Quarrel & Quandary (3 page)

Like the Unabomber, Raskolnikov is an intellectual who publishes a notorious essay expounding his ideas about men and society. Both are obscure loners. Both are alienated from a concerned and affectionate family. Both are tender toward outcasts and the needy. Both are élitists. Both are idealists. Both are murderers. Contemporary America, it seems, has finally caught up with czarist Russia’s most argumentative novelist.

And in
Crime and Punishment
Dostoyevsky was feverishly pursuing an argument. It was an argument against the radicals
who were dominant among Russian intellectuals in the eighteen-sixties, many of them espousing nihilist views. In the universities especially, revolutionary commotion was on the rise. Yet there was an incongruity in the timing of all these calls for violent subversion. St. Petersburg was no longer the seat of the old Czar of the repressive eighteen-forties, the tyrannical Nicholas I, against whose cruelties convulsive outrage might be justly presumed. Paradoxically, under that grim reign even the most fiery radicals were at heart gradualists who modeled their hopes on Western reformist ideas. By the incendiary sixties, the throne was held by Nicholas’s moderate son and successor, whose numerous democratic initiatives looked to be nudging Russia toward something that might eventually resemble a constitutional monarchy. The younger revolutionary theorists would have none of it. It was incomplete; it was too slow. Liberalism, they roared, was the enemy of revolution, and would impede a more definitive razing of evil.

The first installments of
Crime and Punishment
had just begun to appear in
The Russian Messenger
, a Slavophile periodical, when a student revolutionary made an attempt on the life of the Czar as he was leaving the gardens of the Winter Palace to enter his carriage. The government responded with a draconian crackdown on the radicals. “You know,” Dostoyevsky wrote cuttingly to his publisher in the wake of these events, “they are completely convinced that on a
tabula rasa
they will immediately construct a paradise.” But he went on to sympathize with “our poor little defenseless boys and girls” and “their enthusiasm for the good and their purity of heart.” So many “have become nihilists so purely, so unselfishly, in the name of honor, truth, and genuine usefulness! You know they are helpless against these stupidities, and take them for perfection.” And though in the same letter he spoke of “the powerful, extraordinary, sacred union of the Czar with the people,” he objected to
the increase in repression. “But how can nihilism be fought without freedom of speech?” he asked.

This mixture of contempt for the radicals and solicitude for their misguided, perplexed, and perplexing humanity led to the fashioning of Raskolnikov. Pisarev striking right and left was one ingredient. Another was the appeal of self-sacrificial idealism. And a third was the literary mode through which Dostoyevsky combined and refined the tangled elements of passion, brutishness, monomaniacal principle, mental chaos, candor, mockery, fury, compassion, generosity—and two brutal ax-murders. All these contradictory elements course through Raskolnikov with nearly a Joycean effect; but if stream of consciousness flows mutely and uninterruptedly, assimilating the outer world into the inner, Raskolnikov’s mind—and Dostoyevsky’s method—is zigzag and bumpy, given to rebellious and unaccountable alterations of purpose. Raskolnikov is without restraint—not only as an angry character in a novel, but as a reflection of Dostoyevsky himself, who was out to expose the entire spectrum of radical thought engulfing the writers and thinkers of St. Petersburg.

This may be why Raskolnikov is made to rush dizzyingly from impulse to impulse, from kindliness to withdrawal to lashing out, and from one underlying motive to another—a disorderliness at war with his half-buried and equivocal conscience. Only at the start is he seen, briefly, to be deliberate and in control. Detached, reasoning it out, Raskolnikov robs and murders a pawnbroker whom he has come to loathe, an unpleasant and predatory old woman alone and helpless in her flat. He hammers her repeatedly with the heavy handle of an ax:

Unexpectedly, the old woman’s simple-minded sister just then enters the flat; she is disposed of even more horribly: “The blow landed directly on the skull, with the sharp edge, and immediately split the whole upper part of the forehead, almost to the crown.”

The second slaying is an unforeseen by-product of the first. The first is the rational consequence of forethought. What is the nature—the thesis—of this forethought? Shortly before the murder, Raskolnikov overhears a student in a tavern speculating about the pawnbroker: she is “rich as a Jew,” and has willed all her money to the Church. “A hundred, a thousand good deeds and undertakings … could be arranged and set going by the money that old woman has doomed to the monastery!” exclaims the student.

Startled by this polemic, Raskolnikov admits to himself that “
exactly the same thoughts
had just been conceived in his own head”—though not as harmless theoretical bombast.

The theory in Raskolnikov’s head—Benthamite utilitarianism, the greatest good for the greatest number, with its calibrated notions of what is useful and what is expendable—had been current for at least a decade among the Westernizing majority of the Russian intelligentsia, especially the literati of the capital. In supplying Bentham with an ax, Dostoyevsky thought to carry out the intoxications of the utilitarian doctrine as far as its principles would go: brutality and bloodletting would reveal the poisonous fruit of a political philosophy based on reason alone.

A fiercely sardonic repudiation of that philosophy—some of it in the vocabulary of contemporary American controversy—is entrusted to Raskolnikov’s affectionate and loyal comrade, Razumikhin:

The phalanstery, a cooperative commune, was the brainchild of Charles Fourier, who, along with the political theorist Saint-Simon (and well before Marx), was an enduring influence on the Francophile Russian radical intelligentsia. But Razumikhin’s
outcry against the utopian socialists who idealize the life of the commune and fantasize universal harmony is no more than a satiric rap on the knuckles. Dostoyevsky is after a bloodier and more threatening vision—nihilism in its hideously perfected form. This is the ideological cloak he next throws over Raskolnikov; it is Raskolnikov’s manifesto as it appears in his article. The “extraordinary man,” Raskolnikov declaims, has the right to “step over certain obstacles” in order to fulfill a mission that is “salutary for the whole of mankind.”

