feather-headed youngster, that’s all; one might have expected something from him, but there, you know what they are, our brilliant young men. He wanted to go in for some examination, but it’s only to talk and boast about it, it will go no further than that. Of course it’s a very different matter with you or Mr. Razumihin there, your friend. Your career is an intellectual one and you won’t be deterred by failure. For you, one may say, all the attractions of life nihil est—you are an ascetic, a monk, a hermit! … A book, a pen behind your ear, a learned research—that’s where your spirit soars! I am the same way myself. … Have you read Livingstone’s Travels?”

“No.”

“Oh, I have. There are a great many Nihilists about nowadays, you know, and indeed it is not to be wondered at. What sort of days are they? I ask you. But we thought … you are not a Nihilist of course? Answer me openly, openly!”

“N-no …”

“Believe me, you can speak openly to me as you would to yourself! Official duty is one thing but … you are thinking I meant to say friendship is quite another? No, you’re wrong! It’s not friendship, but the feeling of a man and a citizen, the feeling of humanity and of love for the Almighty. I may be an official, but I am always bound to feel myself a man and a citizen. … You were asking about Zametov. Zametov will make a scandal in the French style in a house of bad reputation, over a glass of champagne … that’s all your Zametov is good for! While I’m perhaps, so to speak, burning with devotion and lofty feelings, and besides I have rank, consequence, a post! I am married and have children, I fulfil the duties of a man and a citizen, but who is he, may I ask? I appeal to you as a man ennobled by education … Then these midwives, too, have become extraordinarily numerous.”

Raskolnikov raised his eyebrows inquiringly. The words of Ilya Petrovitch, who had obviously been dining, were for the most part a stream of empty sounds for him. But some of them he understood. He looked at him inquiringly, not knowing how it would end.

“I mean those crop-headed wenches,” the talkative Ilya Petrovitch continued. “Midwives is my name for them. I think it a very satisfactory one, ha-ha! They go to the Academy, study anatomy. If I fall ill, am I to send for a young lady to treat me? What do you say? Ha-ha!” Ilya Petrovitch laughed, quite pleased with his own wit. “It’s an immoderate zeal for education, but once you’re educated, that’s enough. Why abuse it? Why insult honourable people, as that scoundrel Zametov does? Why did he insult me, I ask you? Look at these suicides, too, how common they are, you can’t fancy! People spend their last halfpenny and kill themselves, boys and girls and old people. Only this morning we heard about a gentleman who had just come to town. Nil Pavlitch, I say, what was the name of that gentleman who shot himself?”

“Svidrigailov,” someone answered from the other room with drowsy listlessness.

Raskolnikov started.

“Svidrigailov! Svidrigailov has shot himself!” he cried.

“What, do you know Svidrigailov?”

“Yes … I knew him. … He hadn’t been here long.”

“Yes, that’s so. He had lost his wife, was a man of reckless habits and all of a sudden shot himself, and in such a shocking way. … He left in his notebook a few words: that he dies in full possession of his faculties and that no one is to blame for his death. He had money, they say. How did you come to know him?”

“I … was acquainted … my sister was governess in his family.”