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Crime and Punishment: With selected excerpts from the Notebooks for Crime and Punishment
Crime and Punishment: With selected excerpts from the Notebooks for Crime and Punishment
Crime and Punishment: With selected excerpts from the Notebooks for Crime and Punishment
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Crime and Punishment: With selected excerpts from the Notebooks for Crime and Punishment

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Translated by Constance Garnett with an Introduction and Notes by Dr Keith Carabine, University of Kent at Canterbury.

Crime and Punishment is one of the greatest and most readable novels ever written. From the beginning we are locked into the frenzied consciousness of Raskolnikov who, against his better instincts, is inexorably drawn to commit a brutal double murder.

From that moment on, we share his conflicting feelings of self-loathing and pride, of contempt for and need of others, and of terrible despair and hope of redemption: and, in a remarkable transformation of the detective novel, we follow his agonised efforts to probe and confront both his own motives for, and the consequences of, his crime.

The result is a tragic novel built out of a series of supremely dramatic scenes that illuminate the eternal conflicts at the heart of human existence: most especially our desire for self-expression and self-fulfilment, as against the constraints of morality and human laws; and our agonised awareness of the world's harsh injustices and of our own mortality, as against the mysteries of divine justice and immortality.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateOct 1, 2011
ISBN9781848703506
Crime and Punishment: With selected excerpts from the Notebooks for Crime and Punishment
Author

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) was a Russian short story writer, essayist, journalist, and one of the greatest novelists in all of world literature. His works are broadly thought to have anticipated Russian symbolism, existentialism, expressionism, and psychoanalysis. He also influenced later writers and philosophers including Anton Chekov, Hermann Hesse, Ernest Hemingway, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Jean-Paul Sartre.

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    I could not resonate with the story and the characters, it is so complex. But i am giving 4 stars because I am trying to be objective here.

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Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky

Trayler

general introduction

Wordsworth Classics are inexpensive editions designed to appeal to the general reader and students. We commissioned teachers and specialists to write wide ranging, jargon-free introductions and to provide notes that would assist the understanding of our readers rather than interpret the stories for them. In the same spirit, because the pleasures of reading are inseparable from the surprises, secrets and revelations that all narratives contain, we strongly advise you to enjoy this book before turning to the Introduction.

General Adviser

Keith Carabine

introduction

I’m convinced that not one of our writers, past or living, wrote under the conditions in which I constantly write. Turgenev would die from the very thought. But if you only knew how distressing it is to spoil an idea that has been born in you, made you enthusiastic, of which you know that it’s good – and to be forced to spoil it consciously! (Letters II, pp. 200–1)

Dostoevsky’s boastful lament in June 1866 as he struggled to keep up with the serialisation of Crime and Punishment in the Russian Herald, is, I think, both understated and inaccurate: no writer in the history of literature composed such a great book under such appalling ‘conditions’. That summer, as he explains in the same letter, he was in a terrible state because the previous year, desperate for ready cash in order to ward off the ever-present threat of debtor’s prison, he had accepted three thousand roubles from an unscrupulous publisher, Stellovsky, on condition that he wrote ‘a novel of no fewer than twelve signatures to be published by him, and if I don’t deliver it by November 1, 1866 (the last deadline) he, Stellovsky, is allowed to publish, free, as he pleases, anything I write, without any remuneration for me at all’ (Letters II, p. 200).¹ He escaped this ugly deal by a hair’s breadth because of a wonderful stroke of luck – on October 4 he hired a seventeen-year-old stenographer, Anna Grigoryevna, to whom he dictated The Gambler (for Stellovsky) and the last episodes of Crime and Punishment and who soon became his loyal and devoted wife.

In the summer of 1865 Dostoevsky had used Stellovsky’s cash to pay off his more demanding creditors and to meet the needs of his stepson and the family of his recently deceased brother, Mikhail. Then, depressed, ill and lonely, he travelled to Wiesbaden in July 1865, and within five days gambled the remainder away in the casinos. Destitute and refused service in his wretched hotel, he pleaded for loans from everybody he knew (including Turgenev). Yet precisely at the moment when his ‘affairs were abominable’ and ‘couldn’t be worse’ (Letters II, p. 169), he threw himself into Crime and Punishment.

It began as a novella and in September 1865 he offered it to Mikhail Katkov the conservative editor of the Russian Herald for serialisation, promising to deliver it within a month. He asked for a modest one hundred and twenty-five roubles per signature and begged an advance of three hundred roubles on the basis of his long account of ‘the story’s idea’:²

It is the psychological account of a crime.

The action is contemporary, this year. A young man, expelled from the university, petit-bourgeois by social origin, and living in extreme poverty, after yielding to certain strange ‘unfinished’ ideas floating in the air, has resolved, out of light-mindedness and out of the instability of his ideas, to get out of his foul situation at one go. He has resolved to murder an old woman . . . who lends money at interest. The old woman is stupid, deaf, sick, greedy, charges Jewish interest, is malicious . . . tormenting her younger sister, whom she keeps as a servant. ‘She’s worthless. Why is she alive? Is she of any use to anyone at all?’ And so on. These questions confuse the young man. He decides to murder her and to rob her in order to make his mother, who lives in the provinces, happy; to deliver his sister, who lives as a hired companion . . . from the lascivious attentions of the head of the landowner household – attentions that threaten her with ruin; and to finish the university, go abroad, and then for his whole life long to be honest, firm, unswerving in fulfilling his ‘humanitarian duty to humanity’, whereby, of course, ‘the crime will be expiated’, if in fact crime is the term for that action against a . . . malicious and sick old woman who does not know why she is alive herself and who would perhaps have died on her own in a month.

In spite of the fact that such crimes are terribly difficult to commit – that is, people always leave . . . clues . . . and leave terribly much to chance, which almost always gives away the guilty parties – he manages in an absolutely accidental way to accomplish his undertaking both quickly and successfully.

He spends almost a month after that until the ultimate catastrophe. No suspicion lies on him, nor can it. At this point the whole psychological process of crime is unfolded. Insoluble questions arise before the murderer; unsuspected and unexpected feelings torment his heart. God’s justice, earthly law, comes into its own, and he finishes by being compelled to denounce himself. Compelled, so as to become linked to people again, even at the price of perishing at penal servitude; the feeling of separation and alienation from humanity that came over him immediately after committing the crime has worn him out with torment . . . The criminal himself decides to accept suffering in order to expiate his deed. It is difficult for me to explain my idea completely, how-ever. I want to give it the art[ist]ic form in which it took shape. About the form . . . [sentence unfinished]

In my story there is, in addition, a hint at the idea that the legal punishment imposed for a crime frightens the criminal much less than the lawmakers think, in part because he himself psychologically demands it.

I have seen that even in the most backward people, in the crudest instance of chance. I wanted to express this precisely through an intelligent person, one of the new generation, so that the idea can be seen vividly and tangibly . . .

