knew already that a German lived in this apartment, a clerk with a family: “So this German is moving out now, and so on the fourth floor, on this staircase and this landing, for a while, the old woman’s apartment will be the only one occupied. That’s good… just in case…” he thought again, and rang at the old woman’s door. The bell gave a feeble clink, as if it were made of tin and not of brass. In little apartments like these, in such buildings, almost all the bells are like that. He had forgotten the sound of this little bell, and now that peculiar sound seemed suddenly to remind him of something and to bring it clearly before him… He actually shuddered; his nerves were too weak this time. A little later the door opened a tiny crack: the occupant was examining the visitor through the crack with evident distrust, and all that could be seen were her little eyes glittering out of the dark. But seeing a number of people on the landing, she took heart and opened the door all the way. The young man stepped over the threshold into a dark entryway divided by a partition, behind which was a tiny kitchen. The old woman stood before him in silence, looking at him questioningly. She was a tiny, dried-up old crone of about sixty, with sharp, malicious little eyes, a sharp little nose, and her head bare. Her whitish-blond hair, only a little gray, was thickly smeared with oil. Around her long, thin neck, which looked like a chicken’s leg, some sort of flannel rag was wound, and from her shoulders, in spite of the heat, hung a short fur jacket, worn to tatters and gone yellow. The old crone kept coughing and groaning. The young man must have given her some peculiar look, because suddenly the same distrust flickered again in her eyes.
“Raskolnikov, a student, I was here a month ago,” the young man hurried to mutter with a half bow, remembering that he ought to be more polite.
“I remember, my dear, I remember very well that you were,” the old woman said distinctly, still not taking her questioning eyes off his face.
“Well, ma’am… here I am again, on the same sort of little business…” Raskolnikov went on, a little flustered and surprised at the old woman’s distrust.
“But maybe she’s always like this, and I just didn’t notice last time,” he thought with an unpleasant feeling.
The old woman was silent a moment, as if pondering, then stepped aside and, pointing to the door of the room, said as she let her visitor go ahead of her:
“Go in, my dear.”
The small room the young man went into, with yellow wallpaper, geraniums, and muslin curtains at the windows, was brightly lit at that moment by the setting sun. “And then, too, the sun will be shining just like this!…” flashed as if by chance through Raskolnikov’s mind, and he cast a quick glance over everything in the room, to study and memorize the layout as well as he could. But there was nothing special in the room. The furniture, all very old and of yellow wood, consisted of a sofa with an enormous curved wooden back, a round table of oval shape in front of the sofa, a dressing table with a little mirror in the space between the windows, chairs along the walls, and two or three cheap little prints in yellow frames showing German young ladies with birds in their hands—and that was all the furniture. In the corner a lamp was burning before a small icon. Everything was very clean: the furniture and the floors were rubbed to a shine; everything gleamed. “Lizaveta’s work,” thought the young man. There was not a speck of dust to be found in the whole apartment. “It’s spiteful old widows who keep things this clean,” Raskolnikov went on to himself, and glanced with curiosity at the chintz curtain over the door to the second, tiny room, where the old woman’s bed and chest of drawers stood and into which he had never once looked. The whole apartment consisted of these two rooms.
“What do you want?” the old crone said sternly, coming into the room and, as before, planting herself right in front of him so as to look him straight in the face.
“I’ve brought a pledge, here it is, ma’am!” And he took an old flat silver watch out of his pocket. A globe was engraved on the back. The chain was steel.
“But the time is up on your other pledge too. It was a month the day before yesterday.”
“I’ll pay you the interest for another month; be patient.”
“Whether I’m patient, my dear, or sell your thing right now, that’s for me to decide.”
“How much for the watch, Alyona Ivanovna?”
“You come with trifles, my dear, it’s worth next to nothing. Last time I gave you two little notes for the ring, and you could buy one new from a jeweler for a rouble and a half.”
“Give me four roubles or so, I’ll redeem it, it was my father’s. I’ll be getting money soon.”
“A rouble and a half, sir, and the interest in advance, if you like.”
“A rouble and a half!” the young man cried.
“As you please.” And the old woman held the watch back out to him. The young man took it and was so angry that he was on the point of leaving; but he thought better of it at once, remembering that there was nowhere else to go and that he had come for something else besides.
“Hand it over!” he said rudely.
