Crime and Punishment
Chapter 1 · 1/43
Crime and Punishment
Chapter 1
1CRIME AND PUNISHMENT By Fyodor Dostoevsky Translated By Constance Garnett TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE A few words about Dostoevsky himself may help the English reader to understand his work. 2Dostoevsky was the son of a doctor. 3His parents were very hard-working and deeply religious people, but so poor that they lived with their five children in only two rooms. 4The father and mother spent their evenings in reading aloud to their children, generally from books of a serious character. 5Though always sickly and delicate Dostoevsky came out third in the final examination of the Petersburg school of Engineering. 6There he had already begun his first work, “Poor Folk.” 7This story was published by the poet Nekrassov in his review and was received with acclamations. 8The shy, unknown youth found himself instantly something of a celebrity. 9A brilliant and successful career seemed to open before him, but those hopes were soon dashed. 10In 1849 he was arrested. 11Though neither by temperament nor conviction a revolutionist, Dostoevsky was one of a little group of young men who met together to read Fourier and Proudhon. 12He was accused of “taking part in conversations against the censorship, of reading a letter from Byelinsky to Gogol, and of knowing of the intention to set up a printing press.” 13Under Nicholas I. (that “stern and just man,” as Maurice Baring calls him) this was enough, and he was condemned to death. 14After eight months’ imprisonment he was with twenty-one others taken out to the Semyonovsky Square to be shot. 15Writing to his brother Mihail, Dostoevsky says: “They snapped words over our heads, and they made us put on the white shirts worn by persons condemned to death. 16Thereupon we were bound in threes to stakes, to suffer execution. 17Being the third in the row, I concluded I had only a few minutes of life before me. 18I thought of you and your dear ones and I contrived to kiss Plestcheiev and Dourov, who were next to me, and to bid them farewell. 19Suddenly the troops beat a tattoo, we were unbound, brought back upon the scaffold, and informed that his Majesty had spared us our lives.” 20The sentence was commuted to hard labour. 21One of the prisoners, Grigoryev, went mad as soon as he was untied, and never regained his sanity. 22The intense suffering of this experience left a lasting stamp on Dostoevsky’s mind. 23Though his religious temper led him in the end to accept every suffering with resignation and to regard it as a blessing in his own case, he constantly recurs to the subject in his writings. 24He describes the awful agony of the condemned man and insists on the cruelty of inflicting such torture. 25Then followed four years of penal servitude, spent in the company of common criminals in Siberia, where he began the “Dead House,” and some years of service in a disciplinary battalion. 26He had shown signs of some obscure nervous disease before his arrest and this now developed into violent attacks of epilepsy, from which he suffered for the rest of his life. 27The fits occurred three or four times a year and were more frequent in periods of great strain. 28In 1859 he was allowed to return to Russia. 29He started a journal--“Vremya,” which was forbidden by the Censorship through a misunderstanding. 30In 1864 he lost his first wife and his brother Mihail. 31He was in terrible poverty, yet he took upon himself the payment of his brother’s debts. 32He started another journal--“The Epoch,” which within a few months was also prohibited. 33He was weighed down by debt, his brother’s family was dependent on him, he was forced to write at heart-breaking speed, and is said never to have corrected his work. 34The later years of his life were much softened by the tenderness and devotion of his second wife. 35In June 1880 he made his famous speech at the unveiling of the monument to Pushkin in Moscow and he was received with extraordinary demonstrations of love and honour. 36A few months later Dostoevsky died. 37He was followed to the grave by a vast multitude of mourners, who “gave the hapless man the funeral of a king.” 38He is still probably the most widely read writer in Russia. 39In the words of a Russian critic, who seeks to explain the feeling inspired by Dostoevsky: “He was one of ourselves, a man of our blood and our bone, but one who has suffered and has seen so much more deeply than we have his insight impresses us as wisdom... that wisdom of the heart which we seek that we may learn from it how to live. 40All his other gifts came to him from nature, this he won for himself and through it he became great.” 41CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
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