Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  Rakolnikov appeals to Sonya because it is only she to whom he can reveal the truth—because she too is a flagrant sinner and has become an outcast in the eyes of society. It is she, and not his virtuous family, who might be able to accept him without shock and horror, and even sympathize with his purpose, if not its results. “You too have stepped over the barriers . . . you were able to overstep!” he says to Sonya (6: 252). But exactly the opposite is true: Raskolnikov had wished to “step over” but had been unable to because he had been undermined by the remains of his moral conscience. Sonya had not wished to “step over” at all, and had violated the moral law against her will and desire. For all her debasement, Sonya is not inwardly torn because her sin has been redeemed by the purity of her self-sacrifice. It is this difference that Raskolnikov desperately tries to wipe away when he says, with flagrant sophistry, “you have laid hands on yourself, you destroyed a life . . . your own (it’s all the same)!” On the one side, there is the ethic of Christian agape, the total, immediate, and unconditional sacrifice of self that is the law of Sonya’s being (and Dostoevsky’s own highest value); on the other, there is Raskolnikov’s rational Utilitarian ethic, which justifies the sacrifice of others for the sake of a greater social good.4

  Raskolnikov’s attitude in this scene, in which he asks Sonya to link her fate with his (“so we must go together, by the same path!”), is an inconsistent admixture reflecting a new phase of his moral-psychic struggle. After undermining Sonya’s hope that God will protect little Polechka from Sonya’s fate (“ ‘but, perhaps, there is no God at all,’ Raskolnikov had said with a sort of malignance”), he illustrates the awfulness of this prospect by referring to children as “the image of Christ” and citing the Gospels: “Theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.” When the hysterically weeping Sonya, wringing her hands, asks, “What then must we do?” he replies, “Demolish what must be demolished, once and for all, and take the suffering on ourselves.” This assumption of suffering, however, is immediately countered by a more despotic assertion of egoism than any he has yet consciously uttered so far: “What? Don’t you understand? . . . Freedom and power, but above all, power! Power over all trembling creatures, over the ant-heap . . . that’s the goal!” he tells the bewildered Sonya (6: 252–253). He thus involuntarily reveals the truth about himself that has begun to pierce through to his consciousness.

  The culmination of the scandal scene at the wake following Marmeladov’s funeral prepares the way for an intensification of the moral confrontation between Sonya and Raskolnikov at their next meeting, which follows hard on the rowdy commemoration. Luzhin, attempting to frame Sonya by secretly slipping money into her pocket, had accused her of theft, and Raskolnikov seizes on this incident as an additional self-justification. If Sonya had the choice, would she, he asks, decide that “Luzhin should live and commit abominations,” even if this meant “the ruin of Katerina Ivanovna and the children”? To which the distraught Sonya can only reply, with the instinctive penetration of uncorrupted moral feeling: “But I can’t know God’s intentions. . . . [H]ow could it depend on my decision. . . . Who made me a judge of who shall live and who shall not?” (6: 313). Without a false note, Dostoevsky portrays the uneducated Sonya countering Raskolnikov with the argument that no human could arrogate to herself the power over human life traditionally exercised solely by God.

  This reply is the prelude to Raskolnikov’s final confession, which he makes to Sonya while alternating between feelings of hatred and love—and when she finally comprehends the truth, which he is unable to bring out in words, she throws herself into his arms and exclaims, with total identification: “What have you done . . . to yourself? . . . There is no one, no one, unhappier than you in the whole world” (6: 376). But when Sonya promises to follow him to prison he recoils, and his egoism, the “satanic pride” released in his personality first by his ideas and then through the crime and its aftermath, resurfaces.

