Crime and Punishment By Fyodor Dostoevsky Pdf book download

Crime and Punishment By Fyodor Dostoevsky Pdf book download.

Book: Crime and Punishment

Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky

Release Date: March 28, 2006 

Last Updated: October 27, 2016

Language: English.

(✍️ This article is collected from this book 📚 (All Credit To Go Real Hero The Author of this book 📖) 🙏 Please buy this book hardcopy  anyway.)

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On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the

garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation,

towards K. bridge.

He had successfully avoided meeting his landlady on the staircase. His garret

was under the roof of a high, five-storied house and was more like a cupboard

than a room. The landlady who provided him with garret, dinners, and

attendance, lived on the floor below, and every time he went out he was obliged

to pass her kitchen, the door of which invariably stood open. And each time he

passed, the young man had a sick, frightened feeling, which made him scowl and

feel ashamed. He was hopelessly in debt to his landlady, and was afraid of

meeting her.

This was not because he was cowardly and abject, quite the contrary; but for

some time past he had been in an overstrained irritable condition, verging on

hypochondria. He had become so completely absorbed in himself, and isolated

from his fellows that he dreaded meeting, not only his landlady, but anyone at

all. He was crushed by poverty, but the anxieties of his position had of late

ceased to weigh upon him. 

He had given up attending to matters of practical

importance; he had lost all desire to do so. Nothing that any landlady could do

had a real terror for him. But to be stopped on the stairs, to be forced to listen to

her trivial, irrelevant gossip, to pestering demands for payment, threats and

complaints, and to rack his brains for excuses, to prevaricate, to lie—no, rather

than that, he would creep down the stairs like a cat and slip out unseen.

This evening, however, on coming out into the street, he became acutely

aware of his fears.

“I want to attempt a thing like that and am frightened by these trifles,” he

thought, with an odd smile. “Hm... yes, all is in a man’s hands and he lets it all

slip from cowardice, that’s an axiom. It would be interesting to know what it is

men are most afraid of. Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what they fear

most.... But I am talking too much. It’s because I chatter that I do nothing. Or

perhaps it is that I chatter because I do nothing. I’ve learned to chatter this last

month, lying for days together in my den thinking... of Jack the Giant-killer.

Why am I going there now? Am I capable of that? Is that serious? It is not

serious at all. It’s simply a fantasy to amuse myself; a plaything! Yes, maybe it is

a plaything.”

The heat in the street was terrible: and the airlessness, the bustle and the

plaster, scaffolding, bricks, and dust all about him, and that special Petersburg

stench, so familiar to all who are unable to get out of town in summer—all

worked painfully upon the young man’s already overwrought nerves. The

insufferable stench from the pot-houses, which are particularly numerous in that

part of the town, and the drunken men whom he met continually, although it was

a working day, completed the revolting misery of the picture. An expression of

the profoundest disgust gleamed for a moment in the young man’s refined face.

He was, by the way, exceptionally handsome, above the average in height, slim,

well-built, with beautiful dark eyes and dark brown hair. Soon he sank into deep

thought, or more accurately speaking into a complete blankness of mind; he

walked along not observing what was about him and not caring to observe it.

From time to time, he would mutter something, from the habit of talking to

himself, to which he had just confessed. At these moments he would become

conscious that his ideas were sometimes in a tangle and that he was very weak;

for two days he had scarcely tasted food.

He was so badly dressed that even a man accustomed to shabbiness would

have been ashamed to be seen in the street in such rags. In that quarter of the

town, however, scarcely any shortcoming in dress would have created surprise.

Owing to the proximity of the Hay Market, the number of establishments of bad

character, the preponderance of the trading and working class population

crowded in these streets and alleys in the heart of Petersburg, types so various

were to be seen in the streets that no figure, however queer, would have caused

surprise. But there was such accumulated bitterness and contempt in the young

man’s heart, that, in spite of all the fastidiousness of youth, he minded his rags

least of all in the street. It was a different matter when he met with acquaintances

or with former fellow students, whom, 

indeed, he disliked meeting at any time.

And yet when a drunken man who, for some unknown reason, was being taken

somewhere in a huge waggon dragged by a heavy dray horse, suddenly shouted

at him as he drove past: “Hey there, German hatter” bawling at the top of his

voice and pointing at him—the young man stopped suddenly and clutched

tremulously at his hat. It was a tall round hat from Zimmerman’s, but completely

worn out, rusty with age, all torn and bespattered, brimless and bent on one side

in a most unseemly fashion. Not shame, however, but quite another feeling akin

to terror had overtaken him.

“I knew it,” he muttered in confusion, “I thought so! That’s the worst of all!

Why, a stupid thing like this, the most trivial detail might spoil the whole plan.