It goes without saying that in the present exposition of the idea of my story I have passed over the whole plot . . . as for the artistic execution . . . I will try, even if only for myself, to make it as good as possible. (Letters II, pp. 174–5)

Dostoevsky’s reflections on crime and punishment recall those in Memoirs from the House of the Dead (1862), his account of his four years in a Siberian prison, wherein he is haunted by ‘an almost insoluble problem . . . that of the inequality of the punishment for one and the same crime’ (p. 58). There are, he argues, huge dissimilarities between the crimes themselves and ‘Every different personality means a different crime’ (p. 59). Thus, even ‘the most backward people’, he had observed with a mixture of disdain, incredulity and awe, proved that ‘the legal punishment for crime’ is less frightening and operative than the psychological need to accept suffering and ‘to expiate his deed’. The probable germ for Raskolnikov’s case is Dostoevsky’s example of ‘an educated man, who has an active conscience, a mature mind, and a feeling heart. The pain in his heart is enough to kill him with its agonies before any punishment begins’ (p. 59). In Crime and Punishment, however, the action is ‘contemporary’, the ‘intelligent’ hero is one of the new generation of the 1860s, and the schema is polemical. The tag-ends of the ‘ unfinished ideas . . . in the air’ that confuse Raskolnikov, confirm that Dostoevsky’s satire is directed at the utilitarianism of Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828–89) and the Nihilists.³ This group believed that we are all rational and governed by self-interest; that the basis of morality, therefore, is not spiritual but rather the product of ‘rational egoism’ which was their term for certain innate, shared characteristics, such as our dislike of pain and our natural pursuit of happiness, which teach us that our best interests do not promote strife and competition, but cooperation and a desire for the greatest good for the greatest number, good being that which is useful and beneficial to all. Hence, we can construct in theory, and hope to achieve in practice, a perfectly ordered society based not on religious and mystical imperatives, but on the rigorous application of the scientific method of enquiry. Thus, in Dostoevsky’s schema, Raskolnikov’s subsequent discovery of ‘unsuspected and unexpected feelings’ involves ‘The law of justice and human nature’, grounded in the claims of conscience and the need for Christian expiation, as against the rational, pseudo-humanist ideas that condone murder because it can fulfil our ‘humanitarian duty to humanity’.

This letter is recognisably both an account of, and a sketchy first draft for, the novel that we know as Crime and Punishment. Thus, ‘From the moment of its conception’, as Mochulsky observed, ‘this plan to portray a ‘theoretician-murderer’ was divided into two distinct parts: the crime and its causes, and the effects of the crime upon the criminal’s soul ’ (Mochulsky, p. 273).⁴ And, of course, the crime is accomplished in ‘an absolutely accidental way’ with Raskolnikov being overwhelmed by ‘the feeling of separation and alienation from humanity’. The motives for the crime in this draft, however, constitute only ‘a dry and sketchy determinism’ (John Jones, p. 217) and Dostoevsky passes over ‘the whole plot’. We are told Raskolnikov yearns to be linked to people, but in this account his need for and decision to accept punishment are self-motivated and his story is self-contained; and there is no mention of Marmeladov, Sonia and Porfiry, who contribute so enormously to Raskolnikov’s recognition of ‘the law of justice and human nature’. Most importantly, ‘the form’ of the novel and its narration are putative and unresolved.

Dostoevsky continued to work on the novel on his return to St Petersburg in the autumn of 1865 and decided to merge the story of Marmeladov (first conceived in June as a separate novel, ‘The Drunkards’) with that of Raskolnikov. Then in November, even though he was deeply in debt, sick with epilepsy and haemorrhoids, and even though the first issue of the novel was due to be serialised in January 1866, he burned and abandoned his novella in an act of extraordinary artistic integrity because ‘a new form, a new plan excited me, and I started work all over again’ (Letters II, p. 188). Fortunately, drafts and notes for the novel did survive, and The Notebooks for Crime and Punishment reconstruct three manuscript versions that correspond to the three stages of Dostoevsky’s work: the first short version planned in Wiesbaden; a second lengthier version written in St Petersburg (from October to December); and the last stage (January–February, 1866).⁵ The Notebooks are a major resource because they enable us to appreciate how his ‘new form’ and ‘new plan’ grew out of a protracted, probing search for a narrative method that would allow him to fuse the Marmeladov plot with Raskolnikov’s and that would do justice to his burgeoning, iridescent sense of the complex ramifications of, and interrelations between, ‘the story’s idea’ and the hero’s psychology.

The most important link between the ‘Wiesbaden’ and ‘St Petersburg’ versions is that they are written in the first-person confessional form; and The Notebooks reveal his struggle with the huge problems of control, perspective and ‘relations’ inherent in what Henry James famously called in his Preface to The Ambassadors ‘the large ease of "autobiography’’ ’ when the hero-narrator, such as Dickens’s David Copperfield, must be equipped with ‘the double privilege of subject and object’. In all such narratives there must be a split between the self as a subject who writes, construes and evaluates and the self as an object who acts, reacts, witnesses and suffers; between the present time of the artistic shaping of the order of events into a narrative (what formalists call the sjuzet) and the past time of events as they happened in chronological sequence (the fabula). And such difficulties are drastically compounded when the hero’s actions are extreme and he teeters on the border between sanity and madness. Thus Dostoevsky reminds himself in the Wiesbaden version that Raskolnikov ‘must write, speak, and appear to the reader in part as if not in possession of his senses’ (p. 82), which raises inevitable problems of verisimilitude and time-perspective. How and when can a character on the edge of derangement, who often ‘cannot remember anything more’ and who is cut off from the world, write a coherent narrative, comment on its larger significances and report on and evaluate the people he meets? Dostoevsky proposed an alternative approach: ‘If it is to be a confession, then everything must be entirely clear.’ But how can this be in a narrative told by a young man ‘confused’ by certain ideas that are in the air? Furthermore, ‘If a confession, then in parts it will not be entirely chaste and it will be difficult to imagine why it was written’ (p. 52). In other words, why should the narrator have wished to engage in such a painful act of self-exposure and humiliation? And, of course, the first-person confessional form places great strain on the plotting and the transmission of information, because Raskolnikov either needs to witness or act in every scene he recounts or, if absent, to reconstruct the scenes imaginatively or through the reports of others. Dostoevsky’s reflections on the confessional mode in The Notebooks are among a series of brilliant recognitions sparked by his injunction to himself: ‘Rummage through all the questions in this novel.’ He realises that ‘the plot’s structure[szujet in Russian] is such, the story must be narrated by the author and not by the hero’. Then he glosses this crucial decision: ‘But from the author . . . An omniscient and infallible author will have to be assumed; he will have to appear as one of the members of the new generation’ (Dostoevsky’s italics, p. 52). This contradictory formulation (infallible and a member of the new generation?) yielded ‘Another Plan’: ‘Narration from the point of view of the author, a sort of invisible but omniscient being, who doesn’t leave his hero for a moment’ (p. 53). This astonishing, shifting formulation as the (subjective) author’s point of view fades into the more abstract and detached ‘omniscient being’, and then in a doubling back tethers the omniscient author to the hero’s side, foreshadows, as we shall see, the lineaments of a revolutionary ‘new form’ in the history of the novel – one that is central to the novel’s power and scope and to its direct grasp upon its readers.

