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 Feodor
Dostoevsky,
Crime and
Punishment, 1867
Death of Marmeladov:
…At that same moment the dying man recovered
consciousness and groaned, she hurried to him. He opened his eyes
and they rested, without recognition or understanding on the figure
of Raskolnikov standing close to him. He was drawing deep, laboured
breaths at long intervals; blood trickled from the corners of his
mouth; drops of sweat stood on his forehead. He did not know
Raskolnikov, and his eyes began to wander uneasily. Katerina
Ivanovna’s look was stern and sad, and tears were flowing from her
eyes.
"Oh God, his whole chest is crushed in! Look at the
blood, the blood!" She said in despair. "We must take off all his
outer things! Turn yourself a little, Semen Zakharovich, if you
can," she cried to him.
Marmeladov recognized her,
"A priest!" he murmured hoarsely.
Katerina Ivanovna walked away to the window and
leaned her forehead against the frame, exclaiming in desperation:
"Oh, accursed life!"
"A priest!" said the dying man again, after a moment
of silence.
"They’ve go-o-one!" shrieked Katerina Ivanovna; he
heard the clamour and was silent. His timid anxious glance sought
her out; she returned to his side and stood by his pillow. He seemed
a little calmer, but not for long. Soon his eyes fell on little Lida
(his favourite), who stood in the corner shivering as though with
fever and watching him with her wondering eyes childishly intent.
"But…but…" he indicated her uneasily. He was trying
to say something.
"What is it this time?" cried Katerina Ivanovna.
"Bare-footed! Bare-footed!" he murmured, with his
half-conscious eyes fixed on the little girl’s bare legs and feet.
"Be quiet!" exclaimed Katerina Ivanovna irritable.
"You know why she goes barefoot!"
"Thank God, the doctor!" exclaimed Raskolnikov,
overjoyed.
The doctor, a neat little old man, a German, came in
looking about him with an air of mistrust; he went up to the injured
man, felt his pulse, carefully touched his head, and with Katerina
Ivanovna’s help, unbuttoned his blood-soaked shirt and laid bare his
chest. It was all crushed, trampled, and lacerated; several ribs on
the right side were broken. On the left, immediately over the heart,
was a great yellowish-black mark, left by the cruel blow of a hoof.
The doctor frowned. The policeman explained that the unfortunate man
had been caught by the wheels and dragged along the roadway for some
thirty yards.
"It is surprising that he ever recovered
consciousness at all," whispered the doctor softly to Raskolnikov.
"What is your opinion?" asked he.
"He is dying now."
"Is there really no hope?"
"None at all! He is on the point of death …the head
is very badly injured, too … Hm. Perhaps I might let some blood …
but …it will do no good. He will certainly be dead in five or ten
minutes."
"But surely you ought at least to try it?"
"Perhaps so . . . However, I warn you it will be
quite useless."
Now steps were heard approaching again, the crowd in
the entrance parted, and the priest, a little old man with grey
hair, appeared on the threshold carrying the sacrament. A policeman
had gone for him from the scene of the accident. The doctor
immediately made way for him, exchanging a significant glance with
him as he did so. Raskolnikov begged the doctor to stay, if only for
a short time. He shrugged his shoulders and remained.
They all stood aside. The dying man’s confession was
very short and it is doubtful if he had any clear idea of what was
happening; he was capable of uttering only vague broken sounds.
Katerina Ivanovna took Lidochka, lifted the little boy from the
chair, knelt down in the corner by the stove and made the children
kneel in front of her. The little girl only shivered; but the boy,
on his bare knees, raised his hand, crossed himself, and bowed to
the ground, knocking his forehead on the floor, a process which
seemed to afford him great satisfaction. Katerina Ivanovna was
biting her lips to keep back the tears; she was also praying;
occasionally she straightened the little boy’s shirt, and once,
without rising from her knees or ceasing her prayers, she managed to
take a shawl from the chest of drawers and throw it around the
little girl’s shoulders, which were almost bare. Meanwhile the door
from the inner rooms began to open again under the pressure of the
curious, and in the little lobby the onlookers were crowding thicker
and thicker, from every flat on the staircase; but they did not
cross the threshold of the room. A single candle lighted the scene.
At this moment Polenka, who had been for her sister,
hurriedly pushed through the crowd in the entrance. She came in, out
of breath with running, took off her kerchief, looked round for her
mother, went to her and said: "She is coming! I met her in the
street." Her mother made her kneel down next to her. Out of the
crowd, noiselessly and timidly, appeared a young girl, and her
sudden appearance was strange in that room, in the midst of poverty,
rags, death, and despair. Her own clothes were ragged enough, but
her tuppenny-ha’penny finery, in the taste and style of her special
world of the streets, testified clearly and shamelessly to the
purpose for which it had been chosen.
