Alas, his being numbered among the extraordinary men has come to depend on his willingness to put the theory he has voiced into practice. Had the idea not presented itself to him and the old woman not been so logically available as a subject for experiment, he would still be free. Once the idea has got into his head, he will be a coward to fail to carry it to swift execution. In reality, however, he procrastinates. And here, as was never the case with Julien, there is a struggle of conscience. A strange sort of contest because there are two struggles, really. On the one hand, his good self shrinks in horror from doing “a thing like that,” as he calls it almost incredulously on the very first page. On the other, the usual roles are reversed: duty is compelling him to kill the old woman, while his weaker self resists, begging to be let off, to be given a little more time, and so on. He will let circumstances decide for him, he concludes. Yet, as always happens, the longer he dallies, the less ready he is, and the more craven he feels himself to be in the face of an inexorable judge. As Jean Valjean expressed it, in very different conditions, in Les Misérables: “To be happy we must never understand what duty is; once we understand it, it is implacable.”
Raskolnikov, who has no thought of happiness—happiness is for the ordinary—understands that he will never be at rest till the self-enjoined deed is done. At no point does the crime attract him, not even as sheer idea (duty is unattractive), and, significantly, he never takes the slightest pleasure in picturing the results: how generously he will spend the money, how he will be able at last to face his landlady, stop doing stupid translations for pay... . When he steels his nerve for a “rehearsal” of the crime, he is taken aback to find himself in a bright sunny room with geraniums and everything clean and polished; the discrepancy between the pawnbroker’s shining flat and his hideous project confuses him, until he is able to reconcile the two by saying to himself, “It’s in the houses of spiteful old widows that one finds such cleanliness,” as if recalled with sudden relief to his thesis.
Nevertheless, returning to his lodging after the “rehearsal,” he feels, says Dostoievsky, like a man condemned to death. He commits the murder, finally, to be done with it, to get it over with, so that he can be left alone. Indeed when he climbs the stairs in the tenement house that are leading him to his mission, he seems to have forgotten why he is doing it; he has lost contact with the wider doctrine that to the superior man everything is permitted and is only putting one foot senselessly before the other, still hoping for a reprieve. In his confusion he overlooks most of the victim’s valuables and buries the chamois purse he took from her under a stone. At that moment it occurs to him that he does not know what is in it. “ ‘If it all has really been done deliberately...if I really had a certain and definite object, how is it that I did not even glance into the purse...?...And I wanted at once to throw into the water the purse together with all the things which I had not seen either...how’s that?’ ” He has duly committed the murder, but the purpose of it has eluded him, cruelly slipping from his grasp.
His crime has been a “fearful burden” weighing on him for months, from the instant of its conception, and he of course experiences a momentary lightness when “It,” as he has been calling it, is off his weary shoulders. But the sense of oppression quickly returns, and soon he is flirting with the hope of being detected, feeling impulses to confess, that is, to deposit the burden with the police, who as professionals will maybe know how to handle it. At the same time he is telling himself that “it is not a crime.” In a feverish excitement he cries out to himself: “I didn’t kill a human being but a principle!” And he thinks that he “will never, never forgive the old woman”—who, having turned into a principle, is evidently responsible for everything.