i

The extraordinary qualities of Dostoevsky’s hard-won ‘new form’ are apparent in the remarkable opening paragraphs of Crime and Punishment. It starts in media res: ‘On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. Bridge.’ The speaker functions as a familiar omniscient author who objectively records his hero’s poverty and locates him in time and space; but the indecisiveness of ‘as though in hesitation’ subtly introduces Dostoevsky’s great innovation – he is ‘the first novelist to have fully accepted and dramatised the principle of uncertainty or indeterminacy in the presentation of character’ (Rahv, Norton, p. 549). Thus in the succeeding paragraphs Raskolnikov’s wretched poverty, his ‘overstrained, irritable condition’ and his self-absorption are objectively recorded, but simultaneously we learn that he is both ‘afraid of meeting’ his landlady and ‘Nothing that any landlady could do had a real terror for him’. The first reaction is reported and is mundane and understandable because he owes her money; the sheer intensity of the second, with its wild, baffling conjunction of ‘any landlady’ and ‘real terror’, is ‘double-voiced’ belonging both to the recording narrator and the anxious hero who is clearly hovering on the brink of a crisis or a nervous breakdown.

Our bewilderment is compounded when we glide from the omniscient author into Raskolnikov’s first interior monologue, which is entirely typical of the novel because it is composed of competing languages and self-assessments that both perform and signal a split in his very being. Thus, his thinking tacks from ‘ "I want to attempt a thing like that ’ to I ‘ am frightened by these trifles, he thought with an odd smile’; from self-cajoling axioms and grandiose talk of ‘uttering a new word’ to his Hamletian self-reproach, ‘ It’s because I chatter that I do nothing" ’; culminating in his self-mocking, opposed assessments of ‘that’ as either ‘serious’ or ‘a plaything’. Only when we remember or return to this initial monologue do we realise that the pro and contra pattern of his thinking not only registers a deeply divided, inconsistent consciousness, but a clairvoyant self-awareness that his inability to name the deed to himself ensures that its enactment will be self-destructive. Thus, his ‘new word’ is his private shorthand for ‘the leading idea’ of his article ‘On Crime’ – ‘ "men are in general divided into two categories, inferior (ordinary) . . . and men who have the gift or the talent to utter a new word" ’ (p. 222) – of which, of course, he thinks himself one. But already he also knows that his Napoleonic theory is a form of lying to himself, a ‘fantasy’, and that his ‘thinking’ is a form of prevarication that mocks his claims to belong to the extraordinary few who can ‘transgress the law’ with impunity and speak a new word. Similarly, his self-bemused ‘odd smile’ at his reluctance ‘to rack his brain for excuses, to prevaricate, to lie’ to his landlady while contemplating a ‘thing like that’, anticipates his horrified, divided reaction to his ‘hideous dream’ of the nag beaten to death by drunken peasants: ‘darkness and confusion were in his soul’ and ‘ Good God! he cried, "can it be, can it be, that I shall really take an axe . . . split her skull . . . that I shall tread in the sticky warm blood . . . Good God, can it be?’’ (p. 53). Thus, on the threshold of his crime, the pro and contra battle between his intellect and spirit demonstrates that Raskolnikov knows that his suffering has already begun; even though he anticipates his mortified feelings and his inability to live with his crime, he none the less will go through with the murder: and therein lies his tragedy.

The omniscient narrator’s indecisiveness and the hero’s irresol-ution are inseparable from, and perfectly attuned to the novel’s exploitation of ‘crisis time’ as opposed to the more familiar ‘biographical time’ of many nineteenth-century narratives. By beginning in the middle of things, ‘Dostoyevsky leaps over all that is comfortably habitable, well arranged and stable’; and, therefore, none of his characters (and especially Raskolnikov) ‘live a biographical life in biographical time’ (Bakhtin, p. 169). Consequently we do not follow them from birth, through childhood, marriage, work, children and death. Thus, in the opening pages, there is as, say, in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853), a disorienting lack of exposition; all we learn of his past is that he has spent a month in his ‘den thinking’! Significantly, we are only allowed a glimpse of Raskolnikov’s pious childhood during his dream of the nag, and its latent content arises out of the crisis time of his tangled thinking. Moreover, the dream’s ‘singular actuality’ in which Raskolnikov is the terrified, helpless little boy desperate to save the nag and the grown man poised to reprise the drunken peasant’s brutal killing, dramatises the split in his being and predicts how he will be both witness to and perpetrator of the murder of the old pawnbroker.

No wonder, then, that the novel takes such a direct grasp upon its readers. It is a psychological thriller wherein the reader is both observer and secret sharer of Raskolnikov’s self-consciousness of his own inner divisions and horrified witnessing of his own action. Thus, on the one hand, he is aware of ‘the darkness and confusion in his soul’, and on the other he is terrifyingly self-surprised by his own ‘reason and will’ (p. 64) that ensure his ‘dream’ of ‘a thing like that’ will become a blood-stained, catastrophic reality. So we watch in horror and feel like participants in a ‘hideous dream’ as he prepares for, and then enacts a horrible murder while shaking in his shoes. At any moment we may occupy the position of the ‘invisible but omniscient being’ who reports, ‘His hands were fearfully weak . . . he was afraid he would let the axe slip and fall . . . ’, or zoom in cinematically on Raskolnikoff who is ‘scarcely conscious of himself’ yet becomes appallingly absorbed in close-up by the minute particulars of the pawnbroker’s ‘thin, light hair, streaked with grey, thickly smeared with grease . . . plaited in a rat’s tail and fastened by a broken horn comb which stood out on the nape of her neck’ (p. 68, my italics). Her hair, as Raskolnikov has long anticipated, is about to be smeared in blood and her ‘rat’s tail’ reminds us that he can kill because he objectifies her as vermin feeding upon the poor; but the details of her grey hair and broken comb also attest the quotidian reality and irreducible humanity of the old woman whom he is poised to destroy, while self-laceratingly aware, at the very moment of its enactment, of the futility and self-defeating nature of his deed.

ii

After the murder, Porfiry, the investigating magistrate, never really doubts (as Raskolnikov recognises) that he committed the crime. Hence the novel is never a ‘whodunnit’, but rather a ‘whydunnit’: and in a remarkable twist on the detective story it is the murderer himself who searches for, and tries to understand his own motivation. This process of self-investigation ensures that Raskolnikov remains, as the plan outlined to Katkov anticipated, the spiritual centre of the novel because ‘Insoluble questions arise before the murderer . . . God’s justice, earthly law comes into its own’, obliging him to re-evaluate and takes responsibility for his crime. But in Dostoevsky’s ‘new plan’ Raskolnikov also becomes the compositional centre because the competing theoretical and spiritual aspects of his dual nature, and their attendant ‘idea-feelings’, are externalised and ex-perienced in all the characters he meets, and, reciprocally, he internalises aspects of their personalities. Moreover, in the design of the novel, as I shall show, every character he meets spurs Raskolnikov’s quest for self-understanding and simultaneously offers opposed views on, and incorporates different solutions to, his predicament and fate. This pattern is immediately established in the second chapter, at the very moment his ‘new plan’ fuses the plot of ‘The Drunkards’ with Raskolnikov’s action.

