The Anna Karenina Fix

by Viv Groskop

  St Petersburg itself also had a quality about it that could only be termed ‘unexpectable’ and, occasionally, sinister. You absorbed it and just got used to it. No one has channelled this feeling of menace and magic better than Dostoevsky, who used the city as a backdrop for the ideas that prefigured all the twentieth-century psychological thinking about the unconscious and the subconscious. There are no bears in the front seats of Ladas in his work, but there are lots of weird things in places where they shouldn’t be and lots of people deluding themselves about things that are never going to happen. Dostoevsky is all about the sort of people who are living as clowns yet are adamant that they are not clowns. And Crime and Punishment’s hero Raskolnikov is the really great example of the ultimate unresolved conflict. He is not in denial about being a clown. He is in denial about being a pathetic and weak person who can’t and won’t face up to his responsibilities. He’s a warning: if you don’t face your demons, you will end up destroying yourself, and maybe even others. Where Eugene Onegin suffers because he is too strong to admit his own weaknesses, Raskolnikov suffers because he overcompensates for his feelings of inadequacy. Decades before anyone had defined the psychological term ‘acting out’ (displaying outwardly destructive behaviour instead of facing up to your difficult feelings), Raskolnikov was the poster boy for it.

  Dostoevsky began work on Crime and Punishment in 1865, and the novel is infused with the political questions of the time. Or, rather, the only ones that mattered to Dostoevsky, such as ‘Why is everyone becoming such a godless heathen?’ Dostoevsky, as well as being an inveterate gambler and an incredibly psychologically complex and contradictory person (which is what I like about him), was a Slavophile and a religious man. He was deeply conservative. The character of Raskolnikov represents a warning about atheism and symbolizes Dostoevsky’s fear that Russia is about to be overrun with rationalists and nihilists (who are against God) and utopian socialists (an ideology which he sees as selfish and naive). Raskolnikov’s tortured story is a call for Russia to stay true to its roots and to believe in God and the essential goodness of the Slavophile path.

  For Dostoevsky, the freedom that Raskolnikov represents is dangerous and egotistical. While you might disagree with almost all Dostoevsky’s views above, they are understandable. They are very similar to the views of your average reactionary: ‘We don’t want things to change, they’re fine as they are and anyone who thinks that they have a better way of making life fairer is mad.’ I disagree. But I get it.

  In the novel, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov (both an excellent name and a lovely patronymic) is a former student seeking a path in life. He is good-looking and arrogant. He has delusions of grandeur and dreams of achieving something amazing that will transform the fortunes of his family. His dreams are not selfless, though. What he really wants is to achieve greatness. According to Raskolnikov, boring, normal people ‘preserve the world and increase and multiply, where extraordinary people move the world and guide it to its goal’. I cannot help thinking that, if Raskolnikov had had Twitter, he would not have needed to kill anyone. He could have just lived out all his grandiose fantasies on there, tapping and trolling away. Why overcome inner conflict when you can harass other people with annoying hashtags? And it’s so much less effort than tracking down moneylenders to kill.

  Instead, Raskolnikov has to face up to his problems. Supposedly. His mother and his unmarried sister are living in precarious circumstances. He wants to be a man and ‘save’ them. It’s a letter from his mother that is the catalyst for his crime – or, at least, the excuse. Quite how Dostoevsky achieves the trick of making it seem completely normal that Raskolnikov decides to solve all his problems by killing the old woman moneylender … Well, this is the really impressive thing about Crime and Punishment. Because this is indeed the trick the author achieves. Raskolnikov has a sort of ‘Napoleon’ syndrome, as it is described in the novel. He believes that he is above the normal laws of society and that he is capable of great deeds. He decides to commit the crime to prove it.

