When I die I want to die like Raskolnikov. Memory for memory, injury for injury, death for death.

Did you know that Pushkin was shot in a duel? Brothers Karamazov, Inspector Porfiry takes great interest in this fact - “a duel to the death between, on the one side, a man of the world, a man of wit and intelligence, a man of affairs, if only a young one, and, on the other side, an old and mediocre sluggard? It appears to me, if one must die, in which case it is better to die like Pushkin than Mussorgsky.” - which approach to life should a man take?<br>Pushkin and Lermontov were both duelists. Not some kind of history – like Australia and giraffes, but history. French revolution, Classical Greece, Rome, one coded line in the Odyssey, one obsessed historian, Aristotle, he had no mother, he died in a duel. One line from him makes the difference between medievalism and the modern world – it goes without saying that “a man is a political animal” is Raskolnikov the political animal while Colonel Zverkov Porfiry the political animal?<br>Darkness and shadow in the modern world are oblivion. What are my own thoughts then, when crime and punishment are just words? The earth will never remember me until the day it dies. Inspector Porfiry defines the Raskolnikovian man as a type in which the coincidence of complete egotism with an impossibility, partially unconscious, to bear the presence of even the least injury to his person. Such as man knows, often unconsciously, that his egotism will never let him forgive his personal sufferings, that he will neither forget them nor pardon them…but that he will make sure he pays back – and he will not be afraid or ashamed to do so – as soon as his turn to repay it comes. The type is hopeless, unable to be at peace the moment he encounters even a small, irritating impossibility. Beset by his ceaseless egotism, he harbors the impossible wish that all that exists would at once be nothing – so that he might be free to create his own world. Such a man doesn’t mind that he has nothing. But he cannot stand until the last obstacle has been cleared out of his way.<br>What if he must die? Then if he must die, in which case it is better to die like Pushkin than Mussorgsky.