ILYA KLIGER

Shapes of History and

the Enigmatic Hero in
Dostoevsky: The Case of
Crime and Punishment

T HIS ESSAY STUDIES A CRUCIAL FEATURE of Dostoevsky’s novelistic

poetics, and the poetics of Crime and Punishment (1866) in particular, in light
of contemporaneous debates regarding the historical fate of Russia. The novel,
I argue, is a thought experiment exploring the emerging condition of multi-
historicity — ​t hat is, a simultaneity of multiple emplotment possibilities for the
Russian nation.1 In order to bring these possibilities to light, I read the novel with
an eye on Dostoevsky’s journalism from the early- to mid-sixties, a period charac-
terized by an urgent recognition of the openness of Russia’s historical future.2
Although critics have long recognized that “the central problems which pre-
occupy Dostoevsky in the nonfiction are the same as those that preoccupy his
characters in the fiction” (Kabat 113), reading fiction and journalism side by
side does raise a number of methodological problems. Chief among them is the
problem of translation or transposition: how does one mediate between fiction
and nonfiction without resorting to reductive procedures that posit the episte-
mological priority of one over the other? In what follows I attempt to effect this
transposition with the help of the formal (narratological) categories of charac-
ter and emplotment. I suggest, in other words, that there exists a fundamental
isomorphism in Dostoevsky’s journalism and fiction between historical and nov-
elistic constructions of “personality” or selfhood, and that a similar isomorphism
can be observed between his historical and novelistic “temporal imaginations.” I
argue that his journalistic articulation of Russia’s “national personality” as an
enigmatic puzzle to be solved corresponds to his construction of the novelistic
protagonist as a mystery to himself and to others, a mystery the resolution of

1
Dostoevsky’s awareness of the condition of the multi-historicity in which Russia finds itself in
the late 1850s to the early 1860s anticipates Ernst Bloch’s influential elucidation of the concept of
Ungleichzeitigkeit, or “non-synchronicity,” which has been taken up by numberless intellectual histo-
rians and philosophers of history throughout the twentieth century. See Bloch 97–103.
2
For an excellent discussion of the relation between Crime and Punishment  and the contemporary
Russian press from a literary-institutional perspective, see Klioutchkine.
Comparative Literature  62:3
DOI 10.1215/00104124-2010-012  © 2010 by University of Oregon
 Shapes of History & the Enigmatic Hero in Dostoevsky / 229

which is the work of the entire novel. Moreover, the establishment of the pro-
tagonist’s identity does not fundamentally take the form of a list of character
traits, pre-existing or acquired. Instead, it takes the form of a story binding his
past, present, and future into a meaningful whole. This novelistic search for the
proper emplotment of the hero, I argue, corresponds to the search in contempo-
rary journalism for the proper trajectory of the Russian nation, which, with the
emancipation of the serfs in 1861, is perceived as pregnant with multiple histori-
cal possibilities. An enigma soliciting narrative solutions, Dostoevsky’s socially
underdetermined (raznochinets) hero is thus best understood as a formal condi-
tion of the possibility of exploring Russia’s position at the intersection point of
multiple historical vectors. As such, the hero enables a series of temporal shapes,
laden with historiographic significance, to be considered and then either chosen
or dismissed.
The discussion that follows examines four competing emplotment scenarios
and four possible temporal shapes for the resolution of the corresponding enig-
mas of the protagonist and of Russia. The first is the radically accelerated time
of the crime or the great deed, anchored in the hero Raskolnikov himself; corre-
sponding to it is the time of revolution, the violent overthrow of the current state
of things in Russia in order to create an entirely new order. The second is the no
less precipitous hagiographic time of conversion, offered by Sonya, the saintly pros-
titute and representative of the common people (narod); the historical correlate
here is Russia’s religious regeneration under the influence of the recently liber-
ated narod, with the messianic purpose of leading the peoples of the world into a
new age of universal brotherhood in Christ. The third is the homogeneous empty
time of a career, which tempts the hero in the person of the petit-bourgeois lawyer
Luzhin, whose historiographic analogue can be found in the post-1848 degraded
Western European vision of progress as mechanistic accumulation. And, finally,
there is the developmental temporality of Bildung, insinuated by the detective-
mentor Porfiry Petrovich and his distant relative Razumikhin and corresponding
to the romantic and nationalist Western European ideology of progress as organic
fruition. These emplotment scenarios can be divided further into two pairs, each
privileging a fundamental conception of time: time as rupture (Raskolnikov,
Sonya) and time as continuity (Luzhin, Porfiry-Razumikhin).
In conclusion, I suggest that the novel is ultimately indecisive about the pref-
erable emplotment for the protagonist — ​at least in part because each “positive”
mem­b er of the temporal pair (Sonya, Porfiry-Razumikhin) turns out to be
haunted by its “negative” double (Raskolnikov, Luzhin): regeneration by revolu-
tion, gradual organic fruition by homogeneous mechanistic accumulation. Hedg-
ing its bets, the novel strives for an imaginary resolution that would synthesize
the temporality of conversion with that of Bildung. What we end with is thus a sug-
gestion that Raskolnikov’s (and Russia’s) fate is best grasped as something like a
saint’s life in Bildung  time, infecting the slowness of accumulated meaningful
experience with the heroism of the sudden deed and thus imaginatively contain-
ing the threat of both revolutionary bloodshed and petit-bourgeois “prose of the
world.” A re-inscription of Crime and Punishment  into the context of journalism
from the period of Great Reforms thus allows us to read the novel as a political
allegory that stages and imaginatively resolves the socio-temporal contradictions
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 230

structuring a world torn between conflicting demands for continuity and radical
change.3

The Enigmatic Hero

In his seminal discussion of Dostoevsky’s poetics, Mikhail Bakhtin characterizes
the Dostoevskian hero as essentially self-conscious and therefore unfinalizable.
Self-consciousness, argues Bakhtin, is here not just a feature of the hero’s psycho-
logical makeup, not one character trait among others, but the very principle for
the organization of psychological material, its “artistic dominant.” As such, it
destabilizes all static definitions, rendering everything that might be said about
the hero false by virtue of the hero’s capacity to forestall the other’s (and the
author’s) characterization of him. Self-consciousness here is less Cartesian than
Hegelian, not isolated and self-sufficient but forever anxious, dependent on, and
hostile to other consciousnesses of it, struggling for and, just as obsessively, avoid-
ing recognition (Bakhtin 50–54). On the level of psychology, the principle of self-
consciousness often surfaces as a kind of stubborn contrariness, a refusal of pre-
dictability. Dostoevsky’s heroes are thus frequently motivated by little more than
the need to frustrate expectations. They are intractable and capricious, and they
often justify their capriciousness by elevating it to the level of an explicit philo-
sophical principle. As one of the most vividly self-conscious of them, the hero-
narrator of Notes from Underground (1864), argues, “And in particular [our caprice
or whimsy] may be more profitable than all other profits even in the case when it
is obviously harmful and contradicts the most sensible conclusions of our reason
concerning profits — ​because in any event it preserves for us the chiefest and the
dearest thing, that is, our personality and our individuality” (28–29). The reason-
able and the profitable are refused in the name of personality and individuality,

