Crime and Punishment Read online

  Finally, Crime and Punishment would be imbued with ideas familiar to all readers of Dostoyevsky's post-Siberian journalism: educated Russia needed to return to its roots, to the soil, to the people. Only thus could the warring tribes of Westernizers and Slavophiles, elites and commoners, be joined; only thus would the country's ancient wounds be healed.

  At one level the novel we go on to read satisfies all of these conventional expectations. At another all of them are unsettled, if not thoroughly undermined. We read of murders committed by a handsome young man whom it would be difficult to identify precisely with the radicals of the 1860s (though some offended young readers contrived to do so) or with its unhandsome author. Disturbingly, this man is unsure that his gruesome acts were crimes at all; unsure at times that they even happened. For much of the book he even seems to forget one of his murders entirely. The reality of punishment also eludes him for an unreasonably long time, despite his best efforts. In his mind everything begins to merge: past and future, right and wrong, perpetrator and victim, crime and punishment. The opposition stated by the title, so familiar and in its way so comforting, begins to dissolve for the reader, too; a dark joke, perhaps - like Dostoyevsky's own 'execution'? - yet no less serious for that.

  Because it was written before The Idiot (1868), Demons (1871-2) and The Brothers Karamazov (1879-80), and because it is so often described as a version of the murder mystery or as a novel of religious conversion, Crime and Punishment has an entrenched reputation as the most straightforward of Dostoyevsky's great quartet of late novels. Yet its puzzles and ambiguities, when fully entered into, allow the reader to share the same vertiginous confusion experienced by its protagonist, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov. In the words of Virginia Woolf: 'Against our wills we are drawn in, whirled round, blinded, suffocated, and at the same time filled with a giddy rapture. Out of Shakespeare there is no more exciting reading.'1

  II The sources of the novel's complexity can be traced to the opening sentences of the first detailed record we have of Dostoyevsky's plans for the book. Originally envisioned as a long story, Crime and Punishment was proposed to Katkov in a letter from Wiesbaden, where the recently widowed, forty-three-year-old Dostoyevsky was enduring what his most comprehensive biographer, the late Joseph Frank, aptly calls a 'period of protracted mortification'.2 His first wife, with whom he had rarely been happy, had succumbed to tuberculosis the previous year. Mikhail - his brother and soulmate - had also died in 1864, leaving enormous debts. This moral and financial destitution was further compounded by Dostoyevsky's two uncontrollable manias: one for roulette, another (only marginally weaker) for his ex-mistress Apollinaria Suslova, a femme fatale eighteen years his junior. To top it all, he had recently signed a contract with the unscrupulous publisher Fyodor Stellovsky, requiring him, on pain of losing all rights to his own works, to complete an additional novel by 1 November 1866.

  Yet for all this pressure and turmoil, the proposal for a 'psychological record of a crime' which Dostoyevsky submitted to Katkov is notable for its clarity, confidence and precision. It begins: A contemporary setting, this current year [1865]. A young man, excluded from student status at university, of trading class, living in extreme poverty, succumbs, through frivolity and ricketiness of thought, to certain strange, 'half-baked' ideas in the air, and makes up his mind to get out of his foul situation in a single bound.3

  A great deal changed between the conception of this story in a German spa town and the eventual birth of the novel in Russia. It expanded not only in size, but also in perspective, which grew from the confessional mode (often favoured by Dostoyevsky in his fiction hitherto) to a third-person viewpoint of virtual omniscience and deliberate 'naivety', as Dostoyevsky himself described it in his notebooks. Very little changed, however, about the two sentences quoted above.4 They contain in embryo the strange mixture of ingredients that will determine Raskolnikov's half-real, half-theoretical drama: poverty and social exclusion on the one hand, and frivolous, 'half-baked' thoughts on the other. Only one element is missing - the element of psychogeography, as it would now be called. This is memorably supplied by St Petersburg, 'the most premeditated and abstract city in the world',5 built on a northern swamp by Western architects and Russian serfs. Here, too, we are in the realms of the semi-real and semi-theoretical, of rationalism and delusion - a tradition first developed in the St Petersburg texts of Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) and Gogol and now taken in new directions by their pupil, Dostoyevsky.

