Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - Impressions of Russian Literature - VI
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inadvertently more every day which passes, to those who
are seeking for the perpetrator of the crime. That,
however, is not the chief thing; no discovery from
without annihilates him, but an inner one, that he is not one
of those chosen, exceptional natures to whom everything
is allowed. After having committed his crime, he is no
longer able to raise himself to the height from which he
regarded it before it was accomplished. He is consumed
by inches. “No,” he says to himself, “these men whom
we admire are not constituted as I am. The true ruler,
to whom everything is allowed, lays Toulon waste,
establishes his power in Paris by the bayonet, forgets an
army in Egypt, sacrifices a half a million of men on a
campaign to Moscow, then makes a pun in Vilno about
it, — and after his death he is idolized. Such men must
be of iron, not of flesh and blood.” And a collateral
idea almost makes him smile: “Napoleon, the Pyramids,
Waterloo — and a disgusting, little usury practising old
crone, with a red-strapped trunk under her bed. Would
a Napoleon ever creep in under the bed of such an old
crone? ... Insanity.”
He is not sorry for the murder of the old woman; he
continues to regard her life as a useless one, her death
as an indifferent, almost a beneficial act. The old
woman is, and continues to be, a secondary matter; he
would only by killing her bring a principle to life, kills
not a human being, but a prejudice, and strides over the
chasm which separates the every-day souls who possess
the vulgar faiths from the host of the elect. He has
killed the prejudice, but he remains just the same
standing on this side of the chasm. He is excessively
wretched, more wretched than ever before.
He has not done anything bad. He only wished not
to be obliged to pass by his starving mother and keep
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