Life imitates art:
“He was, by the way, exceptionally handsome, above the average in height, slim, well-built, with beautiful dark eyes and dark brown hair.
...He waked up late next day after a broken sleep. But his sleep had not refreshed him; he waked up bilious, irritable, ill-tempered, and looked with hatred at his room."
....All at once he heard the student mention to the officer the pawnbroker Alyona Ivanovna ...the student began telling his friend various details about Alyona Ivanovna...and began describing how spiteful and uncertain she was, how if you were only a day late with your interest the pledge was lost; how she gave a quarter of the value of an article and took five and even seven percent a month on it and so on...
...He pulled the axe quite out, swung it with both arms, scarcely conscious of himself, and almost without effort, almost mechanically, brought the blunt side down on her head. ...As she was so short, the blow fell on the very top of her skull. She cried out, but very faintly, and suddenly sank all of a heap on the floor, raising her hands to her head. In one hand she still held “the pledge.” Then he dealt her another and another blow with the blunt side and on the same spot. The blood gushed as from an overturned glass, the body fell back. He stepped back, let it fall, and at once bent over her face; she was dead.
..."You were hungry! It was… to help your mother? Yes?”
“No, Sonia, no,” he muttered, turning away and hanging his head. “I was not so hungry…. I certainly did want to help my mother, but… that’s not the real thing either…. Don’t torture me, Sonia.”
“Then why… why, you said you did it to rob, but you took nothing?” she asked quickly, catching at a straw.“
...“Sonia, I have a bad heart, take note of that. It may explain a great deal. I have come because I am bad. There are men who wouldn’t have come. But I am a coward and… a mean wretch. But… never mind! That’s not the point. I must speak now, but I don’t know how to begin.”
He paused and sank into thought.
...“What if it were really that?” he said, as though reaching a conclusion. “Yes, that’s what it was! I wanted to become a Napoleon, that is why I killed her…. Do you understand now?”
...“It was like this: I asked myself one day this question—what if Napoleon, for instance, had happened to be in my place, and if he had not had Toulon nor Egypt nor the passage of Mont Blanc to begin his career with, but instead of all those picturesque and monumental things, there had simply been some ridiculous old hag, a pawnbroker, who had to be murdered too to get money from her trunk (for his career, you understand). Well, would he have brought himself to that if there had been no other means? Wouldn’t he have felt a pang at its being so far from monumental and… and sinful, too? Well, I must tell you that I worried myself fearfully over that ‘question’ so that I was awfully ashamed when I guessed at last (all of a sudden, somehow) that it would not have given him the least pang, that it would not even have struck him that it was not monumental… that he would not have seen that there was anything in it to pause over, and that, if he had had no other way, he would have strangled her in a minute without thinking about it! Well, I too… left off thinking about it… murdered her, following his example. And that’s exactly how it was! Do you think it funny? Yes, Sonia, the funniest thing of all is that perhaps that’s just how it was.”
“I’ve only killed a louse, Sonia, a useless, loathsome, harmful creature.”
“A human being—a louse!”
“I too know it wasn’t a louse,” he answered, looking strangely at her. “But I am talking nonsense, Sonia,” he added.
...“No, Sonia, that’s not it,” he began again suddenly, raising his head, as though a new and sudden train of thought had struck and as it were roused him—”that’s not it! Better… imagine—yes, it’s certainly better—imagine that I am vain, envious, malicious, base, vindictive and… well, perhaps with a tendency to insanity. (Let’s have it all out at once! They’ve talked of madness already, I noticed.)"
(Crime and Punishment)
