Ideas and the Novel (8 page)

The very idea of genius would have been scorned by him too, and not merely when attached to Napoleon as a prodigious military brain. I cannot think he ever used the word, unless in derision; it smacked of charlatanism. All those literary young men in Paris cafés and eating-houses with “genius” stamped on their brows like so many window dummies would have seemed a comic spectacle to the outspoken old man, who would not even put up with it in Shakespeare. Yet there was danger in the silly concept that could not be laughed away, and it was the “irrational” Dostoievsky, not the rational Tolstoy, who fully understood this.

The danger was plainly indicated by Dryden, in 1697, when the word as designating an unusually gifted individual was first coming into use, long before there was a Napoleon to flesh it out on the world stage. “Extraordinary Genius’s have a sort of Prerogative, which may dispense them from Laws.” Dryden was thinking of art and literature, where genius had a license, recognized at any rate in English-speaking countries, to break rules. Slowly or all of a sudden—a historian of language could doubtless trace the development—this license came to be extended to the moral sphere. The freedom of the genius to violate, say, the unities of dramatic convention was accorded to outstanding men in their personal behavior. It was not yet a question of making one’s life a work of art, hence beyond the reach of ordinary conventions; that was left to Oscar Wilde, who announced to the U.S. customs “I have nothing but my genius to declare.” That his life was a thing of exquisite beauty never occurred to a Julien Sorel, who did not need the sanction of art to behave unfeelingly. For the common horde of geniuses simply the fact of knowing oneself to be superior was sanction enough, whether the sensed superiority was conferred by an artistic talent, an intellectual capacity, or by some other, not fully disclosed gift.

This, precisely, was the case of Lucien de Rubempré, whose poetic promise, never fulfilled, permitted him to abuse the trust of his family, run up bills with tailor and haberdasher, forge checks, and so on. As the “great man” of the provinces, he was entitled to his just due of misconduct; unfortunately for his peace of mind, he lacked assurance of exactly how much was owing him. His own timidity and the poverty of his relations restricted his predations and even made him ashamed of them. He was not fully possessed of
“l’ esprit du siècle”
and half recognized laws other than the law of genius.

Julien Sorel is the opposite. His behavior in every particular has the single purpose of demonstrating that he recognizes no law but his own. In an afterword, Stendhal cites the “law of self-preservation” to excuse Julien’s selfishness. But the excuse is a weakness in the author, a tribute paid to convention. In the studied particulars of his daily conduct, Julien has shown that he is above that. When Mathilde de la Mole thinks of him to herself as “a man of genius,” it is the truculence of his manners, rather than his endowments, that has been the sure sign of election. Far from being a failing, selfishness is a duty imposed on him; as it is a proof of his superiority, he makes no attempt to hide it.

Genius, it turns out, has requirements; it is not just a carte blanche entitling the holder to run up bills for gloves and cravats. Julien, in fact, is thrifty, like a peasant; he cares nothing for externals and by preference wears his ecclesiastical black. If the Marquis de la Mole prefers to see him in the evenings in a blue coat, he will have to pay for it. The requirements of genius, for Julien, are inward and take the form of a strict duty to the self. In the outer world, he is constantly testing and “proving” himself, but this is not done for the benefit of others. Certain acts must be performed if he is to be true to his Idea. It is at such moments of testing that he turns to his “rule of conduct,” the
Mémorial.
Yet the duty summoning him has nothing to do with conscience, and the acts he performs at its order have the character of rites. The gardener’s ladder, even though chained down, tells him that he must use it to mount a second time to Mathilde’s bedroom; that is the procedure enjoined on him here, as at Mme de Rênal’s. As the affair reaches the next prescribed stage, he is like a priest moving from the Epistle side to the Gospel side, or, more precisely, like someone compelling himself to walk on the cracks of the sidewalk or to step over them as the case may be. None of Julien’s acts is done from inclination. They are exercises in personal magic.

