Sonya makes the only reply possible: “But that louse was a human being!”
It was nearly another ten years beyond my first reading Crime and Punishment when a late 20th century version of fashionable unbelief took me from the Catholic Church towards what I experienced as freedom from belief in God.
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
For Dostoevsky’s readers it might have been a medical-sounding word, but one that also rang of sham psychiatry. In this scene the diagnosis washes through mother and daughter and Zosimov leaves in a hurry. But reference to the diagnosis keeps recurring, and oddly it will finally be tangled with Raskolnikov’s fate.
