Crime and Punishment (5 page)

In
Crime and Punishment
there are clear indications that Dostoyevsky intends the reader to associate Raskolnikov with the religious heresy of
staroobryadchestvo
(‘Old Ritualism’), not in any specific sense but rather in a general one. In
Chapter II of Part Six
the investigator Porfiry Petrovich tells Raskolnikov that Mikolka, who has ‘confessed’ to the crime, comes from a family in which there are ‘Runners’ – sectarians who travelled around the country begging, and in search of any chance to humble themselves:

‘And did you know that he's a Raskolnik – or rather, not so much a Raskolnik as simply a sectarian; there were “Runners” in his family, and it's not so long ago since he himself spent two whole years in the country under the spiritual guidance of some elder or other… Have you any conception, Rodion Romanovich, of what the word “suffering” means to some of them? They don't do it for the sake of anyone in particular, but just for its own sake, purely and simply as “suffering”; all that matters is to accept suffering, and if it's from the powers-that-be, that's all to the good…’

Porfiry's implication, skilfully presented by means of psychological suggestion and interrogation techniques, is that Raskolnikov, too, has been treading this path – and that he must continue to do so if he is eventually to find salvation. For this is one of the main reasons why Raskolnikov is able to be saved
from the error into which he has fallen – his illness is of a specifically Russian kind, caused not only by the influence of ‘nihilistic’ Western ideas, but also by an inborn
raskol
'
nichestvo
, an ancient Russian sympathy for and identification with the strong dissenter who challenges the authority of Church and State alike. The Epilogue to the novel describes the beginning of his journey back to them, a journey that will ultimately involve not only his own personal recovery and transformation, but also the regeneration and renewal of Russian society. It is the persistent tracing of this theme of a ‘Russian sickness’ of spiritual origin and its cure throughout the book that justifies the author's characterization of it as an ‘Orthodox novel’.

Few works of fiction have attracted so many widely diverging interpretations as
Crime and Punishment
. It has been seen as a detective novel, an attack on radical youth, a study in ‘alienation’ and criminal psychopathology, a work of prophecy (the attempt on the life of Tsar Alexander II by the nihilist student Dmitry Karakozov took place while the book was at the printer's, and some even saw the Tsar's murder in 1881 as a fulfilment of Dostoyevsky's warning), an indictment of urban social conditions in nineteenth-century Russia, a religious epic and a proto-Nietzschean analysis of the ‘will to power’. It is, of course, all these things – but it is more. As the researcher and scholar Helen Muchnic pointed out in 1939,
³
it is hard when reading the critical literature on Dostoyevsky to avoid the feeling that interpretations of his work tend to say more about those who make them than they do about the novelist himself. Even half a century later, this is still largely true of the contributions by Western critics to the study of
Crime and Punishment
: nearly all of them have some special, personal reason for making the kind of statements that they do when writing of the novel. In the case of the British critics, who include J. A. Lloyd, E. H. Carr, Maurice Baring and John Middleton Murry, one receives confirmation of Muchnic's general claim that ‘the tone of the English studies has been either aloof or rhapsodic’. The most typical British response to the work was also one of the earliest – that of Robert Louis Stevenson, who after reading the book
in French translation wrote to John Addington Symonds in 1886 that while he relished its ‘lovely goodness’ and admired the power and strength of the action and characterization, he was bewildered by ‘the incoherency and incapacity of it all’. Continental European critics proved more deeply perceptive, though for a long time there persisted a fashionable view, first formulated by E.-M. de Vogüé in his
Le Roman russe
(1886), which interpreted
Crime and Punishment
as a work of Hugoesque social and civic ‘realism’ concerned with ‘the religion of suffering’, linked to
Poor Folk
and
The House of the Dead
, and thus cut off from the supposedly inferior later novels. Perhaps some of the most telling Western comments on the character of Raskolnikov were made by André Gide in his Dostoievski (
Articles et causeries
) (1923). It is Gide's celebrated remark – ‘humiliation damns, whereas humility sanctifies’ – that makes us most clearly aware of the depth of hurt pride in which Raskolnikov finds himself at the beginning of the novel, and of the journey towards self-denial that is mapped out across its pages. In his discussion of
Crime and Punishment
Gide also shows the clear links that unite it with Dostoyevsky's later works, and illustrates how it prepares the way for them.

