Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  Luzhin’s unctuousness is interwoven with a renewed discussion of the crime, during which Raskolnikov learns even more humiliating details about his blunders and his blindness. Under the pressure of the emotions produced by such glimpses of his failure, he finally intervenes in the conversation about the increase of crime among the educated class in particular. When Luzhin, seeking for an explanation, begins to speak of “morality . . . and so to speak principles,” Raskolnikov cuts him short: “But why do you worry about it. . . . It’s in accordance with your theory—carry out logically the theory you were advocating just now and it follows that people may be slaughtered” (6: 118). Raskolnikov himself, of course, had carried out the theory logically, and when he implicitly recognizes himself in Luzhin’s words, he indicates his awareness that the ideas he had adopted so pure-heartedly could equally well (and even better) justify arrant selfishness, a greedy desire for personal gain, and a bent for sadistic domination. This encounter with Luzhin finally breaks the thread linking Raskolnikov’s Utilitarian reasoning with its supposedly altruistic-humanitarian goals.

  Raskolnikov plunges into the streets with a frenzied, inchoate feeling “that all this must be ended today . . . he would not go on living like that” (6: 120–121). A series of street encounters duplicate those of Part I but reveal the change in Raskolnikov, his need to seek relief from the solitude of his guilt and reestablish links with humanity. He pauses to listen to a street singer, and he gives her a five-kopek piece with no Utilitarian afterthoughts. The climax of this sequence is the meeting with the prostitute Duclida, who asks for six kopeks without offering him her favors in return. Another prostitute rebukes her for descending to beggary, and this grotesque assertion of self-respect recalls to Raskolnikov a book (Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris) in which a condemned man imagines he would prefer to live on a small ledge for a thousand years rather than die within a few hours. “No matter how—only to live! . . . What scoundrels men are!” (6: 123), he thinks, in words similar to his reaction on leaving the Marmeladovs and regretting his instinctive charity. But he is no longer the same person, and such a reaction is transformed into an all-embracing pity for humankind and a twinge of guilt: “ ‘And he is a scoundrel who for this reason calls them scoundrels’—he added a moment later” (6: 123).

  Raskolnikov’s sensibility has thus now thrown off the grip of the Utilitarian dialectic, which had transformed all his impulses of compassion into an attitude of contempt. At the same time, the egoistic component of Raskolnikov’s character is no longer held in check by the mirage of serving any moral cause; it operates solely to aid his self-defense and becomes a naked defiance of the law. This is the moment in the book when Dostoevsky brings into play his coup de maître—the master stroke of which he had spoken in his notes—and begins to develop Raskolnikov’s “satanical pride” (7: 149), kept subordinate up to this point by his poverty, the initial accentuation of his predominantly altruistic purposes, and the desperate situation of his family: “And then suddenly his character showed itself in its full demonic strength, and all the reasons and motives for the crime become clear” (7: 90).

  In the café, ironically called the “Palais de Cristal,” where Raskolnikov goes to consult the newspapers in his quest for self-knowledge, he stumbles upon the mistrustful police clerk Zametov, who suspects him, and this menace drives him into a towering rage. He cannot resist taunting and baiting Zametov in words calculated to fuel his suspicions even further. For Raskolnikov, his dangerous game with Zametov allows him to relive the crime in miniature. The narrator compares the challenge to Zametov and the murder by describing Raskolnikov as breaking “into nervous laughter. . . . And in a flash he remembered . . . when he had stood behind a door with an axe, while the bolt rattled, and outside the door people were swearing and trying to force a way in, and he was suddenly filled with a desire to shriek at them, and laugh, laugh, laugh” (6: 126). This momentary flashback starkly illuminates the fierce and self-absorbed egoism that had driven Raskolnikov and lights up the true nature of his motivation.

