Dostoevsky (107 page)

Raskolnikov now calls himself a “louse” because of the “aesthetic” incongruity between the pettiness of his own deed (“a vile, withered old woman, a moneylender”) and the grandeur of the figure whose name and destiny had hung before him like a lodestar (“Napoleon, the pyramids, Waterloo”). But it is the realization that “I have been importuning Providence for a whole month, calling on it to witness that it was not for my own, so to speak, flesh and lust that I proposed to act but for a noble and worthy end”—it is
this
incongruity that makes him exclaim: “I killed a principle, but as for surmounting the barriers, I did not do that, I remained on this side” (6: 211). Raskolnikov had killed the “principle” of the old moral law against taking human life, but this very purpose and choice
of victim showed that he had not been able “to surmount the barriers.” He had attached a moral aim to his desire to achieve “greatness”; he had remained a man of flesh, who had failed to become one of bronze.

But Raskolnikov—even though he exclaims to himself, “Ah, how I hate the old woman now! I feel I should kill her again if she came to life!”—cannot sustain this hostility for very long, and his thoughts modulate into recollections of Lizaveta and Sonya (“poor, gentle things, with gentle eyes”). His inner struggle then terminates in the dream that ends
Part III
, in which he unsuccessfully tries to rid himself of the ghost of his victim. Fearfully reliving the moment of the murder, he tries to kill Alyona Ivanovna again, but finds her impervious to his blows. Huddled in a chair, with her head drooping and face concealed, she was “overcome with noiseless laughter” and simply “shook with mirth” (6: 213) as he redoubled his blows. He had murdered her in the flesh but not in his spirit, and she continues to haunt his conscience. He had failed to become one of the “great men” who had gone beyond good and evil altogether.

Svidrigailov emerges from the shadows at the beginning of
Part IV
, when Raskolnikov has finally glimpsed the incongruity of attempting to place an all-powerful egoism into the service of moral ends. Materializing in Raskolnikov’s room almost as if part of the dream repetition of the murder, Svidrigailov seems to be an apparition; and Raskolnikov asks Razumikhin whether the latter had actually
seen
Svidrigailov in the flesh. Nothing similar had occurred in the case of Luzhin, and Svidrigailov’s emergence from, as it were, Raskolnikov’s subconscious suggests that he stems from a more deeply rooted level of Raskolnikov’s personality than Luzhin, who embodies his ideas. Svidrigailov mirrors the elemental thrust of that egoism, concentrated in Raskolnikov’s monomania, which had ultimately led to the murders. He now confronts Raskolnikov as someone who has
accepted
the thoroughgoing egoistic amorality that, as Raskolnikov now has begun to realize, he had unwittingly been striving to incarnate himself.

One of Dostoevsky’s most strangely appealing characters, a sort of monster à la Quasimodo longing for redemption to normalcy, Svidrigailov’s Byronic world-weariness signifies a certain spiritual depth, and the contradictions of his personality, swinging between the blackest evil and the most benevolent good, perhaps can best be understood in Byronic terms. Is he not similar to such a figure as Byron’s Lara, “who at last confounded good and ill,” and whose supreme indifference to their distinction made him equally capable of both? One can well say of Svidrigailov,

Svidrigailov thus embodies the same mixture of moral-psychic opposites as Raskolnikov, but arranged in a different order of dominance. What rules within the older man is the conscious acceptance of an unrestrained egoism acting solely in the pursuit of personal and sensual pleasure, but his enjoyments are tarnished by self-disgust. What dominates in Raskolnikov are the pangs and power of conscience even in the midst of a fiercely egoistic struggle to maintain his freedom.

