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- CRIME AND PUNISHMENT 509
shame and disgrace. But he judged himself severely, and his ex-
asperated conscience found no particularly terrible fault in his
past, except a simple blunder which might happen to any one.
He was ashamed just because he, Raskolnikov, had so hope-
lessly, stupidly come to grief through some decree of blind fate,
and must humble himself and submit to "the idiocy" of a sen-
tence, ifhe were anyhow to be at peace.
Vague and objectless anxiety in the present, and in the future
a continual sacrifice leading to nothing — that was all that lay
before him. And what comfort was it to him that at the end of
eight years he would only be thirty-two and able to begin a
new life! What had he to live for? What had he to look for-
ward to? Why should he strive? To live in order to exist? Why,
he had been ready a thousand times before to give up existence
for the sake of an idea, for a hope, even for a fancy. Mere exist-
ence had always been too little for him; he had always wanted
more. Perhaps it was just because of the strength of his desires
that he had thought himself a man to whom more was per-
missible than to others.
And if only fate would have sent him repentance — burning
repentance that would have torn his heart and robbed him of
sleep, that repentance, the awful agony of which brings visions
of hanging or drowning! Oh, he would have been glad of it!
Tears and agorues would at least have been life. But he did not
repent of his crime.
At least he might have found relief in raging at his stupidity,
as he had raged at the grotesque blunders that had brought him
to prison. But now in prison, in freedom, he thought over and
criticised all his actions again and by no means found them so
blundering and so grotesque as they had seemed at the fatal
time.
"In what way," he asked himself, "was my theory stupider
than others that have swarmed and clashed from the beginning
of the world? One has only to look at the thing quite inde-
pendently, broadly, and uninfluenced by commonplace ideas,
and my idea will by no means seem so . . . strange. Oh, sceptics
and halfpenny philosophers, why do you halt half-way!"
"Why does my action strike them as so horrible?" he said to
himself. "Is it because it was a crime? What is meant by crime?
My conscience is at rest. Of course, it was a legal crime, of
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