  Raskolnikov’s struggle to explain the cause of his crime not only to Sonya but, more important, to himself, equals in poetic force some of the final soliloquies of Shakespeare. Raskolnikov knows by this time that all the reasons for the crime he had previously given himself are false, and he finally admits, “I am lying, Sonya. . . . I’ve been lying for a long time. . . . There are quite different reasons here, quite, quite different!” (6: 320). He now knows that this “credo” that might alone could make right had not been his point of departure, and so he shifts, with self-tormenting sarcasm, to a description of the inner struggle with his conscience, whose values he still believed he was obeying even as he contemplated murder. It was just because he was assailed by the question of whether “I had the right to gain power—I certainly hadn’t the right,” or “whether a human being is a louse,” that his failure became inevitable. “If I worried myself all those days, wondering whether Napoleon would have done it or not, it means I must have felt clearly that I wasn’t Napoleon” (6: 311).

  It was “the agony of that battle of ideas” that impelled Raskolnikov finally to throw it off entirely. With the wisdom of hindsight, he breaks through to a comprehension of the compulsion that had been at work in and through his monomania. “I wanted to murder without casuistry, to murder for my own sake, for myself alone!” Raskolnikov’s real aim was solely to test “whether I was a louse like everyone else or a man. . . . Whether I am a trembling creature or whether I have the right.” And Raskolnikov then sweeps away any and every motivation except the testing of his own strength: “I didn’t murder either to gain wealth or to become a benefactor of mankind. Nonsense! I just murdered . . . and whether I became a benefactor to others, or spent my life like a spider catching everyone in my web and sucking the life out of others, must have been of no concern to me at that moment . . . I know it all now.” Raskolnikov’s real aim was solely to test “whether I have the right” (6: 321–322). With these climactic words, Raskolnikov’s understanding finally coincides with what has long since been dramatically conveyed by Dostoevsky.

  This act of self-recognition, however, does not persuade Raskolnikov to accept Sonya’s injunction to “go at once, this very minute, stand at the crossroads, bow down, first kiss the earth which you have defiled and then bow down to all the world and say to all men aloud, ‘I have killed!’ ” (6: 322). Quite the contrary, even though acknowledging the pure egoism that had motivated him “at that moment,” he refuses to imagine surrendering to the legal authorities, who themselves represent for him the same amoral egoism operating on a vastly larger scale. The very self-contradictory nature of the forces motivating Raskolnikov, of which he has only just become fully aware, would humiliate him further in the eyes of the law. “ ‘And what should I say to them—that I murdered her, but did not dare to take the money and hid it under a stone?’ he added with a bitter smile. ‘Why, they would laugh at me, and would call me a fool for not getting it. A coward and a fool!’ ” (6: 323). Raskolnikov thus decides to continue to fight for his freedom.

  Raskolnikov’s confession to Sonya climaxes his quest for knowledge about himself. From this point on the action of the novel is oriented toward the future rather than toward uncovering the meaning of the past, and its thematic structure is well defined in Dostoevsky’s notebooks: “Svidrigailov—the most desperate cynicism. Sonya—the most unrealizable hope. . . . [Raskolnikov] has passionately attached himself to both” (7: 204). These are the two alternatives between which he oscillates, knowing that Svidrigailov, who eavesdropped on his confession to Sonya, is privy to his secret. Both are aware that he is a murderer, and each, in effect, indicates an opposing path along which he can choose to decide his fate.

  Sonya, while waiting to share his destiny, can only imagine the future as being his voluntary acceptance of punishment. Her pleas are reinforced by Porfiry Petrovich, who speaks frankly in his final interview with Raskolnikov. Porfiry’s speech serves to bring out both the social-cultural contrast and the similarity in extremism between the radical intellectual Raskolnikov and the peasan
t sectarian Nikolay (the workman falsely suspected of the murder), who comes from a family of Beguny and who, under the spiritual guidance of an elder (starets) for two years, “was full of fervor, prayed at night, read the old books, the ‘true ones,’ and read himself crazy” (6: 347). Raskolnikov, too, had “read himself crazy,” but Nikolay is ready to accept suffering to atone for his own sinfulness and that of the world, while Raskolnikov, though enduring agonies of conscience, still cannot bring himself to follow its injunctions. This is why, as Porfiry declares, his crime “is a fantastic, gloomy business, a modern case, an incident of today when the heart of man is troubled. . . . Here we have bookish dreams, a heart unhinged by theories.” Here we have “a murderer [who] looks upon himself as an honest man, despises others, poses as a pale angel” (6: 348). Raskolnikov himself is the murderer, Porfiry affirms softly, and urges him to confess voluntarily under the best possible conditions—that is, so as to free an innocent man and thus obtain the goodwill and leniency of the court. Besides, Porfiry informs Raskolnikov, he has found a piece of material evidence and plans to arrest him in a few days.

