Epilogue · II

He had been ill for a long time already; but it was not the horrors of convict life, not the work, not the food, not the shaved head, not the patchwork clothes that had broken him: oh! what were all these torments and tortures to him! On the contrary, he was even glad of the work: worn out physically at work, he at least won himself a few hours of peaceful sleep. And what did the food mean to him, this thin shchi, the cabbage soup with cockroaches in it? As a student, in his former life, he had often not had even that. His clothes were warm and suited to his way of life. He did not even feel the fetters on himself. Was he to be ashamed of his shaved head and his half-and-half jacket? But before whom? Before Sonya? Sonya was afraid of him, and was he to be ashamed before her?

And what then? He was ashamed even before Sonya, whom he tormented for it with his contemptuous and rough treatment. But it was not of his shaved head and fetters that he was ashamed: his pride had been badly wounded; it was from wounded pride that he had fallen ill. Oh, how happy he would have been if he could have accused himself! He would have borne everything then, even shame and disgrace. But he judged himself strictly, and his hardened conscience found no especially terrible guilt in his past, except perhaps a simple blunder that could have happened to anyone. He was ashamed precisely that he, Raskolnikov, had perished so blindly, hopelessly, dully, and stupidly, by some sentence of blind fate, and must humble himself and submit before the “meaninglessness” of some sentence, if he wanted to calm himself at all.

Anxiety with no object and no purpose in the present, and in the future one unbroken sacrifice by which nothing was gained: that was what lay before him in the world. And what of it that in eight years he would be only thirty-two and could begin to live again! What should he live for? What should he have in view? What should he strive for? Live in order to exist? But a thousand times before he had been ready to give up his existence for an idea, for a hope, even for a fantasy. Existence alone had always been too little for him; he had always wanted more. Perhaps it was only by the force of his desires that he had then considered himself a man to whom more was permitted than to another.

If only fate had sent him repentance: burning repentance that breaks the heart and drives away sleep, such repentance that from its terrible torments one sees visions of the noose and the deep pool! Oh, he would have rejoiced at it! Torments and tears, why, that is life too. But he did not repent of his crime.

At least he could have raged at his stupidity, as he had raged before at the hideous and most stupid actions of his that had brought him to prison. But now, already in prison, at liberty, he had again weighed and thought over all his former acts and did not at all find them as stupid and hideous as they had seemed to him at that fatal time, before.

“In what, in what way,” he thought, “was my idea more stupid than other ideas and theories that have swarmed and collided with one another in the world, ever since this world has stood? One has only to look at the thing with a completely independent, broad view, freed from everyday influences, and then, of course, my idea will turn out to be not at all so… strange. O negators and sages at five kopecks in silver, why do you stop halfway!

“Well, why does my act seem so hideous to them?” he said to himself. “Because it is a villainy? What does the word ‘villainy’ mean? My conscience is at rest. Of course, a criminal offense has been committed; of course, the letter of the law has been broken and blood has been shed, well, then take my head for the letter of the law… and enough! Of course, in that case even many benefactors of mankind, who did not inherit power but seized it themselves, ought to have been executed at their very first steps. But those men endured their steps, and therefore they are right, and I did not endure, and so I had no right to permit myself that step.”

That was the one thing in which he acknowledged his crime: only in that he had not endured it and had come and confessed.

He suffered too from the thought: why had he not killed himself then? Why had he stood over the river then and preferred to confess? Can there really be such strength in this desire to live, and is it so hard to overcome? Yet Svidrigailov, who was afraid of death, had overcome it?

He asked himself this question in torment and could not understand that even then, when he stood over the river, he had perhaps sensed a deep falsehood in himself and in his convictions. He did not understand that this presentiment might be the harbinger of a future break in his life, of his future resurrection, of a future new view of life.

He was more inclined to admit here only the dull weight of instinct, which it was not for him to break, and which, again, he had not had the strength to step over (out of weakness and insignificance). He looked at his fellow convicts and was amazed: how they all loved life too, how they prized it! It seemed to him precisely that in prison they loved and valued it still more, and prized it more, than at liberty. What terrible torments and tortures some of them had endured, the vagabonds, for instance! Could a single ray of sun really mean so much to them, a dense forest, a cold spring somewhere in an unknown wilderness, marked out the year before last, which the vagabond dreams of meeting again as of meeting a mistress, sees in his sleep, with the green grass around it, a little bird singing in a bush? Looking further, he saw examples still more inexplicable.

In the prison, in the milieu around him, he of course failed to notice a great deal, and did not want to notice it at all. He lived somehow with his eyes lowered: it was loathsome and unbearable for him to look. But in the end many things began to surprise him, and, somehow involuntarily, he began to notice what he had not even suspected before. In general, and most of all, what began to surprise him was that terrible, that impassable gulf that lay between him and all these people. It seemed as if he and they were of different nations. He and they looked at each other with mistrust and hostility. He knew and understood the general causes of such a separation; but he had never before admitted that these causes were in fact so deep and strong. In the prison there were also exiled Poles, political criminals. They simply regarded all these people as ignoramuses and serfs and despised them from on high; but Raskolnikov could not look at it that way: he saw clearly that these ignoramuses were in many respects much more intelligent than these same Poles. There were Russians here too who also despised these people too much: a former officer and two seminarians; Raskolnikov clearly noticed their mistake as well.