  Nietzsche was only eleven when Dostoevsky was creating Raskolnikov, but the character embodies many of the philosopher’s later ideas about the Übermensch (the man who believes he is above the common herd and not subject to normal ideas of morality). Dostoevsky also uses Raskolnikov to demonstrate how selfish and sick people become when they turn away from God. They begin to believe they can achieve anything and that it’s all in their hands; no need to wait for any guidance from God. Weirdly, this is not dissimilar to some of the ideas expressed by the self-actualization movement so popular today. (Not that I’m suggesting self-help books encourage you to kill anyone, but they do encourage you to believe that you are capable of great things, which is not such a long way away from Raskolnikov’s position.) I think Dostoevsky would not have enjoyed the current godless vogue for self-help books, and he would have absolutely hated R. Kelly’s hit single ‘I Believe I Can Fly’. Believing he could touch the sky, believing that he could soar and go running through that open door … all that was Raskolnikov’s problem. And it does not work out well for him.

  Tortured on the one hand by the idea that he might kill the old lady and turn out to feel bad about it (something he hopes won’t happen but he nonetheless dreads) and on the other by the idea that he might not be able to kill her and then feel like a failure (something he feels like already and can’t bear), Raskolnikov roams the streets of St Petersburg. He ends up at the old lady’s house. He kills her, and he also kills her half-sister, who has witnessed the crime. He is in such a state afterwards (not being much of an Übermensch, after all), however, that he only manages to steal a few bits and bobs. So he kills two people for nothing. The rest of the novel is about his path to self-loathing, confession and, finally, redemption.

  There’s a flaw here for me. It would have been a very different novel if Raskolnikov had ‘successfully’ murdered the old lady and ‘achieved’ something, instead of botching the job somewhat. He could have paid off his family’s debts, helped his sister avoid marrying a series of lecherous old gits who were queuing up for her and set himself up in life in some way. Of course, at some point, he would start to feel bad. Maybe Dostoevsky was too impatient. He is eager to punish Raskolnikov before he has even committed the crime. As far as Dostoevsky is concerned, Raskolnikov should never have wanted to kill the old lady in the first place. In reality, the novel succeeds because Dostoevsky has more in common with Raskolnikov than he cares to admit. He knows what it is like to be desperate for money. (Dostoevsky died owing money, despite his immense fame and success by that point.) He knows what it is like to feel so angry with someone that you want to kill them (I think he probably would have killed Turgenev, given half a chance). He is too close to Raskolnikov for comfort. So perhaps Dostoevsky was afraid to make Raskolnikov’s crime a success, in case it made explicit his own not so secret desire for wealth, revenge and success. (If we are talking self-awareness, Dostoevsky’s was buried under many, many layers of self-loathing. No one was more plagued by inner conflict.)

  There’s a parallel with Tolstoy’s relationship to Anna Karenina here, and the trouble with what our subconscious desires. Tolstoy wanted to use Anna consciously to demonstrate an immorality that should be punished. But this plan doesn’t entirely work out because the author subconsciously sympathizes with her too much. Similarly, Dostoevsky wants to use Raskolnikov as an example of a despicable human being. And yet Dostoevsky gets right under the character’s skin, almost as if he knows what it’s like to be inside Raskolnikov’s head. Both novels work because they are fiendishly complex, not least because both authors appear to be protesting just a little bit too much. Perhaps more disturbing than Raskolnikov’s apparent weirdness is how ordinary he is. Far from being the outsider oddball Dostoevsky might have intended, Raskolnikov is painfully similar to us. He gets tired. He gets frustrated. He gets hungry. He even has some means of controlling his rage: he only has to eat some food to calm his mania. ‘One glass of beer and a
rusk and my mind grows keen, my thoughts clear, my resolution firm. Bah, how paltry it all is.’ He likes having vodka and a pasty and has to have a lie-down afterwards. Poor lamb, he’s not murderous, he’s just tired and hungry.

  Like Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment was inspired by a real-life story. Where Tolstoy had Anna of All the Pies, Dostoevsky had Gerasim Chistov. In Moscow in August 1865, Chistov, a merchant’s son who belonged to the religious denomination known as the Old Belief, murdered two elderly women while robbing their mistress. The time of day was the same as Raskolnikov’s crime, and Chistov also used an axe. Just as Tolstoy borrowed parts of the pie-eater’s name for his fictional version, so Dostoevsky converted the word for ‘Old Believer’ – raskolnik – into the surname of his murderer. He started work on the novel later that month.

