Dostoevsky (104 page)

These clues are false in the sense that they lead away from the true answer to the question of Raskolnikov’s motivation, but the motivations they suggest are not false in any absolute sense. On the contrary, such imputed possibilities exert a strong pressure on Raskolnikov and add greatly to the sympathy he evokes in the reader. Clues of this kind should thus perhaps not be called false, but accessory or ancillary rather than primary; and their validity is constantly challenged both dramatically and, through such characters as Razumikhin, Zosimov, and Porfiry Petrovich, directly and discursively. Built into the narrative of
Crime and Punishment
is thus a view of how it should be read, a hermeneutic of its interpretation, which is an integral part of its anti-radical theme and incorporates Dostoevsky’s oft-expressed belief in the importance of ideas and their power to influence human behavior.

Crime and Punishment
begins
in media res
, two and one-half days before Raskolnikov commits the crime, and continues through a duration estimated to be approximately two weeks. Time in the novel, so far as it is felt through Raskolnikov’s consciousness, contracts and expands freely according to the importance for him of the events being depicted. It thus seems to lack any objective dimension, and it is also manipulated freely to obtain thematic effects by what Ian Watt, writing about Conrad, has called “thematic apposition,” that is, the juxtaposition of events occurring at different times in order to establish connections between them without explanatory authorial intrusion.
²
The objective chronology of events (the time sequence of what has occurred
before
it has been reshaped for the artistic purposes of the novel) plays a crucial part in illuminating the
mystery of Raskolnikov’s motivation. It is this chronology that is gradually uncovered, with all its psychic-ideological implications, as the double time structure of the mystery plot (the time of the action in the present disclosing what occurred in the past) proceeds on its way.

The famous opening section of
Crime and Punishment
is also a subtle construction whose various thematic strands it is important to disentangle. At the center is the inner conflict of Raskolnikov, torn between his intention to commit a crime in the interests of humanity and the resistance of his moral conscience against the taking of human life. He is a sensitive young intellectual whose fineness of sensibility is conveyed both through his instinctive impulses of compassion for the suffering he sees all around him and through the intensity of his self-revulsion at his own intentions. He has, when we first encounter him, been brooding over the crime for six weeks, and though he lives in appalling poverty, it is clear that he would not have thought of committing it for purely selfish reasons. It is the fate of suffering humanity that concerns him, as revealed in the tavern scene, where the Utilitarian-altruistic justification for the proposed crime is clearly expressed for the first time.

Why not kill a wretched, rapacious, and “useless” old moneylender and employ the funds to alleviate the human misery so omnipresent in Raskolnikov’s world? This is the thought that was dawning in his mind when he enters the tavern and hears it uttered simultaneously by a student and a young officer. Dostoevsky does everything in his artistic powers to accentuate the squalor and human wretchedness that stream past Raskolnikov’s eyes or filter through his sensibility, as he walks through the streets filled with pothouses, brothels, and reeling drunks. His encounter with the hopeless drunkard Marmeladov, abject and guilt-stricken at his own degradation, embodies for Raskolnikov everything in the world that he finds intolerable, especially when Marmeladov explains to all and sundry that he and the rest of his starving family are being kept alive by the self-sacrifice of his prostitute daughter, Sonya. On the level of plot, Marmeladov thus seems only to strengthen Raskolnikov’s desire to take action against the horrifying misery that surrounds him, but on the level of ideological theme Dostoevsky uses the encounter to uncover in advance both the heartlessness of Raskolnikov’s own convictions (not yet specifically introduced) and the alternative set of values to be posed against them.

