Crime and Punishment (3 page)

Towards evening I went out for a walk. My head was still aching and spinning from the previous night. But the further the evening wore on and the thicker the twilight became, the more my impressions, too, grew altered and confused, and after them my thoughts. Something within me, within my heart and my conscience, refused to die away, and burned there with a searing anguish. I loitered my way for the most part through the busiest, most crowded streets, through the Meshchanskayas, Sadovaya, the area near Yusupov Park. I was particularly fond of walking through these streets at dusk, at the very time when the crowd of passers-by of all kinds is at its densest, as industrial workers and craftsmen, their faces preoccupied to the point of hatred, return home from their daily employments… On the present occasion all this busy street life made me even more irritable. No matter how hard I tried, I could not get a grip on myself, put two and two together. Something was rising, rising within me without cease, causing me pain,
and would not quieten down. In a state of complete frustration I returned to my rooms. It was as though some crime lay on my soul.

This could come straight from one of the first drafts of the early chapters of
Crime and Punishment
. Indeed, the two works are in many ways interdependent, the
Notes
constituting a philosophical prologue to the novel. The twenty-three-year-old ex-student who emerges on to the Petersburg street on an evening in early July is a spiritual relative of the Underground Man – we are meant to assume that the weeks of isolation and ‘hypochondria’ he has spent indoors have been accompanied by the kind of deliberations that fill the pages of the
Notes
. In the early drafts of the novel, the narrative is in the first person, and has the same obsessive, confessional quality familiar from the earlier work. The principal difference is that while the crime of the Underground Man is of an exclusively moral and personal nature, a sin against another human being and against himself, that of Raskolnikov is in the first instance an outright challenge to the fabric of society, though it also involves the moral and personal dimension.

The ‘stone wall’ that so irks the Underground Man is also present in
Crime and Punishment
. Yet now it stands not only for ‘the laws of nature, the conclusions of the natural sciences and mathematics’ – it is also a symbol of the laws of society. The walls that surround Raskolnikov and hold him within his coffinlike room are not simply the bounds of ‘possibility’: they are also society's protection against its own members. In Dostoyevsky's view there is something profoundly wrong with a social order that needs to imprison, impoverish and torture the best people in it. Yet this does not excuse Raskolnikov's crime (the Russian word
prestuplenie
is much more graphic, suggesting the ‘stepping across’ or ‘transgression’ that he so desires to make). It is
people
who are responsible for the society in which they live, and whether they are in the grip of ‘radical’, atheistic ideas like those of Raskolnikov, or ‘bourgeois’, utilitarian, but also atheistic ideas, like those of Pyotr Petrovich Luzhin, they will abdicate their responsibility to their fellow creatures and destroy them in one way or another. Just as the Underground
Man expresses his contempt for the ‘antheap’, the ‘Crystal Palace’ of modern ‘civilization’ which gives rise mostly to ‘rivers of blood’, so Raskolnikov
acts
out of the same convictions. He also intends, however, to enter the arena of history. It is in this respect above all that
Crime and Punishment
marks a significant development in Dostoyevsky's creative thinking.

The philosopher and literary critic Vasily Rozanov (1856–1919) – another Russian thinker with a close and intuitive understanding of Dostoyevsky – was one of the first to point to this aspect of the writer's art. At the beginning of a ‘criticalbiographical profile’ written in 1893 as an introduction to the publication of Dostoyevsky's complete works in the journal
Niva
, he discusses the function of literature, perceiving it to be the means whereby the individual person is able to withdraw ‘from the details of his own life’ and to understand his existence in terms of its general significance. History takes its origins in the individual, and man is distinguished from the animals by the fact that he is always a
person
, unique and never-to-be-repeated. This, in Rozanov's view, is why conventional, ‘positivist’ science and philosophy will never be able to understand ‘man, his life and history’. The laws that govern the natural universe do not apply to man. ‘Is the most important thing about Julius Caesar, about Peter the Great, about you, dear reader, the way in which we do not differ from other people? In the sense that the most important thing about the planets is not their varying distance from the sun but the shape of their ellipses and the laws according to which they all move equally along them…’ Unlike science and natural philosophy, art and religion address themselves to the individual person, to his heart and soul. They are concerned with the phases of the inner life, not all of which each individual may experience, but which are characteristic of the history of mankind: a period of primordial serenity, a fall from that serenity and a period of regeneration. The ‘fall’ is the phase that predominates over the other two – most of history is taken up with ‘crime and sin’, which is, however, always directed
against
the serenity that went before and also points towards the process of regeneration as the only way towards the recovery of that serenity. In the darkness of history lies the hope of light:

‘In these two lines of verse,’ Rozanov says, ‘is the meaning of all history, and the history of the spiritual development of thousandfold souls.’ Raskolnikov, with his Napoleon-fixation and muddled, radical ideas, does no more than enter into the historical arena of his times – like Napoleon, he is at once an individual soul and an agent of world history, and as such he is able to draw the reader with him on his exploration of the ‘dark night’. The ‘power over the antheap’ he talks of is in reality the power of Dostoyevsky's own artistic persona over the readers of the novel. As Rozanov points out:

In this novel we are given a depiction of all those conditions which, capturing the human soul, draw it towards crime; we see the crime itself; and at once, in complete clarity, with the criminal's soul we enter into an atmosphere, hitherto unknown to us, of murk and horror in which it is almost as hard for us to breathe as it is for him. The general mood of the novel, elusive, undefinable, is far more remarkable than any of its individual episodes: how this comes to be is the secret of the author, but the fact remains that he really does take us with him and lets us feel criminality with all the inner fibres of our being; after all, we ourselves have committed no crime, and yet, when we finish the book it is as if we emerge into the open air from some cramped tomb in which we have been walled up with a living person who has buried himself in it, and together with him have breathed the poisoned air of dead bones and decomposing entrails…

Because of his existence on a historical plane as a psychosocial and moral–intellectual
type
, as a part of the fabric of the time in which he lives, Raskolnikov is able to speak to the collective human reality in all of us. Just as each person contains a tyrant, a Napoleon (or, in a twentieth-century perspective, a Hitler or Stalin), so each contains a suffering victim. The tyrant's crime is punished by that suffering, which alone can redeem it. What Dostoyevsky is pointing to is the possibility, less of social, material change from without than of a transformation of
humanity from within. The drafts and notes for the novel speak very clearly of this: the book was originally planned as a novel of ‘the Orthodox outlook’, expressing ‘the essence of Orthodoxy’, this being summed up in the notion that ‘happiness is bought with suffering’, a state of affairs in which ‘there is no injustice, for a knowledge of life and an awareness of it (i.e. one spontaneously experienced in body and spirit, i.e. as a part of the integral process of life) are acquired by the experience of pro and contra, which one must carry around with one’.

The experience of pro and contra, the ancient mystery of good and evil dressed in the contemporary costume of the mid nineteenth century yet none the less terrifying and elemental for that, is what
Crime and Punishment
is ‘about’. The novel represents the first act in a gigantic Shakespearian tragedy, the other three acts of which are
The Idiot
,
The Devils
and
The Brothers Karamazov
. In this first act the themes of guilt and punishment are established, the terrain of Hell and Purgatory are mapped out, and the goal of Paradise dimly glimpsed. Just how intense was the duel of ‘for’ and ‘against’ that raged within Dostoyevsky's soul may again be seen in the draft notes and jottings. ‘Svidrigailov – despair, the most cynical. Sonya – hope, the most unrealizable. (This must be said by Raskolnikov himself.) He has passionately attached himself to them both,’ reads an entry in the notes for the ‘Finale of the Novel’. The pages of the notebooks teem with lists of contraries, seeds of conflict, the preliminaries to catastrophe. While many of the episodes and allusions are familiar from one's knowledge of the novel in its final form, there are others which do not appear in it, or appear in a less sharply defined way. Such, for example, is the conflict motif ‘socialism–cynicism’. In the final version of the novel, the theme of socialism is kept muted, mostly confined to satirical observations about Fourierist ‘phalansteries’ and theories of diminished responsibility – it does not emerge in full force until
The Devils
. Yet in Dostoyevsky's notes for
Crime and Punishment
it is well to the fore, and helps us both to establish the link between the Underground Man and Raskolnikov, and to understand the nature of the demonism that drives Raskolnikov to commit his crime. Socialism, in Dostoyevsky's view,
suffers from an inherent paradoxical flaw – while professing ‘brotherhood’ it is in essence cynical, expressing ‘the despair of ever setting man on the right road. They, the socialists, are intent on doing it by means of despotism, while claiming that this is freedom!’ The Underground Man's confession that ‘without power and tyranny over someone else I simply cannot live’ is amplified into Raskolnikov's Maratism: the corpses of the old woman moneylender and her sister stand for those of the tyrannized victims on which he will build the new, ‘reformed’ world.