The old woman felt in her pocket for her keys and went into the other room, behind the curtain. The young man, left alone in the middle of the room, listened curiously and calculated. He could hear her unlocking the chest of drawers. “Must be the top drawer,” he calculated. “So she carries her keys in her right pocket… All on one bunch, on a steel ring… And there’s one key there bigger than all the rest, three times bigger, with a notched bit, not for the chest of drawers, of course… So there must be some box or other, or a strongbox… Now that’s interesting. Strongboxes all have keys like that… But how base all this is…”
The old woman came back.
“Here you are, my dear: if it’s ten kopecks a month on the rouble, then for a rouble and a half you owe fifteen kopecks, for a month in advance, sir. And for the two roubles from before you owe another twenty kopecks in advance on the same reckoning. So that makes thirty-five altogether. Which leaves you, for your watch, one rouble fifteen kopecks to receive. Here, take it.”
“What! So now it’s one rouble fifteen kopecks!”
“Just so, sir.”
The young man did not argue and took the money. He looked at the old woman and was in no hurry to go, as if there were something more he wanted to say or do, but as if he himself did not know what exactly…
“Alyona Ivanovna, I may bring you another item one of these days… a silver one… a nice one… a cigarette case… as soon as I get it back from a friend…” He grew confused and fell silent.
“Well, then we’ll talk, my dear.”
“Goodbye, ma’am… And you’re always at home alone, your sister’s not here?” he asked as casually as he could, going out into the entryway.
“And what business is she of yours, my dear?”
“Oh, nothing in particular. I just asked. There you go right away… Goodbye, Alyona Ivanovna!”
Raskolnikov went out in utter confusion. The confusion kept growing. Going down the stairs, he even stopped several times, as if suddenly struck by something. And at last, out in the street, he exclaimed:
“Oh, God! how loathsome all this is! And can it be, can it be that I… no, it’s nonsense, it’s absurd!” he added resolutely. “And could such a horror really have entered my head? What filth my heart is capable of, though! The main thing is, it’s filthy, nasty, vile, vile!… And I, for a whole month…”
But he could not express his agitation in words or in exclamations. The feeling of boundless revulsion that had begun to oppress and sicken his heart while he was still only on his way to the old woman had now grown so large and become so vivid that he did not know where to turn from his anguish. He walked along the sidewalk like a drunk, not noticing the passersby and bumping into them, and came to himself only in the next street. Looking around, he saw that he was standing beside a tavern, the entrance to which led from the sidewalk down a flight of steps into the basement. Just at that moment two drunks were coming out of the door and, holding each other up and cursing each other, clambering up to the street. Without thinking long, Raskolnikov at once went down. He had never before gone into a tavern, but now his head was spinning, and a burning thirst tormented him besides. He wanted a drink of cold beer, all the more because he put his sudden weakness down to hunger as well. He sat down in a dark and dirty corner, at a sticky little table, asked for beer, and greedily drank the first glass. At once everything eased, and his thoughts grew clear. “It’s all nonsense,” he said hopefully, “and there was nothing to be upset about! Simply a physical disorder! One glass of beer, a crust of dry bread—and look, in an instant the mind grows strong, thought grows clear, intentions grow firm! Pah, what a nothing it all is!…” But in spite of this contemptuous spit, he was already looking cheerful, as if suddenly freed from some terrible burden, and he ran a friendly eye over the company. But even at that moment he had a distant presentiment that all this readiness to see things in a better light was also morbid.
There were few people left in the tavern at that hour. Besides the two drunks he had passed on the stairs, a whole crowd of about five had gone out right after them, all at once, with a girl and an accordion. After they left it became quiet and roomy. There remained: one man, a little tipsy but not much, sitting over his beer, by the look of him a petty townsman; his companion, fat, huge, in a short peasant coat and with a gray beard, very drunk, who had dozed off on the bench and now and then, suddenly, as if half asleep, would begin snapping his fingers with his arms flung wide and jerking the upper part of his body without getting up from the bench, singing along to some nonsense as he strained to recall the words, something like:
A whole year I loved my wife, \ A who-ole year I lo-oved my wi-ife…
Or, suddenly waking up, again:
Down Podyacheskaya I went, \ And found my old sweetheart there…
But no one shared his happiness; his silent companion even regarded all these outbursts with hostility and distrust. There was one more man there, who looked something like a retired government clerk. He sat apart, before his little bottle, sipping now and then and looking around. He too seemed to be somewhat agitated.
Notes
1. A verst is a Russian measure of distance, about two-thirds of a mile (1.07 km).