Now exactly the same can be said of Raskolnikov in
Crime and Punishment,
the last of a line of fictional heroes fathered by the great Napoleon. Raskolnikov does not
want
to kill the old pawnbroker, any more than Julien wants to seize the hand of Mme de Rênal. He forces himself to it, and not from mere desire for her money; by itself, that would be a vulgar motive, a motive anybody might have, given need and opportunity. He does it to test himself, to prove a thesis he has fully accepted in thought and embodied months before in an article: “that there are certain persons who...have a perfect right to commit breaches of morality and crimes and that the law is not for them.” You will recognize the doctrine even in Russian clothes: “Extraordinary Genius’s have a sort of Prerogative, which may dispense them from Laws.” By a peculiar twist, already visible in Julien, the “may dispense” has turned into an imperative:
“must
dispense.” The student Raskolnikov has the duty of killing the old pawnbroker
if
he is a superior individual. If he is not, there is no obligation.

In his article he has given the hypothetical example of Newton. If Newton’s discoveries could only have been made known through the sacrifice of the lives of a hundred men, then “Newton would have had the right, would indeed have been in duty bound to
eliminate
...the hundred men for the sake of...the whole of humanity.” Evidently the cases are not identical. Raskolnikov has made no eminent scientific discovery whose publication would be facilitated by an axe-murder. He is aware of that, yet he is desperately poor, the landlady is dunning him, and he has convinced himself that, apart from personal motives, eliminating an old usuress who has done nothing but evil to her fellow-creatures would be a service to humanity. This benefaction will place him securely among the “extraordinary men” capable of saying a “new word,” and the act ought to be no more repugnant to him morally than crushing a louse.

Alas, his being numbered among the extraordinary men has come to depend on his willingness to put the theory he has voiced into practice. Had the idea not presented itself to him and the old woman not been so
logically
available as a subject for experiment, he would still be free. Once the idea has got into his head, he will be a coward to fail to carry it to swift execution. In reality, however, he procrastinates. And here, as was never the case with Julien, there is a struggle of conscience. A strange sort of contest because there are two struggles, really. On the one hand, his good self shrinks in horror from doing “a thing like that,” as he calls it almost incredulously on the very first page. On the other, the usual roles are reversed: duty is compelling him to kill the old woman, while his weaker self resists, begging to be let off, to be given a little more time, and so on. He will let circumstances decide for him, he concludes. Yet, as always happens, the longer he dallies, the less ready he is, and the more craven he feels himself to be in the face of an inexorable judge. As Jean Valjean expressed it, in very different conditions, in
Les Misérables:
“To be happy we must never understand what duty is; once we understand it, it is implacable.”

Raskolnikov, who has no thought of happiness—happiness is for the ordinary—understands that he will never be at rest till the self-enjoined deed is done. At no point does the crime attract him, not even as sheer idea (duty is unattractive), and, significantly, he never takes the slightest pleasure in picturing the results: how generously he will spend the money, how he will be able at last to face his landlady, stop doing stupid translations for pay... . When he steels his nerve for a “rehearsal” of the crime, he is taken aback to find himself in a bright sunny room with geraniums and everything clean and polished; the discrepancy between the pawnbroker’s shining flat and his hideous project confuses him, until he is able to reconcile the two by saying to himself, “It’s in the houses of spiteful old widows that one finds such cleanliness,” as if recalled with sudden relief to his thesis.

Nevertheless, returning to his lodging after the “rehearsal,” he feels, says Dostoievsky, like a man condemned to death. He commits the murder, finally, to be done with it, to get it over with, so that he can be left alone. Indeed when he climbs the stairs in the tenement house that are leading him to his mission, he seems to have forgotten why he is doing it; he has lost contact with the wider doctrine that to the superior man everything is permitted and is only putting one foot senselessly before the other, still hoping for a reprieve. In his confusion he overlooks most of the victim’s valuables and buries the chamois purse he took from her under a stone. At that moment it occurs to him that he does not know what is in it. “ ‘If it all has really been done deliberately...if I really had a certain and definite object, how is it that I did not even glance into the purse...?...And I wanted at once to throw into the water the purse together with all the things which I had not seen either...how’s that?’ ” He has duly committed the murder, but the purpose of it has eluded him, cruelly slipping from his grasp.