3
For a discussion of the term “political allegory” see Jameson (77–83). Some of the more fruitful
approaches to the relation between Dostoevsky’s fiction and his journalism have tended to presup-
pose something like an “intergeneric dialogue” in which fiction and essays “exist in dialogue with
each other, provoking, qualifying and reflecting on each other” (McReynolds 29). Both Dostoevsky’s
journalism and his novels can then be seen as, in the words of Gary Soul Morson, “threshold art,” the
former including extended fictional or at least narrative sections, the latter directly addressing burn-
ing contemporary questions by means of characters’ thoughts, monologues, dialogues, and narrato-
rial intrusions — ​each category generating “hermeneutic perplexity” with regard to whether one
should read the text as fiction or nonfiction (Boundaries  39–68). For two explicit attempts to cast the
relationship between Dostoevsky’s journalistic discourse on Russia and novelistic representations of
character in allegorical terms, see Susan McReynolds and Andrew Wachtel, both of whom tend to
link the “national personality” of Russia with the fictional personality of character by way of a set of
stable characteristics or logics. McReynolds argues that in Crime and Punishment  Dostoevsky’s Russia
is enmeshed in the same paradoxical dynamic of resistance to, and acceptance of, a utilitarian sacri-
ficial logic as the criminal Raskolnikov (117–32). Wachtel offers a reading of The Brothers Karamazov 
as “a novel about the beginning of the end of history, as the three fraternal branches of the Chris-
tian faith — ​the Catholic ideal (Ivan), the Protestant/pagan ideal (Dmitry), and the Orthodox ideal
(Alesha)—​enact the final denouement of civilization as Dostoevsky knew it” (146–47). In what fol-
lows I diverge from this conception of historical allegory in Dostoevsky insofar as my central concern
is characterological and narratological isomorphism, that is, analogous forms rather than entities. A
more productive formulation, for the purposes of this essay, is thus Michael Holquist’s: “[Dostoevsky]
was among the first to recognize that the question of what a man might be could not be separated
from the question of what might constitute an authentic history. Each question is, in its own way, a
dilemma of narrative” (194; my emphasis). For a recent overview of approaches to the problem of read-
ing Dostoevsky’s fiction and journalism together, see McReynolds, 207–09.
 Shapes of History & the Enigmatic Hero in Dostoevsky / 231

and this refusal is complemented on the level of narrative by a resistance to emplot-

ment. Neither the calculations of instrumental reason nor the conventions of lit­
erary plot are allowed to delimit the thoughts and actions of the hero, who, in
Michael Holquist’s apt formulation, “systematically [subverts] the traditional liter-
ary expectation of a neat beginning, middle and end” (54).
All this is difficult to deny, but what nevertheless goes unsaid in discussions of
the radical narrative, psychological, and metaphysical openness of the Dostoev­
skian hero is that supplementing this same unfinalizability is an insistent demand
to be finalized — ​watched, understood, emplotted. “What task are you and I faced
with now?” says Ivan Karamazov to his brother Alyosha during their first extended
conversation, “My task is to explain to you as quickly as possible my essence, that is,
what sort of a man I am, what I believe in and what I hope for, is that right?” (Broth-
ers  235). What we have is not just an unfinalizable hero but an enigmatic one,
soliciting attention without yielding decisive knowledge.
I suggest, then, that it would be fruitful to understand Dostoevsky’s late poetics
as essentially hero-centric — ​that is, as organized by the quest for the identity of
the insistently mysterious hero or heroine. The question “who is s/he?” shapes the
narrative of The Idiot (who is Nastasya Filippovna? who is Prince Myshkin?), The
Devils (who is Stavrogin?), The Adolescent (who is Versilov?), The Brothers Karamazov
(who are Ivan and Mitya?), and perhaps most of all Crime and Punishment (who is
Raskolnikov?). Indeed, as an idiosyncratic proto-detective novel, Crime and Punish-
ment  renders the quest for the identity of the hero explicit and delineates its
parameters. Although we know the criminal’s name, his whereabouts, and even
the minute circumstances of the murder he committed, we lack essential knowl-
edge about him (see Rahv 20; Frank 201–02). The whodunit is translatable as fol-
lows: What is the deeper underlying essence of this man, this former student
Raskolnikov, who killed the old pawnbroker and took her money?
The account of the crime itself, located in a field of tension between competing
narrative trajectories, provides the ground of this ignorance. Prior to the crime,
Raskolnikov vacillates between two contradictory ways of thinking about it. First,
he emplots the crime as an event in the life of a great man: kill the old pawn­
broker, take her money, and become the benefactor of humanity. But, at the same
time, the planning necessary for the successful execution of the crime involves
imagining a series of decidedly unheroic acts: finding an axe, hiding, lying, get-
ting smeared with blood, trembling at the thought of detection. The plot of the
crime itself and the plot of the great man’s biography (of which the crime is only
the first step) interfere with each other so insistently that Raskolnikov vacillates
until the very end, and the murder unfolds “as if someone had taken him by the
hand and pulled him almost wholly mechanically: as if a piece of his clothing had
been caught in the cogs of a machine” (70). Because the numberless accidents
and friendly coincidences that accompany his dazed journey to the place of the
crime and back at once ensure his success and divest him of agency, they also posit
the crime as the place of the enigma, a mysterious event soliciting understanding
and re-emplotment. Who was it, after all, who killed the old pawn-broker? And
how exactly did it happen? If in more conventional detective fiction the endpoint
of the narrative is reached when we retrace the criminal’s steps all the way up to
the moment of the crime, here the logic is reversed. The criminal’s way to the
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 232

crime, traced in detail, is itself the mystery, not the solution, and the criminal him-
self is the first to attempt to answer the questions it poses.
Days after the crime, in a state of delirium, Raskolnikov gathers up everything
he has taken from the old pawnbroker and walks frantically through the city not
knowing what to do with the loot. At a certain point he even considers throwing
it all in the river. But minutes later he wonders: “If indeed this whole thing was
done consciously . . . , then how is it that so far you haven’t even looked into the
purse and do not know what you’ve actually gained . . . ? Weren’t you going to
throw it into the water just now, this purse, along with all the other things which
you also haven’t seen yet?” (110). Confronted with the task of making the crime
his own, Rashkolnikov is unable to do so. He has become a mystery to himself.4

