- cid
- bafkreia4dd6ou3tjfldm2j3ebzak5rzyes56g4ftu3tckdnihcqopmr4cm
- content_type
- image/jpeg
- filename
- crimepunishment00dostiala_page_0518.jpg
- key
- pdf-page-1768923089181-znug4jodmx
- page_number
- 518
- pdf_type
- born_digital
- size
- 208850
- text
- 510 CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
course, the letter of the law was broken and blood was shed.
Well, punish me for the letter of the law . . , and that's enough.
Of course, in that case many of the benefactors of mankind
who snatched power for themselves instead of inheriting it
ought to have been punished at their first steps. But those men
succeeded and so they were right, and I didn't, and so I had no
right to have taken that step."
It was only in that that he recognised his criminality, only
in the fact that he had been unsuccessful and had confessed it.
He suffered too from the question: why had he not killed
himself? Why had he stood looking at the river and preferred to
confess? Was the desire to live so strong and was it so hard to
overcome it? Had not Svidrigailov overcome it, although he
was afraid of death?
In misery he asked himself this question, and could not under-
stand that, at the very time he had been standing looking into
the river, he had perhaps been dimly conscious of the funda-
mental falsity in himself and his convictions. He didn't under-
stand that that consciousness might be the promise of a future
crisis, of a new view of life and of his future resurrection.
He preferred to attribute it to the dead weight of instinct
which he could not step over, again through weakness and mean-
ness. He looked at his fellow prisoners and was amazed to see
how they all loved life, and prized it. It seemed to him that they
loved and valued life more in prison than in freedom. What
terrible agonies and privations some of them, the tramps for
instance, had endured! Could they care so much for a ray of
svmshine, for the primeval forest, the cold spring hidden away in
some unseen spot, which the tramp had marked three years be-
fore, and longed to see again, as he might to see his sweetheart,
dreaming of the green grass round it and the bird singing in the
bush? As he went on he saw still more inexplicable examples.
In prison, of course, there was a great deal he did not see and
did not want to see; he lived as it were with downcast eyes. It
was loathsome and unbearable for him to look. But in the end
there was much that surprised him and he began, as it were
involuntarily, to notice much that he had not suspected before.
What surprised him most of all was the terrible impossible gulf
that lay between him and all the rest. They seemed to be a
different species, and he looked at them and they at him with
- text_extracted_at
- 2026-01-20T15:31:29.181Z
- text_extracted_by
- pdf-processor
- text_has_content
- true
- text_source
- born_digital
- uploaded
- true