When Marmeladov describes going to a moneylender for a loan he would never repay, he understands that his failure to obtain one is in accord with “modern” views. Should the moneylender give him the loan out of “compassion?” “But Mr. Lebezyatnikov, who keeps up with modern ideas, explained the other day that compassion is forbidden nowadays by science itself, and this is what is done in England, where there is political economy” (6: 14). Raskolnikov’s own reasoning is based on exactly the same Utilitarian notions of “political
economy,” which exclude any feeling of compassion for the “useless” individual marked out as the sacrificial victim. By contrast, the ecstatic self-impaling alternative provided by Marmeladov before he collapses provides the starkest antithesis to the inhuman tenor of the ideas that Raskolnikov is dreaming of putting into practice. For here Marmeladov, in a mixture of freely altered citations from the Gospels, envisions Christ returning at the Last Judgment and pardoning even the “children of shame” like himself, because “not one of them believed himself worthy of this” (6: 21). It is certainly not accidental that Christ’s all-forgiving love is opposed “by the wise ones and those of understanding” (this last word translates
razumnie
; the Russian word for “reason” is
razum
), whereby Dostoevsky ingeniously turns the Pharisees of the New Testament into precursors of the Russian radicals of the 1860s.

The symbolic weight of this Petersburg setting reinforces the social-humanitarian motivation that is the nominal justification for Raskolnikov’s crime. This motivation is unforgettably expressed in the important tavern-scene with its conversation between the officer and the student playing billiards. Dostoevsky indicates here how widespread was the reasoning which they discuss to improve society by a humanitarian assassination. But Dostoevsky then increases the weight of this impersonal incitation (“One death, and a hundred lives in exchange—it’s simple arithmetic”) (6: 54) with a more intimate motive: the letter from Raskolnikov’s mother. Here he learns about the desperate circumstances of his own family and his sister Dunya’s decision to marry the tight-fisted and domineering lawyer Luzhin solely to help her adored brother. Dunya’s resolve thus places Raskolnikov, as he realizes only too piercingly, in a comparably debasing (though outwardly more respectable) position as the drunken Marmeladov living off Sonya’s earnings.

Dostoevsky’s portrayal of the agonies of a conscience wrestling with itself, as Raskolnikov struggles to suppress his moral scruples and steel himself for murder, has no equal this side of
Macbeth
. His horrified recoil after the trial visit to the pawnbroker’s flat, so as to spy out the ground in advance, is only the first of several reactions that increase in severity: “Oh God! how loathsome it all is. . . . And how could such an atrocious thing come into my head?” (6: 10). The unforgettable dream sequence in
Chapter 5
, which evokes a childhood recollection of the savagely sadistic beating and killing of a “useless” old mare by the drunken peasant Mikolka, epitomizes Raskolnikov’s lacerating conflict. On the one side, there is the little boy who “loved that church, the old-fashioned icons for the most part without frames, and the old priest with his trembling head” (6: 46). This little boy, who still exists in the depths of Raskolnikov’s psyche, furiously breaks away from his father’s grasp, puts his arms around the head of the dead horse to kiss her lips and wounded eyes, and finally flies “in a frenzy with his little fists out at Mikolka” (6: 49). On the other, there is the grown Raskolnikov
dreaming this dream, who now plans to behave exactly like Mikolka—and not in a drunken rage, but according to a carefully thought out, “rational” theory. The combat within Raskolnikov between these two aspects of himself is so rending that he wakes in a state of terror and self-loathing, believing (mistakenly) that he has at last conquered the obsessive temptation to kill.

The reader remains immersed in Raskolnikov’s consciousness all through
Part I
and tends to identify with his point of view. But interwoven with the major episodes of Raskolnikov’s inner struggle are background incidents whose purpose can only be to indicate that, in reality, Raskolnikov is purblind to the subconscious psychic-emotive forces that have been stirred up in his personality. In all such incidents, Raskolnikov behaves in a fashion that shows his emotions being mobilized
against
the feelings that inspire his Utilitarian-altruistic aims. Here, for example, we see a Raskolnikov who, just after springing to the aid of someone in distress, becomes a coldly unconcerned and contemptuous egoist in the next moment, indifferent to the misfortunes that had stirred his pity.

