Crime and Punishment (74 page)

1
0
.
Rassudkin . . . Razumikhin
: A confusion arising from the fact that the words
rassudok
and
razum
have broadly similar meanings to do with reason, intellect and sense.

1
1
.
Polechka and Lenya
: The younger sister, Lenya, was referred to in Part Two as Lida. Here, as elsewhere, Dostoyevsky's inconsistencies have not been corrected.

1
2
.
Holy fool
: By Dostoyevsky's time, the Russian word
yurodivyi
had acquired two fundamental, but closely related meanings. One was broadly positive, deriving from the form of eccentric religious behaviour known as
yurodstvo Khrista radi
(‘folly for Christ's sake') and finding biblical sanction in Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians. A
yurodivyi
in this sense was a profoundly holy person whose saintliness was expressed in a paradoxical way, whether through provocative ‘madness', aggression or godly simplicity. The other meaning, engendered partly by scepticism
towards ‘false holy fools' who wished to claim unearned privileges, was sharply negative: a halfwit or madman, without any redeeming features. Dostoyevsky often toyed with both of these meanings at once; see Harriet Murav,
Holy Foolishness: Dostoevsky's Novels & the Poetics of Cultural Critique
(Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1992
).

1
3
.
the New Testament in Russian translation
: On his way to prison camp in the Siberian town of Omsk in
1850
, Dostoyevsky was given just such a book by the wives of men punished for their participation in the Decembrist uprising of
1825
. Published in
1823
, it gave the first full translation of the New Testament into modern Russian, rather than Church Slavonic (
PSS
,
BT
). Its publication, though authorized by Tsar Alexander I, met with immediate resistance on the part of some ministers and prelates, thereby endowing it with subversive, revolutionary force. Ministers and prelates feared, as Victoria Frede has recently written, that the new translations published by the Russian Bible Society between
1819
and
1824
‘would “destroy Orthodoxy”, because individuals who sought to interpret scripture on their own would inevitably reach false conclusions. Not only would translations “destroy the true faith”, but they would also “disrupt the fatherland and produce strife and rebellion” [...] It would be another forty years before church and state authorized the publication of a Russian Bible' – thus bringing us up to the time of the writing of
Crime and Punishment
. Quoted from Frede,
Doubt, Atheism, and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Intelligentsia
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
2011
), p. 34.

1
4
.
She will see God
: See the Sermon on the Mount: ‘Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God' (Matthew
5
:
8
).

1
5
.
Read! I want you to!
: Boris Tikhomirov offers an absorbing account of the way this passage evolved during work on the novel. Originally (to judge from his preparatory notes), Dostoyevsky intended Sonya to take the lead: to thrust the Gospels on Raskolnikov and to compare herself to the resurrected Lazarus. The first version of the chapter which Dostoyevsky sent to his publisher, Katkov, has been lost, but was presumably based on this plan. Katkov and his fellow editor rejected it, seeing in it ‘traces of
nihilism
'. The revised version we now have (work on which cost Dostoyevsky, by his own account, the equivalent of ‘three new chapters') represents, as Tikhomirov argues, an artistic advance on the preliminary notes: Sonya, no longer a didactic figure, becomes exemplary, here and throughout, for her presence rather than her words (
BT
). See also Joseph Frank,
Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years,
1865–1871
, pp.
93–5
.

1
6
.
Now a certain man was sick, Lazarus of Bethany
 . . . : Here, and throughout the chapter, Sonya's selected reading from the story of the raising of Lazarus (John
11
:
1–45
) is cited in the Revised Standard Version, though I have replaced ‘ill' with ‘sick'.

1
7
.
Theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven
: A reference to a famous passage in the Gospel of Mark: ‘And they brought young children to him, that he should touch them: and his disciples rebuked those that brought them. But when Jesus saw it, he was much displeased, and said unto them, Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God. Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein' (Mark
10
:
13–15
).

1
8
.
grace-and-favour apartment
: The Russian phrase
kazyonnaya kvartira
(‘an apartment at public expense') could also be used idiomatically to mean a prison (
BT
) – a further example of Porfiry's ‘double-edged' wit.

1
9
.
state . . . actual state . . . privy
: Corresponding to grades
5
,
4
and
3
in the Table of Ranks.

2
0
.
reforms afoot
: The judicial reforms announced in Russia in
1864
had as one of their aims the separation of the judicial system from the civil service: examining magistrates would replace state officials in carrying out preliminary investigation of criminal offences. However, owing to a lack of qualified examining magistrates (equivalents of the
juge d'instruction
in France) many of the old guard from the civil service, like Porfiry Petrovich, stayed on, but under a different title (
BT
).

2
1
.
straight after the Battle of Alma
: After being defeated at the Battle of Alma in September
1854
, during the Crimean War, the Russian army retreated to Sebastopol, where the Allied forces began a siege that lasted almost a year. Sebastopol eventually fell, after heavy casualties on both sides.

2
2
.
Hofkriegsrat . . . General Mack
: The war council of the Austrian Empire, the Hofkriegsrat, was responsible for managing the permanent army. General Mack, commander of the Austrian forces, surrendered with
23
,
000
men to Napoleon at the Battle of Ulm in October
1805
, during the War of the Third Coalition (
1803–6
). Napoleon was now free to advance on the Russian army (commanded by Kutuzov), leading to victory at Austerlitz in December. These events – and the ironies of Mack's failure, despite initial optimism and detailed planning – are reflected in Volume One (Part Two, Chapter
III
) of Leo Tolstoy's
War and
Peace
(
1865–9
), which had recently appeared in
The Russian Messenger
, the same journal in which
Crime and Punishment
was being serially published.

