Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - Impressions of Russian Literature - VI
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flowed on the earth in streams, it is poured out like
champagne, and people are crowned for it on the Capitol
and then called the benefactors of mankind — I myself
only wished for the good and would have done a
hundred thousand good deeds for this one blunder, and it
wras not even a blunder, only a clumsy act. By this
blunder all I wanted was to put myself in an independent
position, make the first step, and then all this would
have been compensated by a proportionally large usefulness.
But I have not been able to take the first step,
because I am a milksop! That is the whole of it.”
Still, in the long run, Sonya is stronger than he. He
cannot withstand the prayer of the strong woman in all
its humility and unworthiness, to make his deed known,
and the novel ends with Raskolnikof’s self-accusation at
the police-office: “It was I who murdered the old register’s
widow and her sister with an axe and then plundered
their property!”
In this story Dostoyevski has plainly intended to give
a picture of the times. “What is before us here,” says
the examining magistrate Porfyrius to the hero, in the
third part of the book, “is, evidently enough, a fantastic,
tragical product of the new tendency of the times; it is
a deed which only the present time could bring forth,
the time in which it is a custom to repress one’s feelings
and to give utterance to phrases like this: that blood
operates refreshing; that is a fantasy which comes from
books; it is a heart which is spasmodically overstrained
by theories; it is a determination which leads to crimes
as if strange feet carried him thither.” The author
evidently has political ferments in view, although he
takes care not to say a single word directly about
politics. There is undoubtedly contained in it an allusion
to the murder of the Tsar. “Still it is well,” Porfyrius
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