Svidrigailov arrives in Petersburg in hot pursuit of Dunya, but though he pretends to be driven only by the pleasure of sensual passion, his desire for Dunya has now become a quest for personal salvation. The plot parallelism with Raskolnikov-Sonya is obvious and could hardly have been carried through if Svidrigailov had been a less complex character. The disabling workings of
his
self-disgust may be gathered from his picture of eternity as a little room, “something like a bathhouse in the country, black with soot, with spiders in every corner. . . . I sometimes imagine it like that, you know,” he confesses to Raskolnikov. When the latter, “with a feeling of anguish,” protests that he might imagine something “juster and more comforting than that,” Svidrigailov only responds that perhaps this would be just, “and, do you know, it’s what I would certainly have made it deliberately!” (6: 221). For all his assumed moral insensibility, Svidrigailov is unable to escape a sense of self-revulsion, which he wishes to extend to humanity as a whole.

Dostoevsky, however, reserves the full deployment of the Raskolnikov-Svidrigailov relation for a later thematic stage. As yet, Raskolnikov sees himself as someone who, like Sonya, has taken on the burden of suffering to aid a humanity trapped in helpless misery, and he thus tries to bring her round to regarding
his
crime as identical with
her
pathetic infringement of conventional morality. Dostoevsky manages to capture Sonya’s innocence in the midst of degradation, her gaucherie and burning purity of religious faith. What she offers to Raskolnikov is an unsullied image of the self-sacrificing Christian love that had once also stirred him to his depths. She is the
existential reality
of that love for suffering mankind which, when amalgamated with the Utilitarian reason of radical ideology, had become perverted into the monstrosities of his crime.

In the scenes between the two, Raskolnikov reveals his desire to embellish his
own deed with the halo of Christian self-sacrifice. This is what makes him so susceptible to “the sort of
insatiable
compassion . . . reflected in every feature of her face”; it is what throws him on his knees to kiss her feet “because of your great suffering” (6: 243, 246). But even as he yields in this way to her example, the unalloyed faith of Sonya does not fail to arouse his educated scorn. When he learns that she and his victim Lizaveta had met to read the New Testament together, he calls them
yurodivy
(holy fools, usually considered simple-minded, if not demented), but finds himself irresistibly drawn to their unshakable faith in God’s ultimate goodness—the faith that, against all reason, miraculously supports Sonya in the midst of vice as she struggles to help the deranged Katerina Ivanovna and the starving children.

Under the effect of this emotion, he commands Sonya to read from the copy of the New Testament given her by Lizaveta. He wishes to hear the passage from the Gospel of Saint John narrating the resurrection of Lazarus, which symbolically holds out the possibility of his own moral resurrection. In pages that have evoked a mountain of commentary, Dostoevsky depicts, with the bleakly reverential simplicity of a Rembrandt etching, “the candle end [that] had long since burnt low in the twisted candlestick, dimly lighting the poverty-stricken room and the murderer and the harlot [
bludnitsa
], who had come together so strangely to read the eternal book” (6: 251–252). Dostoevsky uses the Church Slavonic word
bludnitsa
, rather than a more colloquial one, and thus associates Sonya with Mary Magdalene as Raskolnikov blends with Lazarus. Nowhere perhaps do we come closer to Dostoevsky’s own tortuously anguished relation to religious faith than in the mixture of involuntary awe and self-conscious skepticism with which Raskolnikov reacts to Sonya. But the moment he shakes off the emotions stirred by the Gospel reading, the clash of values between the two recommences.

Rakolnikov appeals to Sonya because it is only she to whom he can reveal the truth—because she too is a flagrant sinner and has become an outcast in the eyes of society. It is she, and not his virtuous family, who might be able to accept him without shock and horror, and even sympathize with his purpose, if not its results. “You too have stepped over the barriers . . . you were able to overstep!” he says to Sonya (6: 252). But exactly the opposite is true: Raskolnikov had wished to “step over” but had been unable to because he had been undermined by the remains of his moral conscience. Sonya had not wished to “step over” at all, and had violated the moral law against her will and desire. For all her debasement, Sonya is not inwardly torn because her sin has been redeemed by the purity of her
self
-sacrifice. It is this difference that Raskolnikov desperately tries to wipe away when he says, with flagrant sophistry, “you have laid hands on yourself, you destroyed a life . . . 
your own
(it’s all the same)!” On the one side, there is the ethic of Christian
agape
, the total, immediate, and unconditional sacrifice of self that is the law of Sonya’s being (and Dostoevsky’s own highest value); on the
other, there is Raskolnikov’s rational Utilitarian ethic, which justifies the sacrifice of
others
for the sake of a greater social good.
⁴