Sonya stopped in the lobby, near the door, without
crossing the threshold of the room, utterly forlorn and apparently
unconscious of her surroundings; she seemed forgetful alike of her
garish fourth-hand silk dress, indecently out of place here with its
ridiculous long train and immense crinoline blocking the whole
doorway, of her light-coloured boots, of the sunshade she carried
with her, although it was useless at night, and of her absurd little
round straw hat with its bright flame-coloured feather. From under
this hat, worn with a boyish tilt to one side, looked out a thin,
pale, frightened little face; the mouth hung open and the eyes
stared in terrified fixity. Sonya was small, about eighteen years
old, thin but quite pretty, with fair hair and remarkable blue eyes.
She kept them fixed on the bed and the priest; she was breathless
with the speed of her arrival. At length the whispering among the
crowd, or some of the words said, seemed to reach her ears; she cast
down her eyes, took a step across the threshold and stood inside the
room, but still very near the door.
The confession had been made and the sacrament
administered, Katerina Ivanovna again approached her husband’s bed.
The priest moved away, but turned before he left to say a word of
exhortation and solace to Katerina Ivanovna.
"And what shall I do with these?" she interrupted
sharply and irritably, indicating the little ones.
"God is merciful. Put your trust in the help of the
Most High," began the priest.
"Ah! Merciful, but not to us!"
"That is sinful, wicked!" he remarked, shaking his
head.
"And what is this!" exclaimed Katerina Ivanovna,
pointing to her husband.
"It may be that those who were the involuntary cause
of your distress will be willing to compensate you, if only for the
loss of income…"
"You do not understand me!" irritably exclaimed Katerina Ivanovna, waving her arms.
"Why should there be any compensations? He was drunk and he crawled
under the feet of the horse himself! And what income? All I ever had
from him was the suffering. He was a drunkard and threw everything
we had in drink! He robbed us and took the money to the public
house; he spent their lives and mine in the public house! Thank God
he is dying! Our loss will be less!"
"You must forgive in the hour of death. This is
sinful, madam; such sentiments are a grievous sin!"
Katerina Ivanovna was busying herself over the
injured man, giving him something to drink, wiping the sweat and
blood from his face, straightening his pillow, and only occasionally
finding time for a word to the priest in the midst of her
activities. Now she turned to him, almost beside herself.
"Oh Lord! Those are only words, nothing but words!
Forgive! Today, if he had not been run over, he would have come home
drunk, with his only shirt dirty and ragged, and gone to bed to
sleep like a log, while I splashed about in water till the dawn,
washing out his old clothes and the children’s and drying them out
of the window, and as soon as it was light I should have had to sit
down and mend them — that is how my night would have been spent . .
. So why talk of forgiveness? I have forgiven him!"
The priest bowed his head and said nothing.
Marmeladov was in the last agony; he did not move
his eyes from Katerina Ivanovna’s face, bent over him once more. He
kept trying to say something to her; moving his tongue with enormous
effort, he even managed to utter some inarticulate words, but
Katerina Ivanovna, understanding that he wanted to ask her
forgiveness, immediately exclaimed peremptorily:
‘Quiet! Don’t! . . .I know what you want to say!’
The dying man was silent; but then his wandering glance fell on the
floor, and he saw Sonya.
Until that instant he had not noticed her; she stood
in the shadowy corner.
"Who is that? Who is it?’ he asked suddenly in a
hoarse panting voice, full of agitation, with his alarmed gaze
directed to the door, where his daughter was standing. He even tried
to raise himself.
‘Lie down! Lie down!’ exclaimed Katerina Ivanovna.
But with unnatural strength he managed to prop
himself on his arm. His wild unmoving gaze remained fixed for some
time on his daughter; he had never before seen her in such a
costume. Suddenly he did recognize her, humiliated, crushed, ashamed
in her gaudy finery, submissively waiting her turn to take leave of
her dying father. Infinite suffering showed in his face.
"Sonya! Daughter! Forgive me!" He cried, and tried to
stretch out his hand towards her, but without its support he fell
and crashed down headlong from the sofa; they rushed to lift him up,
and laid him down again, but he was going. Sonya uttered a feeble
cry, ran forward, put her arms around him, and almost swooned in
that embrace. He died in her arms.
"He brought his fate upon himself!" Cried Katerina
Ivanovna, when she saw her husband’s corpse. "And what shall I do
now? How am I to bury him? And how shall I feed them, tomorrow?"
Raskolnikov went up to her.
Translation by Prestuplenie I. Nakazanie
Death, Murder of Alena Ivanovna & Lizaveta: The
Pawnbroker & Her Sister:
"It doesn’t feel like silver. Lord, what a knot!"
Trying to undo the string she turned towards the window (all her
windows were closed, in spite of the oppressive heat), moved away
from him and stood with her back to him. He unbuttoned his coat and
freed the axe from the loop, but still kept it concealed, supporting
it with his right hand under the garment. His arms seemed to have no
strength in them; he felt them growing more and more numb and stiff
with every moment. He was afraid of letting the axe slip and
fall…His head was whirling.