Self-historicity: A Russian Story

During a conversation with the investigator Porfiry Petrovich, Raskolnikov out-
lines a conception of crime according to which extraordinary men are permitted
to eliminate the obstacles standing between them and a genuine breakthrough in
the history of mankind, even if according to conventional standards this leads
them to commit illegal and amoral acts. Porfiry Petrovich raises a concern:
But tell me this: how does one manage to distinguish these extraordinary ones from the ordinary?
Are they somehow marked at birth, or what [pri rozhdenii, chto l’ znaki takie est’ ]? What I am getting at
is that one could do with more accuracy here, more outward certainty, so to speak: excuse the natural
uneasiness of a practical and law-abiding man, but wouldn’t it be possible in this case, for example, to
introduce some special clothing, the wearing of some insignia, or whatever? . . . Because, you must
agree, if there is some sort of mix-up, and a person from one category imagines he belongs to the
other category . . . (262)
The investigator’s question invokes the widespread contemporary complaint,
rendered classic in Balzac’s Physiologie de la toilette, that it is no longer possible to
distinguish people belonging to particular social classes by the way they dress
(Balzac 20:461). In the liberalized period of the late 1850s to early 1860s a Rus-
sian version of such a modern man bursts on the social scene. Educated sons of
merchants and priests, students, tutors, journalists, poor or impoverished mem-
bers of the gentry — ​in short, the so-called raznochintsy (literally, persons of inde-
terminate rank)— ​fill the streets, salons, and offices of the capital cities, and it is
no longer possible to tell who is who simply by looking.
In replying to the investigator’s sly question, Raskolnikov takes this new state
of affairs into account. Of course such archaic indicators of extraordinariness as
portents at birth ( Jesus?) or special clothing ( Joseph?) are no longer available.
Instead, he argues, in order to determine whether someone is truly exceptional,
we must wait and see how things turn out. If a person who takes himself to be
extraordinary tests himself by transgressing established social norms but soon
enough regrets his actions and ends up humiliating himself publicly and seek-
ing penance, then it becomes retrospectively evident that he has made a mistake,
and his identity is re-established on a ground more solid than that of mere fan-

4
Hence, yet another way to understand the significance of his name: raskol — ​a split, a crack —​
here, between the one who acts and the one who tries to understand the act.
 Shapes of History & the Enigmatic Hero in Dostoevsky / 233

tasy. In other words, because it is not given a priori, the truth about the new enig-
matic man finds its proper medium in a narrative shape, in a story.5
As the type of a new Russian man, the raznochinets  began to attract intense nar-
rative and discursive attention with the ascension to the throne of the reformist
Alexander II and the end of the disastrous Crimean War in 1856. In an atmo-
sphere of relaxed censorship, and in anticipation (and later in the wake) of the
abolition of serfdom, journalistic polemics turned to the question of Russia’s
future. Some argued that Russia had fallen far behind Western Europe and had to
be brought up to date by means of moderately paced liberalizing reforms. Others,
less mainstream and less explicit in their writings, hoped to incite a great peasant
revolution that would destroy every foundation of the existing order. There were
those who believed that such a revolution, though desirable, could be realized
only after a relatively prolonged period of preparation and education of the
masses, while opponents of any change whatsoever instead defended traditional
Russian values: Autocracy, Nationality, Orthodoxy. Still others accepted the need
for progress but conceived of it in organic terms, as an internal development
rather than a consequence of the imposition of external principles, a forced West-
ernization (Karpachev 197–398). Each of these narratives implied a different role
for the emerging raznochintsy  in the country’s future. Were they going to be lead-
ers of the revolutionary avant-garde? Educators of the people? Cabinet ministers?
Apostates and insurrectionists? The novel of the 1860s and 1870s — “populist,”
“anti-nihilist,” and other — ​would explore all of these possibilities. I’d like to pause
here, however, with a cluster of relatively immediate novelistic responses to the
post-emancipation condition authored by Ivan Turgenev, Nikolai Chernyshevsky,
and Dostoevsky himself.
Reacting to a prolonged journalistic polemic about the fate, in Russian litera-
ture and life, of the so-called superfluous man — ​the progressive-minded but, in
matters both personal and political, ineffectual nobleman, who by the early six-
ties seemed increasingly outdated — ​Turgenev and Chernyshevsky attempted to
create or capture a new Russian type who was not a member of the gentry. Turge-
nev’s Fathers and Children (Otsy i deti, 1862) introduced the figure of the “nihilist,”
an adherent of unprecedented views (naturalist, materialist, utilitarian), as well
as a practitioner of a scandalous ethos (direct, anti-hierarchical, provocatively
uncouth). Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? (Chto delat’?, 1863) opposed to this
sullen and ultimately tragic type a number of more cheerful protagonists, who
espoused the principles of social justice, women’s emancipation, and enlightened
self-interest. Placed side by side, these two competing representations of the “new
man” appear to be diametrically opposed. But, when compared with Dostoevsky’s
intervention in Notes from Underground, they turn out to share one crucial feature:
both endow the “new man” with a set of stable socio-psychological characteristics,
more paradoxically combined in Turgenev than in Chernyshevsky, but determinate
nonetheless. Dostoevsky’s Notes  employs a wholly different principle of character

5
My consistent use of “man” and the masculine pronoun here and below reflects historically spe-
cific gender limitations on the position a raznochinets  protagonist might occupy in fictional narrative.
This would start to change in the 1860s and 1870s, especially within the sub-genre of the so-called
new-people novel, in which female heroines begin to inhabit traditionally male roles involving
toughness, isolation, and struggle.
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 234

construction, altogether depriving the hero of stable features and endowing him
with a self-consciousness that works tirelessly to forestall and annihilate all deter-
minations. To be sure, Dostoevsky did not produce this hero especially for the
occasion of this polemic. The protagonists of his early fiction from the 1840s are
already self-conscious and unfinalizable. But it is only here that the Dostoevskian
hero acquires the proportions of the new Russian man and, as such, becomes not
simply an agent of theoretical and narrative negation but also a site of potentiality
that requires proper emplotment. It is only in Notes from Underground, in short, that
the “new man” truly acquires all the requisite features of an enigma.6
A glance at Dostoevsky’s contemporaneous journalistic activity reveals a histo-
riographic dimension to this development in his novelistic poetics. Soon after
returning to St. Petersburg from political exile, Dostoevsky began to publish with
his brother Mikhail the journal Time (Vremia, 1861–63). In it, a group of like-
minded writers and thinkers again and again attacked the abstract universalism —​
liberal, radical, and conservative alike — ​that confined Russia to the same universal-
historical path traveled by the countries of Western Europe. They assumed, on the
contrary, that Russia should follow its own unique path, fulfill its own unique des-
tiny, and in its own time. Thus, one regular contributor to the journal explains the
meaning of freedom (in general and of the former serfs in particular) as follows:
“Freedom consists not in the capacity for development as such, but in the capacity
for active development, i.e. in complete originality [samobytnost’ ]: in self-rule
[samoupravlenie], self-activity [samodeiatel’nost’ ], self-sufficiency [samodostatochnost’ ]
and, most importantly, self-reliance [samoupovanie]” (Time  123; my translation).
The incantatory repetition of the prefix self-  (sam-) renders especially vividly one
of the key philosophical assumptions shared by the contributors to the journal.
Like the Dostoevskian hero, the emancipated peasants and the Russian people in
general are not to be treated as objects. The bureaucratic question “what is to be
done with . . . ?” is inapplicable to them. Instead, they — ​and Russia itself — ​should
be posited as an enigma, not unlike the enigma of the living self, which can only
reveal itself through its own independent self-activity.
To the list of nouns prefixed by self-, Dostoevsky soon adds another, the most
important one of all: self-historicity. “We are distinct,” he writes in an 1865 notice
announcing the publication of his second journal Epoch (Epokha, 1864–65), “we
are peculiar, self-historical [svoeistorichny]” (PSS  20:217; my translation). Whereas
the story of many Western civilizations may have already ended, Russia’s story is, in
many ways, only just beginning. For many years Russia has lain asleep; now it is

