e would only have room to stand, and the
ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest
around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all
his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live than to
die at once." We feel the repercussion of his anguish when death was
imminent for alleged participation in a nihilistic conspiracy. Or,
again, that horrid picture of a "boxed eternity": "We always imagine
eternity as something beyond our conception, something vast, vast! But
why must it be vast? Instead of all that, what if it's one little
room, like a bath-house in the country, black and grimy and spiders in
every corner, and that's all eternity is? I sometimes fancy it is
that." The grotesque and the sinister often nudge elbows in these
morbid, monstrous pages.

His belief in the unchanging nature of mankind is pure fatalism.
"Afterwards I understand ... that men won't change and that nobody can
alter it and that it's not worth wasting efforts over it.... Whoever
is strong in mind and spirit will have power over them. He who
despises most things will be a lawgiver among them, and he who dares
most of all will be most in right. Any one who is greatly daring is
right in their eyes. So it has been till now, and so it always will
be." Thus Rodion, the student to the devoted Sonia. It sounds like
Nietzsche avant la lettre. Or the cynicism of: "Every one thinks of
himself, and he lives most gaily who knows best how to deceive
himself." He speaks of his impending exile to Siberia: "But I wonder
shall I in those fifteen or twenty years grow so meek that I shall
humble myself before people and whimper at every word that I am a
criminal. Yes, that's it, that's it, that's what they are sending me
there for, that's what they want. Look at them running to and fro
about the streets, every one of them a scoundrel and a criminal at
heart, and worse still, an idiot. But try to get me off and they'd be
wild with righteous indignation. Oh, how I hate them all!" (The above
excerpts are from the admirable translation by Constance Garnett.)

As for his own mental condition, Dostoievsky gives us a picture of it
in Injury and Insult: "As soon as it grew dusk I gradually fell into
that state of mind which so often overmasters me at night since I've
been ill, and which I shall call mystic fear. It is a crushing anxiety
about something which I can neither define nor even conceive, which
does not