  As we first see him, cooped up in his garret and barely able to rise from his couch, Raskolnikov exists (or thinks he exists) only in his own mind. For much of the novel that will remain the case, a sign of his catastrophic isolation from mankind. Yet at the same time, through a chain of spatial metaphors, Dostoyevsky makes us see how deeply his mental disarray is tied to the city that surrounds him. Such metaphors are characteristic of the novel's curious artistic achievement: as subtle as the axe that Raskolnikov brings down on the head of his first victim, they are also freighted with the exceptional weight of association that makes us, as readers, share in the protagonist's experience of suffocation from causes both abstract and real. Thus, Raskolnikov's mental state finds its external embodiment in his low-ceilinged, cramped garret. This garret, in turn, is a 'cupboard', a 'ship's cabin', a 'cell', and even, as perceived by his mother, a 'coffin'.

  Raskolnikov's mind also stands in metaphorical relation to the broader topography in which his fate is to be played out: the overcrowded, shabby area of St Petersburg's Haymarket district, with its narrow, twisting streets, its fetid canal (or 'Ditch') and its filthy stairwells, drinking dens and connecting courtyards, through which tradesmen, girl-prostitutes and criminals 'hurry and scurry'. Only a stone's throw from the imperial majesty of the Neva River and Nevsky Prospect (associated with Pushkin and Gogol respectively), this is the shadow St Petersburg, airless and coffin-like in the height of summer, that Dostoyevsky made his own in both literature and life. In place of the sober 'military capital' evoked by Pushkin in The Bronze Horseman (1833) - with its 'severe, elegant appearance', its perfection of form - Dostoyevsky's Haymarket is drunken and unkempt. Here, Baltic Germans shout atrocious Russian, villagers pour in to sub-rent 'corners', and students and officers spout caricatured versions of Bentham and Mill. This, too, is a prison of sorts: not the prison of Pushkin's military autocracy, nor the bureaucratic nightmare of Gogol, but the false freedom of those torn from their roots, left with nothing but words and borrowed ideas.

  The opening pages acquaint us with these borrowed ideas in the recurring themes of Raskolnikov's wretched soliloquies: how to overcome his cowardice and indecisiveness, how to utter 'a new word', to take a 'new step'; above all, how to stop talking and start doing. Before us is a Hamlet without a clearly identifiable cause, a man-child who fears the frivolity of his own thoughts (mere 'toys'), which he is unable to arrange in satisfactory order. A penchant for self-contradiction lends a rebarbative texture to his ruminations, marked by the frequency of 'but' and 'still' and tapering off in rows of dots. It is the self-lacerating language familiar from the narrator of Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground (1864), but spoken now from beneath the eaves, rather than from beneath the floorboards. The masochism of the mouse-man of the Underground is replaced by Raskolnikov's 'Satanic pride'.6

  This pride, however, is knowingly misplaced. Raskolnikov's thoughts are evidently as stale to him as they would have been to contemporary readers, for whom the anxieties of the ineffectual intellectual had long been familiar from novels set on country estates among gifted young men too weak or too comfortable to address the malign status quo. By 1865 the idle moral torments of the 'superfluous men' of Ivan Goncharov (1812-91) and Ivan Turgenev (1818-83) had filtered down to the new breed of declasse, de-Christianized intellectuals, the most influential of whom, such as the socialist Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828-89) and the nihilist Dmitry Pisarev (1840-68), were inspiring a generation of revolutionaries with their heavily ideological fiction and criticism
. For both of these men, prison was more than a metaphor.

  In this context, Raskolnikov's vacillations and ruminations are decidedly old-school, and not infrequently derivative. Thus, Pisarev, in response to Bazarov, the anti-hero of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons (1862), had already set out a division between the conformist masses and the select few to whom all is permitted and who may be prevented only by 'personal taste' from murder and robbery.7 Now, three years later, this idea is plagiarized by Raskolnikov. Nor does Dostoyevsky want us to ignore, from the opening page, the belated echoes of the title of Chernyshevsky's hymn to the emancipatory power of 'rational egoism', the novel What Is to Be Done? (1863). Later, Raskolnikov will address the same question verbatim to his good angel, Sonya, and she, in turn, will pose it to him. Raskolnikov's answer will again be an act of plagiarism: we must break what must be broken - an almost direct quote from Pisarev, recycled many years later by Lenin. But Raskolnikov is an unlikely revolutionary. He is too much a loner to be the 'political conspirator' his friend Razumikhin mistakes him for, and he is certainly no leader of men; perhaps he is just a belated Romantic, framing his outdated, somewhat comical delusions in the language of his day?

