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Razumikhin all but flew into a rage.
“And if you like I can deduce for you right now,” he bellowed, “that you have white eyelashes solely because Ivan the Great[76] is two hundred and fifty feet high, and I can deduce it clearly, precisely, progressively, and even with a liberal tinge. I can! Want to bet?”
“I accept! Let's listen, please, to how he deduces it!”
“Ah, he just goes on pretending, devil take it!” Razumikhin cried out, jumped up, and waved his arm. “You're not worth talking to! He does it all on purpose, you don't know him yet, Rodion! And he took their side yesterday just so as to fool them all. And, Lord, the things he was saying! And didn't he make them happy! ... He sometimes keeps it up like that for two weeks. Last year he assured us, who knows why, that he was going to become a monk: he stood by it for two months! Recently he decided to assure us he was getting married and that everything was set for the wedding. He even had a new suit made. We already started congratulating him. There was no bride, nothing— it was all a mirage!”
“Ah, that's a lie! I had the suit made before. It was because of the new suit that it occurred to me to pull your legs.”
“Are you really such a dissembler?” Raskolnikov asked casually.
“And did you think I wasn't? Just wait, I'll take you in, too—ha, ha, ha! No, you see, I'll tell you the whole truth! Speaking of all these questions, crimes, the environment, little girls, I now recall, though it always interested me, a certain article of yours: 'On Crime'...or whatever it was, I don't remember the title, I've forgotten. I had the pleasure of reading it two months ago in Periodical Discourse. “
“My article? In Periodical Discourse?” Raskolnikov asked in surprise. “I did indeed write an article dealing with a certain book six months ago, when I left the university, but at the time I took it to Weekly Discourse, not Periodical. “
“Yet it got into Periodical Discourse. “
“But Weekly Discourse ceased to exist, which is why it wasn't printed then . . .”
“That's true, sir; and as it was ceasing to exist, Weekly Discourse merged with Periodical Discourse, and so your little article appeared two months ago in Periodical Discourse. And you didn't know?”
Raskolnikov indeed knew nothing.
“But, my goodness, you can demand payment from them for the article! What a character you have, though! Your life is so solitary that you don't even know things that concern you directly. It's a fact, sir.”
“Bravo, Rodka! I didn't know either!” Razumikhin exclaimed. “I'll stop by the reading room today and look for that issue! Two months ago? What was the date? Anyway, I'll find it! What a thing! And he doesn't even say!”
“But how did you find out that the article was mine? I signed it with an initial.”
“By chance, and only the other day. Through the editor, an acquaintance of mine...I was quite interested.”
“As I recall, I was considering the psychological state of the criminal throughout the course of the crime.”
“Yes, sir, and you maintain that the act of carrying out a crime is always accompanied by illness. Very, very original, but... as a matter of fact, what interested me was not that part of your article, but a certain thought tossed in at the end, which unfortunately you present only vaguely, by way of a hint... In short, if you recall, a certain hint is presented that there supposedly exist in the world certain persons who can...that is, who not only can but are fully entitled to commit all sorts of crimes and excesses and to whom the law supposedly does not apply.”
Raskolnikov smiled at this forced and deliberate distortion of his idea.
“What? How's that? The right to commit crimes? But not because they're 'victims of the environment'?” Razumikhin inquired, even somewhat fearfully.
“No, no, not quite because of that,” Porfiry replied. “The whole point is that in his article all people are somehow divided into the 'ordinary' and the 'extraordinary.' The ordinary must live in obedience and have no right to transgress the law, because they are, after all, ordinary. While the extraordinary have the right to commit all sorts of crimes and in various ways to transgress the law, because in point of fact they are extraordinary. That is how you had it, unless I'm mistaken?”
“But what is this? It can't possibly be so!” Razumikhin muttered in perplexity.
Raskolnikov smiled again. He realized all at once what the point was and where he was being led; he remembered his article. He decided to accept the challenge.
“That isn't quite how I had it,” he began, simply and modestly. “I admit, however, that your summary is almost correct, even perfectly correct, if you like . . .” (It was as if he were pleased to agree that it was perfectly correct.) “The only difference is that I do not at all insist that extraordinary people absolutely must and are duty bound at all times to do all sorts of excesses, as you say. I even think that such an article would never be accepted for publication. I merely suggested that an 'extraordinary' man has the right... that is, not an official right, but his own right, to allow his conscience to...step over certain obstacles, and then only in the event that the fulfillment of his idea— sometimes perhaps salutary for the whole of mankind—calls for it. You have been pleased to say that my article is unclear; I am prepared to clarify it for you, as far as I can. I will perhaps not be mistaken in supposing that that seems to be just what you want. As you please, sir. In my opinion, if, as the result of certain combinations, Kepler's or Newton's discoveries could become known to people in no other way than by sacrificing the lives of one, or ten, or a hundred or more people who were hindering the discovery, or standing as an obstacle in its path, then Newton would have the right, and it would even be his duty . . . to remove those ten or a hundred people, in order to make his discoveries known to all mankind. It by no means follows from this, incidentally, that Newton should have the right to kill anyone he pleases, whomever happens along, or to steal from the market every day. Further, I recall developing in my article the idea that all... well, let's say, the lawgivers and founders of mankind, starting from the most ancient and going on to the Lycurguses, the Solons, the Muhammads, the Napoleons, and so forth,[77] that all of them to a man were criminals, from the fact alone that in giving a new law they thereby violated the old one, held sacred by society and passed down from their fathers, and they certainly did not stop at shedding blood either, if it happened that blood (sometimes quite i
76
"Ivan the Great" is a bell-tower in the Moscow Kremlin.
77
Lycurgus, semilegendary lawgiver of ancient Sparta, is said to have lived in the ninth century b.c. Solon (630?-560? b.c.), lawgiver and reformer of the Athenian state, was one of the "seven sages of Greece." Muhammad and Napoleon, among other things, also codified the laws of their nations.
78
The French phrase means "long live the eternal war." The New Jerusalem appears at the end of Revelation (21:1-3) in St. John's vision of "the holy city ... coming down from God out of heaven." However, the Saint-Simonians, followers of the Utopian socialist Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825), interpreted this vision as foretelling a future paradise on earth and a new golden age. Saint-Simon's thought, a sort of neo-Christianity, was popular in Russia during the 1840s.