Dostoevsky (108 page)

It was “the agony of that battle of ideas” that impelled Raskolnikov finally to throw it off entirely. With the wisdom of hindsight, he breaks through to a comprehension of the compulsion that had been at work in and through his monomania. “I wanted to murder without casuistry, to murder for my own sake, for myself alone!” Raskolnikov’s real aim was solely to test “whether I was a louse like everyone else or a man. . . . Whether I am a trembling creature or whether I have the
right
.” And Raskolnikov then sweeps away any and every motivation except the testing of his own strength: “I didn’t murder either to gain wealth or to become a benefactor of mankind. Nonsense! I just murdered . . . and whether I became a benefactor to others, or spent my life like a spider catching everyone in my web and sucking the life out of others, must have been of no concern to me at that moment . . . I know it all now.” Raskolnikov’s real aim was solely to test “whether I have the
right
” (6: 321–322). With these climactic words, Raskolnikov’s understanding finally coincides with what has long since been dramatically conveyed by Dostoevsky.

This act of self-recognition, however, does not persuade Raskolnikov to accept Sonya’s injunction to “go at once, this very minute, stand at the crossroads, bow down, first kiss the earth which you have defiled and then bow down to all the world and say to all men aloud, ‘I have killed!’ ” (6: 322). Quite the contrary, even though acknowledging the pure egoism that had motivated him “at that moment,” he refuses to imagine surrendering to the legal authorities, who themselves represent for him the same amoral egoism operating on a vastly larger scale.
The very self-contradictory nature of the forces motivating Raskolnikov, of which he has only just become fully aware, would humiliate him further in the eyes of the law. “ ‘And what should I say to them—that I murdered her, but did not dare to take the money and hid it under a stone?’ he added with a bitter smile. ‘Why, they would laugh at me, and would call me a fool for not getting it. A coward and a fool!’ ” (6: 323). Raskolnikov thus decides to continue to fight for his freedom.

Raskolnikov’s confession to Sonya climaxes his quest for knowledge about himself. From this point on the action of the novel is oriented toward the future rather than toward uncovering the meaning of the past, and its thematic structure is well defined in Dostoevsky’s notebooks: “Svidrigailov—the most desperate cynicism. Sonya—the most unrealizable hope. . . . [Raskolnikov] has passionately attached himself to both” (7: 204). These are the two alternatives between which he oscillates, knowing that Svidrigailov, who eavesdropped on his confession to Sonya, is privy to his secret. Both are aware that he is a murderer, and each, in effect, indicates an opposing path along which he can choose to decide his fate.

Sonya, while waiting to share his destiny, can only imagine the future as being his voluntary acceptance of punishment. Her pleas are reinforced by Porfiry Petrovich, who speaks frankly in his final interview with Raskolnikov. Porfiry’s speech serves to bring out both the social-cultural contrast and the similarity in extremism between the radical intellectual Raskolnikov and the peasant sectarian Nikolay (the workman falsely suspected of the murder), who comes from a family of
Beguny
and who, under the spiritual guidance of an elder (
starets
) for two years, “was full of fervor, prayed at night, read the old books, the ‘true ones,’ and read himself crazy” (6: 347). Raskolnikov, too, had “read himself crazy,” but Nikolay is ready to accept suffering to atone for his own sinfulness and that of the world, while Raskolnikov, though enduring agonies of conscience, still cannot bring himself to follow its injunctions. This is why, as Porfiry declares, his crime “is a fantastic, gloomy business, a modern case, an incident of today when the heart of man is troubled. . . . Here we have bookish dreams, a heart unhinged by theories.” Here we have “a murderer [who] looks upon himself as an honest man, despises others, poses as a pale angel” (6: 348). Raskolnikov himself is the murderer, Porfiry affirms softly, and urges him to confess voluntarily under the best possible conditions—that is, so as to free an innocent man and thus obtain the goodwill and leniency of the court. Besides, Porfiry informs Raskolnikov, he has found a piece of material evidence and plans to arrest him in a few days.

In this final section, Raskolnikov’s attention turns toward Svidrigailov. Svidrigailov’s past is wrapped in a cloud of atrocious rumors, and he was, as Raskolnikov
concludes, “evidently depraved, undoubtedly cunning and deceitful, possibly malignant.” Raskolnikov refuses to see any connection between Svidrigailov’s sinister past and his own crimes, and believes—what is of course true—that “their very evil-doing is not of the same kind.” All the same, we see him “hastening to Svidrigailov” and somehow “expecting something
new
from him, directions, a way out” (6: 354). Svidrigailov, after all, is the only person who knows that Raskolnikov is guilty and has not urged him to confess; indeed, he seems completely unconcerned, amused rather than shocked, and it is through this cynicism that Raskolnikov feels he might perhaps offer “a way out.” For all his assumed indifference to morality, however, Svidrigailov’s rebuff at the hands of Dunya snaps the last thread attaching him to existence, and this scene is followed by the last hours before his suicide, during which the “cellar rats” (6: 392) of his own past swim out of his subconscious in various dreams. For him there is no natural innocence left in the world; everything he touches turns into the corruption of unashamed vice. With this awareness of his living damnation, Svidrigailov shoots himself.