Egoism as an ingredient of Raskolnikov’s character is indicated early in the “expression of profoundest disgust” that passes over his face as he walks through “the revolting misery” of the stinking streets (6: 43). For Dostoevsky, psychology and ideology were now inseparable, and each precipitous shift of behavior is correlated with some reference to radical doctrine. Just after his trial visit to the pawnbroker, reeling both with fever and self-disgust, he stops at the pothouse, where he meets Marmeladov and drinks a glass of beer. Instantly feeling better, he attributes his previous moral discomposure to lack of nourishment, and shrugs it off; Chernyshevsky had taught that morality was just a product of physiology.

Raskolnikov also has second thoughts about the kopeks he had charitably left with the Marmeladovs on his first visit, out of compassion for their misery. “What a stupid thing I have done,” he reflects. “They have Sonya, and I need the money myself” (6: 25). This Utilitarian consideration checks the spontaneous outflow of pity, and with “a malignant laugh” he ponders on the infinite capacity of mankind to adapt itself to the most degrading circumstances. Much the same happens when, after calling the policeman to help the tipsy girl being followed by a lecherous fat “dandy,” he unexpectedly turns away in disgust. Suddenly “something seemed to sting Raskolnikov; in an instant a complete revulsion of feeling came over him,” and he swings to the other extreme: “Let them devour each other alive—what is it to me?,” he mutters to himself (6: 42). What “stings” Raskolnikov is the bite of these Darwinian reflections, which view the triumph of the stronger as right and just and any help to the weaker as a violation of the laws of nature. This scene is then duplicated internally as Raskolnikov first imagines the girl’s probable future of prostitution, venereal disease, and ruin at eighteen or nineteen, but then caustically dismisses this resurgence of pity because “a certain percentage, they tell us, must every year . . . go that way. . . 
somewhere . . . to the devil, it must be, so as to freshen up the rest and leave them in peace” (6: 43).

Radical ideas, identical in their Utilitarian logic to those expressed in the tavern scene, thus continually act to reinforce the innate egoism of Raskolnikov’s character and to turn him into a hater rather than a lover of his fellow humans. It is not only that his
ideas
run counter to the instinctive promptings of his moral-emotive sensibility; these ideas momentarily transform him into someone for whom moral conscience ceases to operate as part of his personality. Not that his moral aim is insincere, but in steeling himself to accomplish his purpose, we become aware, Raskolnikov must suppress in himself the very moral-emotive feelings from which this aim had originally sprung. What occurs in these scenes thus illustrates the manner in which Raskolnikov’s ideas have been affecting his personality, and they cast an important light on what has been taking place within him emotively ever since he fell under their influence.

If we examine the objective chronology of the novel, disregarding for the moment the
artistic
manipulation of narrative structure, that is, the order in which this structure unfolds for the reader, we realize that radical notions began to influence Raskolnikov approximately six months before the events of the novel begin. It was then that he wrote his fateful article “On Crime,” which recasts and extends Pisarev’s reflections on Bazarov and divides people into two categories, the “ordinary” and the “extraordinary.” The first group, the masses, docilely accepts whatever established order exists; the second, a small elite, is composed of individuals who “seek in various ways the destruction of the present for the sake of the better” (examples given are Newton and Kepler, Lycurgus, Solon, Muhammad, and Napoleon). Such “extraordinary” people invariably commit crimes, if judged by the old moral codes they are striving to replace, but because they work “for the sake of the better,” their aim is ultimately the improvement of mankind’s lot, and they are thus in the long run benefactors rather than destroyers. So that, Raskolnikov argued, “if such a one is forced for the sake of his idea to step over a corpse or wade through blood, he can find in himself, in his conscience, a sanction for wading through blood” (6: 199–200). Since writing that article, Raskolnikov had become fascinated with the majestic image of such a Napoleonic personality who, in the interests of a higher social good, believes that he possesses a moral right to kill.