Dostoevsky (106 page)

At this juncture, there is a hiatus of three days, during which Raskolnikov lies in a semiconscious delirium, only confusedly aware of his surroundings and awakening once the peak of his illness has passed. The climax of this sequence is the visit of Peter Petrovich Luzhin—the fiancé whom Dunya had accepted only after a sleepless night spent praying on her knees fervently before an icon—to Raskolnikov’s dingy and squalid room. Luzhin himself is a self-made man, a lawyer with a high rank in the Civil Service, filled with an overwhelming sense of his own importance. He is also a petty tyrant who looks forward to bending the proud Dunya to his will. Luzhin nonetheless likes to consider himself as “sharing the convictions of the younger generation” (6: 31). Raskolnikov thus finds himself confronted with someone who is not only personally hateful but who also reveals the moral dubiousness of exactly the same Utilitarian logic to which he had become so ruinously committed.

The elegantly attired Luzhin tries to impress the ragged but insouciant Razumikhin, distressingly unawed by the visitor’s imposing hauteur, by declaring his sympathy with “the younger generation” and his approval of “the new, valuable ideas . . . circulating instead of the old dreamy and bookish ones.” Progress, he declares sententiously, is being made “in the name of science and economic truth.” For example, in the past the ideal of “love thy neighbor” had been accepted, and the chief result was that “it came to tearing my coat in half to share with my neighbor and we both were left half-naked.” Now, on the contrary, science had shown that “everything in the world rests on self-interest,” and “therefore in acquiring wealth solely and exclusively for myself, I am acquiring, so to speak, for all, and helping to bring to pass my neighbor’s getting a little more than a coat; and that not from private, isolated liberality, but as a consequence of the general advance” (6: 115–116). One understands why the radicals resented seeing their ideas placed in the mouth of so unsavory a character as Luzhin, but
Dostoevsky accurately captures their reliance on Utilitarian egoism, their aversion to private charity (as demeaning to the receiver), and their rejection of the Christian morality of love and self-sacrifice (in theory if not in practice). Luzhin is so evidently hypocritical in pretending to be concerned about “my neighbor” that Raskolnikov is forced to confront the possibility that his own cherished beliefs could also have concealed such purely self-serving ends.

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 repellent, 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).