6
In a recent essay on Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead, Nancy Ruttenburg elaborates on
another kind of enigma that structures this fictionalized memoir from Siberian exile: the enigma
of the common people — ​of peasants and their way of life — ​for the gentleman narrator. The mys-
tery of the simple folk in turn renders the narrator obscure to himself (Ruttenburg 748). The
enigmatic status of the raznochinets  might thus be viewed analogously — ​t hat is, as a function of his
failed integration into the body of the nation. This is indeed the view Dostoevsky endorses in his
journalism, which suggests that the questions central to the establishment of raznochinets  identity
are twofold: who are the Russian people, and how can one become one with them? However, in his
post-Siberian novels it is the raznochinets  protagonist and not  the occasional minor character of the
peasant who most insistently solicits answers to the mystery of his own identity and the identity of
Russia. I suggest that this has to do with the fact that essential answers in Dostoevsky are shaped as
plots rather than wise sayings, are temporal rather than static. In this respect, the advantages, for
Dostoevsky’s fiction, of the raznochinets  over the peasant are, as far as the breadth of emplotment
possibilities are concerned, obvious.
 Shapes of History & the Enigmatic Hero in Dostoevsky / 235

waking, ready to embark upon “our own story” (nasha sobstvennaiia povest’ ), which
is as yet a mystery, a puzzle (zagadka). Because Russia’s course must be intuited or
guessed (ugadat’ ) (18:57–69), the journal’s central task is to find a story that is
adequate to Russia’s self-historicity, that is uniquely and organically its own.7
Dostoevsky’s novelistic preoccupation with the question “who is s/he?”—​what is
the unique and truthful story of a life of an enigmatic raznochinets  hero? — ​is thus
readable as a biographical recasting of the question “what is Russia?”—​what is the
narrative shape adequate to its distinctiveness, its particularity. Dostoevsky’s post-
Reform novels, and Crime and Punishment  in particular, are testing grounds for
various modes of emplotment, zones of narrative experimentation, in which the
proper plot or configuration of plots can be identified among a number of his-
torically available possibilities.8

Early Options: Why Crime Is Better than a Career

Early in the novel, Raskolnikov is presented with two alternative visions of
advancement in the world: a crime or a career. The narrative trajectory of a crime
is formulated as follows: “Kill [the old pawnbroker] and take her money, so that
afterwards with its help you can devote yourself to the service of all mankind” (65).
This, in the end, is the trajectory he chooses. Here is the one he rejects: “Oh yes,
of course, [my] happiness can be arranged; [I] can be kept at the university, made
a partner in the office, [my] whole fate can be secured; maybe later [I’ll] be rich,
honored, respected, and perhaps [I’ll] even end [my] life a famous man” (44). To
this bifurcation, whose locus classicus  within the realist novel is surely Rastignac’s
“Mandarin” dilemma in Père Goriot, Dostoevsky adds a characteristic twist, casting

7
The association between Russianness and originality is taken to an extreme by Evgeny Petrovich
in The Idiot: “Whoever of the Russian people says, writes, or does something of his own, inalienable
and unborrowed, inevitably becomes national, even if he speaks Russian poorly” (334). For a detailed
recent account of the place of the Russian people (narod ) in the journalism of Time  and Epoch, as
well as a discussion of the place of folk legends, songs, and popular beliefs in Crime and Punishment,
see Ivanits 31–76.
8
Cf. Gary Saul Morson’s suggestive remarks on Dostoevsky’s vision of the present as being rife with
multiple futures. Morson calls the practice of depicting “the present moment in all its openness and
‘incompleteness’” sideshadowing  (Introductory Study  82) and points to passages in which a limited
third-person narrator suggests several possible accounts of an enigmatic event. “The real point,” he
concludes, “is that whatever happened, any  of these incidents could have happened. What is impor-
tant is the field of possibilities, not the one possibility actualized” (86). My account diverges from
Morson’s, however, in its understanding of the specific character of this multiplicity. First, the tempo-
ral plurality at issue here pertains to the representation of many shapes  of time rather than many
possibilities within a time that is itself uniformly conceived. Second, multiplicity is here not in the
service of an anti-totalizing and anti-utopian world view that celebrates indeterminacy, freedom, and
personal responsibility. Rather, multi-temporality allows for narrative experimentation with specific,
historically determinate, and socially grounded temporal trajectories available to the protagonist at a
particular historical moment. Freedom is more than the freedom to choose between several options,
and possibility is more than the possibility for things to have turned out otherwise. Rather, freedom
involves the choice of occupying an altogether different life — ​of switching, say, from the biography of
a great man to the life of a saint or, more miraculously still, to the life of a petit bourgeois. And his-
torical possibility is understood as the possibility of belonging to an altogether differently shaped
history — ​moving, for example, from a universal clock according to which Russia has been left far
behind to a national one showing it to be right on time; or from a liberal future-centric gradualist
time to a conservative past-heavy but similarly gradualist one, or even to a radically presentist, apoca-
lyptic “now.”
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 236

the alternatives not merely as moral choices but as modes of self-knowledge.9 The
question “what is the better, more desirable alternative, crime or career?” turns
into the transcendental inquiry “will I be defined as one who committed murder or
became a lawyer?” In Dostoevsky, wealth, success, and the paths to them are merely
material upon which a mysterious self weaves its self-identifying pattern.
Raskolnikov’s choice to define himself by means of a crime finds its correlative
in a certain narrative impatience: the desire to know immediately. Critics have
commented on the fact that Raskolnikov plays with the Russian word for crime,
prestuplenie, repeatedly calling attention to its etymological makeup. Prestuplenie 
is a kind of overstepping, a transgression. Most explicitly, it evokes the overstep-
ping of moral limitations (whether absolute or merely conventional). It also recalls
a kind of Napoleonic stepping over of corpses on the path to glory. But perhaps
more fundamental, and certainly less readily noticed, is the temporal dimension
of the metaphor: a stepping over of stages in time, not merely for the sake of quick
success but also for the sake of the immediate knowledge that would obviate the
need to live out one’s life, step by step, to the end.
The relevance of this last meaning of prestuplenie  finds confirmation in Dosto-
evsky’s polemic against the radical intelligentsia in an 1861 essay published in
Time: “You yearn for enormous activity; would you like us to give you one, one that
will exceed all of your expectations? . . . Here it is: sacrifice all of your giant-ness
for the sake of the universal good; instead of seven-mile steps, take inch-long ones;
accept the idea that if it is impossible to step farther, then an inch is after all more
than nothing” (PSS  18:68; my translation). According to Dostoevsky, for radicals
impatient to transform Russia once and for all according to pre-existing models
developed in the West, the future is not something that must await fruition; it is
already upon us. Therefore, Russia’s identity must be precipitated in the form of a
popular uprising that would allow the people to become who they (really) are, or
in the form of a coup led by intellectuals telling the people who they should be. In
short, something fast — ​some overstepping — ​is necessary.
This is the historiographic “content” of the narrative shape Raskolnikov chooses.
But what about the one he rejects, the significantly slower path of a career, a choice
associated with the unattractive figure of the arriviste Pyotr Luzhin? The man to
whom Raskolnikov could owe his career advancement, Luzhin is an “intelligent
man” (umnyi chelovek) who knows how to look out for his own advantage. “To make
a fortune and to have as many things as possible”—​this is surely his motto. But it is
not to be found in Crime and Punishment  itself. Instead, the formula appears again
and again in Dostoevsky’s reminiscences about his visit to Paris, which were pub-
lished as Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (Zimnie zametki o letnikh vpechatleniiakh)
in the third volume of Time (1863). According to Dostoevsky, these words express
no less than the highest moral principle of the Paris bourgeois (Time  333).
Still more to the point is his description in Winter Notes  of the temporality
associated with bourgeois accumulation. This temporality is twofold. On the
level of human history, time has ended. The petit bourgeois considers himself to
be the pinnacle of existence, the crown of creation. The entire course of history

