“And suddenly a strange surprising sensation of a sort of bitter hatred for Sonia passed through his (Raskolnikov’s) heart. As it were wondering and frightened of this sensation, he raised his head and looked intently at her; but he met her uneasy and painfully anxious eyes fixed on him: there was love in them; his hatred vanished like a phantom. It was not the real feeling--he has taken the one feeling for the other.”[73] Of this misinterpretation of feeling by the person concerned we should find examples in Marivaux, and in Racine as well. At times one of these feelings exhausts itself by its very exaggeration. It seems as if the expression of the feeling disconcerts the character expressing it. With this we are not yet come to duality of feeling; but here is something more definite! Listen to Versilov, the _Raw Youth’s_ father: “If only I were a weak-willed nonentity and suffered from the consciousness of it! But you see that’s not so. I know I am exceedingly strong, and in what way do you suppose? Why, just in that spontaneous power of accommodating myself to anything whatever, so characteristic of all intelligent Russians of our generation. There’s no crushing me, no destroying me, no surprising me. I’ve as many lives as a cat. I can with perfect convenience experience two opposite feelings at one and the same time, and not, of course, through my own will.”[74] “I do not undertake to account for this co-existence of conflicting feelings,” deliberately says the narrator in _The Possessed_. Versilov goes on to say: “I should like to say something nice to Sonia, and I keep trying to find the right word, though my heart is full of words which I don’t know how to utter; do you know I feel as if I were split in two?”--He looked round at us all with a terribly serious face and with perfectly genuine candour.--“Yes, I am really split in two mentally, and I’m horridly afraid of it. It’s just as though one’s second self were standing beside one; one is sensible and rational oneself, but the other self is impelled to do something perfectly senseless, and sometimes very funny; and suddenly you notice that you are longing to do that amusing thing, goodness knows why; that is, you want to, as it were, against your will; though you fight against it with all your might, you want to. I once knew a doctor who suddenly began whistling in church, at his father’s funeral. I really was afraid to come to the funeral to-day, because, for some reason, I was possessed by a firm conviction that I should begin to laugh or whistle in church, like that unfortunate doctor, who came to rather a bad end....”[75] Listen now to Stavrogin, the strange hero of _The Possessed_: “I am still capable, as I always was, of desiring to do something good, and of feeling pleasure from it; at the same time I desire evil and feel pleasure from that too.”[76] As Baudelaire says, no man but is ever entreating God and the Devil at one and the same time.[77]