The Rehearsal (Part 1, Chapters 1–4)

On an exceptionally hot evening early in July, a young man came out of the little room he rented from tenants in S. Lane, and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, toward K. Bridge.

He had successfully avoided meeting his landlady on the stairs. His garret was under the roof of a high five-story house and was more like a cupboard than a room. The landlady lived on the floor below, and every time he went out he had to pass her kitchen, the door of which nearly always stood open. Each time he passed, he felt a sick, frightened sensation that made him scowl and feel ashamed. He was hopelessly in debt to her, and was afraid of meeting her.

It was not that he was cowardly or timid; 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 even poverty had ceased to oppress him.

"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. That's why I do nothing: I chatter. 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!"

The heat in the street was terrible: the closeness, the bustle, 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. He was remarkably handsome, above the average in height, slim, well-built, with beautiful dark eyes and dark brown hair. His name was Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov. He had been a student. 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.

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 reached a huge house, full of tiny apartments, climbed the dark, narrow staircase to the fourth floor, and rang. The door was opened a tiny crack. The old woman stood facing him in silence, looking at him with suspicion: a tiny, withered old woman of sixty, with sharp malignant eyes and a sharp little nose. Her name was Alyona Ivanovna, and she lent money on pledges.

"Raskolnikov, a student. I came here a month ago," the young man made haste to mutter, with a half bow.

He had brought his father's old silver watch. She gave him a ruble and a half, less interest in advance. While she went into the next room to fetch the money, he listened to every sound, noted where she kept her keys, which chest of drawers she went to. He looked about the room: yellow wallpaper, geranium pots, muslin curtains, everything clean and polished. "That's Lizaveta's work," thought the young man. Lizaveta was the old woman's younger half-sister, who lived with her and worked for her like a servant.

When he came out, he was in a state of extreme agitation. "Oh God, how loathsome it all is! And can I, can I possibly... No, it's nonsense, it's rubbish! And how could such an atrocious thing come into my head? What filthy things my heart is capable of! Yes, filthy above all, disgusting, loathsome, loathsome!"

He went into a tavern, the first he had ever entered, and drank a glass of beer. There a man was staring at him: a man over fifty, bald and grizzled, of medium height and stoutish build. His face, bloated from continual drinking, was of a yellow, even greenish tinge, with swollen eyelids out of which keen reddish eyes gleamed like little chinks. He wore an old, hopelessly ragged black dress coat. At last he addressed Raskolnikov.

"May I venture, honored sir, to engage you in polite conversation? I am a titular councillor. Marmeladov, such is my name. Allow me to inquire: have you been in the service?"

And he poured out his life. His wife, Katerina Ivanovna, was a woman of education, a staff officer's daughter, who had danced at the governor's ball, a widow with three little children whom he had married out of pity, for she had nowhere to go. He had lost his post through drink, found another, lost it again. "Poverty is not a vice, that's a true saying. But beggary, honored sir, beggary is a vice."

He had a daughter of his own, too, by his first marriage: Sonya. "Do you know, sir, what it means when you have absolutely nowhere to turn?" One evening Katerina Ivanovna, ill and half mad with hunger, had reproached Sonya for living off them, and Sonya had put on her shawl and gone out, and at nine o'clock she had come back, gone straight to Katerina Ivanovna, and laid thirty rubles on the table before her in silence. Then she lay down on the bed with her face to the wall, and her little shoulders and her body kept shuddering. And Katerina Ivanovna knelt at her feet all evening, kissing them. Since then Sonya had a yellow ticket, the license of a prostitute, and had to live apart. And he, Marmeladov, had drunk away her last thirty kopecks.

"Why should I be pitied, you say? Yes! there's nothing to pity me for! I ought to be crucified! But He will pity us who has had pity on all men. He will judge all, and will forgive all, the good and the evil, the wise and the meek. And He will forgive my Sonya, for she has loved much. And when He has done with all of them, then He will summon us. 'You too come forth,' He will say, 'come forth, ye drunkards, come forth, ye weak ones, come forth, ye children of shame!' And the wise ones will say, 'Lord, why dost Thou receive these men?' And He will say, 'This is why I receive them, O ye wise, that not one of them believed himself to be worthy of this.' And He will hold out His hands to us, and we shall fall down before Him, and we shall weep, and we shall understand all things!"

Raskolnikov took him home. It was a poverty-stricken room, a corridor really; a candle-end lit it. Katerina Ivanovna, a thin, tall woman with feverish red spots on her cheeks, was walking up and down coughing, her hands pressed to her chest. When she saw her husband, she seized him by the hair and dragged him into the room. The children cried. Before leaving, Raskolnikov put his hand into his pocket, took out what coppers he had, and laid them unnoticed on the window. Afterward, on the stairs, he changed his mind and was on the point of going back. "What a stupid thing I've done," he thought. "Well, what if it is so? Man is a scoundrel, he gets used to everything!"

The next morning, the servant Nastasya brought him a letter. It was from his mother. He sat a long while without opening it. When he did, he read it through twice.

His sister Dunya, she wrote, had been working as a governess in the house of the Svidrigailovs. Mr. Svidrigailov had pursued her with shameful proposals. His wife, Marfa Petrovna, overhearing them in the garden, had blamed Dunya for everything, struck her, and turned her out in disgrace, and the whole town gossiped. Then Svidrigailov, repenting, had shown his wife a letter of Dunya's that proved her innocence, and Marfa Petrovna had driven from house to house reading it aloud, and restored her honor. And now: Dunya was engaged. Pyotr Petrovich Luzhin, a lawyer of forty-five, a practical man with two posts, had made her an offer. He had said that he wanted to marry an honest girl without a dowry, one who had known poverty, because a husband ought to owe nothing to his wife, and it is much better for a wife to look on her husband as her benefactor. And he might be of use to Rodya, in his career. They would soon be in Petersburg.

Raskolnikov's face was wet with tears when he finished. Then he got up, pale and convulsed, and walked out, almost running.

"This marriage shall not take place while I am alive, and Mr. Luzhin be damned! The thing is clear. She is selling herself for her brother! For her beloved brother! Sonya, Sonya Marmeladov, the eternal Sonya, as long as the world lasts! But do you know that Dunya's purity is in more danger than Sonya's?"

On a boulevard he saw a girl, very young, sixteen perhaps, drunk and dishonored, staggering to a bench in a torn dress. A stout, fashionably dressed gentleman was watching her from a little distance, plainly waiting for his moment. Raskolnikov flew at him in a rage, then called a policeman and gave him twenty kopecks to take her home in a cab. And then, a moment later, he was overcome by a strange revulsion. "Let them be! What is it to do with me? Let him have his fun! A certain percentage, they tell us, must go every year... somewhere... to the devil, so that the remainder may remain chaste and not be interfered with. A percentage! What splendid words they have!"

He set off to see his friend Razumikhin, and then stopped. "I'll go to Razumikhin," he thought. "Of course... afterward. When that's over, and everything has begun afresh."

(End of Episode 1 — continued in Episode 2: The Axe)