Raskolnikov’s attitude in this scene, in which he asks Sonya to link her fate with his (“so we must go together, by the same path!”), is an inconsistent admixture reflecting a new phase of his moral-psychic struggle. After undermining Sonya’s hope that God will protect little Polechka from Sonya’s fate (“ ‘but, perhaps, there is no God at all,’ Raskolnikov had said with a sort of malignance”), he illustrates the awfulness of this prospect by referring to children as “the image of Christ” and citing the Gospels: “Theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.” When the hysterically weeping Sonya, wringing her hands, asks, “What then must we do?” he replies, “Demolish what must be demolished, once and for all, and take the suffering on ourselves.” This assumption of suffering, however, is immediately countered by a more despotic assertion of egoism than any he has yet consciously uttered so far: “What? Don’t you understand? . . . Freedom and power, but above all, power! Power over all trembling creatures, over the ant-heap . . . that’s the goal!” he tells the bewildered Sonya (6: 252–253). He thus involuntarily reveals the truth about himself that has begun to pierce through to his consciousness.

The culmination of the scandal scene at the wake following Marmeladov’s funeral prepares the way for an intensification of the moral confrontation between Sonya and Raskolnikov at their next meeting, which follows hard on the rowdy commemoration. Luzhin, attempting to frame Sonya by secretly slipping money into her pocket, had accused her of theft, and Raskolnikov seizes on this incident as an additional self-justification. If Sonya had the choice, would she, he asks, decide that “Luzhin should live and commit abominations,” even if this meant “the ruin of Katerina Ivanovna and the children”? To which the distraught Sonya can only reply, with the instinctive penetration of uncorrupted moral feeling: “But I can’t know God’s intentions. . . . [H]ow could it depend on my decision. . . . Who made me a judge of who shall live and who shall not?” (6: 313). Without a false note, Dostoevsky portrays the uneducated Sonya countering Raskolnikov with the argument that no human could arrogate to herself the power over human life traditionally exercised solely by God.

This reply is the prelude to Raskolnikov’s final confession, which he makes to Sonya while alternating between feelings of hatred and love—and when she finally comprehends the truth, which he is unable to bring out in words, she
throws herself into his arms and exclaims, with total identification: “What have you done . . . to yourself? . . . There is no one, no one, unhappier than you in the whole world” (6: 376). But when Sonya promises to follow him to prison he recoils, and his egoism, the “satanic pride” released in his personality first by his ideas and then through the crime and its aftermath, resurfaces.

Raskolnikov’s struggle to explain the cause of his crime not only to Sonya but, more important, to himself, equals in poetic force some of the final soliloquies of Shakespeare. Raskolnikov knows by this time that all the reasons for the crime he had previously given himself are false, and he finally admits, “I am lying, Sonya. . . . I’ve been lying for a long time. . . . There are quite different reasons here, quite, quite different!” (6: 320). He now knows that this “credo” that might alone could make right had not been his point of departure, and so he shifts, with self-tormenting sarcasm, to a description of the inner struggle with his conscience, whose values he still believed he was obeying even as he contemplated murder. It was just because he was assailed by the question of whether “I had the right to gain power—I certainly hadn’t the right,” or “whether a human being is a louse,” that his failure became inevitable. “If I worried myself all those days, wondering whether Napoleon would have done it or not, it means I must have felt clearly that I wasn’t Napoleon” (6: 311).