9
For different, though not contradictory, approaches to Dostoevsky’s appropriation of Balzac in
Crime and Punishment, see Frank 73. For a more extended discussion of the formal and thematic
links between Dostoevsky and Balzac, see Fanger.
 Shapes of History & the Enigmatic Hero in Dostoevsky / 237

leads up to him and, with him, stops. There is nothing beyond what exists, no
future beyond the status quo.10 Moreover, because history has ended one can only
“faire fortune ” and accumulate as many things as possible; this and this alone is
now “the duty of nature and humanity” (dolg prirody i chelovechestva) (PSS  5:77).
The personal temporal dimension of petit bourgeois accumulation is described
as follows: “So, I’ll do a little business today in the shop and, tomorrow, God will-
ing, I’ll do some more, and maybe the day after tomorrow, too, with God’s great
mercy. Well, and then, then, only to have saved up a tiny bit as quickly as possi-
ble, and après moi le déluge ” (74–75). The comic insertions of phrases like “God
willing” or “with God’s mercy”— ​insertions that would in another context invoke
the uncertainty of the future — ​here emphasize the absence of any weighty con-
ception of the future at all. The time of accumulation, of a career, is meaning-
less repetition and merely quantitative advancement.
Raskolnikov’s choice of crime over career thus adumbrates the distinction
between the narratological conditions of a Russian raznochinets  and a Western
European petit bourgeois. While the Balzacian modern man, deprived of a direct
correspondence between appearance and social “essence,” is still both enigmatic
and dangerous, his descendent has degenerated three decades later into some-
thing so thoroughly knowable and predictable as to be nearly unrepresentable in
narrative. In contrast, Dostoevsky’s raznochinets  is, if anything, too little known, in
possession of too much potential narrative energy. And in this sense the plot of
the enigmatic crime is not a plot like others but rather an enabling condition for a
multiplicity of alternative emplotments. This in turn allows us, recalling the lan-
guage of the underground man, to revisit the distinction between what is reason-
able and profitable, on the one hand, and what is properly individual or personal,
on the other. The reasonable and the profitable are the existential categories orga-
nizing the overdetermined life of Dostoevsky’s petit bourgeois, whereas individu-
ality and personality characterize his enigmatic raznochinets, driven to commit a
crime by an overarching historical logic requiring him to seek detection.

The Shape of a Bildungsroman: The Detective as Mentor

Raskolnikov’s early choices are not, however, limited to career and crime. From
the very start, there is another possibility located at the margins of his conscious-
ness and linked to the character of his fellow student Razumikhin. While wander-
ing through St. Petersburg in a daze of murderous preoccupation, Raskolnikov
realizes to his surprise that he is unconsciously walking in the direction of Razu-
mikhin’s lodgings. “So did I really mean to straighten things out with Razumikhin
alone? To find the solution for everything in Razumikhin?” he asks himself. The
answer, mysteriously enough, appears to be yes, and yet he decides not to go: “I will
go to him . . . the next day, after that, once that  is already finished and everything
has taken a new course” (52). But, of course “after that ” it is already too late, and it
seems clear that had he gone to Razumikhin then, “that” —​the crime — ​may never
have happened. Razumikhin, it turns out, presents Raskolnikov with yet another

10
Perhaps paradigmatically for Dostoevsky, Alexander Herzen echoes the Abbé Sieyès’s famous
dictum, “the third estate is all,” where all [vsio] is meant to imply finality (119).
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 238

narrative possibility. In order to support himself at the university, Razumikhin

works as a tutor and translator, and, when Raskolnikov does visit him, he suggests
that Raskolnikov take on translations as well. The play on the difference between
“crime” (prestuplenie) and “translation” (perevod) is audible in the original: to step
over, to transgress, on the one hand, and to lead to the other side, to translate, on
the other.11
There are also other — ​and better — ​clues to Razumikhin’s position on proper
narrative shapes. At a crucial point in the novel, apparently by way of a digression,
Razumikhin explodes with a diatribe against Westernizing socialists (most likely
admirers of Fourier, Proudhon, and Feuerbach):
With them it’s not mankind developing all along in a historical, living way that will finally turn by
itself into a normal society, but, on the contrary, a social system coming out of some mathematical
head will at once organize the whole of mankind and instantly make it righteous and sinless, sooner
than any living process, without any historical and living way! That’s why they have such an instinc-
tive hatred of history . . . . That’s why they so dislike the living process of life . . . . You can’t overleap
nature with logic alone. (256)
Note the emphasis on historical development as a “living process” and the rejec-
tion of “mathematical,” pre-given formulas for social organization — ​in contrast to
the desire to “overleap,” to find a shortcut to perfection. Note also the association
between theory and radical temporal precipitation. Much of this could have been
taken verbatim from any of the numerous polemical and historico-philosophical
passages in Time  or Epoch (see, for example, PSS  20:216–21). Razumikhin’s pro-
posed temporality moves step by step; it translates, “leads over” (perevodit) rather
than transgresses or oversteps (prestupaet); and, in the process, it educates.
It is this last characteristic that helps us distinguish between two kinds of step-
by-step progression: Luzhin’s petit bourgeois accumulation and Razumikhin’s
nationalist historiography. For Luzhin, temporality is merely serial: the distinc-
tion between one moment and the next is quantitative — fi ​ rst this much, then more
of the same, then still more, and so on.12 The trajectory advocated by Razumikhin
is one in which every moment contributes something essentially new; it is, on the
level of history, the trajectory of organic development, and, on the level of the
individual, the shape of a Bildungsroman.13

