But she was even more occupied with her own thoughts. She no longer felt in her heart the bitter resentment toward Olga Vseslavovna that had filled it yesterday. She was conscious of a feeling of sorrow for the helpless woman, of compassion for her empty, shallow life, the fruit of an empty, shallow heart. And she was wondering why such empty, joyless lives should exist in a world where there was such deep happiness and joy.
She came over to her father's coffin, close to which the deacon was still droning out his liturgy, and stood beside the dead body, looking down at the strong, quiet face, and vividly recalling her dream of the night before. Her eyes rested on the many stars and medals on his breast, and on his hands, quietly clasped in death. Then suddenly, and quite mechanically, Olga Vseslavovna's cry, as she returned to consciousness, came back into her mind:
"The will! In his hands! Take it!" And bending down, she noted for the first time something white beneath the muslin canopy. As she scrutinized it wonderingly, she was conscious of an humble, apologetic voice murmuring something at her elbow:
"Forgive me, Anna Iurievna. I humbly beg you, forgive me! It was I . . . in the night . . . the flowers fell . . . I was putting them back . . . fixing the head of your sainted papa. . . . It was under his head, the paper . . . I thought he wanted to keep it. . . . I put it in his hands, to be safe! . . . Forgive me, Anna Iurievna, if I have done any harm."
It was the deacon, still oppressed by a feeling of guilt. Anna Iurievna turned to him, and then turned back again, to her father's body, to the white object shining under the muslin canopy. And once more Olga Vseslavovna's words came into her mind:
"The will! In his hands! Take it!"
Gently raising the canopy, she softly drew the paper from beneath the general's clasped hands, and unfolded it. She read no more than the opening words, but she had read enough to realize that it was, indeed, her father's will.
Feodor Mikhailovitch Dostoyevsky
Crime and Punishment*
* (At the risk of shocking the reader, it has been decided that the real permanent detective stories of the world were ill represented without Dostoyevsky's terrible tale of what might be called "self- detection." If to sensitive readers the story seems so real as to be hideous, it is well to recall that Dostoyevsky in 1849 underwent the agony of sentence to death as a revolutionist. Although the sentence was commuted to hard labor in Siberia, and although six years later he was freed and again took up his writing, his mind never rose from beneath the weight of horror and hopelessness that hangs over offenders against the Great White Czar. Dostoyevsky, sentenced as a criminal, herded with criminals, really BECAME a criminal in literary imagination. Add to this a minute observation, a marvelous memory, ardent political convictions—and we can understand why the story here, with others of his, is taken as a scientific text by criminologists.—EDITOR.)