broadly, and uninfluenced
by commonplace ideas, and my idea will by no means seem so... strange.
Oh, sceptics and halfpenny philosophers, why do you halt half-way!"

"Why does my action strike them as so horrible?" he said to himself. "Is
it because it was a crime? What is meant by crime? My conscience is at
rest. Of course, it was a legal crime, of course, the letter of the law
was broken and blood was shed. Well, punish me for the letter of the
law... and that's enough. Of course, in that case many of the
benefactors of mankind who snatched power for themselves instead of
inheriting it ought to have been punished at their first steps. But
those men succeeded and so _they were right_, and I didn't, and so I
had no right to have taken that step."

It was only in that that he recognised his criminality, only in the fact
that he had been unsuccessful and had confessed it.

He suffered too from the question: why had he not killed himself? Why
had he stood looking at the river and preferred to confess? Was the
desire to live so strong and was it so hard to overcome it? Had not
Svidrigailov overcome it, although he was afraid of death?

In misery he asked himself this question, and could not understand that,
at the very time he had been standing looking into the river, he had
perhaps been dimly conscious of the fundamental falsity in himself and
his convictions. He didn't understand that that consciousness might be
the promise of a future crisis, of a new view of life and of his future
resurrection.

He preferred to attribute it to the dead weight of instinct which he
could not step over, again through weakness and meanness. He looked at
his fellow prisoners and was amazed to see how they all loved life and
prized it. It seemed to him that they loved and valued life more in
prison than in freedom. What terrible agonies and privations some of
them, the tramps for instance, had endured! Could they care so much for
a ray of sunshine, for the primeval forest, the cold spring hidden away
in some unseen spot, which the tramp had marked three years before, and
longed to see again, as he might to see his sweetheart, dreaming of the
green grass round it and the bird singing in the bush? As he went on he
saw still more inexplicable examples.

In prison, of course, there was a great deal he did not see and did not
want to see; he lived as it were with downcast eyes. It was loathsome
and unbearable for him to look. But in the end