Edsverb
Play
The archive, at your fingertips
Try an author, a thought, or a phrase in “quotes”.↑ ↓ Navigate · Esc Close

0 words found

Explore all results ↗

The voices / 433 fragments

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

1821 AD — 1881 AD

Dostoyevsky’s arguments change with speaker and circumstance. Read Razumihin’s excited defence of independent mistakes beside the narrator’s account of possible renewal, keeping Garnett’s English wording and the scene in view.

Author and source reference ↗
▷ Play this voiceSearch within this voice ↗Place in time ↗lovetruthfaithlifetimeknowledgedeathjustice

Life and writing

The catalogue identifies Fyodor Dostoyevsky and gives his lifetime as 1821–1881. It credits Constance Garnett with the English translation; the linked text repeats that credit before a biographical introduction and the novel. The introduction must remain distinct from the characters and narrator. Digital credits name John Bickers, Dagny and David Widger. The checked record does not identify the underlying printed edition or publisher. This profile binds the existing Dostoyevsky-labelled identity and selected passages only; it does not merge other spelling labels or fill their unknown quotation dates.

Project Gutenberg catalogue — Crime and Punishment ↗Checked related reading — Crime and Punishment ↗ Catalogue identity/lifetime and linked edition credits, framing or cast

In Part III, Chapter I, Razumihin excitedly defends making one’s own mistakes while escorting Raskolnikov’s mother and sister. His forceful speech and their responses belong to a particular social exchange, not a licence to act carelessly. Epilogue II then describes Raskolnikov feeling a possible change before he can analyse it, with Sonia and a New Testament in the surrounding scene. Both complete selected English extracts match the checked Garnett text under limited normalization. The ending suggests renewal within the novel; it does not guarantee recovery or erase responsibility for harm.

Checked related reading — Crime and Punishment ↗ Part III, Chapter I; Razumihin speaks excitedly to Pulcheria Alexandrovna and Avdotya Romanovna; Epilogue, section II; narrator describes Raskolnikov’s feelings and possible renewal

Reading this voice

Read Part III, Chapter I with its listeners and their responses, then the final section of the epilogue with its religious setting. Distinguish Razumihin’s speech from the narrator’s account of Raskolnikov. Both selected complete English extracts match this Garnett text under punctuation, case and spacing comparison. Other attribution spellings and unknown archive dates remain separate and unchanged.

Subjects to explore

Editorial reading connections, distinct from the archive’s word matching.

truthresponsibilityjudgementhope

A work to read

Begin with these archive passages

Editorial starting points from this author’s existing entries.

Profile sources and editorial status

Original agent-assisted editorial profile, checked 2026-10-05. No human review is recorded. Life dates are recorded to the year; they do not date individual quotations.

Archive entries

06Undated
And so will I here state just plainly and briefly that I accept God. But I must point out one thing: if God does exist and really created the world, as we well know, he created it according to the principles of Euclidean geometry and made the human brain capable of grasping only three dimensions of space. Yet there have been and still are mathematicians and philosophers-among them some of the most outstanding-who doubt that the whole universe or, to put it more generally, all existence was created to fit Euclidean geometry; they even dare to conceive that two parallel lines that, according to Euclid, never do meet on earth do, in fact, meet somewhere in infinity. And so my dear boy, I’ve decided that I am incapable of understanding of even that much, I cannot possibly understand about God.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky / quote
↗
07Undated
It's God that's worrying me. That's the only thing that's worrying me. What if He doesn't exist? What if Rakitin's right -that it's an idea made up by men? Then, if He doesn't exist, man is the king of the earth, of the universe. Magnificent! Only how is he going to be good without God? That's the question. I always come back to that. Who is man going to love then? To whom will he be thankful? To whom will he sing the hymn? Rakitin laughs. Rakitin says that one can love humanity instead of God. Well, only an idiot can maintain that. I can't understand it. Life's easy for Rakitin. 'You'd better think about the extension of civic rights, or of keeping down the price of meat. You will show your love for humanity more simply and directly by that, than by philosophy.' I answered him: 'Well, but you, without a God, are more likely to raise the price of meat if it suits you, and make a rouble on every penny.' He lost his temper. But after all, what is goodness? Answer that, Alyosha. Goodness is one thing with me and another with a Chinaman, so it's relative. Or isn't it? Is it not relative? A treacherous question! You won't laugh if I tell you it's kept me awake for two nights. I only wonder now how people can live and think nothing about it. Vanity!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky / quote
↗
08Undated
Why did you come in to-night with your heads in the air? 'Make way, we are coming! Give us every right and don't you dare breathe a word before us. Pay us every sort of respect, such as no one's ever heard of, and we shall treat you worse than the lowest lackey!' They strive for justice, they stand on their rights, and yet they've slandered him like infidels in their article. We demand, we don't ask, and you will get no gratitude from us, because you are acting for the satisfaction of your own conscience! Queer sort of reasoning!... He has not borrowed money from you, he doesn't owe you anything, so what are you reckoning on, if not his gratitude? So how can you repudiate it? Lunatics! They regard society as savage and inhuman, because it cries shame on the seduced girl; but if you think society inhuman, you must think that the girl suffers from the censure of society, and if she does, how is it you expose her to society in the newspapers and expect her not to suffer? Lunatics! Vain creatures! They don't believe in God, they don't believe in Christ! Why, you are so eaten up with pride and vanity that you'll end by eating up one another, that's what I prophesy. Isn't that topsy-turvydom, isn't it infamy?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky / quote
↗
22Undated
Where is it I've read that someone 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'd only 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 so than to die at once. Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky / quote
↗
24Undated
I could have done even better, miss, and I'd know a lot more, if it wasn't for my destiny ever since childhood. I'd have killed a man in a duel with a pistol for calling me low-born, because I came from Stinking Lizaveta without a father, and they were shoving that in my face in Moscow. It spread there thanks to Grigory Vasilievich. Grigory Vasilievich reproaches me for rebelling against my nativity: 'You opened her matrix,' he says. I don't know about her matrix, but I'd have let them kill me in the womb, so as not to come out into the world at all, miss.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky / quote
↗

Read further

Follow a checked source edition or explore related works. Each book labels its connection to this reading.