  Raskolnikov, however, can sustain such a bellicose attitude only when confronted by a concrete threat to his freedom. Left to himself, and painfully aware of his self-deception, he plunges back into total despair. Overcome by the same sense of icy desolation that had assailed him in the police station, he decides to settle for “the square yard of space,” the life of ignominy he had refused to condemn a little while before. Turning his steps toward the police station to confess, he realizes he is passing the tenement in which the crime took place, and his eerily somnambulistic return to the scene of the murder climaxes his compelling need to play detective toward the confused tangle of his own deed. He is “terribly annoyed” that the old wallpaper is being replaced and that “everything was so altered.” It is as if he wished to reverse time, or at least arrest its flow, and return to the beginning of what had gone so badly awry (6: 133). His odd behavior arouses suspicion, and he challenges those who question him to come with him to the police station. Finally, he sets off alone for the last step, but while still hesitating, in the midst of a world in which “all was dead and silent like the stones on which he walked, dead to him, to him alone” (6: 135), another masterly plot twist occurs, which again reverses the course of the action. His attention is caught by the commotion of an accident, and he rushes toward it to find the dying Marmeladov crushed by the wheels of a passing carriage.

  Raskolnikov leaps to Marmeladov’s aid and suddenly finds himself thrust into a world in which his aching need to establish bonds of emotive solidarity can be amply gratified. His crime, intended to benefit humanity, had cut him off from others by an invisible wall, but now he pours all his altruism, unhindered by Utilitarian reconsiderations, into easing the terrible lot of the Marmeladovs, whose misery Dostoevsky depicts with laconic, almost unbearable power. A sharp contrast is also drawn between Raskolnikov’s impulse to give them his last penny and the pious platitudes of the priest summoned to perform the rites for the dying, whose ritually consoling words drive the half-crazed and tubercular Katerina Ivanovna into a despairing rage. The gratitude and affection lavished upon Raskolnikov open the floodgates of all his previously suppressed Christian sentiments, and he asks little Polechka, Sonya’s half-sister, to “pray for me sometimes: ‘and Thy servant, Rodion’—just that” (6: 147). The need for absolution, which he will soon seek through Sonya, is already evident here. This direct release of Raskolnikov’s pent-up Christian emotions leads to a remarkable recovery from hopelessness, and he is filled with “a strange, new feeling of boundlessly full and powerful life—a feeling which might be compared with that of a man condemned to death and unexpectedly reprieved” (6: 146). The arrival in Petersburg of Raskolnikov’s mother and sister, however, plunges him back into the agonizing awareness that his horrible secret has cut him off from those he loves the most.

  Dostoevsky now, as a preparation for the full disclosure of the article “On Crime,” begins to fill in those aspects of Raskolnikov’s past that help to illuminate his self-identification with the “extraordinary” people. His mother, going farther back into the pre-radical past, recalls his plan to marry the landlady’s daughter, despite, she says, “my tears, my entreaties, my illness, my possibly death from grief, from poverty” (6: 166). His concern for his family had thus always been subordinate to an immutable egoism of personal self-affirmation. This egoism had previously been combined with a whole-souled acceptance of Christian values quite the opposite of callous inhumanity; still, the innate extremism of Raskolnikov’s temperament had been evident even in this commitment. The girl, Razumikhin remarks with some perplexity, was “positively ugly . . . and such an invalid . . . and strange” (6: 166). Raskolnikov explains that “ ‘she was fond of giving alms to the poor, and was always dreaming of a nunnery. . . . I believe I would have liked her better still if she had been lame or a hunchback’ (he smiled dreamily)” (6: 177). These disturbing words indicate a desire to embrace what others would find repell
ent, and suggest a desire for self-sacrifice bordering on martyrdom; it is as if Raskolnikov looked on his proposed marriage as some sort of self-exalting as well as morally heroic deed. His conversion to radicalism involved no change in the moral aims of these ambitions and supplied a similar outlet for his egoism, but it inspired a heroism in terms of Utilitarian principles. Six months after burying his fiancée, with whom, as he tells Dunya, he had argued about his new convictions, he wrote the article expressing this new self-image.

  It is against this background that Raskolnikov comes for his first meeting with Porfiry Petrovich. Porfiry is highly cultivated, and, since he has come across Raskolnikov’s article and made inquiries about the author, he has been closely following the movement of contemporary ideas. He thus has an understanding of Raskolnikov’s cast of mind, which, taken along with everything he has learned from Zametov and others, convinces him that Raskolnikov is the murderer. Even though Razumikhin considers Porfiry to be employing the “old, material method” of criminal investigation, the very opposite is true: he understands that the cause of Raskolnikov’s crime is ultimately “psychological” (that is, ideological) and cannot be understood in “material” terms.