  In this final section, Raskolnikov’s attention turns toward Svidrigailov. Svidrigailov’s past is wrapped in a cloud of atrocious rumors, and he was, as Raskolnikov concludes, “evidently depraved, undoubtedly cunning and deceitful, possibly malignant.” Raskolnikov refuses to see any connection between Svidrigailov’s sinister past and his own crimes, and believes—what is of course true—that “their very evil-doing is not of the same kind.” All the same, we see him “hastening to Svidrigailov” and somehow “expecting something new from him, directions, a way out” (6: 354). Svidrigailov, after all, is the only person who knows that Raskolnikov is guilty and has not urged him to confess; indeed, he seems completely unconcerned, amused rather than shocked, and it is through this cynicism that Raskolnikov feels he might perhaps offer “a way out.” For all his assumed indifference to morality, however, Svidrigailov’s rebuff at the hands of Dunya snaps the last thread attaching him to existence, and this scene is followed by the last hours before his suicide, during which the “cellar rats” (6: 392) of his own past swim out of his subconscious in various dreams. For him there is no natural innocence left in the world; everything he touches turns into the corruption of unashamed vice. With this awareness of his living damnation, Svidrigailov shoots himself.

  Svidrigailov’s mockingly provocative account of his sexual philanderings had revolted Raskolnikov, and his well-aimed sneers at Raskolnikov’s reproaches had brought home to the murderer that he had lost any right to distinguish himself morally from his shameless interlocutor. Raskolnikov thus decides to yield to Sonya’s entreaties and take Porfiry’s advice. He goes to his mother for a last farewell and, when she blesses him with the sign of the cross, “for the first time after all these awful months his heart was softened. He fell down before her, he kissed her feet, and both wept, embracing” (6: 397). With Dunya, however, there is a last flare-up of Raskolnikov’s pride, and he rebels against acknowledging that he has committed any “crime” at all. What he has learned from his failure is only his own weakness, his own inability to subdue his conscience completely and place it in the service of his “idea.” But his own failure was not a refutation of this “idea,” in which he still could not see any logical flaw; there was no great reason why a true “great man,” untroubled and secure in his absolute right to overstep existing moral bounds, could not also be a “benefactor of mankind.” “I too wished to do good and would have done hundreds, thousands of good deeds to make up for this one piece of stupidity.” His failure was a purely personal one: “but I . . . I couldn’t carry out even the first step, because I am contemptible, that’s what’s the matter” (6: 400). He had placed himself in the wrong category, and this tragic misjudgment about himself has nothing to do with the validity or justice of his unshaken belief.

  In the final chapter, Raskolnikov bows down and kisses the earth at the Hay-market, as Sonya had admonished, in a gesture of repentance typical of the raskolniki, only to be met with the laughter and jeers of people who think he is either drunk or about to embark as a pilgrim for the Holy Land. Then he goes to confess to Lieutenant Gunpowder, unwilling to accept the humiliation of surrendering to Porfiry, and hears, in the midst of a friendly flow of chatter about various radical fads, that Svidrigailov had killed himself the night before. Raskolnikov is so overcome that he stumbles out into the courtyard without saying a word, but there stood Sonya, on her face “a look of poignant agony, of despair” (6: 409), and he returns to make the confession. His fate and that of Svidrigailov thus form a continuous parallel up to the very end.

