And his tenacious love of life is exemplified in Raskolnikov's musing: "Where is it I've read that some one condemned to death says or thinks an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he 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.)