Crime and Punishment Read online

  13. The literariness of Russian legal culture in this period has been superbly analysed by Kathleen Parthe 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).

  14. This matches the ambivalence of Porfiry's own position on the cusp of the reforms that were intended to create an independent judiciary. Educated under the old system, when (in the words of the historian Richard Pipes) 'justice was a branch of the administration', he will stay on with a new title under the new dispensation, owing to a lack of well-qualified new recruits - a suitable fate for a born actor like Porfiry, as well as an ironic comment on the 'reforms' themselves.

  15. See Frank, pp. 151—4.

  16. Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary (New York: New York Review of Books, 2012), p. 327.

  17. The phrase 'living life' is taken from Dostoyevsky's later novel, The Adolescent, but has a longer history in Russian literature.

  18. From 'Success' in William Empson, The Complete Poems (London: Penguin Classics, 2001), p. 80.

  19. J. L. Rice, Who Was Dostoevsky? (Oakland, California: Berkeley Slavic Specialties, 2011), pp. 73—104, and the same author's Dostoevsky and the Healing Art (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Ardis, 1985).

  Further Reading

  Dostoyevsky's own writings are the best place to start. Among the works that cast most light on Crime and Punishment are the early novella The Double (1846, but revised in the mid-1860s), Notes from the Dead House (1860-2), and Notes from Underground (1864). See, too, The Notebooks for Crime and Punishment, translated and edited by Edward Wasiolek (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967).

  Also recommended is the long line of fiction inspired (sometimes negatively) by Crime and Punishment or by the Dostoyevsky of that period. Among the highlights: Under Western Eyes (1911) by Joseph Conrad; Despair (1934; English translation 1965) by Vladimir Nabokov, Dostoyevsky's most ungrateful reader; Summer in Baden-Baden (completed 1980; English translation 1987) by Leonid Tsypkin; The Master of Petersburg (1994) by J. M. Coetzee; and, in a more light-hearted vein, the untranslated F. M. (2006) by Boris Akunin.

  In the list of secondary reading that follows, categories inevitably blur; all the biographies, for example, are also exercises in literary criticism.

  BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR

  Robert Bird, Fyodor Dostoevsky (London: Reaktion Books, 2012). A short and stimulating reading of the life and works, and the threads that join them.

  Anna Dostoevsky, Reminiscences, translated and edited by Beatrice Stillman (London: Wildwood House, 1976). The memoirs of Dostoyevsky's second wife: a unique, if inevitably partisan, portrait of a loving marriage.

  Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). The condensed version (running to almost 1,000 pages) of Frank's five-volume literary biography, the fourth volume of which, Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865-71 (London: Robson Books, 1995), contains more detailed treatment of Crime and Punishment and the years in which it was written. Frank pays particular attention to the intellectual and ideological context from which Dostoyevsky's fiction emerged.

  Konstantin Mochulsky, Dostoevsky: His Life and Work, translated by Michael A. Minihan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967). Focused and highly readable.

  James L. Rice, Who Was Dostoevsky? (Oakland, California: Berkeley Slavic Specialties, 2011). A collection of articles towards a portrait of a 'secular Dostoyevsky' by one of his most contrarian interpreters.

  Peter Sekirin, The Dostoevsky Archive: Firsthand Accounts of the Novelist from Contemporaries' Memoirs and Rare Periodicals (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co., 1997) CRITICISM

  Carol Apollonio (ed.), The New Russian Dostoevsky: Readings for the Twenty-First Century (Bloomington, Indiana: Slavica, 2010) Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, translated and edited by Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) Rene Girard, Resurrection from the Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky, translated and edited by James G. Williams (East Lansing, Michigan: Michigan State University Press, 2012) Robert Louis Jackson, Dostoevsky's Quest for Form: A Study of His Philosophy of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966) ___ (ed.), Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Crime and Punishment: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1974) Malcolm V. Jones, Dostoyevsky after Bakhtin: Readings in Dostoyevsky's Fantastic Realism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) Y. Karyakin, Re-reading Dostoyevsky, translated by S. Chulaki (Moscow: Novosti Press, 1971). An engaging exploration of the questions posed by Crime and Punishment.

