Dostoevsky
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1 The question remains open, though the second hypothesis seems to me more plausible. It is difficult to imagine Dostoevsky beginning with an unmotivated murder. Gary Rosenshield, whose perceptive analysis of the techniques of narration is one of the best studies devoted to Crime and Punishment, writes that “the narrator’s preoccupation with his present memory of the past perhaps indicates that Crime and Punishment was originally a psychological study of a criminal only after the murder.” See Gary Rosenshield, Crime and Punishment (Lisse, 1978), 15, 17.
The lost first chapter was probably contained in a notebook that Dostoevsky mislaid. There is a reference to this missing notebook in PSS, 28/Bk. 2: 157; May 9, 1866.
2 See The Notebooks for Crime and Punishment; ed. and trans. Edward Wasiolek (Chicago, 1967), 101. My citations of the notebooks are taken from this indispensable work, with some slight alterations.
3 L. M. Rosenblyum believes that Dostoevsky employs the term tselomudrenno to stress the impropriety of a first-person narrator depicting the murder in all its repulsive naturalistic crudity. It may also, in her view, apply to the rapidity with which Raskolnikov, as originally sketched, resolves the moral problem caused by the murder through his repentence. See Rosenblyum, Tvorcheskie dnevniki (Moscow, 1981), 272–273.
4 For a discussion of Bakhtin’s views, see my essay “The Voices of Mikhail Bakhtin,” in Through the Russian Prism (Princeton, NJ, 1990), 18–33.
5 See E. M. de Vogüé, Le roman Russe (Paris, 1910), 253.
CHAPTER 34
Crime and Punishment
This was the time, when, all things tending fast
To depravation, speculative schemes—
That promised to abstract the hopes of Man
Out of his feelings, to be fixed thenceforth
For ever in a purer element—
Found ready welcome. Tempting region that
For Zeal to enter and refresh herself,
Where passions had the privilege to work,
And never hear the sound of their own names.
—William Wordsworth, The Prelude
Crime and Punishment (Prestuplenie i nakazanie) is the first of the truly great novels of Dostoevsky’s mature period. The psychology of Raskolnikov is placed squarely at the center of the work and is carefully interwoven with the ideas ultimately responsible for his fatal transgression. Every other feature as well illuminates the agonizing dilemma in which Raskolnikov is caught, with its inextricable mixture of tormenting passions and lofty rationalizations. The main character is surrounded by others who serve as oblique reflectors of his inner conflicts, and even the subplots serve as implicit thematic commentary. The development of the plot-action is organized to guide the reader toward a proper grasp of the significance of Raskolnikov’s crime. Every element of the book thus contributes to an enrichment of its theme and to a resolution of the deepest issues that are posed. At the center of the plot-action is the suspense created by Raskolnikov’s inner oscillations and the duel between him and Porfiry Petrovich, but this must be placed in the context of all those “reverberations” generated by the novel’s extraordinarily tight-knit ideological-thematic texture. No detail or event seems casual or irrelevant.
It is not surprising that the radicals refused to recognize themselves in his pages, since Dostoevsky portrayed Nihilist ideas not on the level at which they were ordinarily advocated, but rather as they were refashioned by his eschatological imagination and taken to their most extreme consequences. The aim of these ideas, as he knew, was altruistic and humanitarian, inspired by pity and compassion for human suffering. But these aims were to be achieved by suppressing entirely the spontaneous outflow of such feelings, relying on reason (understood in Chernyshevskian terms as Utilitarian calculation) to master all the contradictory and irrational potentialities of the human personality, and, in its latest variety of Bazarovism, encouraging the growth of a proto-Nietzschean egoism among an elite of superior individuals to whom the hopes for the future were to be entrusted.
