Crime and Punishment

“Razumikhin was just telling me that you're still accusing Nikolai, and were assuring Razumikhin of it yourself...”

His breath failed him, and he did not finish. He had listened in inexpressible excitement to the way this man who had seen through him to the very bottom disavowed himself. He was afraid to believe it, and he did not believe it. In the still ambiguous words he greedily sought and hoped to catch something more precise and final.

“That Mr. Razumikhin!” Porfiry exclaimed, as if rejoicing at the question from Raskolnikov, who up to then had been silent. “Heh, heh, heh! But Mr. Razumikhin simply had to be gotten out of the way: two's company, three's a crowd. Mr. Razumikhin is something else, sir; he's an outsider; he came ru

These last words, after everything that had been said before and that had seemed so much like a disavowal, were too unexpected. Raskolnikov began trembling all over as if he had been pierced through.

“Then...who did...kill them? . . .” he asked, unable to restrain himself, in a suffocating voice. Porfiry Petrovich even recoiled against the back of his chair, as if he, too, were quite unexpectedly amazed at the question.

“What? Who killed them? . . .” he repeated, as if not believing his ears. “But you did, Rodion Romanych! You killed them, sir . . .” he added, almost in a whisper, in a completely convinced voice.

Raskolnikov jumped up from the sofa, stood for a few seconds, and sat down again without saying a word. Brief spasms suddenly passed over his face.

“Your poor lip is twitching again, like the other day,” Porfiry Petrovich muttered, even as if sympathetically. “It seems, Rodion Romanych, that you did not understand me rightly,” he added after a short pause. “That's why you're so amazed, sir. I precisely came with the intention of saying everything this time, and of bringing it all out in the open.”

“It wasn't me,” Raskolnikov whispered, just as frightened little children do when they are caught red-handed.

“No, it was you, Rodion Romanych, it was you, sir, there's no one else,” Porfiry whispered sternly and with conviction.

They both fell silent, and the silence even lasted strangely long, for about ten minutes. Raskolnikov leaned his elbows on the table and silently ran his fingers through his hair. Porfiry Petrovich sat quietly and waited. Suddenly Raskolnikov looked contemptuously at Porfiry.

“You're up to your old tricks again, Porfiry Petrovich! You just cling to the same methods: aren't you sick of it, really?”

“Eh, come on, what do I care about methods now! It would be different if there were witnesses here; but we're alone, whispering to each other. You can see I didn't come to hunt you down and catch you like a hare. Whether you confess or not—it's all the same to me right now. I'm convinced in myself, even without you.”

“In that case, why did you come?” Raskolnikov asked irritably. “I'll ask you my former question: if you consider me guilty, why don't you put me in jail?”

135

The word "schismatic" (raskolnik in Russian) rings oddly in the original because of its closeness to the protagonist's name. It refers to the Old Believers, who split off from the Russian Orthodox Church in disagreement over the reforms of the patriarch Nikon in the mid-seventeenth century. "Ru

136

Dostoevsky describes this convict in Notes from the Dead House (1860), a semific-tional account of his own prison experiences.