  The impossibility of amalgamating the qualms of Christian conscience with Raskolnikov’s previous image of “greatness” is brought to the fore when, already upset by Porfiry’s questioning, Raskolnikov is suddenly called a “murderer” by a workman in the street. This blunt accusation strikes the final blow to his tottering self-control. The thoughts that now race through his mind in a seemingly disconnected torrent climax the process of self-confrontation that has been occurring all along, and Raskolnikov’s eyes are finally opened to the tragic antinomy on which he has become impaled—not only how far he had fallen short of his expectations, but even more, how foolish it had been for him to believe he could succeed when he continued to cling to the moral purpose of his intended deed. True great men like Napoleon cared not a whit about any such purpose, and acted solely out of a supreme conviction in their right to do whatever they pleased. “No, these men are not made so. The real Master to whom all is permitted storms Toulon, carries out a massacre in Paris, forgets an army in Egypt, wastes half a million men in the Moscow expedition and gets off with a jest at Vilna. And altars are set up to him after his death, and so all is permitted. No, such people it seems are not of flesh but of bronze!” (6: 211).

  Raskolnikov now calls himself a “louse” because of the “aesthetic” incongruity between the pettiness of his own deed (“a vile, withered old woman, a moneylender”) and the grandeur of the figure whose name and destiny had hung before him like a lodestar (“Napoleon, the pyramids, Waterloo”). But it is the realization that “I have been importuning Providence for a whole month, calling on it to witness that it was not for my own, so to speak, flesh and lust that I proposed to act but for a noble and worthy end”—it is this incongruity that makes him exclaim: “I killed a principle, but as for surmounting the barriers, I did not do that, I remained on this side” (6: 211). Raskolnikov had killed the “principle” of the old moral law against taking human life, but this very purpose and choice of victim showed that he had not been able “to surmount the barriers.” He had attached a moral aim to his desire to achieve “greatness”; he had remained a man of flesh, who had failed to become one of bronze.

  But Raskolnikov—even though he exclaims to himself, “Ah, how I hate the old woman now! I feel I should kill her again if she came to life!”—cannot sustain this hostility for very long, and his thoughts modulate into recollections of Lizaveta and Sonya (“poor, gentle things, with gentle eyes”). His inner struggle then terminates in the dream that ends Part III, in which he unsuccessfully tries to rid himself of the ghost of his victim. Fearfully reliving the moment of the murder, he tries to kill Alyona Ivanovna again, but finds her impervious to his blows. Huddled in a chair, with her head drooping and face concealed, she was “overcome with noiseless laughter” and simply “shook with mirth” (6: 213) as he redoubled his blows. He had murdered her in the flesh but not in his spirit, and she continues to haunt his conscience. He had failed to become one of the “great men” who had gone beyond good and evil altogether.

  Svidrigailov emerges from the shadows at the beginning of Part IV, when Raskolnikov has finally glimpsed the incongruity of attempting to place an all-powerful egoism into the service of moral ends. Materializing in Raskolnikov’s room almost as if part of the dream repetition of the murder, Svidrigailov seems to be an apparition; and Raskolnikov asks Razumikhin whether the latter had actually seen Svidrigailov in the flesh. Nothing similar had occurred in the case of Luzhin, and Svidrigailov’s emergence from, as it were, Raskolnikov’s subconscious suggests that he stems from a more deeply rooted level of Raskolnikov’s personality than Luzhin, who embodies his ideas. Svidrigailov mirrors the elemental thrust of that egoism, concentrated in Raskolnikov’s monomania, which had ultimately led to the murders. He now confronts Raskolnikov as someone who has accepted the thoroughgoing egoistic amorality that, as Raskolnikov now has begun to realize, he had unwittingly been striving to incarnate himself.