  First and foremost, Dostoevsky intended the book as an attack against nihilism. As the historian Ronald Hingley writes, Dostoevsky had spent a long time brooding on his ideas about the path of Russia. These ideas were not always necessarily very sensible. Hingley is a sympathetic and loving biographer who is very much on the side of his subject. He describes Dostoevsky as ‘this neurotic, hypersensitive, habitually over-reacting, never-relaxing man’. If this is what his friends say, I’d hate to hear from his enemies.

  Before he decided to become a writer, Dostoevsky had lived a peculiar life. He was from a fairly well-off family descended from Lithuanian nobles. (Ironically, in view of the fact that he would become so obsessed with being Russian. Ah, how I sympathize with that fixation.) His father was a military doctor who struggled to keep up the appearance of being middle class. The family had a country estate but could barely afford to maintain it. The estate had a hundred serfs and his father had a hereditary title. But, still, later in life, Dostoevsky always had a chip on his shoulder about being from a ‘lesser’ class, compared to Tolstoy and Turgenev. I think it’s also safe to assume that his parents didn’t always get on that well, as his mother once wrote a letter to his father, assuring her husband that he was the father of her latest child: ‘I swear to you that my present pregnancy is the seventh and firmest bond in our love for each other. My love for you is pure, holy, chaste and passionate, and has never swerved since the day of our marriage.’ That is a pretty extraordinary thing to write to the man by whom you have already borne six children.

  Dostoevsky’s father was apparently a colourful character, not much loved by the serfs on his estate. Later, Dostoevsky’s daughter was to claim that her grandfather had been murdered by his serfs who had ‘smothered him with the cushions of his own carriage’. There are many competing stories like this about his death: that he was ‘forcibly choked with vodka’; that he was ‘lynched by a dozen peasants’; and that he was ‘smothered while his sexual organs were crushed between stones’. (Good grief. A crime for which, surely, there’s no sufficient punishment. Ouch.) None of these accounts comes from Dostoevsky himself, who was eighteen at the time of his father’s death, but presumably, these are rumours he would have known about. And they already sound like something out of his novels. They make Raskolnikov’s bungled axe attack sound kind.

  At the age of sixteen, Dostoevsky was sent to the army’s Chief Engineering Academy, an experience which he considered to have ruined his life. He was held back a year for ‘incompetent drill’, fuelling his paranoia and his obsession with the fact that he was doomed to occupy an inferior status compared to others. This became increasingly channelled into a sort of xenophobia. Before he was twenty, he was already known for expressing ‘an intense and uncontrollable loathing for non-Russians in general’. Dostoevsky had to plead with his flatmate ‘never again to introduce him to foreigners’: ‘If I don’t watch out, they’ll marry me to a Frenchwoman, and then it will be goodbye once and for all to Russian literature.’ Luckily for Frenchwomen everywhere, Dostoevsky was known for fainting or having a fit every time he met a beautiful woman, so they were at little risk of falling prey to his ‘charms’.

  He convinced himself, meanwhile, that writing would be his chosen profession. His first novel, Poor Folk, was an immediate success, admitting him to St Petersburg’s literary circles, where he was hailed as ‘a new Gogol’. This was a poisoned chalice for Dostoevsky, though, who at first enjoyed the attention but soon became apt to clash with anyone who argued with him, which was, essentially, everyone. His next novel was The Double. This is an extraordinary book about a government clerk called Golyadkin who encounters a man who is his doppelgänger. At first, they become friends, but then the double starts taking over his life. It’s clearly a portrait of mental disintegration. It had mixed reviews. And the more Dostoevsky’s writings became known, the more he became a subject of ridicule, some of which was fuelled by Turgenev, sowing the seeds of their later feud abroad.

