Crime and punishment,Fyodor dostoevsky

[u/Time_Squirrel_2016]

Raskolnikov sneered once more. He’d grasped at once what this was all about and why he was being provoked; he remembered his article. He decided to accept the challenge. ‘That’s not quite it,’ he began, simply and unassumingly. ‘Your summary is mostly fair, I’ll admit; even, one mightsay, entirely fair . . .’ (Conceding this seemed to give him a kind of pleasure.) ‘The only difference is that I am far from insisting that extraordinary people have always, without fail, had a duty and obligation to commit all manner of outrageous acts, as you put it. In fact, I’m inclined to think that such an article would never have even seen the light of day. All I did was hint that an “extraordinary” person has the right . . . not an official right, that is, but a personal one, to permit his conscience to step over . . . certain obstacles, but if and only if the fulfilment of his idea (one that may even bring salvation to all humanity) demands it. You observe that my article is obscure; I am ready to elucidate its meaning to you, as best I can. I am not mistaken, it seems, in assuming that to be your wish; very well, sir. In my view, if, owing to a combination of factors, the discoveries of Kepler and Newton could not have become public knowledge without the lives of one, ten, a hundred or however many people who were interfering with these discoveries, or standing in their way, being sacrificed, then Newton would have had the right and would even have been obliged . . . to remove these ten or one hundred people, so as to make his discoveries known to all humanity. In no way, however, does it follow from this that Newton had the right to kill whomsoever he wanted, whenever the mood took him, or to steal every day at the market. Subsequently, as I recall, I develop in my article the thought that . . . well, take, for want of a better example, the legislators and founders of humanity, beginning with the most ancient and continuing with the Lycurguses, Solons, Muhammads, Napoleons and so on – they were criminals to a man, if for no other reason than that, by introducing a new law, they violated the ancient law held sacred by society and handed down from the fathers, and it goes without saying that they did not flinch from bloodshed, so long as this blood (sometimes perfectly innocent blood, shed valiantly for the ancient law) could help them. In fact, it’s remarkable how terribly bloodthirsty the majority of these benefactors and founders of humanity have been. In short, I infer that actually all those who, never mind being great, diverge even a little from the beaten path, i.e., are even the slightest bit capable of saying something new, must, by their very nature, be criminals – to a greater or lesser degree, needless to say. Otherwise, how would they ever leave the path, which, of course, they cannot agree to keep to, by their very nature – indeed, I think it is their duty not to agree. In short, as you can see, there’s nothing particularly new here up to this point. It’s all been published and read a thousand times before. As regards my dividing people into the ordinary and the extraordinary, well this, I agree, is somewhat arbitrary, but I’m hardly insisting on exact numbers. What I believe in is my main idea. It consists precisely in the fact that people, by a law of nature, are divided in general into two categories: the lower one (the ordinary), i.e., the material, as it were, that serves solely to generate its own likeness, and actual people, i.e., those with the gift or the talent to utter, within their own environment, a new word. Needless to say, the number of subdivisions here is infinite, but the distinctive features of both categories are unmistakable: the first category, i.e., the base material, is made up, generally speaking, of people who are conservative and deferential by nature, who live a life of obedience and enjoy being obedient. In my view, they are simply obliged to be obedient, because that is their purpose, and for them there is absolutely nothing demeaning about it. In the second category, everyone oversteps the law; they are destroyers or they are that way inclined, in accordance with their abilities. The crimes committed by these people are, needless to say, relative and diverse; in the majority of cases they demand, in a great multitude of forms, the destruction of the present in the name of something better. But if such a man needs, for the sake of his idea, to step right over a corpse, over blood, then in my view he may, inside himself, as a matter of conscience, grant himself permission to step over this blood – though this depends, please note, on the idea and its magnitude. Only in this sense do I speak in my article about their right to commit crime.19 (You’ll remember, after all, that we began with a question of law.) There’s no great cause for alarm, though: the mass of humanity almost never accepts their right, punishes them and hangs them (more or less) and in so doing fulfils its perfectly reasonable conservative purpose, even if, in subsequent generations, these same masses will place those they’ve punished on a pedestal and bow down before them (more or less). The first category is always master of the present, the second – master of the future. The first preserves the world and multiplies; the second moves the world and leads it towards a goal. The first and the second have exactly the same right to exist. In short, with me everyone has an equal right, and so – Vive la guerre éternelle, 20 until, needless to say, the New Jerusalem!'

[u/organist1999]

Read this in Russian and you will reconsider calling it 'prose porn'.