  In accordance with the tradition of the nineteenth-century novel, Dostoevsky provides an epilogue in which the lives of his main characters are followed beyond the limits of the plot action. The main aim of the epilogue is to offer an authorial perspective on the major thematic issues that, Dostoevsky felt, required either reinforcement or completion. One such issue is the decisive role that must be ascribed to the effect of Raskolnikov’s ideas on his psyche. These ideas, in bringing on his monomania, had ultimately provided the motivating force for the crime; and the epilogue points once again to their centrality. Another issue is the gap that still exists between the moral-psychic emotions that led Raskolnikov to confess and his continued belief that his ideas, whatever his own personal defeat, have not been invalidated.

  The reader knows that Raskolnikov’s so-called “heartfelt repentance” is really a crushing sense of defeat, and the depression that marks his behavior in the Siberian prison camp, where he even rebuffs Sonya’s effort to comfort him, is the result not of the hardship of his lot but of the collapse of belief in himself. He falls ill for a long time, and “it was wounded pride that made him ill.” What tortures him is that he cannot see any flaw in his theory but finds it only in himself: “his exasperated conscience found no particular terrible fault in his past, except a single blunder which might happen to anyone. Not being able to find any flaw in his ideas, he could thus see no value in the ‘continual sacrifice leading to nothing’ that he had accepted. Of course he had committed a crime, but ‘what is meant by crime? My conscience is at rest. . . . Well, punish me for the letter of the law . . . and that’s enough. Of course in that case many benefactors of mankind who snatched power for themselves instead of inheriting it ought to have been punished at their first steps. But those men succeeded and so they were right, and I didn’t, and so I had no right to have taken that first step’ ” (6: 416–417). Raskolnikov thus believes that there is nothing inherently incompatible between the ruthless acquisition of power by an “extraordinary person,” who never questions for a moment that his ego is superior to all moral laws, and the possibility of that person then becoming a “benefactor of mankind.”

  To resolve this thematic crux Dostoevsky has recourse to the famous final dream of Raskolnikov, the dream in which he sees “the whole world . . . condemned to a terrible new strange plague that had come to Europe from the depths of Asia.” This dream, like all the others in the book, emerges from the depths of his moral-emotive psyche, and like them is the response of his conscience to his ideas. His logic is answered not by any sort of rational refutation but by the vision of his horrified subconscious (which in Dostoevsky is usually moral, as it also is in Shakespeare). The dream represents nothing less than the universalization of Raskolnikov’s doctrine of the “extraordinary people” in which all attempt to put this belief into practice. Those attacked by the plague became “mad and furious” while believing they had reached new heights of wisdom and self-understanding. “Never had men considered themselves so intellectual, and so completely in possession of the truth as these sufferers. Never had they considered their decisions, their scientific conclusions, their moral convictions so infallible.” The disease allows each person to preserve “moral convictions” and inspires a desire to enlighten others with the truth of such convictions so as to become a benefactor of humanity. “Ea
ch thought that he alone had the truth and was wretched looking at the others” (6: 419–420).

  But the certainty of each ego in its own infallibility, and the absolute assurance and authority imparted by such certainty, leads to the breakdown of all common norms and values. “They did not know how to judge and could not agree what to consider evil and what good” (6: 420). No form of social cohesion could resist the contagion of the plague; the plague thus removes the implicit basis of consensus on which human society is based, and the final result is total social chaos. Here we see Dostoevsky destroying the last shreds of Raskolnikov’s conviction that a supreme egoism could be combined with socially benevolent consequences. Let all presume they were “extraordinary people,” and the result would be the Hobbesian world of Raskolnikov’s feverish nightmare, the war of all against all. This is the world of Western society as Dostoevsky had described it in Winter Notes, the world in which “the ego sets itself in opposition, as a separate, self-justifying principle, against all of nature and all other humans; it claims equality and equal value with whatever exists outside of itself” (5: 79). It is not only equality that each ego now claims, but also absolute superiority; and this is the plague that has come to Russia from Europe to infect the radical intelligentsia, the plague of a moral amorality based on egoism and culminating in a form of self-deification. Dostoevsky thus uses the typical technique of his eschatological imagination to dramatize all the implicit dangers of the new radical ideology.