His crime has been a “fearful burden” weighing on him for months, from the instant of its conception, and he of course experiences a momentary lightness when “It,” as he has been calling it, is off his weary shoulders. But the sense of oppression quickly returns, and soon he is flirting with the hope of being detected, feeling impulses to confess, that is, to deposit the burden with the police, who as professionals will maybe know how to handle it. At the same time he is telling himself that “it is not a crime.” In a feverish excitement he cries out to himself: “I didn’t kill a human being but a principle!” And he thinks that he “will never, never forgive the old woman”—who, having turned into a principle, is evidently responsible for everything.

In sum, like Julien, Raskolnikov has been gripped body and soul by an idea. With Julien, the idea can be roughly equated with ambition. It includes but is not circumscribed by the intention of rising to the top, scaling the peaks of society. And, despite appearances to the contrary, he is successful in his aim, though at the cost of being guillotined. In prison, waiting for execution, he tells himself
“Je suis isolé ici dans ce cachot, mais je n’ai pas
vécu
isolé sur la terre; j’avais la puissante idée du
devoir” (“Here in this cell I am isolated, but I have not
lived
in isolation on the earth; I had the powerful idea of
duty”).
And he is right in his feeling of triumph. He has distinguished himself, made an indelible mark on his surroundings, as the marble-encrusted mountain sanctuary housing his remains will testify for a great many years, perhaps centuries, to come.

The idea possessing Raskolnikov is ambitious in another sense. He will eliminate an old usuress for the sake of humanity at large. In robbing her, he will also be settling a claim of humanity—the claim of the deserving poor against the undeservedly rich. He expects no glory in return, only the knowledge in his own heart of being equal to the conception he started with, that of the extraordinary individual superior to the rule of law. But—the duty laid on him being weightier, encompassing more than the mere recognition of the self—the result is a total failure. Not the slightest benefit accrues to humanity from his murdering two women (he is obliged to kill her sister too), and the point he wished to prove fails to be made, owing to his inner vacillations, which betray him as not being “up” to the requirements. By ordinary standards, his reluctance to commit the crime would show that he was
better
than he had thought, but those standards, self-evidently, cannot be Raskolnikov’s. Dostoievsky, however, has other views; he intends us to see that his hero is better than he knows. Indeed, the punishment of the title consists in Raskolnikov’s being forced to come to terms with this humiliating discovery. Yet the author is too considerate, that is, too respectful of Raskolnikov’s pride, to show us a conversion taking place. That is withheld from view, kept for another story, as Dostoievsky says at the end. At the close of
this
story, Raskolnikov has begun his atonement, but his reasoning does not yet match the new man he will become.

It will be no surprise to you to hear that on Raskolnikov’s list of extraordinary men who were also criminals the familiar name of Napoleon figures. On that honor roll are leaders and legislators who “transgressed the old law” in order to make a new one and shed innocent blood in the process—that is only to be expected, Raskolnikov argues. Otherwise it would be hard for them to get out of the common rut; “and to remain in the common rut is what they can’t submit to, from their very nature...and to my mind they ought not to submit to it.” This conversation, prompted by Raskolnikov’s old article, which has unexpectedly come back to haunt him, takes place a week after the double murder, and, though it is a social occasion, an examining magistrate “happens” to be present. With a pair of dreadful winks, the magistrate, Porfiry Porfirovich, wonders whether Raskolnikov, a quite extraordinary young man to all appearances, would bring himself to put his theory into practice. Raskolnikov contemptuously evades the question: “If I did I certainly should not tell you.” Porfiry Porfirovich insists that he is speaking from a purely literary point of view. The conversation continues. Then, from a corner of the room, comes the voice of a disagreeable acquaintance: “Perhaps it was one of these future Napoleons who did for Alyona Ivanovna last week?” Raskolnikov does not answer and after an angry look around him turns to go.