Svidrigailov’s mockingly provocative account of his sexual philanderings had revolted Raskolnikov, and his well-aimed sneers at Raskolnikov’s reproaches had brought home to the murderer that he had lost any right to distinguish himself morally from his shameless interlocutor. Raskolnikov thus decides to yield to Sonya’s entreaties and take Porfiry’s advice. He goes to his mother for a last farewell and, when she blesses him with the sign of the cross, “for the first time after all these awful months his heart was softened. He fell down before her, he kissed her feet, and both wept, embracing” (6: 397). With Dunya, however, there is a last flare-up of Raskolnikov’s pride, and he rebels against acknowledging that he has committed any “crime” at all. What he has learned from his failure is only his own weakness, his own inability to subdue his conscience
completely
and place it in the service of his “idea.” But his own failure was not a refutation of this “idea,” in which he still could not see any logical flaw; there was no great reason why a true “great man,” untroubled and secure in his absolute right to overstep existing moral bounds, could not
also
be a “benefactor of mankind.” “I too wished to do good and would have done hundreds, thousands of good deeds to make up for this one piece of stupidity.” His failure was a purely personal one: “but I . . . I couldn’t carry out even the first step, because I am contemptible, that’s what’s the matter” (6: 400). He had placed himself in the wrong category, and this tragic misjudgment about himself has nothing to do with the validity or justice of his unshaken belief.

In the final chapter, Raskolnikov bows down and kisses the earth at the Hay-market, as Sonya had admonished, in a gesture of repentance typical of the
raskolniki
, only to be met with the laughter and jeers of people who think he is either drunk or about to embark as a pilgrim for the Holy Land. Then he goes to
confess to Lieutenant Gunpowder, unwilling to accept the humiliation of surrendering to Porfiry, and hears, in the midst of a friendly flow of chatter about various radical fads, that Svidrigailov had killed himself the night before. Raskolnikov is so overcome that he stumbles out into the courtyard without saying a word, but there stood Sonya, on her face “a look of poignant agony, of despair” (6: 409), and he returns to make the confession. His fate and that of Svidrigailov thus form a continuous parallel up to the very end.

In accordance with the tradition of the nineteenth-century novel, Dostoevsky provides an epilogue in which the lives of his main characters are followed beyond the limits of the plot action. The main aim of the epilogue is to offer an authorial perspective on the major thematic issues that, Dostoevsky felt, required either reinforcement or completion. One such issue is the decisive role that must be ascribed to the effect of Raskolnikov’s ideas on his psyche. These ideas, in bringing on his monomania, had ultimately provided the motivating force for the crime; and the epilogue points once again to their centrality. Another issue is the gap that still exists between the moral-psychic emotions that led Raskolnikov to confess and his continued belief that his ideas, whatever his own personal defeat, have not been invalidated.

The reader knows that Raskolnikov’s so-called “heartfelt repentance” is really a crushing sense of defeat, and the depression that marks his behavior in the Siberian prison camp, where he even rebuffs Sonya’s effort to comfort him, is the result not of the hardship of his lot but of the collapse of belief in himself. He falls ill for a long time, and “it was wounded pride that made him ill.” What tortures him is that he cannot see any flaw in his theory but finds it only in himself: “his exasperated conscience found no particular terrible fault in his past, except a single blunder which might happen to anyone. Not being able to find any flaw in his ideas, he could thus see no value in the ‘continual sacrifice leading to nothing’ that he had accepted. Of course he had committed a crime, but ‘what is meant by crime? My conscience is at rest. . . . Well, punish me for the letter of the law . . . and that’s enough. Of course in that case many benefactors of mankind who snatched power for themselves instead of inheriting it ought to have been punished at their first steps. But those men succeeded and so they were right, and I didn’t, and so I had no right to have taken that first step’ ” (6: 416–417). Raskolnikov thus believes that there is nothing
inherently
incompatible between the ruthless acquisition of power by an “extraordinary person,” who never questions for a moment that his ego is superior to all moral laws, and the possibility of that person then becoming a “benefactor of mankind.”

To resolve this thematic crux Dostoevsky has recourse to the famous final dream of Raskolnikov, the dream in which he sees “the whole world . . . condemned
to a terrible new strange plague that had come to Europe from the depths of Asia.” This dream, like all the others in the book, emerges from the depths of his moral-emotive psyche, and like them is the response of his conscience to his ideas. His logic is answered not by any sort of rational refutation but by the vision of his horrified subconscious (which in Dostoevsky is usually moral, as it also is in Shakespeare). The dream represents nothing less than the universalization of Raskolnikov’s doctrine of the “extraordinary people” in which
all
attempt to put this belief into practice. Those attacked by the plague became “mad and furious” while believing they had reached new heights of wisdom and self-understanding. “Never had men considered themselves so intellectual, and so completely in possession of the truth as these sufferers. Never had they considered their decisions, their scientific conclusions, their moral convictions so infallible.” The disease allows each person to preserve “moral convictions” and inspires a desire to enlighten others with the truth of such convictions so as to become a benefactor of humanity. “Each thought that he alone had the truth and was wretched looking at the others” (6: 419–420).

But the certainty of each ego in its own infallibility, and the absolute assurance and authority imparted by such certainty, leads to the breakdown of all common norms and values. “They did not know how to judge and could not agree what to consider evil and what good” (6: 420). No form of social cohesion could resist the contagion of the plague; the plague thus removes the implicit basis of consensus on which human society is based, and the final result is total social chaos. Here we see Dostoevsky destroying the last shreds of Raskolnikov’s conviction that a supreme egoism could be combined with socially benevolent consequences. Let all presume they were “extraordinary people,” and the result would be the Hobbesian world of Raskolnikov’s feverish nightmare, the war of all against all. This is the world of Western society as Dostoevsky had described it in
Winter Notes
, the world in which “the ego sets itself in opposition, as a separate, self-justifying principle, against all of nature and all other humans; it claims equality and equal value with whatever exists outside of itself” (5: 79). It is not only equality that each ego now claims, but also absolute superiority; and this is the plague that has come to Russia from Europe to infect the radical intelligentsia, the plague of a moral amorality based on egoism and culminating in a form of self-deification. Dostoevsky thus uses the typical technique of his eschatological imagination to dramatize all the implicit dangers of the new radical ideology.