That these ideological polemics were an integral part of the novel's original conception is amply evidenced by the notebooks. The satire on the nihilists that is worked around the person of Lebezyatnikov is not a superfluous, period-determined ornament to the general flow of the narrative. It is rather a caustic, though humorous, attack on a whole generation, and on human nature itself. In many ways, Yeliseyev's instincts did not deceive him: the novel
is
a work in which ‘the entire corporation of young men stands accused of a wholesale attempt at robbery with murder’. What he failed to perceive, however, is that in those nihilists Dostoyevsky saw himself at an earlier phase of his development, and that it is also himself he is satirizing. It is significant that Dostoyevsky's real venom is reserved for the respectable
bourgeois
who laid the groundwork for the theories of the nihilists and made them possible – the utilitarians like Bentham, who inspire the conduct of a Luzhin. In the account of Raskolnikov's dream in the final chapter of the novel, a dream that is in every sense prophetic in its horror, we are made aware of how great are the dangers to mankind that are involved in the abandonment of God:

In his illness he had dreamt that the entire world had fallen victim to some strange, unheard of and unprecedented plague that was spreading from the depths of Asia into Europe. Everyone was to perish, apart from a chosen few, a very few. Some new kind of trichinae had appeared, microscopic creatures that lodged themselves in people's bodies. But these creatures were spirits, gifted with will and intelligence. People who absorbed them into their systems instantly became rabid and insane. But never, never had people considered themselves so
intelligent and in unswerving possession of the truth as did those who became infected. Never had they believed so unswervingly in the correctness of their judgements, their scientific deductions, their moral convictions and beliefs. Entire centres of population, entire cities and peoples became smitten and went mad. All were in a state of anxiety and no one could understand anyone else, each person thought that he alone possessed the truth and suffered agony as he looked at the others, beating his breast, weeping and wringing his hands. No one knew who to make the subject of judgement, or how to go about it, no one could agree about what should be considered evil and what good. No one knew who to blame or who to acquit. People killed one another in a kind of senseless anger. Whole armies were ranged against one another, but no sooner had these armies been mobilized than they suddenly began to tear themselves to pieces, their ranks falling apart and their soldiers hurling themselves at one another, gashing and stabbing, biting and eating one another. All day in the cities the alarm was sounded: everyone was being summoned together, but who was calling them and for what reason no one knew, but all were in a state of anxiety. They abandoned the most common trades, because each person wanted to offer his ideas, his improvements, and no agreement could be reached; agriculture came to a halt. In this place and that people would gather into groups, agree on something together, swear to stick together – but would instantly begin doing something completely different from what had been proposed, start blaming one another, fighting and murdering. Fires began, a famine broke out. Everyone and everything perished. The plague grew worse, spreading further and further. Only a few people in the whole world managed to escape: they were the pure and chosen, who had been predestined to begin a new species of mankind and usher in a new life, to renew the earth and render it pure, but no one had seen these people anywhere, no one had heard their words and voices.