Crime and Punishment Page 3
There is, perhaps, only one chain of clues whose validity seems beyond question in helping us approach the enigma mentioned above: the determinative role of literature itself in shaping Raskolnikov's plight. Incongruous though it may sound in the context of a novel about murder, such a claim will come as less of a surprise to readers of Dostoyevsky's earlier works, which are filled with writers or would-be writers, or of his journalism of the early 1860s, with its recurrent concern with the effects of knizhnost' (or bookishness) on Russian society.10
IV
Though never, to my knowledge, presented as such, Crime and Punishment is one of the most self-reflexive classics of pre-Modernist European literature, continuing - and developing - a line that stretches from Cervantes's Don Quixote (1605) to Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (1823-31). It is a novel about words and texts as much as deeds and life, and it is correspondingly saturated with self-quotation and misquotation. The apparently simple line of Raskolnikov's destiny - crime, then punishment - is interwoven with hints about the complicit and complicating role of literature itself.
This self-reflexivity is not just a matter of the belatedness and imitativeness already discussed, the possibility that Raskolnikov, like Pushkin's Onegin, might be a 'parody' of earlier bookish types and ideas. Nor can it be fully contained by Mikhail Bakhtin's pioneering analysis of the 'polyphony' of Dostoyevsky's fiction, the interpenetration of characters' thoughts and speech with each other's words and consciousness, as constantly exhibited by Raskolnikov's monologues, which are, in fact, dialogues with the words of others.11 Rather, it is about the immersion of an entire society in texts and in literary dreams, and the baneful consequences for Raskolnikov in particular.
Raskolnikov has blood on his socks and ink on his fingers. He prepares for his crime not only by extensive reading, but also, we later learn, by attempting his first literary debut - a scholarly article with the same theme as the drama in which he plays the starring role. Published without his knowledge, this article is shown to him much later by his proud mother, whereupon, despite the grotesque incongruity with his current situation, he experiences 'that strange and caustically sweet sensation which every author feels on seeing himself published for the first time, especially at only twenty-three years of age'. Raskolnikov's achievements as an author may be modest, but his readerly habits are unshakeable. After committing his murders he visits a tavern to hunt through a pile of recent newspapers for textual evidence of his crime, which itself evokes dozens of other crimes from Russia and Europe widely reported in the Russian press in the 1860s - and especially in Dostoyevsky's own journal Time (Vremya).12 The trail of his crime is not only physical, but also (and much more elusively) textual, keeping Dostoyevsky scholars busy for many decades to come.
Raskolnikov is himself a textual sleuth, an inveterate literary critic. Before and after his crime he shows an uncommon analytical interest in written communications, which are shared with the reader in their entirety: a ten-page letter from his mother, a much curter missive from his sister's odious suitor. He reads between the lines (thereby encouraging us, as readers, to do the same) and judges character by style, surprising those around him by picking on apparently trivial choices of words and phrase at moments when far weightier issues seem to be at stake. For Raskolnikov, life is a text to be understood, and even, at times, a text that has already been written. At the novel's end he imagines what the future has in store for him and asks himself, 'So why live? Why? Why am I going there now, when I know myself that this is exactly how it will be, as it is writ?'
In his bookishness, as in his other characteristics, Raskolnikov is the type of eccentric who, at the deepest level, is most exemplary of his society (a paradox Dostoyevsky explicitly formulated in his prologue to his last novel, The Brothers Karamazov). Subtly, insistently, we are encouraged to see that Raskolnikov's addiction to the written word is a symptom of a general, albeit less pathological condition that eddies out from the hero to encompass his family and the country at large. One might not want to make too much of the fact that Raskolnikov's patronymic - Romanovich - etymologically suggests not just 'son of Roman' (a perfectly common name), but also 'son of the novel', were it not for Raskolnikov's mother telling us that his father 'when he was still alive, twice tried sending work to the journals: first some poems (I still have the notebook - I'll show it to you one day), then a whole novella (I begged him to let me copy it out for him), and you should have seen how we prayed for them to be accepted . . . They weren't!'
Frustrated literary ambition is a powerful motif in Crime and Punishment, displayed in one form or another by several characters across society, especially Raskolnikov's adversaries in the police and civil service. In particular, the investigator Porfiry Petrovich, who engages Raskolnikov in repeated, chapter-long verbal jousts, is a literary artist and actor manque, who, like Dostoyevsky himself, reveres the comic genius of Gogol, citing liberally from his works. In Porfiry's extraordinary rhetoric we see the interweaving of literary and legal discourse that was such a feature of the Russian judicial system before and after the legal reforms of 1864, and which Dostoyevsky criticized in his journalism for distracting from the true purpose of the law: to discover the truth.13 A graduate from the prestigious Imperial School of Jurisprudence, which produced an unusual quantity of eminent writers as well as lawyers, Porfiry imbues his words with Gogolian slipperiness.14
The saturation of Russian society in texts, furthermore, not only relates to modern, secular literature. Sonya used to meet with one of Raskolnikov's victims to read from the Bible together, and later she will read out a passage to the murderer himself about the raising of Lazarus. Indeed, in Crime and Punishment all believers are fervent readers. Mikolka, the country lad who first confesses to Raskolnikov's crime, 'kept reading the old, "true" books and read himself silly'. The fact that Mikolka is introduced by Porfiry to Raskolnikov as a raskolnik - an adherent of the 'Old Belief', which broke off from the official Orthodox Church in the seventeenth century - marks him out as one of the protagonist's many alter egos in the novel, just as his reading habits suggest that Raskolnikov, too, 'read himself silly'. This connection is further enriched if we bear in mind that the raskolniki were a prime target of the propaganda envisioned by the (proto-Communist) revolutionary faction into which Dostoyevsky himself was drawn in the late 1840s. The revolution this secret society had in mind was decidedly textual. With the aid of an illegal hand press, assembled shortly before the arrest of the participants in the group, they set about composing revolutionary texts in the language and stylistic register (including the use of Old Church Slavonic) that serfs and 'particularly, perhaps, the raskolniki' would understand.15
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 Rasko
lnikov'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.
10. 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.
11. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, translated and edited by Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
12. 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.