  W. J. Leatherbarrow (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Dostoevskii (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). An innovative, wide-ranging collection of essays.

  George Pattison and Diane Oenning Thompson (eds.), Dostoevsky and the Christian Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) Richard Peace (ed.), Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment: A Casebook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) Lev Shestov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Nietzsche, translated by S. Roberts (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1969) George Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in Contrast (London: Faber and Faber, 1960) Rene Wellek (ed.), Dostoevsky: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1962) Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction (London: Continuum, 2008) REFERENCE

  Kenneth Lantz, The Dostoevsky Encyclopedia (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 2004) Boris Tikhomirov, 'Lazar'! Gryadi von': Roman F. M. Dostoevskogo 'Prestuplenie i nakazanie' v sovremennom prochtenii ['Lazarus! Come Forth': F. M. Dostoyevsky's Novel Crime and Punishment Read in the Light of Its Time] (St Petersburg: Serebryanyi vek, 2006). Some extracts from this important commentary are available in translation in The New Russian Dostoevsky, pp. 95-122.

  Note on the Translation

  The troublesome question 'Why retranslate the classics?' has perhaps only one satisfactory answer: because the translator hopes to offer a closer approximation to his or her experience of the original than is otherwise available. A new interpretation of a famous symphony or play is valuable simply for being itself, for being unique; the argument is less convincing when applied to a retranslation, if only because most readers cannot be expected to read long novels in multiple versions. For this reason it seems appropriate to set out what I have tried to achieve that I found lacking in previous translations - for all their other, non-replicable virtues. Only the reader, of course, can judge the result.

  The most widely read translations of Crime and Punishment have tended, in my view, towards a polish, and therefore tameness, absent from Dostoyevsky's text (effects gained in large part by judicious trimming or padding); or else they have clung so closely to the Russian that the spell cast by the original is periodically broken by jarring literalism, and the author's peculiarities of style, smoothed over in other translations, are made odder still. In my rendering I have sought to preserve both the novel's spell and the expressive, jagged concision palpable from the very first sentence.

  Observations made fifty years ago by George Steiner about Dostoyevsky's method helped set me on my way: 'all superfluity of narrative is stripped away in order to render the conflict of personages naked and exemplary; the law of composition is one of maximum energy, released over the smallest possible extent of space and time' (Tolstoy or Dostoevsky). These comments are especially pertinent to the constricted setting and style of Crime and Punishment, where Dostoyevsky largely eschews the verbosity that is a feature and a concern of several of his earlier, and later, works. In fact, the narrative passages are notable for the narrowness of their lexical range, using verbal repetition to help evoke the psychological experience of Raskolnikov, who repeats actions almost as often as he repeats words. Lexical and thematic cl
usters - to do with memory or family relations or time - prove inseparable. Sometimes, idiomatic English has to be forced a little to capture these repetitions; on other occasions a single Russian word gains an accretion of reference that can be recovered in English only in part - by compensating for its untranslatability elsewhere. A salient example is the noun delo ('deed', 'action', 'criminal case', 'matter', 'thing', 'business'), which is repeated so often, and in so many contexts, that it comes to mimic the great obsession of Dostoyevsky's time, and of Raskolnikov himself: when will words finally become deeds?

  Another aspect of the 'maximum energy' mentioned by Steiner has to do with the vitality and variety of the spoken word in Dostoyevsky's fiction. The characters of Crime and Punishment are defined by their language, irony and humour. To recapture their speech patterns - especially those of Porfiry Petrovich, the detective - a considerably greater licence seemed appropriate than in the compressed passages of pure narrative. Dostoyevsky's characters would, furthermore, have sounded very modern to his readers, except where they consciously invest their speech with archaism (to recall, in many cases, the fading Russia of fixed social hierarchies). The narrator's language would also have sounded fresh and alive. To replicate this vividness, while reserving scope for archaism elsewhere, I have aimed for an idiom that still sounds modern today, but is not exclusively of our time.