At the end of the first chapter, after his trial visit to the old pawnbroker, Raskolnikov is full of self-loathing at ‘ the filthy things my heart is capable of ’ and ‘without stopping to think’ he enters a tavern for the first time in his life, driven by ‘a desire to be with other people’. He immediately encounters Marmeladov, a discharged civil servant, who is pompous, self-lacerating and self-dramatising, one of Dostoevsky’s great, tragic buffoons who articulates the major issues of the novel, so dimly foreshadowed in Raskolnikov’s initial confusion. Thus, his sceptical paraphrase of Lebeziatnikov’s modern idea ‘ that compassion is forbidden nowadays by science ’ (p. 13) parodies Western utilitarian logic, but it also exposes the heartlessness at the core of Raskolnikov’s rational, altruistic plan to devote the old pawnbroker’s money ‘to the service of humanity and the good of all’ (p. 59). Again his tragi-comic account of why his second wife should marry a sot like himself culminates in the great question that confronts Raskolnikov after the murder: ‘ Do you understand, sir, do you understand what it means to have absolutely nowhere to turn? ’ (p.15). Then, before he collapses into a drunken stupor, ecstatically proclaiming, ‘ Lord, Thy kingdom come! ’ (p. 21), he rehearses ‘The Orthodox Point of View’, which by the beginning of 1866 had become ‘The Idea of the Novel’: ⁶

There is no happiness in comfort: happiness is bought with suffering.

. . . There’s no injustice here, because the knowledge of life and consciousness (that is, that which is felt immediately with your body and spirit, that is through the whole vital process of life) is acquired by experience pro and contra, which one must take upon one’s self. (The Notebooks, p. 188)

The Orthodox Idea inspires Marmeladov’s vision of the all-embracing mercy of Christ that enfolds an incorrigible drunkard like himself and ‘my Sonia’ who ‘gave herself for her cross’ when she became a prostitute in order to save her whole family from utter destitution. Marmeladov speaks for Dostoevsky’s most cherished values when he accepts that his drunken irresponsibility has sunk his family in dreadful misery: ‘ Crucify me, O judge, crucify me – but pity me! And then I will go of myself to be crucified, for its not merrymaking I seek but tears and tribulation! . . . ’ (p. 21). ‘There’s no injustice here’ because Marmeladov, like his daughter Sonia, takes upon himself the joyous burden of suffering and throws himself upon Christ’s mercy. So even before the murder, Marmeladov’s ravings articulate the Russian Orthodox alternative to the varieties of Western egoism and rationalism embodied in Lebeziatnikov’s communitarianism and Luzhin’s egoism. More-over, he speaks for, and to, the spiritual side of Raskolnikov that revolts against his loathsome plan; and at this very moment, as we learn later, Raskolnikov falls in love with the image of Sonia’s self-sacrifice, intuiting that he will turn to her exemplary compassion and selflessness once he has transgressed and cut himself off from family, friends and the community.

But, of course, it is precisely against the ‘injustice’ of the world, imaged in Sonia’s desperate resort to prostitution that Raskolnikov (anticipating Ivan Karamazov) rebels, and her dilemma is immediately replicated in his sister Dounia’s self-sacrificial decision to marry the odious rational egoist Luzhin in order to provide for her family. Thus, in marked contrast to the old sot who yields the mystery of earthly suffering to the final judgment when the Kingdom of God shall reign, Raskolnikov experiences contra and proudly questions the value of both Sonia’s self-sacrifice, which casts her as ‘the eternal victim so long as the world lasts’, and his sister’s self-abnegating ‘bargain’ of marriage to Luzhin in return for the financial security of her family and the prospect of a stable career for her beloved brother. In the midst of his spleen, Marmeladov’s last-ditch question – ‘do you understand, sir, what it means when you have absolutely nowhere to turn?’ – resurfaces, and his ‘mere dream’ takes ‘a new, menacing and quite unfamiliar shape’ (p. 41) that once again he dare not substantiate. This new shape, as ever with Raskolnikov, has a double origin: it registers his noble disgust and awe at the human cost such ‘loving, over-partial hearts’ as Sonia and Dounia are prepared to bear in order to secure the earthly happiness of others, and it manifests a misplaced faith (in Porfiry’s terms) in human ‘intellect’ and ‘abstract arguments’ (p. 290) characteristic of utilitarian and socialist theories and contracts that propose the establishment of a man-made Kingdom of God on earth as the answer to the ‘unsolved questions’ (p. 41) posed by the terrible reality of human suffering. Even before the murder, then, Raskolnikov (raskol = split or schism) is aptly named because his pro and contra thinking manifests a clash between his intellect and his spirit. After the murder, the drama centres on his volatile inner conflict as he fluctuates between his rebellious defiance of the law and his felt need to confess; and these opposed imperatives with their very different solutions to his fate, in keeping with Dostoevsky’s ‘new plan’, are embodied and rehearsed in all the other characters.

After the murder, and before his first meeting with Porfiry, Raskolnikov is delirious for several days and suffers from an appal- ling isolation because his terrible secret cuts him off from his family and all humankind; and he wavers between an urge to confess and an animal cunning that drives him to hide the evidence of his crime and to dissemble before his family and friends. Once again he swings between his need for others, an unquenchable need to be out on the streets, and ‘an immeasurable, almost physical, repulsion for everything surrounding him, an obstinate, malignant feeling of hatred’, a hatred that is both rooted in his Napoleonic theories and a patent projection of his self-loathing on to others. Raskolnikov’s every encounter dramatises this split and prompts an uneasy process of self-understanding. Two examples from this section of the novel must suffice. In Part Two, Chapter 5, Luzhin, anxious to convince his future brother-in-law that he appreciates progressive ideas, proceeds to demonstrate the superiority of utilitarian thinking to Christ’s charitable injunction, ‘Love thy neighbour’: ‘ Science now tells us, love yourself before all men, for everything in the world rests on self-interest ’ (p. 129). Luzhin’s exposition leads to a discussion of the socialist case for the relationship between crime and poverty which prompts Raskolnikov to exclaim: ‘ Why, carry out logically the theory you were advocating just now, and it follows that people may be killed . . . ’ (p. 131). Those three dots mark an elegant intellectual comedy as we are invited to share his silent, shamed recognition that his idealistic motive for his crime (the good of others) conceals a utilitarian self-interest as manifest as that of the detestable Luzhin. Secondly, his need for others (that his theory denies) leads to his spontaneous assumption of responsibility for the dying Marmeladov and to his meeting with Sonia who will function, as he intuited, as his redeemer. Covered in Marmeladov’s blood, Raskolnikov is reawakened by ‘an overwhelming sensation of life and strength that surged up suddenly within him’ like ‘that of a man condemned to death who has suddenly been pardoned’ (p. 161). His instinctive charity prompts Sonia’s undying love for him and his potential rebirth into the human community of ordinary life already evident in his social instinct. Typically, however, Raskolnikov’s response to this moment is twofold: he asks Polenka to pray for ‘ Thy servant Rodion ’ (p. 162); and he feels ‘ My life has not died yet ’ and defiantly challenges ‘some power of darkness’ when he re-affirms his ‘ will ’ and ‘ strength ’ and his determination to avoid capture and jail (p. 162).