2
3
.
deputies
: A reference to the pre-Reform practice whereby ‘deputies' were chosen from the same social estate to which the accused belonged (in this case, the nobility) and tasked with monitoring judicial proceedings (
BT
).

PART FIVE

1
.
Knop's and the English Shop
: Two fancy goods shops on Nevsky Prospect (
BT
).

2
.
Fourier's system and Darwin's theory
: The utopian socialist ideas of François Fourier and the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin (
1809–82
) both found many unreliable disciples among the Russian ‘social democrats', atheists and ‘progressivists' with whom Dostoyevsky so often polemicized, and whose ideas are slavishly recycled by Lebezyatnikov in this chapter. Highly sceptical of the practical application of Fourierist ideas to Russia, Dostoyevsky was even more hostile towards the crude application by some Russian radicals of Darwin's
The
Origin of Species
(
1859
) to modern society. The spectre of ‘social Darwinism' – of a society in which oppression, moral adaptation and rampant egoism might all be justified – haunts Raskolnikov's thinking throughout the novel.

3
.
a new commune somewhere on Meshchanskaya Street
: Young Russian radicals – women as much as men – had begun to establish ‘communes' in St Petersburg in the mid-
18
60s, encouraged in particular by Chernyshevsky's novel
What Is to Be Done?
. It was hoped that a loosely structured communal life, based on the model of ordinary urban dormitories, would ultimately develop into full-blown Fourierist phalansteries. Communes soon acquired notoriety for free love and staunch opposition to Church and law (
BT
). A commune of nihilists (including some charged in connection with Dmitry Karakozov's failed attempt to assassinate Alexander
II
in April
1866
) did indeed move to Middle Meshchanskaya Street, very close to Raskolnikov's address, though it is unclear whether or not they had already done so by the time this part of the novel was being written (
BT
,
PSS
).

4
.
Take Terebyeva . . . civil marriage
: Lebezyatnikov's confused attempts to stand up for women's emancipation and the equality of the sexes echo
the ideological concerns of
What Is to Be Done?
, to which Lebezyatnikov unwittingly provides a ‘parodic commentary', in the words of Leonid Grossman (cited in
SB
). At the same time, they reflect genuine changes in the morals of young, anti-religious intellectuals of the time, among whom so-called ‘civil marriages' (which Russian law of the time did not acknowledge) were rife – the term often being used in a rather euphemistic sense (
BT
).

5
.
Another young man who's ‘flown the nest'
: An allusion to comments by the mother of Bazarov, the nihilist hero of Ivan Turgenev's
Fathers and Sons
(1862), about her independent and free-thinking son. The Russian idiom is more graphic: literally, ‘a broken-off chunk' (of bread), playing on the Russian saying that ‘a broken-off chunk can't be stuck back on the loaf'. The context of the quotation perhaps justifies the attenuated translation given here. The mother says to her husband: ‘Well, what can we do, Vasya? Our son's flown the nest. He's like a falcon: flies in when he wants to, flies off when he wants to; while you and I never budge' (Chapter
21
).

6
.
distinguons
: ‘Let's distinguish' (French).

7
.
Environment is everything . . . Not to mention Belinsky
: On the environment, see Part Three, note
14
. The extent to which the environment shapes (and consumes) the individual had been a theme of Russian literature since the
1840
s, when Vissarion Belinsky (
1811–48
), the supremely influential critic and champion of socially minded art, was still alive. The theme was discussed at length in a long essay of
1860
by Nikolai Dobrolyubov (
1836–61
), whose utilitarian aesthetics are a target of Dostoyevsky's own essay ‘Mr ——bov and the Question of Art' (
1861
).

8
.
the unequal gesture of hand-kissing
: Further parroting by Lebezyatnikov of
What Is to Be Done
?
, in which Chernyshevsky's heroine, Vera Pavlovna, explains why women find it offensive to have their hands kissed by men: ‘it means that they [men] don't consider women as people like them, they think that [...] however much a man may abase himself before her, he is still not her equal, but far superior' (Chapter
2
,
XVIII
).

9
.
workers' associations in France
: A theme often championed by the
Contemporary
, with which Dostoyevsky's own journals often crossed swords. One contributor to the
Contemporary
, writing in
1864
, saw in the Parisian workers' associations founded by French socialists not just ‘liberation' in a material sense, but ‘a moral improvement in the working class' (
PSS
).

1
0
.
open doors
: In
What Is to Be Done?
rules are established for communal living in which a man and a woman each have one room in which they
cannot be disturbed, as well as one ‘neutral' room in which they take tea and meals together. Here Lebezyatnikov appears to suggest that contemporary commune-dwellers have even ‘gone beyond' Chernyshevsky (
BT
).

1
1
.
cesspits
: The question of who would attend to the ‘cesspits' in a Fourier-style community was a familiar one in journalistic debate of the time. Fourier said that this chore would be carried out by ‘cohorts of self-sacrificing' adolescents (
BT
); here, too, Lebezyatnikov and his mentors have gone one step further (‘no self-sacrifice would be involved').