Yes, my hat is too noticeable.... It looks absurd and that makes it noticeable....

With my rags I ought to wear a cap, any sort of old pancake, but not this

grotesque thing. Nobody wears such a hat, it would be noticed a mile off, it

would be remembered.... What matters is that people would remember it, and

that would give them a clue. For this business one should be as little conspicuous

as possible.... Trifles, trifles are what matter! Why, it’s just such trifles that

always ruin everything....”

He had not far to go; he knew indeed how many steps it was from the gate of

his lodging house: exactly seven hundred and thirty. He had counted them once

when he had been lost in dreams. At the time he had put no faith in those dreams

and was only tantalising himself by their hideous but daring recklessness. Now, a

month later, he had begun to look upon them differently, and, in spite of the

monologues in which he jeered at his own impotence and indecision, he had

involuntarily come to regard this “hideous” dream as an exploit to be attempted,

although he still did not realise this himself. He was positively going now for a

“rehearsal” of his project, and at every step his excitement grew more and more

violent.

With a sinking heart and a nervous tremor, he went up to a huge house which

on one side looked on to the canal, and on the other into the street. This house

was let out in tiny tenements and was inhabited by working people of all kinds—

tailors, locksmiths, cooks, Germans of sorts, girls picking up a living as best they

could, petty clerks, etc. There was a continual coming and going through the two

gates and in the two courtyards of the house. Three or four door-keepers were

employed on the building. The young man was very glad to meet none of them,

and at once slipped unnoticed through the door on the right, and up the staircase.

It was a back staircase, dark and narrow, but he was familiar with it already, and

knew his way, and he liked all these surroundings: in such darkness even the

most inquisitive eyes were not to be dreaded.

“If I am so scared now, what would it be if it somehow came to pass that I

were really going to do it?” he could not help asking himself as he reached the

fourth storey. There his progress was barred by some porters who were engaged

in moving furniture out of a flat. He knew that the flat had been occupied by a

German clerk in the civil service, and his family. This German was moving out

then, and so the fourth floor on this staircase would be untenanted except by the

old woman. “That’s a good thing anyway,” he thought to himself, as he rang the

bell of the old woman’s flat. The bell gave a faint tinkle as though it were made

of tin and not of copper. The little flats in such houses always have bells that ring

like that. He had forgotten the note of that bell, and now its peculiar tinkle

seemed to remind him of something and to bring it clearly before him.... He

started, his nerves were terribly overstrained by now. In a little while, the door

was opened a tiny crack: the old woman eyed her visitor with evident distrust

through the crack, and nothing could be seen but her little eyes, glittering in the

darkness. But, seeing a number of people on the landing, she grew bolder, and

opened the door wide. The young man stepped into the dark entry, which was

partitioned off from the tiny kitchen. The old woman stood facing him in silence

and looking inquiringly at him. She was a diminutive, withered up old woman of

sixty, with sharp malignant eyes and a sharp little nose. Her colourless,

somewhat grizzled hair was thickly smeared with oil, and she wore no kerchief

over it. Round her thin long neck, which looked like a hen’s leg, was knotted

some sort of flannel rag, and, in spite of the heat, there hung flapping on her

shoulders, a mangy fur cape, yellow with age. The old woman coughed and

groaned at every instant. The young man must have looked at her with a rather

peculiar expression, for a gleam of mistrust came into her eyes again.

“Raskolnikov, a student, I came here a month ago,” the young man made haste

to mutter, with a half bow, remembering that he ought to be more polite.

“I remember, my good sir, I remember quite well your coming here,” the old

woman said distinctly, still keeping her inquiring eyes on his face.

“And here... I am again on the same errand,” Raskolnikov continued, a little

disconcerted and surprised at the old woman’s mistrust. “Perhaps she is always

like that though, only I did not notice it the other time,” he thought with an

uneasy feeling.

The old woman paused, as though hesitating; then stepped on one side, and

pointing to the door of the room, she said, letting her visitor pass in front of her:

“Step in, my good sir.”

The little room into which the young man walked, with yellow paper on the

walls, geraniums and muslin curtains in the windows, was brightly lighted up at

that moment by the setting sun.

“So the sun will shine like this then too!” flashed as it were by chance through

Raskolnikov’s mind, and with a rapid glance he scanned everything in the room,

trying as far as possible to notice and remember its arrangement. But there was

nothing special in the room. The furniture, all very old and of yellow wood,

consisted of a sofa with a huge bent wooden back, an oval table in front of the

sofa, a dressing-table with a looking-glass fixed on it between the windows,

chairs along the walls and two or three half-penny prints in yellow frames,

representing German damsels with birds in their hands—that was all. In the