Dostoevsky (103 page)

The notebooks thus contain a third possibility, which is attached to a near-definitive outline of the action concerning Raskolnikov during the first two-thirds of the novel. “A New Plan,” Dostoevsky announces. “The Story of a Criminal. Eight years before (in order to keep it completely at a distance)!” (7: 144). The phrase in parentheses indicates just how preoccupied Dostoevsky was with this issue of narrative distance, and how clearly he saw all of the problems involved. In this new plan, the narrator would be writing after the conclusion of his prison term (eight years), and what was probably the subtitle would indicate the profound moral alteration induced by the passage of time: the narrator now calls himself a criminal, no longer maintaining that the murder could not be considered a “crime” at all. The narrator is now so far removed from his previous self that it would require only a short step to shift from an I-narrator to the third person.

This narrative shift, however, did not occur all at once, and Dostoevsky debates the reasons for it in pages that, lying in close proximity to those just cited, were probably written at about the same time. “If it is to be a confession,” he muses, “then everything must be made overly clear to the
utter extreme
.” The recognition of this necessity leads Dostoevsky to some second thoughts: “If a confession, then in parts it will not be chaste (
tselomudrenno
) and it will be difficult to imagine why it was written.” The use of the term “chaste” (which can also be translated broadly as “proper”) in this context probably refers to the
question of why the narrator should have wished to engage in so painful an act of self-exposure. At this point, Dostoevsky comes to the conclusion that his narrative technique must be altered.
³

“But the subject is like this. The story from oneself [the author], and not from
him
[the character]” (7: 148–149). By “subject” Dostoevsky may be thinking about his conception of a main character who, after the crime, reveals unexpected aspects of himself—aspects of which, previously, he had not been fully aware. If, in a first-person narration, “everything must be made clear
to the utter extreme
” at every instant, then it would be difficult to obtain such an effect of self-surprise; at best, the revelations could be referred to and explained, but they could hardly be presented with full dramatic force. Taken in conjunction with the problem of justifying his narrative, such considerations would explain why Dostoevsky, despite his desperate economic straits, could not resist making a fresh start and transferring to a third-person narrator.

But there still remained the question of exactly what kind of narrator this should be. Contemporary narratologists have long known that authorial narrators are not just loose, amorphous presences who know how to spin a yarn; they are, rather, “implied authors,” with distinct profiles and attitudes that decisively shape the novelistic perspective. Dostoevsky was fully conscious of this important truth and tried to define exactly the stance that his authorial narrator would adopt. No such problem had arisen earlier because the narrator was the central character. Everything had been presented from his own point of view, which meant that, though guilty of a terrible crime, he would inevitably arouse a certain sympathy because of his altruistic impulses, his inner sufferings, and his final repentance. What sort of third-person narrator could play the same role in relation to the reader? As Dostoevsky pondered the choice between the first and third person, he wrote, “But from
the author
. Too much naïveté and frankness are needed.” Why this should be so is hardly self-evident; but the context suggests that Dostoevsky may still have been thinking of some sort of confessional novel, which, even if cast in the third person, would involve the total identification of the narrator with the main protagonist. Such an assumption would help explain the emphasis of the next sentence, which insists on the separation of the author from the character: “It is necessary to assume
as author someone omniscient and faultless
, who holds up to the view of all one of the members of the new generation” (7: 149).

The narrator will thus be undertaking a specific historical task: to exhibit for scrutiny an example of the very latest Russian type, the successor to Bazarov and the other “new men” of Russian literature. But Dostoevsky may have felt that such a narrator would be too coolly detached, too “omniscient and faultless” to serve his purposes (“faultless” translates the Russian
ne pogreshayushim
, which literally means “sinless” and can be taken to imply an accusatory or condemnatory posture). He therefore alters his narrator, in another notation, merely to a “sort of invisible and omniscient being, who doesn’t leave his hero for a moment, even with the words: ‘all that was done completely by chance’ ” (7: 146). By attaching the narrator as closely as possible to the protagonist’s point of view, Dostoevsky retains the advantages of I-narration, which automatically generates the effect of sympathy created by all inside views of a character; and he reminds himself to maintain such inside views, as far as possible, even when moving from the direct portrayal of consciousness into summary and report. At the same time, he retains the freedom of omniscience necessary to dramatize the process of Raskolnikov’s self-discovery, to reveal the character gradually, to comment on him from the outside when this becomes necessary, and to leave him entirely when the plot-action widens out.

This narrative technique fuses the narrator very closely with the consciousness and point of view of the central character as well as other important figures (though without, as Mikhail Bakhtin was inclined to maintain, eliminating him entirely as a controlling perspective).
⁴
Dostoevsky had used a similar narrative approach earlier in
The Double
, and such a fusion was by no means unprecedented in the history of the novel (in Jane Austen, among others). But in
Crime and Punishment
this identification begins to approximate, through Dostoevsky’s own use of time shifts of memory and his remarkable manipulation of temporal sequence, the experiments of Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and later stream-of-consciousness writers such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. Brilliantly original for its period, this technique gives us the gripping masterpiece we know, whose intricate construction and artistic sophistication can only cause us to wonder at the persistence of the legend that Dostoevsky was an untidy and negligent craftsman. Some light on this legend may be cast by the remark of E. M. de Vogüé, a novelist himself, who wrote of
Crime and Punishment
with some surprise in 1886 that “a word . . . one does not even notice, a small fact that takes up only a line, have their reverberations fifty pages later . . . [so that] the continuity becomes unintelligible if one skips a couple of pages.”
⁵
This acute observation, which expresses all the disarray of a late nineteenth-century reader accustomed
to the more orderly and linear types of expository narration, helps to account for the tenacity of such a critical misjudgment, but we have now begun to attain a more accurate appreciation of Dostoevsky’s pathbreaking originality. Even so,
Crime and Punishment
still has not yet been read with sufficiently close attention to the interweaving of those “reverberations” on whose connections its meaning depends.

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.

—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.