  One of Dostoevsky’s most strangely appealing characters, a sort of monster à la Quasimodo longing for redemption to normalcy, Svidrigailov’s Byronic world-weariness signifies a certain spiritual depth, and the contradictions of his personality, swinging between the blackest evil and the most benevolent good, perhaps can best be understood in Byronic terms. Is he not similar to such a figure as Byron’s Lara, “who at last confounded good and ill,” and whose supreme indifference to their distinction made him equally capable of both? One can well say of Svidrigailov,

  Too high for common selfishness, he could

  At times resign his own for other’s good,

  But not in pity, not because he ought,

  But in some strange perversity of thought,

  That sway’d him onward with a secret pride

  To do what few or more would do beside;

  And thus some impulse would, in tempting time,

  Mislead his spirit equally to crime.3

  Svidrigailov thus embodies the same mixture of moral-psychic opposites as Raskolnikov, but arranged in a different order of dominance. What rules within the older man is the conscious acceptance of an unrestrained egoism acting solely in the pursuit of personal and sensual pleasure, but his enjoyments are tarnished by self-disgust. What dominates in Raskolnikov are the pangs and power of conscience even in the midst of a fiercely egoistic struggle to maintain his freedom.

  Svidrigailov arrives in Petersburg in hot pursuit of Dunya, but though he pretends to be driven only by the pleasure of sensual passion, his desire for Dunya has now become a quest for personal salvation. The plot parallelism with Raskolnikov-Sonya is obvious and could hardly have been carried through if Svidrigailov had been a less complex character. The disabling workings of his self-disgust may be gathered from his picture of eternity as a little room, “something like a bathhouse in the country, black with soot, with spiders in every corner. . . . I sometimes imagine it like that, you know,” he confesses to Raskolnikov. When the latter, “with a feeling of anguish,” protests that he might imagine something “juster and more comforting than that,” Svidrigailov only responds that perhaps this would be just, “and, do you know, it’s what I would certainly have made it deliberately!” (6: 221). For all his assumed moral insensibility, Svidrigailov is unable to escape a sense of self-revulsion, which he wishes to extend to humanity as a whole.

  Dostoevsky, however, reserves the full deployment of the Raskolnikov-Svidrigailov relation for a later thematic stage. As yet, Raskolnikov sees himself as someone who, like Sonya, has taken on the burden of suffering to aid a humanity trapped in helpless misery, and he thus tries to bring her round to regarding his crime as identical with her pathetic infringement of conventional morality. Dostoevsky manages to capture Sonya’s innocence in the midst of degradation, her gaucherie and burning purity of religious faith. What she off
ers to Raskolnikov is an unsullied image of the self-sacrificing Christian love that had once also stirred him to his depths. She is the existential reality of that love for suffering mankind which, when amalgamated with the Utilitarian reason of radical ideology, had become perverted into the monstrosities of his crime.

  In the scenes between the two, Raskolnikov reveals his desire to embellish his own deed with the halo of Christian self-sacrifice. This is what makes him so susceptible to “the sort of insatiable compassion . . . reflected in every feature of her face”; it is what throws him on his knees to kiss her feet “because of your great suffering” (6: 243, 246). But even as he yields in this way to her example, the unalloyed faith of Sonya does not fail to arouse his educated scorn. When he learns that she and his victim Lizaveta had met to read the New Testament together, he calls them yurodivy (holy fools, usually considered simple-minded, if not demented), but finds himself irresistibly drawn to their unshakable faith in God’s ultimate goodness—the faith that, against all reason, miraculously supports Sonya in the midst of vice as she struggles to help the deranged Katerina Ivanovna and the starving children.

  Under the effect of this emotion, he commands Sonya to read from the copy of the New Testament given her by Lizaveta. He wishes to hear the passage from the Gospel of Saint John narrating the resurrection of Lazarus, which symbolically holds out the possibility of his own moral resurrection. In pages that have evoked a mountain of commentary, Dostoevsky depicts, with the bleakly reverential simplicity of a Rembrandt etching, “the candle end [that] had long since burnt low in the twisted candlestick, dimly lighting the poverty-stricken room and the murderer and the harlot [bludnitsa], who had come together so strangely to read the eternal book” (6: 251–252). Dostoevsky uses the Church Slavonic word bludnitsa, rather than a more colloquial one, and thus associates Sonya with Mary Magdalene as Raskolnikov blends with Lazarus. Nowhere perhaps do we come closer to Dostoevsky’s own tortuously anguished relation to religious faith than in the mixture of involuntary awe and self-conscious skepticism with which Raskolnikov reacts to Sonya. But the moment he shakes off the emotions stirred by the Gospel reading, the clash of values between the two recommences.