“Now, what do they find so hideous in my action?” he kept saying to himself. “That it was an evildoing? What does the word 'evildoing' mean? My conscience is clear. Of course, a criminal act was committed; of course, the letter of the law was broken and blood was shed; well, then, have 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 for themselves, ought to have been executed at their very first steps. But those men endured their steps, and therefore they were right, while I did not endure, and so I had no right to permit myself that step.”

This alone he recognized as his crime: that he had not endured it, but had gone and confessed.

And he suffered from another thought: why had he not killed himself then? Why, when he was standing over the river then, had he preferred to go and confess? Was there really such force in this desire to live, and was it so difficult to overcome it? Had not Svidrigailov, who was afraid of death, overcome it?

In torment he asked himself this question, and could not understand that even then, when he was standing over the river, he may have sensed a profound lie in himself and in his convictions. He did not understand that this sense might herald a future break in his life, his future resurrection, his future new vision of life.

Instead he allowed only for the dull burden of instinct here, which it was not for him to break through, and which (again owing to weakness and worthlessness) he had been unable to step over. He looked at his fellow convicts and was amazed: how they, too, all loved life, how they valued it! It precisely seemed to him that in prison they loved and valued it even more, cherished it even more than in freedom. What terrible pains and torments had some of them not endured—the tramps, for instance! Could some one ray of sunlight mean so much to them, a deep forest, a cool spring somewhere in the untrodden wilderness, noticed two years before, to meet which the tramp dreams as he dreams of meeting his mistress, sees it in his sleep, green grass growing around it, a bird singing in a bush? Looking further, he found examples still more inexplicable.

In prison, in his surroundings, he did not notice much, of course, and really did not want to notice. He lived somehow with lowered eyes: it was repulsive and unbearable to look. But in the end many things began to surprise him, and he somehow involuntarily began to notice what he had not even suspected before. But, generally, he came to be surprised most of all by the terrible and impassable abyss that lay between him and all these people. It was as if he and they belonged to different nations. He and they looked at each other with mistrust and hostility. He knew and understood the general reasons for such disunion; but he had never before assumed that these reasons were in fact so deep and strong. There were also exiled Poles there, political prisoners. They simply regarded all these people as ignorant slaves and haughtily disdained them; but Raskolnikov could not take such a view: he saw clearly that these ignorant men were in many respects much smarter than the Poles themselves. There were also Russians who all too readily despised these people—a former officer and two seminarians; Raskolnikov clearly saw their mistake as well.

As for him, he was disliked and avoided by everyone. In the end they even began to hate him—why, he did not know. Men far more criminal than he despised him, laughed at him, laughed at his crime.

“You're a gentleman!” they said to him. “What did you take up an axe for; it's no business for a gentleman.”

During the second week of the Great Lent, it was his turn to fast and go to services together with his barracks.^[162] He went to church and prayed together with the others. For some reason unknown to him, a quarrel broke out one day; they all fell on him at once with ferocity.

“You're godless! You don't believe in God!” they shouted. “You ought to be killed!”

He had never talked with them about God or belief, but they wanted to kill him for being godless; he kept silent and did not argue with them. One convict flew at him in a perfect frenzy; Raskolnikov waited for him calmly and silently: his eyebrows did not move, not a feature of his face trembled. A guard managed to step between him and the murderer just in time—otherwise blood would have been shed.

Still another question remained insoluble for him: why had they all come to love Sonya so much? She had not tried to win them over; they met her only rarely, at work now and then, when she would come for a moment to see him. And yet they all knew her, knew also that she had followed after him, knew how she lived and where she lived. She had never given them money or done them any special favors. Only once, at Christmas, she brought alms for the whole prison: pies and kalatchi.^[163] But, little by little, certain closer relations sprang up between them and Sonya. She wrote letters for them to their families, and posted them. When their male or female relations came to town, they would instruct them to leave things and even money for them in Sonya's hands. Their wives and mistresses knew her and visited her. And when she came to see Raskolnikov at work, or met a party of convicts on the way to work, they would all take their hats off, they would all bow to her: “Little mother, Sofya Semyonovna, our tender, fond little mother!”—so the coarse, branded convicts would say to this small and frail being. She would smile and bow in return, and they all liked it when she smiled to them. They even liked the way she walked; they would turn and follow her with their eyes to see how she walked, and praise her; they even praised her for being so small; they were even at a loss what not to praise her for. They even came to her with their ailments.

He lay in the hospital all through the end of Lent and Holy Week. As he began to recover, he remembered his dreams from when he was still lying in feverish delirium. In his illness he had dreamed that the whole world was doomed to fall victim to some terrible, as yet unknown and unseen pestilence spreading to Europe from the depths of Asia. Everyone was to perish, except for certain, very few, chosen ones. Some new trichinae had appeared, microscopic creatures that lodged themselves in men's bodies. But these creatures were spirits, endowed with reason and will. Those who received them into themselves immediately became possessed and mad. But never, never had people considered themselves so intelligent and unshakeable in the truth as did these infected ones. Never had they thought their judgments, their scientific conclusions, their moral convictions and beliefs more unshakeable. Entire settlements, entire cities and nations would be infected and go mad. Everyone became anxious, and no one understood anyone else; each thought the truth was contained in himself alone, and suffered looking at others, beat his breast, wept, and wrung his hands. They did not know whom or how to judge, could not agree on what to regard as evil, what as good. They did not know whom to accuse, whom to vindicate. People killed each other in some sort of meaningless spite. They gathered into whole armies against each other, but, already on the march, the armies would suddenly begin destroying themselves, the ranks would break up, the soldiers would fall upon one another, stabbing and cutting, biting and eating one another. In the cities the bells rang all day long: everyone was being summoned, but no one knew who was summoning them or why, and everyone felt anxious. The most ordinary trades ceased, because everyone offered his own ideas, his own corrections, and no one could agree. Agriculture ceased. Here and there people would band together, agree among themselves to do something, swear never to part—but immediately begin something completely different from what they themselves had just suggested, begin accusing one another, fighting, stabbing. Fires broke out; famine broke out. Everyone and everything was perishing. The pestilence grew and spread further and further. Only a few people in the whole world could be saved; they were pure and chosen, destined to begin a new generation of people and a new life, to renew and purify the earth; but no one had seen these people anywhere, no one had heard their words or voices.