  Rude verses appeared, claiming that Dostoevsky was eaten up with envy for Gogol. He quickly established a reputation as a rather freakish character, known for his tics: twitching and tweaking his beard, biting his moustache or swearing. There are various academic discussions about whether this was epilepsy, Tourette’s or St Vitus’ Dance, and Freud himself later wrote his own casebook on Dostoevsky. He clearly had epileptic seizures and wrote to his brother of suffering ‘all kinds of attacks’. Freud decided it was all in the writer’s mind, brought on as a reaction to the death of his father.

  I love the darkness and the black humour of Dostoevsky’s work, but it’s almost painful to read if you know anything about the writer’s life. Although his fiction is not autobiographical, his mental torment is in every character. I cannot bear to think how much he must have suffered in his strange life. Just as he became known as a writer, he was arrested for political conspiracy. At that time, aged twenty-eight, he faced a mock execution in front of a firing squad at which each of the victims was dressed in a white shroud with long sleeves and a hood. To make matters worse, the man reading out the death sentence had a stutter. At the last minute, the Tsar intervened and Dostoevsky was sent to Siberia for four years instead. And, remember, all this is happening to someone who already suffered from severe epilepsy and was, arguably, mentally unstable or, at the very least, sensitive and fragile.

  Dostoevsky meant to show through Raskolnikov that Russia was sick and needed to return to her roots. His early writings about his country give a foretaste of what was to come. After serving four years in the Siberian prison and a fair amount of time in the army (which he hated), he married an irritable woman who could barely tolerate his epilepsy. He later wrote of her, ‘She and I were decidedly unhappy together owing to her weird, pernickety and pathologically fantastic character.’

  Clearly, this would not put you in a good mood. And already Dostoevsky was a very angry young man. When he first settled in St Petersburg, he wrote some articles for a magazine he co-founded with his brother. They were ultra-nationalist in tone and content. Russians never take offence, as other peoples do, he wrote. Russians can speak all languages. And they never boast, he added. (I can testify that none of these things is true of Russians, or indeed of any nationality. Possibly, they may be true of a species on Star Trek. But the bit about never getting offended is especially untrue of Russians. If experience has taught me anything, it’s that Russians love to get offended. But good on Dostoevsky for being a patriot, I guess.) There is something sad about Dostoevsky’s desperate protestations here, that reminds me of my own crazed insistence that I must force myself to speak poetry like Akhmatova and swear off speaking English for months at a time in order to feel ‘more authentically Russian’. These are the insistences of a person who is not facing up to inner conflict. Dostoevsky had Tatar, Lithuanian, Belorussian and Polish blood but considered himself to be ‘a Russian of the Russians’. See what I mean about delusional clowns not wanting to be the thing they really are?

  All the accounts of Dostoevsky’s life feature him doing things that make you think, ‘Oh, Fedya, what have you done now?’ (Diminutive of Fyodor. Tick.) This is a man who wrote a novel entit
led The Idiot and yet was constantly, unintentionally, doing idiotic things which caused him harm. He may have loved Russia, but he didn’t love many of the Russians he met while in Western Europe. On encountering Herzen, he wrote to a friend: ‘… our intellectuals. What wretched insignificant scum puffed up with vanity! What shit!’ On a visit to London, he is disgusted by the gin, the soot and the prostitutes. He particularly hated Crystal Palace. He left, appalled, for Paris, which he hated even more: ‘By God, the French do make me sick.’ I think he did derive some joy from his love of women, although positive emotions were evidently difficult for him. After his wedding to his first wife, he suffered epileptic fits for four days. His second wife, Anna Grigorievna Snitkina, was, however, a godsend. She was introduced to him when she became stenographer for his novel The Gambler. On their first meeting she described him as ‘weird, shattered, battered, exhausted, sick’ and wearing a stained jacket. (Hmm. The ideal blind date.) Thanks to her shorthand, the novel was written in twenty-six days. On the day the book was finished, she arrived wearing ‘a gown of lilac silk’ which he found so charming it made him blush. They married three months later.