Crime and Punishment (4 page)

As Porfiry goes on to say however:

‘Mikolka's not our man! What we've got here, sir, is a fantastical, dark deed, a modern deed, a deed of our time, when the heart of man has clouded over; when there's talk of “renewal” through bloodshed; when people preach about anything and everything from a position of comfort. What we have here are bookish dreams, sir, a heart stirred up by theories [...]'

The investigation leads (as the reader knows from the start) straight back to Raskolnikov, the modern man, who stands, from our twenty-first-century perspective, like a bridge between the advent of Russian Christianity a thousand years before, bringing with it books and an alphabet, and the no-less literary zeal of Russian Communism. ‘Bookish dreams' bore terrible fruit in Soviet Russia, whose leaders (Lenin, Stalin, Brezhnev) doubled as prolific authors and fastidious literary critics, and whose drastic changes in policy could be ‘justified' by reference to one or another line in one or another of the great books in the Chernyshevskian-Marxist-Leninist canon. As the one-time Bolshevik Victor Serge wrote in Moscow in
1933
, ‘No real intellectual inquiry is permitted in any sphere. Everything is reduced to a casuistry nourished on quotations.'
16

Demons
is usually seen as Dostoyevsky's great prophetic novel, but
Crime and Punishment
, written half a dozen years earlier, is no less so. Analysing the sealed space of Raskolnikov's mind, Dostoyevsky shows how theory estranges life, and casuistry – wisdom; how reality becomes a game, at once trivial and fatal, in the mind of the reader (writer, artist), the domain of a self-appointed king. In this space the invisible links that hold both the individual psyche and communal life in some sort of balance dissolve. Not just the arguably relative notions of good and evil, but more seemingly fixed dichotomies collapse: here, mere words become murderous deeds, almost without the thinker's awareness; an aesthete becomes a ‘louse'; subject becomes object. ‘It was myself I killed,' Raskolnikov later reflects. His murders are at once a suicide, his crime is his punishment. The word ‘Raskolnikov' may suggest schism (
raskol
), but the point about his modernity, his novelty, is not that he is divided – in Dostoyevsky's world everyone is divided – but that he divides himself, taking an axe to his own humanity.

V

And yet, although he commits suicide of the spirit, Raskolnikov does not commit suicide of the body; like Lazarus, he is given – or does he find? – new life. In a characteristic move that would be repeated in
The Brothers Karamazov
, Dostoyevsky argues against his novel's own pessimism, writing a book against bookishness and setting ‘living life' against the coffin-life of Raskolnikov.
17
This second narrative is the novel that eventually grew from the story pitched to Katkov. It is a journey that will be negotiated not through texts, but through people – the same people whose company Raskolnikov wants to avoid from the opening page. In them, opposites do not collapse, but are held in tension, as the novel's gallery of physical and psychological portraits, riven with contradiction, often attests.

In these encounters the worlds of theory and life finally intersect, and their meeting place is the workshop of human intentions. Dostoyevsky, indeed, is the great novelist of intentions. His characters are always defined, to an unusual degree, by the futures that they, like authors, construct for themselves, whether secretly or in public, and which, like Don Quixote, they try to coax into being through language. Now, on his second journey, Raskolnikov is brought face to face with the intentions (good, evil or confused) of other living beings, who represent not so much doubles for him, as is so often stated, but possibilities: different paths between which he must choose.

It is at this intersection that the universal aspect of Raskolnikov's fate emerges most forcefully, for it is only among people that his analysis of his own fateful intentions attains a degree of clarity and honesty. He tells Sonya:

‘Try to understand: taking that same road again, I might never have repeated the murder. There was something else I needed to find out then, something else was nudging me along: what I needed to find out, and find out quickly, was whether I was a louse, like everyone else, or a human being? Could I take that step or couldn't I? Would I dare [...]?'

To the end, Raskolnikov's ‘Satanic pride' remains with him, but the reader can strip away the rhetoric and see that his fundamental motivation may have been little more than that of a child all along: could he ‘dare'? As Raskolnikov himself is painfully aware, this would make a mockery of any claims to lofty morality, but it also renders his story universal: a story of the passage from childhood to maturity. Etymologically, a crime in Russian is a ‘stepping-over' (
pre-stuplenie
), a transgression. To feel alive and free, every person must ‘step over' their conscience and the limits imposed on them by themselves and by others. In this sense, everyone has their crime to commit; or, as a certain cynic tells Raskolnikov, everyone has their ‘steps to take'. Punishment, too, can be measured in steps – all the way to Siberia – but it must be imposed by another to be meaningful. Here, as throughout the novel, themes, motifs and verbal echoes (whether to do with walking, with air or fire) coincide with exceptional force and complexity.

It is at this intersection, too, that autobiographical undercurrents can, if we so wish, be identified. If all people are determined by their plans for the future, then how did Dostoyevsky's own theoretical plans as a youthful revolutionary differ from Raskolnikov's? Were not the ‘criminal intentions to overthrow the existing state order in Russia' with which he and his associates were charged (not without foundation) potentially even more murderous than the realized intentions of Raskolnikov?