When Raskolnikov encounters Porfiry for the first time he pretends that he hasn’t a care in the world, but we share his frenzied recognition that if the magistrate indicates that he knows about his incriminating revisit to the scene of the murder that he will be forced to confess. Raskolnikov’s division of humankind into the two categories of the inferior mass and the superior individuals who like Lycurgus, Solon, Mahomet and Napoleon were ‘ benefactors and leaders of humanity ’ and ‘ were guilty of terrible carnage ’, signals that he is a latent revolutionary. Moreover, his appeal to great deeds of destruction to which history would provide the justification, voices Dostoevsky’s deepest and most prophetic fear that the sacred foundations of the Russian state would be sundered in the name of abstract theories (‘the destruction of the present for the sake of the better’) that strive to correct the ills of the present (manifest in the terrible poverty and squalor of St Petersburg) by attempting to establish ‘the New Jerusalem’ on earth (pp. 223). All earthly Jersusalems invented by social theorists such as Shigalov in The Devils (and, of course, his historical predecessors, contemporaries and successors such as Fourier, Chernyshevsky, Lenin and Stalin) would start ‘from unlimited freedom’ and arrive at ‘unlimited despotism’: unlimited because, as Ivan Karamazov realises, once God is dead all sources of authority are abolished.⁷ Hence, in a world given over to human appetites and designs, ‘all is permitted’, including parricide and the assassination of the Tsar.

In all three scenes with Raskolnikov, Porfiry not only functions ‘as the investigator charged with the case’ or ‘inquisitor’ (Weisburg, p. 683) determined to solve a bloody double murder, but he is also allied with Sonia, Dounia, Razumihin (and his creator) in his concern for Raskolnikov’s spiritual regeneration. He shows this in two related ways: convinced of Raskolnikov’s guilt, he mockingly reveals in their first interview the terrible implications of his Napoleonic theories and, as M. V. Jones argues, like a psycho-analyst, ‘he repeatedly calls attention to areas of his personality’ – namely his essentially Russian ‘nature’ – that he wilfully repressed when he ‘waded through blood’ (p. 223) and murdered the two women. Thus he immediately solicits Raskolnikov’s self-contra-dictory admission that he believes in God and in ‘Lazarus’s rising from the dead’ and is, therefore, unlike the obsessive systematisers such as Lebeziatnikov, Shigalov and Chernyshevsky, subject to the demands of a transcendent Christian vision of humankind’s future. And because Raskolnikov is manifestly an inept and hapless regenerator of humanity, Porfiry simultaneously mocks his theory and attendant self-image when he asks: ‘ how do you distinguish those extraordinary people from the ordinary ones? Are there signs at birth? ’ (p. 224). In direct contrast to Luzhin, the very embodiment of the ordinary man who, fuelled by vanity, thinks he is extraordinary, and to Lebeziatnikov who thinks he is extra-ordinary because of his advanced views when he is merely ‘a lackey of thought’, Raskolnikov’s special sign, as Porfiry establishes, is his conscience.⁸ And this recognition spurs Raskolnikov’s reiteration of ‘The Idea of the Novel’: ‘ If he has a conscience he will suffer for his mistake. That will be his punishment – as well as the prison ’ (p. 226). Raskolnikov’s gruelling process of self-confrontation is immediately augmented by Razumihin’s alarmed question con-cerning those who have the right to murder: ‘ Oughtn’t they to suffer at all even for the blood they’ve shed? ’, which drives the anguished protagonist to redefine greatness: ‘ Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth, he added dreamily, not in the tone of the conversation’ (p. 226). Dreamily, because Raskolnikov is talking to himself about the continual battle he incarnates between his intellect that urges rebellion against God’s world and his ‘deep heart’ that feels his theories are loathsome and self-destructive. Thus, his impromptu redefinition of greatness affirms, and the whole narrative confirms, that he is ‘extraordinary’ not because he can wade in blood, but because he has ‘acquired by experience pro and contra’, ‘the knowledge of life and consciousness’ that demands, as he has always known, that he ‘must take upon’ himself the full responsibility for his transgression. He is, therefore, extraordinary in the dialectics of the novel because in Porfiry’s diagnosis he is a ‘special case’, because, unlike (say) ‘A Pole’, he will not try and escape the law, because he incarnates the split that only intelligent Russians incarnate between the lure of Western rational theories and ‘a law of nature’ (p. 289).⁹ From this perspective, he anticipates such riven God-tormented seekers as Stavrogin of The Devils and Ivan Karamazov, and his tragedy is expressive of the divisions that only Dostoevsky’s ‘broad Russian natures’, with large intelligences and deep hearts, can experience and express.

iii

Raskolnikov’s initial interview with Porfiry is the first of three remarkable chapters spanning the halfway point of the narrative; and it is entirely typical of the patterning of the novel that the following chapter dramatises the terrible psychic cost infusing the hero’s redefinition of greatness. Feverish and barely conscious, he hears a voice call him ‘ murderer ’ and once again his response is double: he wildly insists ‘ I didn’t kill a human being, but a principle ’ (p. 234), and then mocks his utilitarianism – ‘ I am putting my little brick into the happiness of all and so my heart is at peace. Ha-ha! ’ (p. 234) – and takes vindictive pleasure in the idea that ‘ I am certainly a louse ’ (p. 234). Losing consciousness, he dreams and re-enacts the murder but to his horror the old woman does not die and every blow of the axe increases her ‘noiseless laughter’ (p. 237). As this startling dream suggests the old woman is alive in Raskolnikov’s subconscious and her mockery chimes with his own persistent self-derision. He wakes up, and as if born out of this nightmare, he discovers the long-awaited Svidrigailov, the prince of mockers, ‘watching him intently’ (p. 237).