Every lawgiver or founder of a new idea, he goes on, has always been a criminal—“all of them to a man … from the fact alone that in giving a new law they thereby violated the old one … and they certainly did not stop at shedding blood either, if it happened that blood … could help them.” Such extraordinary men—Lycurgus, Solon, Napoleon—call for “the destruction of the present in the name of the better,” and will lead the world toward a new Jerusalem.

To which Razumikhin, recoiling, responds: “You do finally permit bloodshed
in all conscience.
” And just here, in the turbulence of Razumikhin’s revelation—and prefiguring Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn, and Sharansky—Dostoyevsky makes his case for the dismantling of the Soviet state half a century before the revolutionary convulsion that brought it into being.

Yet the mammoth irony of Dostoyevsky’s life remains: the writer who excoriated the radical theorists, who despised the nihilist revolutionaries, who wrote novel after novel to defy them, once belonged to their company.

It is easy to dislike him, and not because the spectacle of a self-accusing apostate shocks. He ended as a Slavophile religious believer; but in his twenties he was what he bitterly came to scorn—a Westernizing Russian liberal. Nevertheless a certain nasty consistency ruled. At all times he was bigoted and xenophobic: he had an irrational hatred of Germans and Poles, and his novels are speckled with anti-Semitism. He attacked Roman Catholicism as the temporal legacy of a pagan empire, while extolling Russian Orthodoxy. He was an obsessive and deluded gambler scheming to strike it rich at the snap of a finger: he played madly at the roulette tables of Europe, and repeatedly reduced himself and his pregnant young second wife to actual privation. Escaping debtors’ prison in Russia, he was compelled for years to wander homelessly and wretchedly through Germany and Switzerland. In Wiesbaden he borrowed fifty thalers from Turgenev and took ten years to repay him. He held the rigidly exclusionary blood-and-soil tenet that the future of civilization lay with Russia alone. He was seriously superstitious and had a silly trust in omens and dreams. He was irritable, sometimes volcanically so, and inordinately vain. And if all these self-inflicted debilities of character were not ugly enough, he suffered from a catastrophic innate debility: he was subject, without warning, to horrifying epileptic seizures in a period when there were no medical controls.

Though not quite without warning. Dostoyevsky’s fits were heralded by a curious surge of ecstasy—an “aura” indistinguishable from religious exaltation. He underwent his first seizure, he reported, on Easter morning in 1865, when he was forty-four years old: “Heaven had come down to earth and swallowed me. I really grasped God and was penetrated by Him.” But there may have been unidentified earlier attacks, different in kind. At the age of ten he experienced an auditory hallucination; he thought he heard a voice cry “A wolf is on the loose!” and was comforted by a kindly serf who belonged to his father.

Later fits uniformly triggered the divine penumbra. He was well prepared for it. From childhood he had been saturated in a narrow household piety not unlike the unquestioning devoutness of the illiterate Russian peasant. Prayers were recited before icons; a clergyman came to give lessons. The Gospels were read, and the
Acta Martyrum
—the lives of the saints—with their peculiarly Russian emphasis on passive suffering. No Sunday or religious holiday went unobserved, on the day itself and at vespers the evening before. Rituals were punctiliously kept up. Dostoyevsky’s father, a former army doctor on the staff of a hospital for the poor outside Moscow, frequently led his family on excursions to the great onion-domed Kremlin cathedrals, where religion and nationalism were inseparable. Every spring, Dostoyevsky’s mother took the children on a pilgrimage to the Monastery of St. Sergey, sixty miles from Moscow, where they kneeled among mobs of the faithful before an imposing silver reliquary said to contain the saint’s miraculous remains. None of this was typical of the Russian gentry of the time. Neither Tolstoy nor Turgenev had such an upbringing. Joseph Frank, Dostoyevsky’s superb and exhaustive biographer, explains why. “Most upper-class Russians,” he recounts, “would have shared the attitude exemplified in Herzen’s anecdote about his host at a
dinner party who, when asked whether he was serving Lenten dishes out of personal conviction, replied that it was ‘simply and solely for the sake of the servants.’ ”

There is speculation that Dostoyevsky’s father may himself have had a mild form of epilepsy: he was gloomy, moody, and unpredictably explosive, a martinet who drank too much and imposed his will on everyone around him. In his youth he had completed his studies at a seminary for non-monastic clergy, a low caste, but went on instead to pursue medicine, and eventually elevated himself to the status of the minor nobility. His salary was insufficient and the family was not well off, despite the doctor’s inheritance of a small and scrubby estate, along with its “baptized property”—the serfs attached to the land. When Dostoyevsky was sixteen, his father dispatched him and his older brother Mikhail, both of whom had literary ambitions, to the Academy of Military Engineers in St. Petersburg, in preparation for government careers. But the doctor’s plan for his sons came to nothing. Less than two years later, in a season of drought, bad crops, and peasant resentment, Dostoyevsky was informed that his father had been found dead on the estate, presumably strangled by his serfs. Killings of this kind were not uncommon. In a famous letter to Gogol (the very letter that would ultimately send Dostoyevsky before the firing squad), the radical critic Vissarion Belinsky wrote that the Czar was “well aware of what landowners do with their peasants and how many throats of the former are cut every year by the latter.”