Raskolnikov (from the Russian raskolnik, “dissenter”) was created to exemplify all the potentially dangerous hazards contained in such an ideal, and the moral-psychological traits of his character incorporate this antinomy between instinctive kindness, sympathy, and pity, on the one hand, and on the other, a proud and idealistic egoism that has become perverted into a contemptuous disdain for the submissive herd. All the other major figures in the book are equally integrated with Raskolnikov’s fluctuations between these two poles; each is a “quasi-double” who embodies, in a more sharply accentuated incarnation, one or another of the clashing oppositions within Raskolnikov’s character and ideas. Bakhtin aptly remarks that each character Raskolnikov encounters becomes “for him instantly an embodied solution to his own personal question, a solution different from the one at which he himself had arrived; therefore every person touches a sore spot in him and assumes a firm role in his inner speech.”1 Such characters structure the novel not only through “inner speech” but more centrally through the unrolling sequence of encounters generated by the plot-action. These encounters, which present Raskolnikov with one or another aspect of himself, work to motivate that process of self-understanding so crucial for Dostoevsky’s artistic purposes.
Crime and Punishment is focused on the solution of an enigma: the mystery of Raskolnikov’s motivation. For Raskolnikov himself, as it turns out, discovers that he does not understand why he killed; or rather, he becomes aware that the moral purpose supposedly inspiring him cannot really explain his behavior. Dostoevsky thus internalizes and psychologizes the usual quest for the murderer in the detective story plot and transfers this quest to the character himself; it is now Raskolnikov who searches for his own motivation. This search provides a suspense that is similar to, though of course much deeper and more morally complex than, the conventional search for the criminal. To be sure, there is an investigating magistrate, Porfiry Petrovich, whose task it is to bring Raskolnikov to justice, but this purely legal function is subordinate to his role of spurring on the course of Raskolnikov’s own self-questionings and self-comprehension.
Dostoevsky also brilliantly adapts another feature of the detective story. Such a narrative always contains clues, some pointing to the real criminal, others to perfectly innocent characters who are falsely suspected and are meant to mislead the reader temporarily. Since the central mystery is that of Raskolnikov’s motivation, he uses such blunders to plant clues to this enigma that both guide and misguide the reader. The guiding ones, carefully woven into the background of the action from the very start (but so unobtrusively that they are easy to overlook, especially on first reading), point to what Raskolnikov will finally discover about himself—that he killed not for the altruistic-humanitarian motives he believed he was acting upon but solely because of a purely selfish need to test his own strength. The false clues, particularly prominent in Part I, are suggestions that Raskolnikov was acting in response to material, social, or purely psychopathic causes, but such a deterministic point of view is openly combated in the book itself.
These clues are false in the sense that they lead away from the true answer to the question of Raskolnikov’s motivation, but the motivations they suggest are not false in any absolute sense. On the contrary, such imputed possibilities exert a strong pressure on Raskolnikov and add greatly to the sympathy he evokes in the reader. Clues of this kind should thus perhaps not be called false, but accessory or ancillary rather than primary; and their validity is constantly challenged both dramatically and, through such characters as Razumikhin, Zosimov, and Porfiry Petrovich, directly and discursively. Built into the narrative of Crime and Punishment is thus a view of how it should be read, a hermeneutic of its interpretation, which is an integral part of its anti-radical theme and incorporates Dostoevsky’s oft-expressed belief in the importance of ideas and their power to influence human behavior.
Crime and Punishment begins in media res, two and one-half days before Raskolnikov commits the c
rime, and continues through a duration estimated to be approximately two weeks. Time in the novel, so far as it is felt through Raskolnikov’s consciousness, contracts and expands freely according to the importance for him of the events being depicted. It thus seems to lack any objective dimension, and it is also manipulated freely to obtain thematic effects by what Ian Watt, writing about Conrad, has called “thematic apposition,” that is, the juxtaposition of events occurring at different times in order to establish connections between them without explanatory authorial intrusion.2 The objective chronology of events (the time sequence of what has occurred before it has been reshaped for the artistic purposes of the novel) plays a crucial part in illuminating the mystery of Raskolnikov’s motivation. It is this chronology that is gradually uncovered, with all its psychic-ideological implications, as the double time structure of the mystery plot (the time of the action in the present disclosing what occurred in the past) proceeds on its way.