Dostoevsky’s last entry in his Notebooks is: ‘Svidrigailov is despair, the most cynical. Sonia is hope, the most unrealizable . . . He [Raskolnikov] became passionately attached to both’ (p. 244). And in the design of the novel, as many commentators have noticed, they function as the hero’s evil and good doubles or angels. Svidrigailov is, however, altogether more interesting than Sonia; indeed in the narrator’s words ‘there was something about Svidrigailov which gave him a certain original, even a mysterious character’ (p. 409. Dostoevsky captures this originality in the ironical nonchalance and inconsequentiality of his talk which could not be more different from Raskolnikov’s intensely dialogical interior monologues. In the novel Raskolnikov does not become ‘passionately attached’ to Svidrigailov, but he is fascinated, puzzled, afraid of and drawn to him; and his mixed feelings contribute greatly to the reader’s sense of his unfathomability. He assures Raskolnikov that they are ‘ birds of a feather ’ (p. 246), and Raskolnikov does feel a shock of recognition when Svidrigailov claims to have been visited by the ghost of his dead wife, to ‘ know I am not well . . . though I don’t know what’s wrong ’ (p. 245) and to share his loathing of Luzhin. Immediately after this conversation, Raskolnikov tells Razumihin, ‘ I don’t know why I am afraid of that man ’ (p. 250), feeling, as does Dounia, that ‘ he has got some terrible plan ’ in mind (p. 264). More importantly, however, he is afraid of Svidrigailov because he doesn’t understand him, while feeling throughout that his stray talk addresses, and may offer a solution to, his own condition.

Svidrigailov, in fact, monopolises the conversation with Raskolnikov and the reader shares the hero’s bafflement and disquiet as he struggles to keep up with his sudden switches of subject from the seemingly weighty to the most trivial, all of which are rendered equal by his even tone of self-amused and oddly dis-engaged humour. Thus, anticipating Raskolnikov’s anger over his treatment of his sister, he calmly bypasses the issues of his proposed adultery, of his exploitation of Dounia’s vulnerability and the opprobrium heaped upon her, and of her outrage; instead, he blandly assumes that because he is ‘capable . . . of falling in love . . . then everything can be explained in the most natural manner’. And because he was rejected, ‘ The question is, am I a monster, or am I myself a victim? ’ (p. 239). Meanwhile, his pose of terminal boredom prompts such puzzling reflections as, ‘ My only hope now is in anatomy, by Jove, it is! ’ (p. 242) or, ‘ I should have gone perhaps on an expedition to the North Pole ’ (p. 243). Moreover, Svidrigailov recounts the death of his wife whom he has probably murdered, with a whimsical detachment: ‘ the medical inquiry diagnosed apoplexy due to bathing immediately after a heavy dinner and a bottle of wine ’ and consequently ‘ my own conscience is quite at rest on that score ’ (p. 240). Similarly, he announces his plan to give ten thousand roubles to Dounia, ‘ not to compensate, not to repay her for the unpleasantness, but simply to do something to her advantage, to show that I am not, after all, privileged to do nothing but harm ’ (p. 248). Raskolnikov, therefore, fears Svidrigailov because his duality, his actions for good or for ill – in marked contrast to his own terror-drenched division – are prompted by his sensuality and his total amoralism, rendering him indifferent to the consequences of his actions. Again, his smooth relativism and essential detachment from the sufferings of others shock Raskolnikov, precisely because they perform a version of the attitude he ascribes to Napoleon – ‘it would not have given him the least pang’ (p. 350) – that he would like to take to his own transgression. But, of course, his radical indifference that calmly posits eternity as ‘ a bath house . . . black and grimy and spiders in every corner ’ is anathema to the anguished Raskolnikov, who cries, ‘ Can it be you can imagine nothing juster and more comforting than that? ’ (p. 246).

Svidrigailov does not reappear again in the novel until Part Five, Chapter 6, when to Raskolnikov’s bewilderment he resurfaces at the moment of Mrs Marmeladov’s terrible death and promises to look after the orphans and to ‘settle fifteen hundred roubles to be paid to each on coming of age’. And in response to Raskolnikov’s querying of the motive for his benevolence, with ‘an air of gay winking slyness’ he reveals his knowledge of his transgression when he mockingly explains that Mrs Marmeladov ‘ wasn’t ‘a louse’ . . . like some old pawnbroker woman ’ (p. 367).¹⁰ From this moment on, Raskolnikov is both terrified by Svidrigailov and drawn to him, because he is the only person who knows of his crime and does not expect him to confess. Indeed, Raskolnikov feels that Svidrigailov, like Porfiry, ‘ seems to be waiting for me to come to him of my own accord ’ (p. 376), and he turns to him because his very cynicism seems to offer an alternative solution to his dilemma. When they finally meet towards the end of the novel after Raskolnikov has confessed to Sonia and virtually confessed to Porfiry, he is disgusted by Svidrigailov’s advocation of ‘vice’ as ‘ something permanent, founded indeed upon nature and not dependent on fantasy ’ (pp. 395). Raskolnikov is now aware of a very different permanence and nature founded on Christ’s sacrifice, and Svidrigailov’s terminal boredom and indifference as to the consequences of, and his responsibly for, his actions is revealed as a mocking version of his own fantastic, proud theories that had refused to recognise any moral limits to his transgression. Thus, finally, in the dynamics of the novel he functions to confirm the justice of Raskolnikov’s confession. Thereafter, Svidrigailov, unlike Raskolnikov with Sonia, vainly seeks redemption through the love of Dounia and in committing suicide he accepts and takes over the solution Dostoevsky in The Notebooks had envisaged for his hero. Unlike Raskolnikov, nothing binds him to life; even vice, chillingly, is only ‘ an occupation of a sort ’, and his derisive contempt for Raskolnikov because ‘ "he’s too eager for life ’ (p. 425) signals ‘despair, the most cynical’. Performing until the last, he stages his death in front of an amazed stranger, after uttering one of the bleakest and most solitary jokes in literature: ‘ When you are asked, you just say he was going, he said, to America" ’ (p. 430).

