Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - Impressions of Russian Literature - VI
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eyes, earns twenty rubles a year more, sends him a
letter, from whose kind, considerate expressions he
learns that his only dearly loved sister, proud and
beautiful as she is, is about to offer up herself on the altar of
a detested marriage in order to be able to keep him at
the university and support her mother in her old age.
He starts up against it, he kicks against the pricks, he
will forbid his pure sister from entering into this
horrible marriage. But what right has he to forbid it?
How can he prevent it? What can he offer her instead?
To devote to her and their mother his whole future,
when he has first completed his studies and obtained a
position! In ten years perhaps! But by that time his
mother will be blind or dead from fasting or consumption,
and by that time his sister will be ... what
cannot happen in ten years!
He had early formed a theory of his own about crime,
that the extraordinary man has the right, not the official
right, but one which his conscience gives him, to
overstep certain obstacles and barriers which circumscribe
other men; only, however, in the case that his idea, an
idea which looks towards the happiness of mankind,
demands such a step. If men like Kepler and Newton
could in no way have made their discoveries available
to the world without the taking of human life, which put
obstacles in the way of these discoveries, then they
would have had the right, nay, it would have been their
duty, to take that human life. Experience teaches him
that almost all the lawgivers and reformers of humanity,
from the oldest down to Lycurgus, Solon, Mahomet,
Napoleon, have been criminals, from the very fact
that they have created a new law and set aside the old,
which was regarded by society as holy and had been
handed down from their ancestors, and that they had not
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