In Russia, as we have seen, criticism of the novel has also been coloured by partisan and ideological interests. In the political climate of nineteenth-century Russia the implications of Dostoyevsky's message were already keenly felt by the book's earliest reviewers, and even in Soviet times literary critics tended to write of it as a work of ‘moral’ and social significance, shying clear of the underlying anti-materialist, anti-revolutionary and anti-humanist elements it contains. Perhaps the most sensitive interpretations apart from those of Rozanov and V. S. Solovyov have come from critics and philosophers of the Christian–existentialist school such as Konstantin Mochulsky and Nicholas Berdyaev, whose thinking and spiritual experience, while not proceeding directly from those of Dostoyevsky, none the less run parallel to them. Berdyaev, who viewed Dostoyevsky not as a psychologist but as a ‘pneumatologist’, a researcher of souls, probably comes closer than any other critic, Russian or non-Russian, to providing a way towards an inner understanding
of the novel for Western readers. The way is to be found in
Dostoievsky
–
An Interpretation
(1934). There, however, Berdyaev characterizes the Russian soul as being fundamentally different in nature from the Western soul. Berdyaev's study may help Westerners along a part of the route – but in the last result, approached in a non-Russian context,
Crime and Punishment
requires a leap of the spirit and imagination by readers themselves.

1.
All his life Dostoyevsky showed a considerable interest in Victor Hugo's prose fiction, and in 1862, during his first visit to western Europe, he read the newly published
Les Misérables
with excitement.
Crime and Punishment
shows the influence of Hugo's novel in respect of plot (a criminal trying to evade a police agent who is shadowing him), background (the sewers of Paris have their counterpart in the canals of St Petersburg) and character (it is possible to draw parallels between Jean Valjean and Raskolnikov, Cosette and Dunya, Marius and Razumikhin, and Thénardier and Svidrigailov, among others). The subject of the many points of coincidence between the two novels has been thoroughly investigated by Nathalie Babel Brown in her valuable study
Hugo and Dostoevsky
, Ardis/Ann Arbor, 1978.

2.
Philip Rahv, ‘Dostoevsky in
Crime and Punishment
’,
Partisan Review
, XXVII (1960).

3.
Helen Muchnic, ‘Dostoevsky's English Reputation (1881–1936)’, Smith College Studies in Modern Languages, vol. 20, nos. 3/4.

Berdyaev, Nicholas,
Dostoievsky
(Sheed & Ward, 1934). Not a biography in the strict sense, but rather a philosophical study of Dostoyevsky's world view and aesthetics by a major Christian existentialist thinker.

Brown, Nathalie Babel,
Hugo and Dostoevsky
(Ardis, 1978). Contains a detailed comparison of
Crime and Punishment
and
Les Misérables
, and their structural similarities.

Catteau, Jacques,
Dostoyevsky and the Process of Literary Creation
(Cambridge University Press, 1989).

Dostoevskaya, Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina, Dostoevsky:
Reminiscences
(Liveright, 1975).

Frank, Joseph,
Dostoevsky
:
The Years of Ordeal, 1850–1859
(Princeton University Press, 1983).

—,
Dostoevsky
:
The Stir of Liberation
, 1860-1865 (Princeton University Press, 1986).

—,
Dostoevsky
:
The Miraculous Years
, 1865–1871 (Princeton University Press, 1995).

Gide, André,
Dostoevsky
(Secker & Warburg, 1949).

Grossman, Leonid Petrovich,
Balzac and Dostoevsky
(Ardis, 1973).

Jackson, Robert Louis,
Twentieth
-
Century
Interpretations of Crime and Punishment
:
A Collection of Critical Essays
(Prentice-Hall, 1974).

