“Svidrigailov,” someone responded huskily and indifferently from the other room.

Raskolnikov gave a start.

“Svidrigailov! Svidrigailov shot himself!” he cried out.

“What, you know Svidrigailov?”

“Yes...I do...he came recently . . .”

“Right, he came recently, lost his wife, a man of wanton behavior, and all of a sudden he shot himself, and so scandalously, you can't even imagine...left a few words in his notebook, that he was dying in his right mind and asked that no one be blamed for his death. The man had money, they say. And how do you happen to know him?”

“I...was acquainted...my sister lived with them as a governess . . .”

“Aha, aha, aha...But you can tell us about him, then. You didn't even suspect?”

“I saw him yesterday...he...was drinking wine...I knew nothing.”

Raskolnikov felt as if something had fallen on him and crushed him.

“You seem to have turned pale again. This is a stuffy place . . .”

“Yes, it's time I was going, sir,” Raskolnikov muttered. “Excuse me for having troubled...”

“Oh, heavens, as much as you like! It's my pleasure, and I'm glad to say . . .”

Ilya Petrovich even offered him his hand.

“I just wanted...to see Zamyotov . . .”

“I understand, I understand, and it's been my pleasure.”

“I'm...very glad...good-bye, sir . . .” Raskolnikov smiled.

He walked out; he was reeling. His head was spinning. He could not feel his legs under him. He started down the stairs, propping himself against the wall with his right arm. It seemed to him that some caretaker with a book in his hands pushed him as he climbed past on his way up to the office, that some little mutt was barking its head off somewhere on a lower floor, and that some woman threw a rolling pin at it and shouted. He went on down the stairs and came out into the courtyard. There in the courtyard, not far from the entrance, stood Sonya, pale, numb all over, and she gave him a wild, wild look. He stopped before her. Something pained and tormented, something desperate, showed in her face. She clasped her hands. A hideous, lost smile forced itself to his lips. He stood a while, grinned, and turned back upstairs to the office.

Ilya Petrovich was sitting down, rummaging through some papers. Before him stood the same peasant who had just pushed Raskolnikov on his way up the stairs.

“A-a-ah? You again! Did you leave something behind?...But what's the matter?”

Raskolnikov, his lips pale, a fixed look in his eyes, went straight up to the desk, leaned on it with his hand, tried to say something, but could not; only incoherent sounds came out.

“You're not well! A chair! Here, sit down on the chair, sit down! Water!”

Raskolnikov sank down on the chair, but would not take his eyes from the quite unpleasantly surprised face of Ilya Petrovich. For a minute or so they went on looking at each other and waiting. Water was brought.

“It was I . . .” Raskolnikov tried to begin.

“Drink some water.”

Raskolnikov pushed the water aside with his hand and said softly, with some pauses, but distinctly:

“It was I who killed the official's old widow and her sister Lizaveta with an axe and robbed them. “

Ilya Petrovich opened his mouth. People came running from all sides.

Raskolnikov repeated his statement.....................

Epilogue

I

Siberia. On the bank of a wide, desolate river stands a town, one of the administrative centers of Russia; in the town there is a fortress; in the fortress, a prison.^[161] In the prison, already confined for nine months, is exiled convict of the second class Rodion Raskolnikov. Almost a year and a half has passed since the day of his crime.

The court proceedings in his case went without great difficulties. The criminal firmly, precisely, and clearly supported his statement, without confusing the circumstances, without softening them in his favor, without distorting the facts, without forgetting the slightest detail. He recounted the whole process of the murder to the last trace: explained the mystery of the pledge (the piece of wood with the metal strip), which had been found in the murdered woman's hand; told in detail how he had taken the keys from the old woman, described the keys, described the trunk and what it was filled with, even enumerated some of the particular objects that were in it; explained the riddle of Lizaveta's murder; told how Koch had come and knocked, and the student after him, and repeated everything they had said between themselves; told how he, the criminal, had then run down the stairs and heard the shrieks of Mikolka and Mitka; how he had hidden in the empty apartment, then gone home; and in conclusion he pointed them to the stone in the courtyard on Voznesensky Prospect, near the gateway, under which the articles and purse were found. In short, it turned out to be a clear case. The investigators and judges were very surprised, incidentally, that he had hidden the purse and articles under the stone without making any use of them, and most of all that he not only did not remember in detail all the things he had actually carried off, but was even mistaken as to their number. Indeed, the circumstance that he had not once opened the purse and did not even know exactly how much money was in it appeared incredible (there turned out to be three hundred and seventeen silver roubles and three twenty-kopeck pieces in the purse; from lying so long under the stone, some of the topmost bills, the largest, had become quite damaged). For a long time they strove to discover why the accused would lie precisely about this one circumstance, when he had confessed voluntarily and truthfully to everything else. Finally, some of them (especially from among the psychologists) even admitted the possibility that he had indeed not looked into the purse and therefore did not know what was in it, and thus, without knowing, had gone and put it under the stone, but from this they concluded at once that the crime itself could not have occurred otherwise than in some sort of temporary insanity, including, so to speak, a morbid monomania of murder and robbery, with no further aim or calculation of profit. This fell in opportunely with the latest fashionable theory of temporary insanity, which in our time they so often try to apply to certain criminals. Furthermore, Raskolnikov's long-standing hypochondriac state of mind was attested to with precision by many witnesses, by Dr. Zossimov, former friends, the landlady, the maid. All this contributed greatly to the conclusion that Raskolnikov was not quite like the ordinary murderer, outlaw, and robber, but that something else was involved. To the great annoyance of those who defended this opinion, the criminal did almost nothing to defend himself; to the ultimate questions of precisely what had inclined him to homicide and what had prompted him to commit robbery, he answered quite clearly, with the crudest exactitude, that the cause of it all lay in his bad situation, his poverty and helplessness, his wish to fortify the first steps of his life's career with the help of the three thousand roubles, at least, that he counted on finding at the murdered woman's. He had resolved on the murder as a result of his frivolous and fainthearted nature, further exasperated by hardship and failure. And to the question of what precisely had prompted him to come and confess his guilt, he answered directly that it was sincere repentance. There was something almost crude about it all . . .

The sentence nevertheless turned out to be more merciful than might have been expected, given the crime committed, perhaps precisely because the criminal not only did not try to justify himself, but even seemed to show a desire to inculpate himself still more. All the strange and particular circumstances of the case were taken into consideration. The criminal's illness and distress prior to committing the crime were not subject to the least doubt. That he had not made use of what he had stolen was attributed partly to the influence of awakened repentance, partly to the not quite sound state of his mental capacities at the time the murder was committed. The circumstance of the accidental killing of Lizaveta even served as an example in support of the latter suggestion: the man commits two murders, and at the same time forgets that the door is standing open! Finally, the confession of his guilt, at the very time when the case had become extraordinarily tangled as a result of the false self-accusation of a dispirited fanatic (Nikolai), and when, moreover, there was not only no clear evidence against the real criminal, but hardly even any suspicion (Porfiry Petrovich had fully kept his word)—all this contributed in the end to mitigating the accused man's sentence.