Speculation, however, is all we have. The elusiveness that Dostoyevsky cultivated in his fiction was replicated in his life and literary persona. He left no private diaries, no memoirs, no autobiography. Instead he gave us a very public
Diary of a Writer
, in which he appears before his readers wearing a variety of masks (notably that of the ‘Paradoxicalist'); letters, in which he frequently declares the impossibility of expressing his true self (his correspondence with his brother Mikhail is an important exception); and notebooks, in which his plots branch off along endless alternative paths. The author's inner life, meanwhile, largely escapes us. We know the facts but not the person, and this is in tune with Dostoyevsky's own lifelong polemic with modernity's exaggeration of the value of mere data. Whatever ‘key fact' we take from his life proves – as Porfiry likes to say – ‘double-edged' in its potential meaning. Even the meaning of Dostoyevsky's suffering eludes us. We might say that the sadistic charade before the firing squad on Semyonovsky Square traumatized the author for life, or we might say, with William Empson, that ‘It was a reprieve / Made Dostoevsky talk out queer and clear.'
18
We might say that four years of forced labour in Siberia left him old before his time and disabused him about human nature, or we might say that it saved him as a writer and a man, removing him from the hothouse of St Petersburg literary society in which he was wilting and supplying him with a new-found maturity, as well as the trove of fresh material, linguistic and human, that he acquired by observing his fellow ‘common' convicts – much of which resurfaces in the present novel. We can argue that his frequent and violent attacks of epilepsy were a curse, inflicting terror, near-madness and pain, or we can argue (following the late J. L. Rice) that they were a creative tonic.
19

It is apt that some of the most interesting recent books on Dostoyevsky have been works of fiction. The ‘master', one suspects, might well have approved of J. M. Coetzee's
Master of Petersburg
(
1994
), in which an invented plot sets off a compelling portrait of Dostoyevsky surrounded and oppressed by the atmosphere of his own novels. He himself needed invention as a path to understanding. Indeed, he appeared to need it to the same extent that his great rival Tolstoy – whose
War and Peace
(
1865–9
) was published at the same time as
Crime and Punishment
, and in the very same journal – grew to abhor it. The two works meet in their dethronement of the ‘great man' theory of history, the ‘Napoleon complex', but have little else in common. Tolstoy needed certainty and truth, Dostoyevsky required ‘lies': that vibrant stream of invention in relation to the past, present and future that, as channelled through the rogue Masloboyev in
The Insulted and the Injured
(
1861
), makes even his weakest novel memorable. Perhaps, like Razumikhin, Dostoyevsky thought that ‘fibbing' would bring him to the truth, or at least to a more complete picture of the truth than that provided by his tendentious writing in non-fictional genres.

Certainly, in the much-disputed epilogue to
Crime and Punishment
the ‘truth' remains elusive. Some will conclude that Raskolnikov rediscovers himself in his rediscovery of his native land and native people; others will cite his own astonishment at ‘the dreadful, unbridgeable gulf that lay between him and all these commoners' and his own enduring confusion about his ‘crime'. Some, following one of Dostoyevsky's sharpest critics and biographers, Konstantin Mochulsky, have read the epilogue as a ‘pious lie' – an unconvincing conversion to Christianity; others remain unpersuaded that any conversion takes place at all. What is beyond dispute is that these final pages, filled with a restrained joy, show Dostoyevsky at his most tender and his writing at its most delicate. Here, one would like to think, the autobiographical subtext is far from arbitrary. For as he wrote these pages Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky was himself setting out on a new path, taking with him a new wife – his stenographer, Anna Grigoryevna – and, no doubt, the very best intentions.

NOTES

1
.
From Woolf's essay ‘The Russian Point of View' in
The Common Reader
(
1925
). The quotation describes the experience of reading Dostoyevsky in general, but is especially appropriate to
Crime and Punishment
.

2
.
Joseph Frank,
Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time
(Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2010
), p.
460
.

3
.
My translation from F. M. Dostoyevsky,
Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh
(Leningrad: Nauka,
1972–
90
), vol.
28
.
2
, p.
136
.

4
.
The one exception is the protagonist's class of origin, which seems closer to impoverished gentry than trade, but which is in any case left strikingly vague – the better to emphasize his status as a ‘former student'.

5
.
As described by the narrator of Dostoyevsky's
Notes from Underground
(
1864
).

6
.
The reference to Raskolnikov's ‘Satanic pride' comes from Dostoyevsky's notebooks; Dostoyevsky,
Polnoe sobranie sochinenii
, vol.
7
, p.
149
.

7
.
See Derek Offord's article ‘
Crime and Punishment
and Contemporary Radical Thought', reprinted in
Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment: A Casebook
, ed. Richard Peace (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2006
), pp.
119–
48
.

8
.
The Soviet-era film
Twenty-Six Days in the Life of Dostoyevsky
(
Dvadtsat' shest' dnei iz zhizni Dostoevskogo
,
1980
) captures all the drama of that month – October
1866
.

9
.
Frank,
Dostoyevsky: A Writer in His Time
, p.
484
.

1
0
.
This latter topic sparks some fascinating reflections on Dostoyevsky in Lesley Chamberlain's
Motherland: A Philosophical History of Russia
(London: Atlantic,
2004
), pp.
173–
82
.

1
1
.
Mikhail Bakhtin,
Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics
, translated and edited by Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1984
).

1
2
.
On Raskolnikov as ‘media man' and the ‘subsumption of the social world by the discursive reality of the press', see Konstantine Klioutchkine, ‘The Rise of
Crime and Punishment
from the Air of the Media',
Slavic Review
, vol.
61
, no.
1
(Spring,
2002
), pp.
88–
108
. I would argue that in
Crime and Punishment
the social world is subsumed not only by the press, however, but by literature more broadly.

1
3
.
The literariness of Russian legal culture in this period has been superbly analysed by Kathleen Parthé in ‘Who Speaks the Truth? Writers vs Lawyers',
Universals and Contrasts
(The Journal of the
NY –
St Petersburg Institute of Linguistics, Cognition and Culture), vol.
1
, no.
1
(Spring,
2012
), pp.
155–
71
. See also Gary Rosenshield,
Western Law, Russian Justice: Dostoevsky, the Jury Trial, and the Law
(Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press,
2005
).