their master! For them, he who dares is right. He who cares least is their lawmaker, and he who dares most is most right! It’s always been the way and always will be! Only a blind man would fail to see it!’
Though Raskolnikov was looking at Sonya as he said this, he no longer worried whether or not she would understand. The fever had him in its grip. Some dismal ecstasy had overcome him. (Yes, it had been far too long since he’d last spoken to anyone!) Sonya understood that this gloomy catechism had become his creed and law.
‘That, Sonya,’ he continued rapturously, ‘was when I realized that power is given only to the man who dares to stoop and grab. One thing, just one: to dare! A certain thought came to me then, for the first time in my life; one which had never come to anyone, ever! Anyone! It suddenly dawned on me like the sun: how come not a single person, walking past all these absurdities, has ever dared, not now, not ever, to grab everything by the tail and shake it to hell? I . . . I felt like trying . . . I killed for a dare, Sonya, and that’s the whole reason!’
‘Oh, be quiet, be quiet!’ cried Sonya, throwing up her arms. ‘You walked away from God and God struck you and gave you away to the devil!’
‘By the way, Sonya – when I was lying in the dark and all this was dawning on me,35 was that the devil playing with my mind? Eh?’
‘Be quiet! Don’t you dare laugh, you blasphemous man. You don’t understand a thing, not a thing! O Lord! He’ll never understand, never!’
‘Hush, Sonya, I’m not laughing at all. I know myself that it was the devil dragging me along. Hush, Sonya, hush!’ he repeated dismally and insistently. ‘I know everything. I thought and whispered my way through it all while lying on my own in the dark back then . . . Argued my way through every point, down to the last little mark, the last little jot, and I know everything, everything! How sick and tired I was of all this empty talk! I wanted to forget it all and start again, Sonya, and stop wittering! Surely you don’t think I went there like some idiot, without a moment’s thought? I went there like a man with brains, and that was my downfall! Can’t you see that I must have known that if I’d already started asking myself the question, “Do I have a right to power?”, then it already meant I didn’t. Or that if I asked, “Is a human being a louse?”, then man was certainly no louse for me, only for someone to whom the question never occurs, and who sets off without asking questions . . . And if I’d already tormented myself for so many days wondering, “Would Napoleon have gone or wouldn’t he?”, then I obviously knew that I was no Napoleon . . . I endured all the agony of this empty talk, Sonya, all of it, and now I just wanted to shake it off. I wanted to kill without casuistry, Sonya, to kill for myself, for myself alone! I didn’t want to lie about it, not even to myself! It wasn’t to help mother that I killed – nonsense! It wasn’t to acquire funds and power that I killed, so as to make myself a benefactor of humanity. Nonsense! I just killed. I killed for myself, for myself alone; and whether I’d become anyone’s benefactor or spend my entire life as a spider, catching everyone in my web and sucking out their vital juices, shouldn’t have mattered to me one jot at that moment! . . . And it wasn’t so much money I needed, Sonya, when I killed; not so much money as something else . . . I know all this now . . . Try to understand: taking that same road again, I might never have repeated the murder. There was something else I needed to find out then, something else was nudging me along: what I needed to find out, and find out quickly, was whether I was a louse, like everyone else, or a human being. Could I take that step or couldn’t I? Would I dare to stoop and grab or wouldn’t I? Was