11
For an interesting reading of the issue of translation in Crime and Punishment  that focuses on
Dostoevsky’s views of national originality, see Baer. Whereas I view translation as connected to the
gradualist and mediating temporality of the Western European Bildungsroman, Baer sees it as a
method of engaging (either imitatively or creatively) the cultural heritage (one might say, Bildungs-
gut) of the West.
12
Curiously, at one point in the novel Luzhin mistakes Razumikhin’s name as “Rassudkin.” In
doing so, he points to a key distinction between two Russian words for reason: razum  and rassudok.
Rassudok, very much in evidence in Luzhin’s own behavior, is a kind of practical know-how, reason as
essentially instrumental. Perhaps closest to what in German idealism is referred to as “understand-
ing” or Verstand, it analyzes the world and manipulates it to one’s advantage. Razum  is a higher form
of reason, or Vernunft, characteristic of Razumikhin’s “character zone” (see note 14)— ​even if not
always of his “experience.” It refers to a capacity for seeing the world in its overarching organic inter-
connectedness.
13
An illuminating and paradigmatic encounter between bearers of these two temporalities
occurs in a remarkable passage towards the end of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Apprenticeship.
Here, Wilhelm meets his childhood friend Werner after a long separation. While the hero of the
novel has been undergoing his Bildung, Werner has been making money as a merchant. When the
two see each other again, Werner comments: “Look at how you stand! How well everything fits
together! Indolence makes one prosper, whereas I, poor wretch . . . , if I had not spent my time earn-
ing a mint of money, there wouldn’t be anything to say for me” (306).
 Shapes of History & the Enigmatic Hero in Dostoevsky / 239

Towards the middle of the novel Razumikhin seems to pass the baton of this
mode of emplotment to his distant relative Porfiry Petrovich, who is the detective
investigating the recent murder of the pawnbroker. During his three long conver-
sations with Raskolnikov, Porfiry Petrovich bemoans the young man’s impatience
and subtly interpolates the logic of passivity and duration into the hero’s experi-
ence of time. He makes him wait and refuses to get to the point, deliberately brak-
ing Raskolnikov’s impetuous movement. Suffering, passivity, letting the course of
one’s life take care of itself — ​all invoke the dynamics of the Bildungsroman. There
is Reason (Razum) outside of the hero, a design not of his making that, at least for
now, transcends his understanding; were he willing to abandon himself to it,
everything would turn out for the best. The temporal dimensions of the life Porfiry
is offering are strikingly different from those that compelled Raskolnikov’s choice
of crime over the options suggested by both Luzhin and Razumikhin. Ten years, a
long time in Siberia with no one to see him — ​only this, according to Porfiry
Petrovich, will make it possible for Raskolnikov’s true biography to begin to unfold.
As Franco Moretti has argued, “The ‘trial’ that the protagonist of the Bildungsro-
man must overcome consists . . . in accepting the deferment of the ultimate mean-
ing of his existence” (46).
The investigator’s methods of detection depend upon a recognition that the
truth about a self is impossible to grasp in static terms, that the medium of a story
is inescapable if one wants to establish the identity of a certain raznochinets. As a
result, the truth about Raskolnikov is a temporally distended truth. However, it is
not enough for Porfiry Petrovich simply to put Raskolnikov in prison, try him, and
exile him to Siberia. He must also contextualize these events within a plot shaping
a life in its entirety: “Suffer, then . . . . [ Just] give yourself directly to life, without
reasoning; don’t worry — ​it will carry you straight to the shore and set you on your
feet” (460). Instead of merely “detecting” the criminal, catching and punishing
him, Porfiry Petrovich attempts to re-inscribe him into a different narrative, to re-
configure his relationship to time.
If Luzhin’s trajectory (that of a career) is identifiably petit bourgeois, what are
the socio-historical implications of the investigator’s Bildungsroman-like narrative
shape? To begin to answer this question is to recognize how uncharacteristic Por­
firy’s conception of Bildung  actually is vis-à-vis the paradigmatic Western Euro-
pean model most influentially instantiated in Goethe, but developed by Balzac
and, on Russian soil, by Ivan Goncharov. The most striking divergence of the inves-
tigator’s suggested (and interpolated) narrative from its more classical instances
pertains to the question of the hero’s socialization in a modernized world. The
path sketched out for Raskolnikov by his mentor-investigator is one that leads to
a long sojourn in Siberia, that is, as far from the modern world as possible. Further­
more, its central organizing category is not, as in Goethe, the aristocratic, philan-
thropic “Society of the Tower,” nor, as in Balzac, Restoration-era Paris, or even the
more abstractly conceived “modern age” of Goncharov’s A Common Story (Obykno-
vennaiia istoriia, 1846). Rather, it is the “life” characterized simply by a certain
vague benevolence, by something verging on “Providence.” In short, the investi-
gator’s mode of emplotment, although resembling a Bildungsroman, diverges from
that form, especially in regard to the Bildungsroman’s concern with the ascent of
a middle-class hero into maturity through socialization in the modern world.
Some other shape is clearly being sought here.
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 240

Zones of Emplotment: The Hagiographic Plot, the Suicide

In light of what we have already seen, and in light of what is still to come, it is
tempting to introduce another corrective to Bakhtin’s influential account of Dos-
toevsky’s polyphonic novel. For Bakhtin, the polyphony most forcefully at work in
Dostoevsky involves the characters’ discourses and the world views embodied in
them. Yet, because particular world views are reflected not only in characters’
speech but also in their manner of plotting, the polyphony of discourses in Crime
and Punishment, reflecting the multiplicity (“heteroglossia”) of social dialects of
the time, is complemented by the polyphony of emplotments, representing some
of the most prominent temporal shapes competing for dominance over the his-
torical moment. The two polyphonies are impossible to tell apart, and what Bakh­
tin refers to as discursive “character zones” are also zones of emplotment.14 So far,
I have considered three such zones: Raskolnikov’s, which compels him to stake
everything on a single act; Luzhin’s petit bourgeois, careerist option, which views
time as homogeneous and serial; and the Razumikhin-Porfiry model of an idio-
syncratic Bildungsroman.15
The crime and the career are, as far as Raskolnikov is concerned, plots of incep-
tion. They answer the question, where to start? The Bildungsroman, especially as it
is interpolated into the protagonist’s fate by Porfiry Petrovich, is a plot of comple-
tion, affording Raskolnikov a way out of the impasse in which he finds himself:
confess, suffer, let life take care of you, and you will know. But side by side with this
possibility we find another plot of completion, this one arising from within the
emplotment zone of the saintly prostitute Sonya (whose name, in turn, invokes
Holy Wisdom). After committing the murder, Raskolnikov repeatedly seeks or
finds himself in Sonya’s company, and their acquaintance culminates in a gothic
scene during which, at his request, she reads to him the Gospel story of the raising
of Lazarus: “At the last verse: ‘Could not this man, which opened the eyes of the
blind . . .’ she lowered her voice, conveying ardently and passionately the doubt,
reproach, and reviling of the blind, unbelieving Jews, who in another moment, as
if thunderstruck, would fall down and weep and believe . . . ‘And he, he who is also
blinded and unbelieving, he too will now hear, he, too, will believe — ​yes, yes! right
now, this minute” (327). Sonya’s thinking rejects all mediation. To her, what hap-