"Why is it all wrapped up like this?" exclaimed the
woman sharply, and turned towards him.
There was not a moment to lose. He pulled the axe
out, swung it up with both hands, hardly conscious of what he was
doing, and almost mechanically, without putting any force behind it,
let the butt-end fall on her head. His strength seemed to have
deserted him, but as soon as the axe descended it all returned to
him.
The old woman was, as usual, bareheaded. Her thin
fair hair, just turning grey, and thick with grease, was plaited
into a rat’s tail and fastened into a knot above her nape with a
fragment of horn comb. Because she was so short the axe struck her
full on the crown of the head. She cried out, but very feebly, and
sank in a heap to the floor, still with enough strength left to
raise both hands to her head. One of them still held the ‘pledge’.
Then he struck her again and yet again, with all his strength,
always with the blunt side of the axe, and always on the crown of
the head. Blood poured out as if from an overturned glass and the
body toppled over on its back. He stepped away as it fell, and then
stooped to see the face: she was dead. Her wide-open eyes looked
ready to start out of their sockets, her forehead was wrinkled and
her whole face convulsively distorted.
He laid the axe on the floor near the body and,
taking care not to smear himself with blood, felt in her pockets,
the right-hand pocket, from which she had taken her keys last time.
He was quite collected, his faculties were no longer clouded nor his
head swimming, but his hands still shook.
… A footstep sounded in the room where the old woman
lay. He stopped and remained motionless as the dead. But all was
still; he must have imagined it. Then he distinctly heard a faint
cry, or perhaps rather a feeble interrupted groaning, then dead
silence again for a minute or two. He waited, crouching by the
trunk, hardly daring to breathe; then he sprang up, seized the axe,
and ran out of the room.
There in the middle of the floor, with a big bundle
in her arms, stood Lizaveta, as white as a sheet, gazing in frozen
horror at her murdered sister and apparently without the strength to
cry out. When she saw him run in, she trembled like a leaf and her
face twitched spasmodically; she raised her hand as if to cover her
mouth, but no scream came and she backed slowly away from him
towards the corner, with her eyes on him in a fixed stare, but still
without a sound, as though she had no breath left to cry out. He
flung himself forward with the axe, her lips writhed pitifully, like
those of a young child when it is just beginning to be frightened
and stands ready to scream, with its eyes fix on the object of its
fear. The wretched Lizaveta was so simple, brow-beaten, and utterly
terrified that she did not even put up her arms to protect her face,
natural and almost inevitable as the gesture would have been at this
moment when the axe was brandished immediately above it, She only
raised her free left hand a little and slowly stretched it out
towards him as though she were trying to push him away. The blow
fell on her skull, splitting it open from the top of the forehead
almost to the crown of the head, and felling her instantly.
Raskolnikov, completely beside himself, snatched up her bundle,
threw it down again, and ran to the entrance.
The terror that possessed him had been growing
greater and greater, especially after this second, unpremeditated
murder. He wanted to get away as quickly as possible. If he had been
a condition to exercise soberer judgement and see things more
clearly, if he could only have recognized all the difficulty of his
position and how desperate, hideous, and absurd it was, if he could
have understood how many obstacles to surmount, perhaps even crimes
to commit, still lay before him, before he could escape from the
house and reach home — very probably he would have abandoned
everything and given himself up, not out of fear for himself so much
as from horror and repulsion for what he had done. Repulsion,
indeed, was growing in his heart with every moment. Not for anything
in the world would he have returned to the trunk, or even to the
room.
But a growing distraction, that almost amounted to
absentmindedness, had taken possession of him; at times he seemed to
forget what he was doing, or rather to forget the important things
and cling to trivialities. However, when he glanced into the kitchen
and saw a pail full of water on a bench, it gave him the idea of
washing his hand and the axe. His hands were sticky with blood. He
put the head of the axe in the water, then took a piece of soap that
lay in a broken saucer on the window-sill, and began to wash his
hand in the pail. When he had washed them he drew out the axe and
washed the blade and then spent some three minutes trying to clean
the part of the handle that was blood-stained, using soap to get the
blood out. After this he wiped it with a cloth which was drying on a
line stretched across the kitchen, and then spent a long time
examining it carefully at the window.
There were no stains left, but the handle was still damp. With
great care he laid the axe in the loop under his coat. Then, as well
as the dim light in the kitchen allowed, he examined his overcoat,
trousers, and boots. At first glance there was nothing to give him
away, except for some stains on his boots. He wiped them with a damp
rag. He knew, however, that he had not been able to see very well,
and might have failed to notice something quite conspicuous. He
stood hesitating in the middle of the room. A dark and tormenting
idea was beginning to rear its head, the idea that he was going out
of his mind and that he was not capable of reasoning or protecting
himself, Perhaps what he was doing was not at all what ought to be
done…"My God, I must run, I must run!" he muttered and hurried back
to the entrance. Here there awaited him a more extreme terror than
any he had yet to experience.
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