  A related point is the translation of biblical language. Part Four of Crime and Punishment contains extensive extracts and quotations from the Gospels. For these, I have used the mid-twentieth-century Revised Standard Version, to reflect the fact that the Russian translation cited in the novel sounded (and still sounds) modern, in stark contrast to the much older translation done into Old Church Slavonic, strong traces of which can be heard, for example, in Part One, Chapter II, where, correspondingly, I have used the seventeenth-century King James Version.

  NOTE ON THE TEXT

  This translation is based on the text found in F. M. Dostoyevsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972-90), vol. 6 (1973). Since this celebrated edition, a further Collected Works, which claims to adhere more closely to Dostoyevsky's own preferences for the visual appearance of his text and markers of emphasis, has been published in Moscow (Voskresenye, 2003-5). The differences between the editions have mainly to do with punctuation (modernized to some degree in this translation), and for most scholars of Dostoyevsky the authority of the Soviet 'Academy' edition remains unsurpassed.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  As the first new translator of Crime and Punishment in a generation, I have had the good fortune of benefiting not only from the experience of my predecessors, recent and distant, but also from the copious scholarship that has appeared in the intervening period, both in the digital wonderland and in more traditional formats (notably, Boris Tikhomirov's Russian commentary on the novel, listed in Further Reading).

  A personal debt is owed to those who have read parts of the draft at various stages: Catriona Kelly, Iain Rogers, Dmitry Shatalov, Richard Short, Adrian Tahourdin, James Womack, Sarah Young. For helping to answer intractable queries I thank Alexander Ilichevskii, Alexander Krasovitsky, Nina Kruglikova, Aleksandr Rodionov and especially Boris Tikhomirov. The Dostoyevsky reading group run in Oxford by Muireann Maguire and attended by the late Diane Oenning Thompson provided vital stimulation. For valuable comments on my Introduction and Notes I thank Malcolm Jones, Andrew Kahn, Eric Naiman and Anna and Thomas Ready. The support of Wolfson College (Oxford), St Antony's College (Oxford) and the Russkiy Mir Foundation has been essential. Without the editorial confidence of Alexis Kirschbaum, I would never have started, and without the skilled guidance of Rose Goddard, Anna Herve and Ian Pindar, I might never have finished. Anthony Hippisley and Stephen Ryan spared no effort to improve my text.

  Above all, this translation has been a family affair. It was typed up from manuscript by my mother, Marisa, the most responsive first reader one could wish for, reviewed with the greatest discernment by my father, Nigel, willed on from afar by my siblings, Natasha and Tom, graced by the births of two daughters, Isabel and Natalie, and accompanied at every step by my wife, Ania.

  Note on Names

  The List of Characters that follows contains the full and alternative names of all the novel's protagonists, as well as those of the most prominent secondary and episodic characters.

  All Russians have three names - a first name, a patronymic and a surname. Thus: Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov or Marfa Petrovna Svidrigailova. The patronymic is the father's given name with the ending -ovich or -evich for men, and -ovna or -evna for women.

  Russian knows three main modes of address, in descending order of formality: by honorific and surname (Mr Raskolnikov), by first name and patronymic (Rodion Romanovich) and by first name alone. First names and patronymics are routinely shortened or softened in spoken Russian to suggest greater familiarity and affection: thus Rodion may become Rodya or Rodka, and Romanovich may become Romanych. Confusingly for the foreign reader, some diminutive forms of given names are quite distant from the original: Raskolnikov's sister, for example, who bears the proud and formal-sounding name Avdotya, is most commonly referred to in the text as Dunya and Dunechka.

  Sudden shifts to the use of the affectionate forms of given names are typical of Dostoyevsky's style and are preserved in translation. It is not just the characters who shift freely and meaningfully between these modes, but the narrator himself, who thereby subtly registers his apparent sympathies and antipathies. A few characters, such as Svidrigailov, are most commonly mentioned by surname alone, thereby creating a sense of distance and perhaps mystery. More common in the stiflingly close-knit world of Crime and Punishment is the use of first name and patronymic. Indeed one central character, the investigator Porfiry Petrovich, who declares himself opposed to formality on principle, is given no surname at all; nor is the pawnbroker, Alyona Ivanovna.