14
On character zones, see Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination (316–20). Although Bakhtin characteris-
tically conceives of heterogeneity in the novel in discursive terms — ​a s a multiplicity of world views
expressed in speech — ​t here are indications in his work that a similar multiplicity might be found
at the level of temporal organization. Thus, at the end of “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the
Novel” he writes that “Chronotopes are mutually inclusive, they co-exist, they may be interwoven
with, replace or oppose one another, contradict one another or find themselves in ever more com-
plex interrelationships” (Dialogic Imagination  252). See also a related discussion of “heterochrony”
in Morson and Emerson, 425–29. Bakhtin’s hostility towards the literary-theoretical category of
plot (as distinct from the broader philosophical conception of temporality) is, however, well docu-
mented. In affirming the epistemological centrality of emplotment zones as end-directed, finalizing 
temporal discourses, this essay thus departs sharply from Bakhtin’s understanding of multiplicity
in the novel. For Bakhtin’s polemic against the prominence of plot as a literary-theoretical category
in the 1960s and 1970s, see Sobranie sochinenii  6:388; 6:585–88.
15
Leslie Johnson’s analysis of subjective time in Crime and Punishment  presupposes a loosely exis-
tentialist framework and is largely incompatible with a zones-of-emplotment approach adopted
here. The latter, by analogy with the conception of character zones offered in Bakhtin, focuses less
on characters’ personal experiences  of time than on objective — ​t hat is, historically operative, specific
and therefore generic —​“auras” of temporality accompanying them through the novel.
 Shapes of History & the Enigmatic Hero in Dostoevsky / 241

pened nearly two thousand years ago is happening eternally — ​still, “right now,
this minute.” She makes no difference between reading and witnessing, narrating
something and testifying to it. In short, she confuses the time and space of narra-
tive with those of discourse. It is this kind of reading that allows her to draw a
parallel between Raskolnikov and the disbelieving Jews, a parallel that also allows
her to hope that her listener, too, will come to have faith in Christ upon hearing
about (or, witnessing — a​ gain, for her there is little difference) the great miracle of
the resurrection of Lazarus.
Sonya’s penchant for the immediate acquires socio-historical content towards
the end of the novel, when, having followed Raskolnikov to Siberia, she demon-
strates a mysterious inner intimacy with the common people among the con-
victs. As a mouthpiece for the expression of the most sacred moral and religious
(Christ-centered) values of the Russian peasantry, Sonya emerges as a specifi-
cally Dostoevskian gloss on a Russian novelistic archetype: a heroine with deep
national (popular) roots. Her zone of emplotment thus appears to provide
Porfiry’s somewhat qualified Western European Bildungsroman  with something
like a native alternative.
We get a clear sense of what such an alternative might look like when, having
learned that Raskolnikov is a murderer, she tells him: “Go now, this minute, stand
at the crossroads, bow down, and first kiss the earth you have defiled, then bow to
the whole world, on all four sides, and say aloud to everyone: ‘I have killed!’ Then
God will send you life again” (420). The narrative into which she attempts to inter-
polate Raskolnikov is filled with symbolic acts, stressing the now, this very moment,
the crossroads, the four corners of the world. The sequence of actions she suggests
invokes the conversion of a saint, a conversion that brings chronology to an end
and begins a new life outside earthly duration. The “life” here invoked is thus very
different from the “life” of the hero in the investigator’s projected Bildungsroman.
For Porfiry Petrovich, “life” is temporally distended meaning. Sonya’s is another
“life” altogether, one that echoes the verse she has just read so passionately from
the Gospel of John: “I am the life and the resurrection.” Thus, if Porfiry’s and
Sonya’s emplotment strategies lead Raskolnikov in the same direction — ​to the
police station, to trial, to Siberian exile — ​the meaning of confession is in each case
radically different. In one genre of emplotment, it is the beginning of true growth,
the inception of a peculiar Bildungsroman; in the other, it is the end of time and
the beginning of eternally blissful paradise on earth (cf. Elder Zosima’s mysteri-
ous visitor in The Brothers Karamazov  303).
There is one other option for the proper emplotment of the story of this enig-
matic Russian raznochinets. During his exile in Siberia, Raskolnikov wonders “why
had he not killed himself [as soon as he realized that he was just a criminal and
not a “great man”]? . . . Was there really such a force in this desire to live, and was
it so difficult to overcome it? Had not Svidrigailov, who was afraid of death, over-
come it?” (545). Svidrigailov’s suicide scenario heavily shadows Raskolnikov’s last
days of freedom, and, just as Luzhin represents a degraded Balzacian parvenu, so
this depraved landowner is best understood as a fallen version of the hero who
dominated the Russian novel until the early 1860s: the long line of aristocratic
misfits — ​morally confused but psychologically fascinating — ​from Pushkin to Ler-
montov to Herzen to Turgenev. Starting in the 1860s, literary critical debates
about the place of the so-called superfluous man in the liberalized environment
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 242

of the Great Reforms coincided with the replacement of this type within the Rus-
sian novel by the positively, negatively, or, as in Dostoevsky’s case, enigmatically
construed figure of the raznochinets.16 Svidrigailov thus appears as a relic of the
past, a grotesque instance of aristocratic indolence, depravity, and degeneration.
Like Luzhin’s projected temporality, Svidrigailov’s possesses no genuinely sig-
nifying dimension. It is empty serial time — ​not of career and accumulation, to
be sure, since Svidrigailov already has everything he needs —​but the serial time
of a monstrous boredom. And if, as the novel suggests, Svidrigailov is indeed a
criminal, he is a criminal of a very different kind from Raskolnikov. Raskolnikov’s
crime is a way of testing himself; it possesses the status of a question, a wager, a risk.
Svidrigailov’s crimes are once again serial and senseless, guided only by the needs
of the moment. He risks nothing, attempts no leap. Suicide, then, is here depicted
as Svidrigailov’s “natural” death, the most appropriate form of death for a man
any moment of whose life is indistinguishable from any other. It is no wonder,
then, that suicide becomes an attractive option for Raskolnikov in exile — t​ hat is,
after the ordeal is finished, the test has been failed, and time has been divested
of the ability to bring out the truth.

The End and the Contours of Plot beyond the Novel

What, then, is the true identity of Russia’s enigmatic raznochinets  hero? The sto-
ries of the great man and of the mere criminal (both of Raskolnikov’s own cre-
ation), of a career (Luzhin), of depravity and suicide (Svidrigailov), of the sinner’s
conversion (Sonya), or of Bildung (Porfiry, Razumikhin)? The novel’s epilogue, in
its brief treatment of the trial and the first months of Raskolnikov’s life in Sibe-
ria, eliminates the first four possibilities. Its final pages unfold in the ambiguous
shadow of the remaining two.
The first of these reflects Sonya’s emplotment zone and narrates the event of
Raskolnikov’s “conversion.” The moment is carefully prepared: “There, on the
boundless, sun-bathed steppe . . . was freedom, there a different people lived, quite
unlike those here, there time itself seemed to stop, as if the centuries of Abraham
and his flocks had not passed” (549). We are transported into an archaic space that
appears timeless. Nothing of St. Petersburg modernity remains; history collapses
into myth. Sonya appears. “How it happen[s], [Raskolnikov] himself [does] not
know,” but he falls at her feet, bursts into tears, and embraces her knees: “Seven
years, only seven years! At the beginning of their happiness there were moments
when they were both ready to look at those seven years as if they were seven days.
He did not even know that a new life would not be given him for nothing, that it still
had to be dearly bought, to be paid for with a great future deed” (551). The confla-
tion of seven years with seven days (the seven days of creation to boot), the treat-
ment of time as everlasting kairos, the persistence of the miraculous — ​these are of