Throughout the narrative, Sonia the humble, vulnerable and self-sacrificing prostitute is a fixed point, embodying ‘hope, the most unrealisable’; and from the moment he seeks her out it is axiomatic that her fate is inseparable from his. Sonia is rather difficult to take because we have to accept, as (say) with Oliver Twist, that ‘not one drop of real depravity had penetrated to her heart’ (p. 275), and the idea of the harlot who believes that God ‘does everything for her’ reading the raising of Lazarus to the axe murderer may be exemplary, but it is not without traces of spiritual kitsch. Overall, however, the scenes between Sonia and Raskolnikov are poignant and powerful because the hero always voices the reader’s qualms – ‘ She is a religious maniac! ’ (p. 276) – and tries to break her spirit. Most importantly, it is precisely her gratitude for his generosity and compassion for his suffering that force him to confront and plumb the motives for his crime. Thus, in the great confession scene, she continually points up the intrinsic discrepancy between the criminal and his crime, exclaiming, for example, ‘how could you give away your last farthing and yet rob and murder!’ (p. 348); and her insistence on an explanation of the mystery of his action is matched by Raskolnikov’s of the mystery of her compassion for him. Hence her bewilderment, her forgiveness and her resolute refusal to grant his right to murder another human being, function as a form of torture forcing him to examine his motives and to understand himself. So, in a striking sequence, he wildly offers and retracts an array of conflicting reasons: plunder, hunger, ‘ a bad heart ’, his Napoleonism, his desire to aid his family and to augment his university career and personal independence. Then, spurred by her incredulous ‘ that’s not it ’, he tries theory – ‘ I’ve only killed a louse ’ (p. 351); environment – ‘ tiny rooms cramp the soul and the mind ’ (p. 351); theory again – ‘ He who despises most things will be a lawgiver ’ to the masses; pride – ‘ "I wanted to have the daring" ’; and, reprising both his theory and his self-lacerating sense of his abject failure – ‘ I wanted to find out then and quickly: whether I was a louse like everybody else or a man ’ (p. 353). His chaotic survey culminates in the searing and potentially liberating recognition: ‘ Did I murder the old woman? I murdered myself, not her! ’ (p. 353).

From this moment on, Raskolnikov faces the great questions posed by Sonia which recall her father’s about what it means to have nowhere to turn: ‘ how will you go on living? What will you live for? ’ (p. 354). And she immediately offers him Lizaveta’s cypress cross to wear, ‘ when you go to meet your suffering ’ (p. 356). Sonia’s ‘when’ regards his acceptance of suffering as inevitable and her case is reinforced by Dostoevsky’s orchestration of the viewpoints of all those closest to Raskolnikov, who continues to resist a doctrine of suffering because (as ever) he feels he is either contemptible and incapable of, or unable to understand faith, or because he proudly holds on to the essential rightness of his grand theory. Thus, in their last encounter Porfiry speaks for his author when he diagnoses Raskolnikov’s ‘ modern case ’ and his shame at the collapse of his base theory. He urges him to take a change of air, and to accept ‘life’ that his intellect has isolated him from, and to thank God (and the novelist!) who holds the answer to man’s eternal question, ‘Where to?’ Raskolnikov’s irate question, ‘ From the height of what majestic calm do you proclaim these words of wisdom? ’, reveals this collusion between the triple providences of magistrate, God and author when Porfiry responds: ‘ A man perhaps of feeling and sympathy, maybe of some knowledge too ’, who knows ‘ You can’t get on without us ’, who is convinced that ‘ you will decide ‘to accept your suffering’ ’’ ’, and ends by replaying the Orthodox idea that ‘ Suffering . . . is a great thing . . . there’s an idea in suffering " ’ (p. 388).

Porfiry’s spiritual instructions are reinforced in the closing chapters by Dounia in her last conversation with her brother and, of course, by Sonia who shares Porfiry’s and the author’s appreciation of Raskolnikov’s ‘vanity, his pride and his lack of faith’. She alone, however, despairs that he may confess the crime through ‘cowardice and fear of death’, because he would then deny the glorious possibility contained in Christ’s promise: ‘I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in Me though he were dead, yet shall he live’ (p. 278). It is entirely typical of the narrative’s uncertainty and of Dostoevsky’s respect for Raskolnikov’s divisions that his indecisiveness is manifest even when he follows Sonia’s way of the cross. Thus, though he ‘kissed the filthy earth with bliss and rapture’, both the derisive and semi-respectful remarks of the crowd (again speaking as from within his own divided consciousness) check Raskolnikov, and the narrator cannot be certain that the words ‘ I am a murderer ’ were even ‘on the point of dropping from his lips’ (463–4). This pattern is repeated when he enters the police office, learns of Svidrigailov’s suicide and fails to confess. Significantly, he returns only after he sees his attendant good angel, Sonia, looking at him despairingly, ‘pale and horror-stricken’. Finally, then, he confesses and submits to the Orthodox Idea: ‘through experience pro and contra’, which ‘he takes upon himself’, he acknowledges the responsibility of the individual to his community and accepts the possibility of his resurrection into a new life.

iv

The Epilogue, set eighteen months later in Siberia and told omni-sciently, has disappointed many readers for a variety of reasons: its treatment of time is perfunctory, covering years in sentences after covering seconds in pages; the author’s views, now, are obtrusive; and Raskolnikov’s conversion is both too sudden and ‘a pious lie’ (Mochulsky, p. 312). I certainly do not want to defend the ending against such charges; rather I want to dwell on the most curious feature of the Epilogue, namely that it seems swiftly to rewrite the protracted story we have just finished. Thus, the first description of Raskolnikov’s psychological state during his long illness stresses his shame before, and torture of, Sonia; and reiterates both ‘wounded pride made him ill’ and ‘his exasperated conscience found no particularly terrible fault in his past, except a simple blunder which might happen to anyone’ (p. 456). This account takes us back, so to speak, to square one: his relationship with Sonia follows the same old pattern; it is as if his confessions never happened and his acceptance of suffering, which figured so hugely in the thematics of the novel, never existed. Instead, the Epilogue concentrates on the inseparable questions of ‘Why had he not killed himself? Why had he . . . preferred to confess?’ And from this moment on the narrative swiftly charts a series of recognitions that enable him to attain, appreciate and experience the wisdom Sonia embodies and the narrator affirms, namely his decision against suicide arose not from a mere fear of death, but from a presentiment ‘of a new view of life and of his future resurrection’ (p. 457).

His first recognition replays Dostoevsky’s Memoirs from the House of the Dead. Thus, Raskolnikov shares his creator’s awareness of ‘the terrible impossible gulf that lay between him’ and the common convicts; and once again the Polish gentry prisoners’ contempt for the ‘common churls’ ignites Raskolnikov’s appreciation that their loathing of atheism and their love of Sonia spring from their quintessentially Russian faith in God – a faith that he has tried to bury and needs to recover. Hence, secondly, the enormity of his stubborn insistence that ‘many of the benefactors of mankind’ whom he had tried vainly to emulate, ‘were right’ (p. 457), is once again addressed through his apocalyptic science-fiction nightmare of a terrible plague: ‘New sorts of microbes . . . endowed with intelligence and will’ infect all mankind, convincing them that ‘their decisions, their scientific conclusions, their moral convictions’ are ‘infallible’ (p. 459). Consequently, all communal bonds and loyalties are destroyed: chaos reigns, good and evil are confused and people end up murdering each other. Most terrifyingly, at the end of the pestilence no wisdom has been gleaned because a myth of a new élite of ‘pure chosen people, destined to found a new race and a new life’, survives intact on the ruins of a world demolished because all its inhabitants regard themselves as ‘extraordinary’ people (p. 459). The ideological functions of Raskolnikov’s eschatological nightmare are all too obvious: it universalises his private, theoretical, egoistic, obsessive dream of murder, reconfirming Porfiry’s diagnosis of his special case and Sonia’s horror at his deed, as well as redemonstrating Dostoevsky’s fear that atheism will abolish all grounds of authority, ushering in the triumph of unchecked quests for personal happiness and for (Western) theoretical schemes for social and political justice that will reduce the world to a chaos of competing egos and theories.