He himself, though, was disliked and avoided by everyone. In the end they even began to hate him: why? He did not know. They despised him, laughed at him; those who were much greater criminals than he laughed at his crime.

“You’re a gentleman!” they said to him. “Was it for you to go about with an axe? That’s no business for a gentleman at all.”

In the second week of Great Lent his turn came to fast and prepare for communion together with his barracks. He went to church to pray along with the others. Over what, he himself did not know, a quarrel broke out one day; all at once they fell on him in a frenzy.

“You’re an atheist! You don’t believe in God!” they shouted at him. “You ought to be killed.”

He had never talked with them about God or faith, but they wanted to kill him as an atheist; he kept silent and did not argue with them. One convict rushed at him in utter frenzy; Raskolnikov waited for him calmly and silently: his eyebrow did not stir, not a feature of his face quivered. The guard managed to get between him and the murderer in time, or blood would have been shed.

There was one more question he could not solve: why had they all come to love Sonya so? She did not court their favor; they met her rarely, only sometimes at work, when she came for a minute to see him. And yet everyone already knew her, knew too that she had followed him, knew how she lived and where she lived. She did not give them money or render them any special services. Only once, at Christmas, she brought alms for the whole prison: pirogi and kalachi, the white loaves. But little by little certain closer relations were formed between them and Sonya: she wrote letters to their families for them and sent them off by post. Their male and female relatives, coming to the town, left things for them, and even money, in Sonya’s hands, as they directed. Their wives and mistresses knew her and went to see her. And when she appeared at the work sites, coming to Raskolnikov, or met a party of convicts going to work, they all took off their caps, they all bowed: “Little mother, Sofya Semyonovna, you’re our mother, tender, compassionate!” these coarse, branded convicts would say to this small and thin creature. She would smile and bow back, and they all loved it when she smiled at them. They even loved her walk, turned to look after her as she went, and praised her; they praised her even for being so small, they no longer even knew what to praise her for. They even went to her to be treated for illnesses.

He lay in the hospital through the whole end of Lent and Holy Week. Already recovering, he remembered the dreams he had had while he was still lying in fever and delirium. In his illness he had dreamed that the whole world was condemned to fall victim to some terrible, unheard-of, and unseen pestilence coming from the depths of Asia upon Europe. All were to perish except some, a very few, chosen ones. Some new trichinae had appeared, microscopic creatures that lodged in people’s bodies. But these creatures were spirits endowed with intelligence and will. People who took them into themselves at once became possessed and mad. But never, never had people considered themselves so intelligent and so unshakable in the truth as these infected ones did. Never had they considered their judgments, their scientific conclusions, their moral convictions and beliefs more unshakable. Whole villages, whole cities and nations were infected and went mad. All were in alarm and did not understand one another, each thought that the truth was contained in him alone, and suffered, looking at the others, beat his breast, wept, and wrung his hands. They did not know whom to judge or how, could not agree on what to consider evil and what good. They did not know whom to accuse, whom to acquit. People killed one another in some senseless spite. They gathered against one another in whole armies, but the armies, already on the march, would suddenly begin to tear themselves apart, the ranks broke up, the soldiers threw themselves on one another, stabbed and cut, bit and ate one another. In the cities the alarm bell rang all day long: everyone was being summoned, but who was summoning and for what, no one knew, and everyone was in alarm. The most ordinary trades were abandoned, because everyone proposed his own ideas, his own corrections, and they could not agree; agriculture came to a stop. Here and there people ran together in heaps, agreed together on something, swore not to part, but at once began something completely different from what they themselves had just proposed, began to accuse one another, fought and cut one another. Fires began, famine began. Everyone and everything was perishing. The pestilence grew and moved further and further. Only a few people in the whole world could be saved; these were the pure and chosen ones, destined to begin a new race of people and a new life, to renew and purify the earth, but no one anywhere had seen these people, no one had heard their word or their voice.

What tormented Raskolnikov was that this senseless delirium echoed so sadly and so painfully in his memories, that the impression of these fevered dreams took so long to pass. It was already the second week after Easter; warm, clear spring days had set in; in the convicts’ ward the windows had been opened (barred windows, beneath which a sentry walked). During the whole time of his illness Sonya had been able to visit him in the ward only twice; each time permission had to be sought, and that was difficult. But she often came into the hospital yard, under the windows, especially toward evening, and sometimes just to stand in the yard for a minute and look at the windows of the ward, if only from afar. One day, toward evening, Raskolnikov, by then almost fully recovered, had fallen asleep; on waking, he happened to go to the window and suddenly saw Sonya in the distance, at the hospital gates. She was standing there and seemed to be waiting for something. Something seemed to pierce his heart at that moment; he started and quickly moved away from the window. The next day Sonya did not come, nor on the third day; he noticed that he was waiting for her uneasily. At last he was discharged. Coming back to the prison, he learned from the convicts that Sofya Semyonovna had fallen ill, was lying at home and not going out anywhere.