The famous opening section of Crime and Punishment is also a subtle construction whose various thematic strands it is important to disentangle. At the center is the inner conflict of Raskolnikov, torn between his intention to commit a crime in the interests of humanity and the resistance of his moral conscience against the taking of human life. He is a sensitive young intellectual whose fineness of sensibility is conveyed both through his instinctive impulses of compassion for the suffering he sees all around him and through the intensity of his self-revulsion at his own intentions. He has, when we first encounter him, been brooding over the crime for six weeks, and though he lives in appalling poverty, it is clear that he would not have thought of committing it for purely selfish reasons. It is the fate of suffering humanity that concerns him, as revealed in the tavern scene, where the Utilitarian-altruistic justification for the proposed crime is clearly expressed for the first time.
Why not kill a wretched, rapacious, and “useless” old moneylender and employ the funds to alleviate the human misery so omnipresent in Raskolnikov’s world? This is the thought that was dawning in his mind when he enters the tavern and hears it uttered simultaneously by a student and a young officer. Dostoevsky does everything in his artistic powers to accentuate the squalor and human wretchedness that stream past Raskolnikov’s eyes or filter through his sensibility, as he walks through the streets filled with pothouses, brothels, and reeling drunks. His encounter with the hopeless drunkard Marmeladov, abject and guilt-stricken at his own degradation, embodies for Raskolnikov everything in the world that he finds intolerable, especially when Marmeladov explains to all and sundry that he and the rest of his starving family are being kept alive by the self-sacrifice of his prostitute daughter, Sonya. On the level of plot, Marmeladov thus seems only to strengthen Raskolnikov’s desire to take action against the horrifying misery that surrounds him, but on the level of ideological theme Dostoevsky uses the encounter to uncover in advance both the heartlessness of Raskolnikov’s own convictions (not yet specifically introduced) and the alternative set of values to be posed against them.
When Marmeladov describes going to a moneylender for a loan he would never repay, he understands that his failure to obtain one is in accord with “modern” views. Should the moneylender give him the loan out of “compassion?” “But Mr. Lebezyatnikov, who keeps up with modern ideas, explained the other day that compassion is forbidden nowadays by science itself, and this is what is done in England, where there is political economy” (6: 14). Raskolnikov’s own reasoning is based on exactly the same Utilitarian notions of “political economy,” which exclude any feeling of compassion for the “useless” individual marked out as the sacrificial victim. By contrast, the ecstatic self-impaling alternative provided by Marmeladov before he collapses provides the starkest antithesis to the inhuman tenor of the ideas that Raskolnikov is dreaming of putting into practice. For here Marmeladov, in a mixture of freely altered citations from the Gospels, envisions Christ returning at the Last Judgment and pardoning even the “children of shame” like himself, because “not one of them believed himself worthy of this” (6: 21). It is certainly not accidental that Christ’s all-forgiving love is opposed “by the wise ones and those of understanding” (this last word translates razumnie; the Russian word for “reason” is razum), whereby Dostoevsky ingeniously turns the Pharisees of the New Testament into precursors of the Russian radicals of the 1860s.
The symbolic weight of this Petersburg setting reinforces the social-humanitarian motivation that is the nominal justification for Raskolnikov’s crime. This motivation is unforgettably expressed in the important tavern-scene with its conversation between the officer and the student playing billiards. Dostoevsky indicates here how widespread was the reasoning which they discuss to improve society by a humanitarian assassination. But Dostoevsky then increases the weight of this impersonal incitation (“One death, and a hundred lives in exchange—it’s simple arithmetic”) (6: 54) with a more intimate motive: the letter from Raskolnikov’s mother. Here he learns about the desperate circumstances of his own family and his sister Dunya’s decision to marry the tight-fisted and domineering lawyer Luzhin solely to help her adored brother. Dunya’s resolve thus places Raskolnikov, as he realizes only too piercingly, in a comparably debasing (though outwardly more respectable) position as the drunken Marmeladov living off Sonya’s earnings.