Raskolnikov is saved by two further recognitions that arise out of the other side of his split being. Thus, shortly after Easter on a beautiful spring morning he finds himself alone contemplating ‘the vast steppe’ and the nomads living freely ‘as though the age of Abraham and his flocks had not passed’. This moment is un-convincing because it is as fantastic as those of the Western theorists the novel always mocks and it is capped by the appearance of Sonia before whom the weeping Raskolnikov prostrates himself. This coincidence, of course, neatly links Sonia with the days of untroubled faith in a pristine Russia that has always remained immune to the contamination of Western atheism; and his love for her inaugurates ‘the dawn of a new future, of a full resurrection into a new life’ (p. 461) enshrined in the New Testament that he requests of her in order to remind himself throughout his in-carceration of Christ’s greatest miracle, the raising of Lazarus from the dead. The novel ends with the beginning of ‘a new story . . . of his gradual regeneration . . . of his initiation into a new unknown life’ (p. 462). Dostoevsky can only promise rather than write this ‘new story’: but it confirms the central vision of Crime and Punishment – one that he pursued obsessively throughout the rest of his career – of creating an educated and spiritually developed Russian who, through experience pro and contra, conquers his egoism and doubts and who is, therefore, prepared to re-enter the human community through his conversion to the Orthodox point of view.

Keith Carabine

Rutherford College

University of Kent at Canterbury

introduction notes

1 A ‘signature’ is one printer’s sheet, the equivalent of sixteen pages in a book.

2 A draft of this letter was found among the papers gathered by Anna Grigoryevna, so it may not have been sent.

3 A full discussion of Dostoevsky’s quarrel with his contemporaries is beyond the scope of an ‘Introduction’, but I have tried to illustrate the issues in the Notes to this edition. Interested readers should consult the essays by Offord and the biography of Joseph Frank. The term ‘nihilism’ from the Latin nihil (nothing) was coined to describe ‘the new men of the sixties’ who rejected past traditions, including the ‘liberals’ of the 1840s, and felt that the Emancipation Edict of 1861, which had freed the serfs without land, had not gone far enough. Turgenev in Fathers and Sons (1862) depicted ‘the new man’ in the dynamic, abrasive figure of Bazarov, a scientist and materialist who scorned all social, religious and familial institutions.

4 For the full reference for this and subsequent citations, see the Bibliography that follows this Introduction.

5 For extracts from The Notebooks, see the Appendix that follows the Notes to this edition.

6 This doctrine is difficult, perhaps, for Westerners to take. It certainly disgusted Joseph Conrad, the English novelist born in Poland, who rewrote Crime and Punishment in Under Western Eyes (1911). His English narrator lambasts the Orthodox Idea: ‘in its strange pretensions of sanctity, and in the secret readiness to abase itself in suffering, the spirit of Russia is the spirit of cynicism’ (Dent Collected Edition, p. 67).

7 ‘Socialism – that’s the despair of ever creating a real man; hence they create despotism and say that it is freedom!’ (The Notebooks, p. 195)

8 ‘N.B. 13 November. Nihilism is base servility of thought. A Nihilist is a lackey of thought’ (The Notebooks, p. 239)

9 Porfiry’s chauvinistic comparison signals that at stake in Raskolnikov’s special case is nothing less than the present situation and future of Russia, which, as ever in Dostoevsky’s writings, is inseparable from his complex sense of Russia’s relation to Poland – her great historical (and hated) adversary and rival for leadership of the Slav world – and to the West. This subject, too huge for an Introduction, is the grand theme of W. Lednicki’s Russia, Poland and the West, New York, 1954.

10 Svidrigailov’s benevolence disposes much too easily of all the social misery Dostoevsky so unsparingly depicts and it enables him, on the one hand, to side-step the socialist case for the link between poverty and crime and, on the other, to reinforce Raskolnikov’s rejection of poverty as a motive for his transgression. This thematic imbalance is consistent with Dostoevsky’s persistent mockery of all forms of social redress for poverty; and, to Western readers especially, it underlines the central problem of his doctrine of suffering, namely its essential quietism and tacit refusal to accept that the manifold miseries of the Russian people are also linked to the repressive political and social conditions engendered by an inflexible Autocracy.

bibliography

Dostoevsky: Works and Letters

Crime and Punishment (1866), edited by George Gibian, translated by Jessie Coulson, third edition, Norton, New York 1989; contains a fine selection of essays or excerpts from the major books on Dostoevsky beginning with the contemporary responses of Strakhov and Tolstoy through key twentieth-century Russian and Western interpreters

The Devils (1871), translated by David Margarshack, Penguin Books, London 1953

Dostoevsky: Letters, Vols I–V, edited and translated by David Lowe, Ardis Publishers, Ann Arbor 1989–91

Dostoevsky: The Notebooks for Crime and Punishment, edited and translated by Edward Wasiolek, University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London 1967; an essential resource

Memoirs from the House of the Dead (1864), edited by Ronald Hingley, translated by Jessie Coulson, World’s Classics, Oxford University Press, 1983

Notes from the Underground (1864), translated by Jessie Coulson, Penguin Books, 1972

Selected Letters of Fyodor Dostoevsky, edited by Joseph Frank and David I. Goldstein, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick 1987

Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (1863), edited and translated by Kyril FitzLyon, Quartet Books, London 1985

A Writer’s Diary, Vols I & II, translated and annotated by Kenneth Lanz, Northwestern University Press, Evanston 1993

Criticism: Biography and Books on Dostoevsky

Robert B. Anderson, Dostoevsky: Myths of Duality, University of Florida Press, Gainesville 1986

Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 1929, edited and translated by Caryl Emerson, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1984; has greatly influenced modern criticism, claiming that Dostoevsky invented the ‘polyphonic novel’

Nicholas Berdyaev, Dostoevsky, 1957, translated by Donald Attwater, New American Library, New York 1974

Jacques Catteau, Dostoevsky and the Process of Literary Creation, translated by Audrey Littlewood, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1989

Gary Cox, Crime and Punishment: A Mind to Murder, G. K. Hall, Boston 1990; full account of all aspects, especially useful for the background to the novel

Dostoevsky, Anna G., Dostoevsky: Reminiscences, translated and edited by Beatrice Stillman, Liveright, New York 1977; a fine memoir, particularly interesting on the writing of Crime and Punishment

Donald Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism, University of Chicago Press , Chicago and London 1965; a good book, especially on Dostoevsky and the city

Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821–1849; Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850–1859; Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860–1865; Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865–1871, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1983–1995; perhaps the finest life-and-works biography of the

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