  Dostoyevsky also introduces in the early chapters a further element latent in his pitch to Katkov: the impatience of his protagonist, who 'makes up his mind to get out of his foul situation in a single bound'. This is brought to the surface by the maid and country girl Nastasya, who, endowed with the intuition that Dostoyevsky often reserves for his less educated characters, divines that Raskolnikov is too lazy to work and wants his fortune 'right now'. Unimpressed by 'eggheads' who never do a stroke of work, she nevertheless feels a rough tenderness towards him as a human being, foreshadowing the much deeper feelings and intuition that will be shown by Sonya, who similarly opposes her own unconscious wisdom (Sonya: Sophia) to the sophistry of Raskolnikov.

  In the folkloric context that would have constituted Nastasya's own education, Raskolnikov might be cast as Ivan the Fool, who sits on the stove all day and waits for a pretty maiden and a crock of gold to fall into his lap. Raskolnikov, who also hails from the provinces, has himself kept one foot in the cuckoo land of magic tales, as an early, jarring reference to King Pea (Tsar Gorokh, associated with bygone happiness) makes plain. But St Petersburg, he will find, is no place for childish dreams.

  Nor is it a place for a 'player' (igrok), to give the literal translation of the Russian word for 'gambler'. For Raskolnikov - like Pushkin's Hermann in 'The Queen of Spades' (1834), and like Dostoyevsky himself - is obsessed by the mirage of a winning formula, and it should be no surprise that the short novel for which Dostoyevsky had to break off work on Crime and Punishment bears the title Igrok (The Gambler). Produced to fulfil his contract with Stellovsky, it was dictated to a young stenographer, Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina, and completed in less than four weeks.8 But if The Gambler is set in a Wiesbaden-esque 'Roulettenburg', where rich and poor throw caution to the winds, Crime and Punishment is set in St Petersburg, where numbers are calculated coldly and old pawnbrokers make sure to take their interest in advance. In such a city, murder, too, must be 'premeditated and abstract', and Raskolnikov's first crime, however risky, is both those things; he even counts the steps from his room to the home of his victim. Yet when the crime is actually set in motion he is barely aware of what he is doing: 'As if a scrap of his clothing had caught in the wheel of a machine that was now pulling him in.' This striking contradiction stands at the heart of the novel's innermost concerns, developed over the five hundred-odd pages that remain after Raskolnikov's murders.

  III The nature of these deepest concerns, however, is far from obvious. The unusual construction of Crime and Punishment, which gives so much weight to the aftermath of the crime (five parts out of six) and only an epilogue to the punishment itself, has led many to see the novel as less a whodunnit than a whydunnit. According to Joseph Frank: 'Crime and Punishment is focused on the solution of an enigma: the mystery of Raskolnikov's motivation.'9 We may wonder, though, whether this 'enigma' is not itself a decoy planted by this most devious of writers.

  Certainly, there is no shortage of motivating factors. Raskolnikov is desperately poor and desperately proud, unable to countenance his own humiliating situation; nor can he accept the humiliations endured and imposed by his mother and sister, who send him remittances and sacrifice everything to their 'priceless Rodya'. His intended victim, the withered pawnbroker, is a 'noxious louse' who does nothing but harm; killing her would yield a net gain for humankind (the utilitarian argument). He dreams of being a good man in the future, a benefactor of humanity (the philanthropic argument). He dreams of being a great man, one of the select few, like Lycurgus, Muhammad or Napoleon, 'criminals to a man', whose evil deeds in the present will be forgotten by grateful generations in the future (the heroic argument).