  Like Gogol before him, Dostoyevsky makes great play of 'speaking names' (such as Marmeladov) for various purposes, notably irony and humour. The possible referents of some surnames are explained in the list that follows. Further comments on names are included in the Notes.

  List of Characters

  Characters referred to most often by their surnames

  (stressed vowels are underlined)

  Lebezyatnikov, Andrei Semyonovich: Neighbour of the Marmeladovs and a 'young friend' of Luzhin. Works 'in one of the ministries'. The Russian verb lebezit' means 'to fawn'.

  Luzhin, Pyotr Petrovich: A middle-aged 'man of business' recently arrived from the provinces to work as a lawyer in St Petersburg. Luzha: puddle or pool.

  Marmeladov, Semyon Zakharovich: Married to Katerina Ivanovna. Father of Sonya from his first marriage. A failed civil servant. Marmelad: fruit jelly, from the French marmelade.

  Raskolnikov, Rodion (Rodka, Rodya) Romanovich: The twenty-three-year-old hero, who has recently dropped out of university. Raskolot': to cleave, split, chop, break. Raskol: a split or schism, especially in reference to the Schism within Russian Orthodoxy in the seventeenth century, though with broader metaphorical application; raskolnik: religious schismatic, dissenter. Raskolnikov's first name and, in particular, its associated diminutive forms (Rodya, Rodka) point to the family theme: rod, meaning 'family, kin, origin'.

  Razumikhin, Dmitry Prokofyevich: A friend of Raskolnikov's from university. Razum: reason, intellect.

  Svidrigailov, Arkady Ivanovich: A nobleman and country gentleman with a disreputable past.

  Zametov, Alexander Grigoryevich: Head clerk at the police bureau. A friend of Razumikhin. Zametit': to notice, observe.

  Zosimov (only surname given): Doctor. Friend of Razumikhin.

  Characters referred to most often (or always) by first name and patronymic

  Alyona Ivanovna: Ageing, widowed pawnbroker.

  Amalia Ivanovna Lippewechsel: The Marmeladovs' (and Lebezyatnikov's) landlady.

  Avdotya (Dunechka, Dunya) Romanovna Raskolnikova: Raskolnikov
's sister. Worked as a governess in the country for the Svidrigailovs.

  Ilya Petrovich ('Powder Keg'): Assistant to the district superintendent Nikodim Fomich at the police bureau. Lieutenant.

  Katerina Ivanovna Marmeladova: Married to Marmeladov. Mother from her first marriage of two girls, Polina (Polya, Polechka, Polenka) and Lenya (first mentioned as Lida/Lidochka), and a boy, Kolya (the common diminutive of Nikolai).

  Lizaveta: Alyona Ivanovna's younger half-sister. Mends and sells clothes. Friend of Sonya.

  Luiza (Laviza) Ivanovna: A madam well known to the local police.

  Marfa Petrovna Svidrigailova: The recently deceased wife of Svidrigailov, whom she saved from ruin. Distantly related to Luzhin.

  Mikolai (Mikolka) Dementyev: A young man of peasant background, from the province of Ryazan, who decorates apartments in Petersburg. Mikolka is also the name of the peasant in Raskolnikov's dream in Part One, Chapter V. Mikolai is a fairly rare derivative of Nikolai, which is also used in the original but is avoided here in order to spare the English reader further confusion.

  Nastasya (Nastyenka, Nastasyushka): A country girl who now works as a cook and maid in the house where Raskolnikov lives. A diminutive form of Anastasiya. Like Sofya (see below), Anastasiya also has a strong spiritual meaning derived from Greek: resurrection.

  Nikodim Fomich: District superintendent at the police bureau. Captain.

  Porfiry Petrovich: Chief investigator. Distant relative of Razumikhin.

  Praskovya Pavlovna Zarnitsyna (Pashenka): Raskolnikov's widowed landlady.

  Pulkheria Alexandrovna Raskolnikova: Raskolnikov's widowed mother.

  Sonya (Sonechka) Semyonovna: Marmeladov's daughter and Katerina Ivanovna's stepdaughter. A prostitute. Though usually referred to as Sonya, the full form of her first name Sofya (Sophia: divine wisdom) is clearly significant.