“All is in a man’s hands, and he lets it all slip from cowardice”

“All is in a man’s hands, and he lets it all slip from cowardice” is the expression Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov turns into an “axiom” as he confronts the gap between an intended undertaking and his fear of taking even its first step. Its force lies in that contradiction: the thought declares human agency, while its speaker immediately measures how readily a person can surrender it.

The Thought and Its Setting

Raskolnikov thinks the phrase while walking out into the street. He has just reflected that he would rather creep down the stairs like a cat than face his landlady’s gossip, demands for payment, threats, and complaints. The contrast gives his maxim its immediate edge: the minor encounter he evades is set against the far more serious thing he is considering attempting. He frames the disparity in his own words: “I want to attempt a thing like that and am frightened by these trifles,”

The thought comes with an odd smile, but it does not settle the conflict. Calling the maxim an axiom makes it sound like a general truth; its occasion makes it an accusation directed at himself. At this point, the undertaking remains unnamed in the passage, and the expression exposes the tension without resolving what he will do.

Fear, Speech, and Inaction

Raskolnikov extends the thought from his personal fear to a broader claim: “Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what they fear most.” The pairing of a step and a word joins action to speech as parallel thresholds. Both involve beginning; both can be withheld. The expression therefore concerns not simply timidity before danger, but the hesitation that prevents intention from becoming an act.

He then turns the accusation toward his own talk. He says he chatters because he does nothing, and considers the reverse possibility: that he does nothing because he chatters. The circular phrasing leaves the cause unsettled, presenting speech as both a symptom of inaction and a possible refuge from it. He says this habit has grown over the last month, which he has spent lying in his den and thinking of Jack the Giant-killer. When he considers why he is going where he is going, he dismisses the prospect as fantasy, a plaything. The maxim’s confidence is thus undercut by his repeated attempts to treat the contemplated act as unreal.

Narrative Significance

The expression concentrates a passage structured around contrasts: a large intended act and trivial fears, a proclaimed axiom and an uncertain speaker, a new step and a new word, action and chatter. Its general wording sounds decisive, but the surrounding self-questioning makes decisiveness itself doubtful. The maxim does not prove that Raskolnikov has overcome fear; it records his recognition that fear can make a person relinquish agency before acting.

The external setting intensifies that conflict without explaining it away. The heat, airlessness, bustle, plaster, scaffolding, bricks, dust, and familiar summer stench of Saint Petersburg weigh painfully on his already overwrought nerves. Against this pressure, the expression reads both as an attempt to spur himself forward and as evidence of how much effort that self-persuasion requires.