  All of these motivations are valid; but equally, none of them is. Raskolnikov's initial crime is both over-and under-motivated; mere 'casuistry', as he calls it himself. Not for nothing does he overhear another student telling an officer, over tea after a game of billiards, not only about the self-same pawnbroker, but about why her murder would be morally justified. The student expounds the logic of such a hypothetical crime persuasively and at great length, but the conversation ends in bathos: 'Here you are speaking and speechifying, but tell me: are you going to kill the old woman yourself, or aren't you?'

  'Of course not! I'm talking about justice . . . It's not about me . . .'

  'Well, as I see it, if you don't dare do it yourself, there's no justice to speak of! Let's have another game!'

  This coincidence - brazen in its technical 'naivety' even by Dostoyevsky's standards (unless, of course, Raskolnikov is imagining the entire conversation) - serves to make a powerful point, just before Raskolnikov finally turns words into deed. A 'why' can always be found for a crime; much more difficult to explain is the 'how': how an intention becomes reality, how theory is enfleshed, how abstract reasoning ends in a sensitive, compassionate man slipping in 'sticky, warm blood'. What state of mind is needed for this to happen?

  Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) responded to this quandary in his late essay 'Why Do People Stupefy Themselves?' (1890), where he sought to explain the state of mental automatism in which Raskolnikov carried out his crime. But Tolstoy, an aggressive teetotaller by this stage in his life, was surely exaggerating when he implies that the glass of beer Raskolnikov consumes at the end of the first chapter 'silences the voice of conscience'. Raskolnikov's utter passivity, which makes him succumb to 'ideas in the air' and to gamble everything on one desperate act, reaches back far further than the glass of beer, deeper even than the question of 'conscience'. Nor can it be reduced to the verdict of insanity, as Raskolnikov himself is aware (even when others are not). This passivity is a state of spiritual death and it is this that enables the crime. Dostoyevsky shows how a man who feels as if he is not alive and not truly capable of affecting reality will affect it for precisely that reason - and with catastrophic results. In his own estranged perception, not only is his sense of his own reality attenuated, so too is his sense of the reality of his fellow human beings, of the boundaries between separate lives. The eerie astonishment that overcomes Raskolnikov throughout his crime is the eeriness of a dead man meeting and muffling life.

  Where does this state of spiritual death come from, and why is this wretched man-child, Raskolnikov, buried alive in his youth? Here, perhaps, is the true 'enigma' to which Dostoyevsky applies himself in Crime and Punishment, both before and after the murders. In so doing, he scatters clues and red herrings to enlighten and confound us. Family pressures, societal pressures, illness, loss of faith: all of these possible explanations are deepened in the course of the novel, but also, at various times, ironized and presented as somehow dishonest. Psychoanalytic, religious, sociological and other interpretations all have much to offer us, but all are also limited, in the final analysis, by Dostoyevsky's strategy of ambivalence in both literature and
life. Here was a talented actor who could ask his interrogators what proof they had that he was on the side of the critic and not the author, when he read out Belinsky's letter to Gogol, and who infused the words of his fictional characters with an exceptional ambiguity of meaning and intonation, employing humour less to lighten their arguments than to complicate them. The regrettable division of much Dostoyevsky scholarship (Soviet and post-Soviet) into secular and religious camps ignores the fact that in his fiction Dostoyevsky always thought in terms of pro and contra - not just in his final masterpiece The Brothers Karamazov, with its legendary dramatization of atheism versus Orthodoxy, but equally in Crime and Punishment. The vector of Dostoyevsky's intentions - to judge from his notebooks, letters and (arguably) the final pages of this novel - may have tended towards faith and self-abnegation, but the reality of his artistic achievement is very different. Some will be moved by Sonya's selflessness, forgiveness and acceptance of God's world, whatever its injustices, but many readers will be even more struck by the defiance shown by another woman, Katerina Ivanovna - a drunkard's widow with three children on her hands, consumption and no money - towards the priest summoned against her will at her dying hour. The fire of self-abnegating faith and the fire of injured pride blaze with equal strength from the first chapter of the novel to the last, sometimes within the same hearts, and there is no guarantee which will burn the reader more fiercely.