Johnson, Leslie A.,
The Experience of Time in
‘
Crime and Punishment
’ (Slavica Publishers, 1985).

Kjetsaa, Geir,
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
,
A Writer
'
s Life
(Viking, 1987). A good general and comprehensive overview of Dostoyevsky's life and work for the non-specialist reader.

Lary, N. M.,
Dostoevsky and Dickens: A Study of Literary Influence
(Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973).

Mochulsky, K.,
Dostoevsky: His Life and Work
(Princeton University Press, 1967).

Muchnic, Helen,
Dostoevsky
'
s English Reputation
, 1881-1936 (Octagon Books, 1969). Dostoyevsky seen through the eyes of English writers and novelists, and a study of his effect on the development of English literature.

Peace, Richard Arthur,
Dostoyevsky; An Examination of the Major Novels
(Cambridge University Press, 1971).

Rozanov, V. V.,
Dostoevsky and the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor
(Cornell University Press, [1972]).

Shestov, Lev,
Dostoevsky
,
Tolstoy
,
and Nietzsche
(Ohio University Press, 1969).

Solovyov, Vladimir,
War
,
Progress and the End of History
(Lindisfarne Books, 1990). A study by one of Russia's greatest philosophers of the problem of evil in the modern world, with many echoes, and a critique, of Raskolnikov's ideas.

Wasiolek, Edward,
Dostoevsky: The Major Fiction
(MIT Press, 1964).

Wellek, René,
Dostoevsky
:
A Collection of Critical Essays
(Prentice-Hall, 1962).

The text used for the present translation is that contained in Volume 6 of F. M. Dostoyevsky,
Polnoye sobranie sochineniy v tridtsati tomakh
(Leningrad, 1973). Use has also been made of the draft material and notes contained in Volume 7.

While the translation strives to retain as much of Dostoyevsky's style, syntax and sentence-structure as possible, it also tries to take account of the general literary context in which the author composed the novel. It is important for the reader of English to be aware, for example, that in certain passages and chapters Dostoyevsky wrote under the direct influence of Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Dickens, among other English-language authors, and at times the translation attempts to reflect their style, too. It also aims to provide as readable a text as possible, in keeping with the novel's background in the popular journalism of its time, and its engagement with topical issues.

In 1865, the year in which the action of Dostoyevsky's novel takes place, the most commonly used items of currency were as follows:

There is some play with this last expression in the novel – in Russian, it also means ‘the yellow card’ (
la carte jaune
) or ‘the yellow ticket’, which was a euphemism for the special passport carried by prostitutes. The old woman pawnbroker uses the term
biletiki
(literally, ‘little tickets’) as slang for ‘roubles’, something that serves to increase Raskolnikov's irritation.

Mention is also made in the text of paper ‘credit bills’ (
kreditki
) or banknotes worth five roubles (
sinie bilety
, or ‘bluebacks’) and ten roubles (
krasnye bilety
, or ‘redbacks’).

The hundred-rouble note was known as a
raduzhnyy bilet
, or ‘rainbow note’, from its rainbow colouring.

IOU's (‘promissory notes’), Government bonds and lottery tickets were also in circulation, together with regular currency.

Silver roubles had a fluctuating and inconstant value; following the recent devaluation of silver, they were actually worth less than paper roubles.

At the beginning of July, during a spell of exceptionally hot weather,
¹
towards evening, a certain young man came down on to the street from the little room he rented from some tenants in S— Lane and slowly, almost hesitantly, set off towards K—n Bridge.
²

He had succeeded in avoiding an encounter with his landlady on the stairs. His room was situated right under the roof of a tall, five-storey tenement,
³
and sooner resembled a closet than a place of habitation. His landlady, from whom he rented this room with dinner and a maid, lived on the floor below in a separate apartment, and each time he wanted to go down to the street he had to pass his landlady's kitchen, the door of which was nearly always wide-open on to the stairs. And each time, as he passed it, the young man had a morbid sensation of fear, of which he was ashamed and which caused him to frown. He was heavily in debt to his landlady, and was afraid of running into her.