Essential Novelists - Fyodor Dostoevsky. Fyodor Dostoevsky
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idea! Perhaps we will all keep you company. Wouldn’t you like... something more essential before tea?”
“Get along with you!”
Porfiry Petrovitch went out to order tea.
Raskolnikov’s thoughts were in a whirl. He was in terrible exasperation.
“The worst of it is they don’t disguise it; they don’t care to stand on ceremony! And how if you didn’t know me at all, did you come to talk to Nikodim Fomitch about me? So they don’t care to hide that they are tracking me like a pack of dogs. They simply spit in my face.” He was shaking with rage. “Come, strike me openly, don’t play with me like a cat with a mouse. It’s hardly civil, Porfiry Petrovitch, but perhaps I won’t allow it! I shall get up and throw the whole truth in your ugly faces, and you’ll see how I despise you.” He could hardly breathe. “And what if it’s only my fancy? What if I am mistaken, and through inexperience I get angry and don’t keep up my nasty part? Perhaps it’s all unintentional. All their phrases are the usual ones, but there is something about them.... It all might be said, but there is something. Why did he say bluntly, ‘With her’? Why did Zametov add that I spoke artfully? Why do they speak in that tone? Yes, the tone.... Razumihin is sitting here, why does he see nothing? That innocent blockhead never does see anything! Feverish again! Did Porfiry wink at me just now? Of course it’s nonsense! What could he wink for? Are they trying to upset my nerves or are they teasing me? Either it’s ill fancy or they know! Even Zametov is rude.... Is Zametov rude? Zametov has changed his mind. I foresaw he would change his mind! He is at home here, while it’s my first visit. Porfiry does not consider him a visitor; sits with his back to him. They’re as thick as thieves, no doubt, over me! Not a doubt they were talking about me before we came. Do they know about the flat? If only they’d make haste! When I said that I ran away to take a flat he let it pass.... I put that in cleverly about a flat, it may be of use afterwards.... Delirious, indeed... ha-ha-ha! He knows all about last night! He didn’t know of my mother’s arrival! The hag had written the date on in pencil! You are wrong, you won’t catch me! There are no facts... it’s all supposition! You produce facts! The flat even isn’t a fact but delirium. I know what to say to them.... Do they know about the flat? I won’t go without finding out. What did I come for? But my being angry now, maybe is a fact! Fool, how irritable I am! Perhaps that’s right; to play the invalid.... He is feeling me. He will try to catch me. Why did I come?”
All this flashed like lightning through his mind.
Porfiry Petrovitch returned quickly. He became suddenly more jovial.
“Your party yesterday, brother, has left my head rather.... And I am out of sorts altogether,” he began in quite a different tone, laughing to Razumihin.
“Was it interesting? I left you yesterday at the most interesting point. Who got the best of it?”
“Oh, no one, of course. They got on to everlasting questions, floated off into space.”
“Only fancy, Rodya, what we got on to yesterday. Whether there is such a thing as crime. I told you that we talked our heads off.”
“What is there strange? It’s an everyday social question,” Raskolnikov answered casually.
“The question wasn’t put quite like that,” observed Porfiry.
“Not quite, that’s true,” Razumihin agreed at once, getting warm and hurried as usual. “Listen, Rodion, and tell us your opinion, I want to hear it. I was fighting tooth and nail with them and wanted you to help me. I told them you were coming.... It began with the socialist doctrine. You know their doctrine; crime is a protest against the abnormality of the social organisation and nothing more, and nothing more; no other causes admitted!...”
“You are wrong there,” cried Porfiry Petrovitch; he was noticeably animated and kept laughing as he looked at Razumihin, which made him more excited than ever.
“Nothing is admitted,” Razumihin interrupted with heat.
“I am not wrong. I’ll show you their pamphlets. Everything with them is ‘the influence of environment,’ and nothing else. Their favourite phrase! From which it follows that, if society is normally organised, all crime will cease at once, since there will be nothing to protest against and all men will become righteous in one instant. Human nature is not taken into account, it is excluded, it’s not supposed to exist! They don’t recognise that humanity, developing by a historical living process, will become at last a normal society, but they believe that a social system that has come out of some mathematical brain is going to organise all humanity at once and make it just and sinless in an instant, quicker than any living process! That’s why they instinctively dislike history, ‘nothing but ugliness and stupidity in it,’ and they explain it all as stupidity! That’s why they so dislike the living process of life; they don’t want a living soul! The living soul demands life, the soul won’t obey the rules of mechanics, the soul is an object of suspicion, the soul is retrograde! But what they want though it smells of death and can be made of India-rubber, at least is not alive, has no will, is servile and won’t revolt! And it comes in the end to their reducing everything to the building of walls and the planning of rooms and passages in a phalanstery! The phalanstery is ready, indeed, but your human nature is not ready for the phalanstery—it wants life, it hasn’t completed its vital process, it’s too soon for the graveyard! You can’t skip over nature by logic. Logic presupposes three possibilities, but there are millions! Cut away a million, and reduce it all to the question of comfort! That’s the easiest solution of the problem! It’s seductively clear and you musn’t think about it. That’s the great thing, you mustn’t think! The whole secret of life in two pages of print!”
“Now he is off, beating the drum! Catch hold of him, do!” laughed Porfiry. “Can you imagine,” he turned to Raskolnikov, “six people holding forth like that last night, in one room, with punch as a preliminary! No, brother, you are wrong, environment accounts for a great deal in crime; I can assure you of that.”
“Oh, I know it does, but just tell me: a man of forty violates a child of ten; was it environment drove him to it?”
“Well, strictly speaking, it did,” Porfiry observed with noteworthy gravity; “a crime of that nature may be very well ascribed to the influence of environment.”
Razumihin was almost in a frenzy. “Oh, if you like,” he roared. “I’ll prove to you that your white eyelashes may very well be ascribed to the Church of Ivan the Great’s being two hundred and fifty feet high, and I will prove it clearly, exactly, progressively, and even with a Liberal tendency! I undertake to! Will you bet on it?”
“Done! Let’s hear, please, how he will prove it!”
“He is always humbugging, confound him,” cried Razumihin, jumping up and gesticulating. “What’s the use of talking to you? He does all that on purpose; you don’t know him, Rodion! He took their side yesterday, simply to make fools of them. And the things he said yesterday! And they were delighted! He can keep it up for a fortnight together. Last year he persuaded us that he was going into a monastery: he stuck to it for two months. Not long ago he took it into his head to declare he was going to get married, that he had everything ready for the wedding. He ordered new clothes indeed. We all began to congratulate him. There was no bride, nothing, all pure fantasy!”
“Ah, you are wrong! I got the clothes before. It was the new clothes in fact that made me think of taking you in.”
“Are you such a good dissembler?” Raskolnikov asked carelessly.
“You wouldn’t have supposed it, eh? Wait a bit, I shall take you in, too. Ha-ha-ha! No, I’ll tell you the truth. All these questions about crime, environment, children, recall to my mind an article of yours which interested me at the time. ‘On Crime’... or something of the sort, I forget the title, I read it with pleasure two months ago in the Periodical Review.”
“My article? In the Periodical Review?” Raskolnikov asked in astonishment. “I certainly did write an article upon a book six months ago when I left the