Crime and Punishment

“More blasts, more thunder and lightning, tornadoes, hurricanes!” Nikodim Fomich pleasantly and amicably addressed Ilya Petrovich. “His heart has been stirred up again, he's boiling again! I heard it way downstairs.”

“‘Twas nothing!” Ilya Petrovich uttered with gentlemanly nonchalance (not even “nothing” but somehow “ 'Twa-as na-a-awthing”), going to another table with some papers, and jerking his shoulders spectacularly with each step—a step here, a shoulder there. “Look, sir, if you please: mister writer here, or student, rather—a former one, that is—owes money and doesn't pay it, has given out all sorts of promissory notes, won't vacate his apartment, there are constant complaints about him, and he is so good as to start an altercation with me for smoking a cigarette in his presence! He's s-s-scoundrelly enough himself, and look at him, if you please, sir: here he is in all his attractiveness!”

“Come, come, my friend, poverty is no vice! We know you're like gunpowder, unable to bear an offense. You must have gotten offended with him for some reason and couldn't help saying something,” Nikodim Fomich went on, amiably addressing Raskolnikov, “but you mustn't do that: he is a mo-o-st no-o-oble man, I must tell you, but gunpowder, gunpowder! He flares up, he boils up, he burns up—and that's it! All gone! And what's left is his heart of gold! In our regiment he was known as 'Lieutenant Gunpowder'...”

“And what a r-r-regiment it was!” exclaimed Ilya Petrovich, quite content to be so pleasantly tickled, but still sulking.

Raskolnikov suddenly wanted to say something extraordinarily pleasant to them all.

“I beg your pardon, Captain,” he began quite casually, suddenly addressing Nikodim Fomich, “but you must also understand my position...I am even ready to ask his forgiveness if for my part I was in any way disrespectful. I am a poor and sick student, weighed down” (that was how he said it: weighed down ) “by poverty. I am a former student because I ca

They will send it, and I...will pay. My landlady is a kind woman, but she is so angry because I lost my lessons and haven't paid her for four months that she won't even send up my di

“But that is not our business . . .” the clerk observed again.

“Allow me, allow me, I completely agree with you, but allow me to explain,” Raskolnikov picked up again, still addressing himself not to the clerk but to Nikodim Fomich, but trying as hard as he could to address Ilya Petrovich as well, though he stubbornly pretended to be burrowing in his papers and contemptuously ignored him, “allow me, too, for my part, to explain that I have been living with her for about three years now, ever since I came from the province, and earlier...earlier... but then, why shouldn't I confess it, at the very begi

“Such intimacies are hardly required of you, my dear sir, and we have no time for them,” Ilya Petrovich interrupted rudely and triumphantly, but Raskolnikov hotly cut him off, though it had suddenly become very difficult for him to speak.

“But allow me, do allow me to tell everything, more or less...how things went and...in my turn...though it's u

“All these touching details, my dear sir, are of no concern to us,” Ilya Petrovich insolently cut in. “You must make a response and a commitment, and as for your happening to be in love, and all these other tragic points, we could not care less about them.”

“Now that's...cruel of you...really . . .” Nikodim Fomich muttered, and he, too, sat down at the table and started signing things. He felt somehow ashamed.

“Write,” the clerk said to Raskolnikov.

“Write what?” he asked, somehow with particular rudeness.

“I'll dictate to you.”

Raskolnikov fancied that after his confession the clerk had become more casual and contemptuous with him, but—strangely—he suddenly felt decidedly indifferent to anyone's possible opinion, and this change occurred somehow in a moment, an instant. If he had only cared to reflect a little, he would of course have been surprised that he could have spoken with them as he had a minute before, and even thrust his feelings upon them. And where had these feelings come from? On the contrary, if the room were now suddenly filled not with policemen but with his foremost friends, even then, he thought, he would be unable to find a single human word for them, so empty had his heart suddenly become. A dark sensation of tormenting, infinite solitude and estrangement suddenly rose to consciousness in his soul. It was not the abjectness of his heart's outpourings before Ilya Petrovich, nor the abjectness of the lieutenant's triumph over him, that suddenly so overturned his heart. Oh, what did he care now about his own mea

The clerk began dictating to him the customary formal response for such occasions—that is, I ca

“You can't even write, you're barely able to hold the pen,” the clerk observed, studying Raskolnikov with curiosity. “Are you sick?”

“Yes...dizzy...go on!”

“That's all. Sign it.”

The clerk took the paper from him and busied himself with others.

Raskolnikov gave back the pen, but instead of getting up and leaving, he put both elbows on the table and pressed his head with his hands. It was as if a nail were being driven into his skull. A strange thought suddenly came to him: to get up now, go over to Nikodim Fomich, and tell him all about yesterday, down to the last detail, then go to his apartment with them and show them the things in the corner, in the hole. The urge was so strong that he had already risen from his seat to carry it out. “Shouldn't I at least think it over for a moment?” raced through his head. “No, better do it without thinking, just to get it off my back!” But suddenly he stopped, rooted to the spot: Nikodim Fomich was talking heatedly with Ilya Petrovich, and he caught some of the words.