16
The fiction of Lev Tolstoy from the sixties and seventies constitutes a formidable exception to
this trend, at least insofar as it continues to focus on the nobility while largely neglecting the emerg-
ing new social class. However, Tolstoy’s noblemen do not fit easily into the category of the “superflu-
ous men” either. He tends to treat them, or at least the positively marked among them, as aristo-
cratic frondeurs  capable of launching a thoroughgoing critique of contemporary Russian society
while keeping their dignity and, ultimately, their happiness intact.
 Shapes of History & the Enigmatic Hero in Dostoevsky / 243

course characteristic of Sonya’s emplotment temporality. We once again encounter

a break in the normal state of affairs — ​a grand, revelatory, or redemptive event
inaugurating a saintly life and retroactively redeeming the life of a sinner.
But it is not the end. The final paragraph gestures beyond the novel to another
story, one that is only about to begin: “the account of a man’s gradual renewal, the
account of his gradual regeneration, his gradual transition from one world to
another, his acquaintance with a new, hitherto completely unknown reality” (551).
Contrary to the sacralizing impetuousness of conversion, we have here a triple
insistence on the gradual. The narrative shape at which the novel gestures beyond
itself once again looks strikingly like the narrative Raskolnikov has rejected at the
start of the novel, the slow biographical story of development, given voice to, early
on, by Razumikhin and, towards the middle of the novel, by Porfiry Petrovich.
In a recent essay, Gary Saul Morson suggests that many readers feel dissatisfied
with the novel’s epilogue because, while the novel as a whole tends to align itself
with Razumikhin’s “prosaic practical goodness,” the final passages are “cast wholly
in Sonya’s terms” (“The God of Onions” 108). As a result, there is an inconsistency
between the novel’s privileging of “practical reason and small acts of [prosaic]
goodness,” on the one hand, and its celebration of religious faith, on the other.
From the perspective that views character not as a set of psychological traits but as
a historically determinate and historiographically fruitful temporal shape or zone
of emplotment, however, the place of both Razumikhin and the epilogue in the
novel appears in a different light.
Although as a moral-psychological type Razumikhin is indeed “a decent fellow,”
he is consistently associated with the ideology of organic historiography and the
generic aura of a Bildungsroman, and his very name presupposes a higher reason
(razum) than the one associated with practical activity and good sense (rassudok).
As a zone of emplotment for his enigmatic friend (and, with him, for Russia),
Razu­mikhin thus comes to represent not so much a potentially infinite series of
prosaic little acts as a global — ​and thoroughly “theoretical”—​conception of both
universal history and individual biography that emphasizes the gradual unfolding
or fruition of the organic spirit of a human being or a nation. The re-insertion of
Razumikhin’s temperament into the temporal (historiographic and generic) shape
with which it is associated makes it clear that the ideology of small prosaic acts
(good or bad) is more properly associated in Dostoevsky with the petit-bourgeois
historiography of a Luzhin than with that of the hero of a possible national epic
(bogatyr’ ), Razumikhin. In fact it might be this very heightening of the pathos of
the gradual that allows Razumikhin’s zone of emplotment to be reactivated along-
side Sonya’s in the last words of the novel, with their triple insistence on the slow-
ness of the hero’s regeneration.
How, then, do we make sense of the novel’s ultimate vacillation between the two
shapes of Raskolnikov’s future? The fact that we are confronted with something
other than a Bildungsroman  and something other than a saint’s life is, I would
argue, not altogether surprising. We have seen that the Bildungsroman, insofar as
it is an emplotment possibility for Raskolnikov throughout the novel, departs in
significant ways from its classical Western European models. While appearing to
adopt this sub-genre’s “gradualist” temporal shape as well as its faith in the hero’s
eventual formation and ascent into meaning, it rejects the assumptions about what
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 244

that formation would amount to and what that meaning would endorse. It rejects,
in other words, the genre’s tendency to posit the goal of the hero’s Bildung in social-
ization, adaptation to the exigencies of modern city life, and ascent into the petit-
bourgeois mechanistic time of prosaic acts and material accumulation. That is
why the novel transfers the site of consummation into the pre-modern wilderness
of Siberia, displaying suspicion of contemporary social institutions.
Meanwhile, the hagiographic mode of emplotment, although prominent
throughout the novel, emerges as dangerously resonant both with the narra-
tive impatience of the radical intelligentsia and Raskolnikov’s own compulsion
to commit the inaugural crime. A saint’s life, like the life of a radical or a great
man, hinges on precipitant acts, ready results, and immediate knowledge. And
so the narrator must intervene, disabusing the protagonists and the readers of
their hopes for an imminent (and immanent) resolution.
A saint’s life in Bildung-time, then — ​this is the shape of the story beyond Crime
and Punishment, transcending it and constituting its regulative ideal. This is the
narrative and generic synthesis that would constitute the imaginary solution to
the contradictions tearing at “Russian temporality” in the period of Great Reforms.
Rupture and continuity, apocalypse and development, the archaic and the mod-
ern, saintly self-sacrifice and robust worldliness — ​t wo genres and two narrative
shapes could hardly be further apart, and yet it is they that are called upon, at the
end of the novel and beyond, to coalesce in constituting the proper story of the
enigmatic raznochinets  Raskolnikov and with it, synecdochally, the proper shape of
Russian history.

New York University

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 1

Abstract

ILYA KLIGER

Shapes of History and the Enigmatic Hero in Dostoevsky:

The Case of Crime and Punishment

This essay studies a crucial feature of Dostoevsky’s novelistic poetics, and the poetics of

Crime and Punishment (1866) in particular, in light of contemporaneous debates regarding the

historical fate of Russia. The novel, I argue, is a thought experiment exploring the emerging

condition of multi-historicity—that is, a simultaneity of multiple emplotment possibilities for the

Russian state. In order to bring these possibilities to light, I read the novel with an eye on

Dostoevsky’s journalism from the early- to mid-sixties, a period characterized by an urgent

recognition of the openness of Russia’s historical future.

Mediating between the novel and its contemporary journalistic discourse with the help of

the formal (narratological) categories of character and emplotment, I argue that the novelistic

search for the proper emplotment of its enigmatic hero corresponds to the search in

contemporary journalism for the proper trajectory of the Russian nation, which, with the

emancipation of the serfs in 1861, is perceived as pregnant with multiple historical possibilities.

As an enigma soliciting narrative solutions, Dostoevsky’s socially underdetermined

(raznochinets) hero is best understood as a formal condition of the possibility of exploring

Russia’s position at the intersection point of multiple historical vectors. As such, the hero enables

a series of temporal shapes, laden with historiographic significance, to be considered and then
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