Dostoevsky’s portrayal of the agonies of a conscience wrestling with itself, as Raskolnikov struggles to suppress his moral scruples and steel himself for murder, has no equal this side of Macbeth. His horrified recoil after the trial visit to the pawnbroker’s flat, so as to spy out the ground in advance, is only the first of several reactions that increase in severity: “Oh God! how loathsome it all is. . . . And how could such an atrocious thing come into my head?” (6: 10). The unforgettable dream sequence in Chapter 5, which evokes a childhood recollection of the savagely sadistic beating and killing of a “useless” old mare by the drunken peasant Mikolka, epitomizes Raskolnikov’s lacerating conflict. On the one side, there is the little boy who “loved that church, the old-fashioned icons for the most part without frames, and the old priest with his trembling head” (6: 46). This little boy, who still exists in the depths of Raskolnikov’s psyche, furiously breaks away from his father’s grasp, puts his arms around the head of the dead horse to kiss her lips and wounded eyes, and finally flies “in a frenzy with his little fists out at Mikolka” (6: 49). On the other, there is the grown Raskolnikov dreaming this dream, who now plans to behave exactly like Mikolka—and not in a drunken rage, but according to a carefully thought out, “rational” theory. The combat within Raskolnikov between these two aspects of himself is so rending that he wakes in a state of terror and self-loathing, believing (mistakenly) that he has at last conquered the obsessive temptation to kill.
The reader remains immersed in Raskolnikov’s consciousness all through Part I and tends to identify with his point of view. But interwoven with the major episodes of Raskolnikov’s inner struggle are background incidents whose purpose can only be to indicate that, in reality, Raskolnikov is purblind to the subconscious psychic-emotive forces that have been stirred up in his personality. In all such incidents, Raskolnikov behaves in a fashion that shows his emotions being mobilized against the feelings that inspire his Utilitarian-altruistic aims. Here, for example, we see a Raskolnikov who, just after springing to the aid of someone in distress, becomes a coldly unconcerned and contemptuous egoist in the next moment, indifferent to the misfortunes that had stirred his pity.
Egoism as an ingredient of Raskolnikov’s character is indicated early in the “expression of profoundest disgust” that passes over his face as he walks through “the revolting misery” of the stinking streets (6: 43). For Dostoevsky, psychology and ideology were now inseparable, and each precipitous shift of behavior is correlated with some reference to radical doctrine. Just after his trial visit to the pawnbroker, reeling both with fever and self-disgust, he stops at the pothouse, where he meets Marmeladov and drinks a glass
of beer. Instantly feeling better, he attributes his previous moral discomposure to lack of nourishment, and shrugs it off; Chernyshevsky had taught that morality was just a product of physiology.
Raskolnikov also has second thoughts about the kopeks he had charitably left with the Marmeladovs on his first visit, out of compassion for their misery. “What a stupid thing I have done,” he reflects. “They have Sonya, and I need the money myself” (6: 25). This Utilitarian consideration checks the spontaneous outflow of pity, and with “a malignant laugh” he ponders on the infinite capacity of mankind to adapt itself to the most degrading circumstances. Much the same happens when, after calling the policeman to help the tipsy girl being followed by a lecherous fat “dandy,” he unexpectedly turns away in disgust. Suddenly “something seemed to sting Raskolnikov; in an instant a complete revulsion of feeling came over him,” and he swings to the other extreme: “Let them devour each other alive—what is it to me?,” he mutters to himself (6: 42). What “stings” Raskolnikov is the bite of these Darwinian reflections, which view the triumph of the stronger as right and just and any help to the weaker as a violation of the laws of nature. This scene is then duplicated internally as Raskolnikov first imagines the girl’s probable future of prostitution, venereal disease, and ruin at eighteen or nineteen, but then caustically dismisses this resurgence of pity because “a certain percentage, they tell us, must every year . . . go that way. . . somewhere . . . to the devil, it must be, so as to freshen up the rest and leave them in peace” (6: 43).