He was very uneasy and sent to inquire about her. He soon learned that her illness was not dangerous. Learning in her turn that he was so anxious and concerned about her, Sonya sent him a note written in pencil, informing him that she was much better, that she had a slight, trifling cold, and that she would soon, very soon, come to see him at work. When he read this note his heart beat hard and painfully.

The day was again clear and warm. Early in the morning, about six o’clock, he set off to work, to the riverbank, where a kiln for baking alabaster had been set up in a shed, and where they pounded it. Only three workers went there. One of the convicts took the guard and went with him to the fortress for some tool; the other began to prepare firewood and load it into the kiln. Raskolnikov came out of the shed onto the very bank, sat down on some logs piled by the shed, and began to look at the wide and desolate river. From the high bank a wide view of the country opened out. From the far other bank a song could faintly be heard. There, in the boundless steppe flooded with sunlight, the nomads’ yurts showed black as barely visible dots. There was freedom there, and other people lived there, not at all like those here; there time itself seemed to have stopped, as though the ages of Abraham and his flocks had not yet passed. Raskolnikov sat and looked, motionless, without tearing his eyes away; his thought passed into daydreams, into contemplation; he was not thinking of anything, but some anguish stirred and tormented him.

Suddenly Sonya was beside him. She had come up almost inaudibly and sat down next to him. It was still very early; the morning chill had not yet softened. She was wearing her poor old burnous and the green shawl. Her face still bore signs of illness; it had grown thinner, paler, more drawn. She smiled at him gladly and warmly, but, as usual, held out her hand to him timidly.

She always held out her hand to him timidly, sometimes did not even offer it at all, as if she were afraid he would push it away. He always took her hand as if with loathing, always met her as if with vexation, sometimes stubbornly kept silent the whole time of her visit. It happened that she trembled before him and went away in deep grief. But now their hands did not part; he glanced at her quickly, fleetingly, said nothing, and lowered his eyes to the ground. They were alone; no one saw them. The guard had turned away just then.

How it happened he himself did not know, but suddenly something seemed to seize him and seemed to throw him at her feet. He wept and embraced her knees. In the first instant she was terribly frightened, and her whole face went deathly pale. She jumped up from her place and, trembling, looked at him. But at once, in that same instant, she understood everything. In her eyes shone infinite happiness; she understood, and for her there was no longer any doubt that he loved her, loved her infinitely, and that at last that moment had come…

They wanted to speak but could not. Tears stood in their eyes. They were both pale and thin; but in these sick and pale faces there already shone the dawn of a renewed future, of a full resurrection into a new life. Love had resurrected them; the heart of each held infinite sources of life for the heart of the other.

They resolved to wait and endure. They still had seven years left; and until then so much unbearable torment and so much infinite happiness! But he had risen again, and he knew it, he felt it fully with all his renewed being, and she, why, she lived only by his life!

On the evening of that same day, when the barracks had already been locked, Raskolnikov lay on the plank bed and thought about her. That day it had even seemed to him that all the convicts, his former enemies, were already looking at him differently. He had even begun to talk to them himself, and they had answered him kindly. He remembered this now, but that was how it had to be: wasn’t everything bound to change now?

He thought about her. He remembered how he had constantly tormented her and wrung her heart; he remembered her poor, thin little face, but these memories hardly tormented him now: he knew with what infinite love he would now redeem all her sufferings.

And what were they, all these, all these torments of the past! Everything, even his crime, even the sentence and the exile, seemed to him now, in the first rush of feeling, some external, strange fact, as if it had not even happened to him. That evening, however, he could not think about anything for long or steadily, could not concentrate his mind on anything; and he would not have resolved anything consciously now; he only felt. Instead of dialectics, life had come, and in his consciousness something completely different had to work itself out.

Under his pillow lay the Gospels. He took the book up mechanically. This book belonged to her; it was the same one from which she had read to him about the raising of Lazarus. At the beginning of his penal servitude he had thought she would torment him with religion, would bring up the Gospels and force books on him. But, to his greatest surprise, she had not once spoken of it, had not once even offered him the Gospels. He himself had asked her for it not long before his illness, and she had silently brought him the book. Until now he had not even opened it.

He did not open it now either, but one thought flashed through him: “Can her convictions not be my convictions now? Her feelings, her strivings, at least…”

She too had been agitated all that day, and in the night she even fell ill again. But she was so happy that she was almost frightened of her happiness. Seven years, only seven years! At the beginning of their happiness, at certain moments, they were both ready to look on these seven years as on seven days. He did not even know that the new life would not be given him for nothing, that it had still to be dearly bought, paid for with a great future deed…

But here a new story begins, the story of a man’s gradual renewal, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his gradual passage from one world into another, of his acquaintance with a new reality, hitherto completely unknown. That might make the subject of a new tale, but our present tale is ended.

1866