The Outsider (31 page)

The spiritual nature of man forbids the killing of the least and most harmful of men: it means the loss of one
’
s essential humanity ... it is a crime no higher end can justify. Our neighbour is more precious than any abstract notion.
...
That is the Christian conception and it is Dostoevsky
’
s.
¹⁹

Now, this is a convenient simplification that completely obscures the real meaning of the novel. Raskolnikov rejects this point of view and there is no evidence that Dostoevsky accepts it. Dostoevsky does
not
state:
‘
Murder is wrong because the Christian conception of the sacredness of human life is right.
’
His theme is far more subtle; and although it is true that
his final conclusions are Christian, it would be downright dishonesty to accept Berdyaev
’
s short-cut to them. It would involve the assumption that Dostoevsky created Raskolnikov as Shakespeare created Iago, to be a pure villain: we should then agree with Berdyaev:
‘
There is no humanitarianism in Raskolnikov, who is cruel and without pity
’
; whereas, in point of fact, a glance at almost any page of
Crime and Punishment
will show us that this is nonsense. The central theme of
Crime and Punishment
is pity; pity is Raskolnikov
’
s undoing. The idea that obsesses him is Van Gogh
’
s
‘
Misery will never end
’
. From the beginning of the book, all the situations are devised to drive this home: the drunken Marmeladov (who enjoys suffering, like the beetle-man) and his starving family; the dream of the horse being beaten to death; the long recital of woes in the letter from Raskolnikov
’
s mother; there are even little episodes that have no relation to the plot, but were interposed simply to intensify the picture of human suffering: the young girl who has been drugged and seduced, the woman who tries to drown herself as Raskolnikov leans on the bridge. To add to all this, there are Raskolnikov
’
s humiliations: his poverty, his landlady dunning for rent, etc. And underneath all this, even more fundamental, there is the beetle-man
’
s problem: What is worth doing?

For the beetle-man, the problem was complicated by his emotional anaemia: he thinks much more than he enjoys or suffers. Raskolnikov is a little better off: the world
’
s misery unites his whole being with a mixed feeling of revolt and pity. Particularly, his feeling about
‘
lower forms of life
’
(Lawrence
’
s detestation) are unambiguous—about vile old pawnbrokresses, for instance. He is a dissatisfied man and therefore a dangerous man. There is human misery, and he asks himself the question: What can be done about it? His healthy-minded answer is:
‘Y
ou
can do nothing as you are.
’
And why? Because as he is he suffers from all the Outsider
’
s disabilities; he is aware of his strength, but has no idea of how to use it; he thinks instead of acting.

He is not quite such a fool and neurotic as the beetle-man. Nevertheless, he
is
over-sensitive, and he over-estimates his own callousness. Besides which, he has intended to kill only the old woman; when he is interrupted, he has to kill her sister too. Later two painters are accused of the crime and there is
a possibility they may be executed; in which case he will have committed four murders. All this contributes to his breakdown. Finally, the last indignity, the murders do not alter his life; he derives no benefit from them. With two murders to his credit, possibly four, he is back where he started. No wonder he breaks down and confesses!

But before the end of the book, he has caught a glimpse of
‘
a way out
’
. There is the scene with the prostitute Sonia, in which she reads aloud the story
of raising Lazarus. And Raskol
nikov recognizes his own problem. For he too needs to be raised from the dead. Like another Outsider we have considered, the idea both fascinates and revolts him. For the spiritually dead, the idea of rebirth is terrible. Sonia who is simple and docile and, like Susan Kitteredge in
The Secret Life,
has no spiritual problems, can somehow divine Raskolnikov
’
s misery; she too could tell him:
‘
You
’
ll
have
to be, somehow.
’
His attempt at solution of the Outsider
’
s problems is a failure; he has tried to gain self-control and has not succeeded. But it would be a mistake to suppose that this is because his method was
wrong.
He has already advanced to Nietzsche
’
s position of
‘
beyond good and evil
’
. Although he tells Sonia, in confessing the murder,
‘
I murdered myself, not her,
’
this is not an indication that he accepts the murder to have been evil, for later he asked frenziedly:
‘
Crime? What crime? That I killed a vile, noxious insect.
...
’

And it is apparent, at the end, that he has no feeling of
‘
Christian repentance
’
for the murder. He is not giving himself up because he wants to
‘
expiate
’
it:

Only now I see clearly the imbecility of my cowardice.... It
’
s simply because I am contemptible and have nothing in me that I have decided to [give myself up]. ... I wanted to do good to men, thousands of good deeds to make up for that one piece of stupidity; not stupidity even, simply clumsiness, for the idea was by no means so stupid as it seems now it has failed.
...
²⁰

This is unambiguous, and unless we assume that Dostoevsky completely dissociates himself from Raskolnikov
’
s ideas, we can hardly persist in the belief that Raskolnikov fails because his solution is
morally wrong.
He fails for the very different
reason that he is not strong enough
to cease to be an Outsider.
This, of course, does not
mean that we must accept Raskol
nikov
’
s belief that murder is
not
morally wrong. It is simply that the question is
irrelevant
to the Outsider
’
s problems; and
Crime and Punishment
is first and foremost a book about the Outsider
’
s problems.

The transition from
Notes from Underground
to
Crime and Punishment
is obviously very much like the transition from Barbusse
’
s hero to Van Gogh and T. E. Lawrence. The beetle-man is a passive (Barbusse) Outsider; Raskolnikov is an active (Van Gogh) Outsider. Dostoevsky
’
s treatment of the theme has taken an immense leap forward from one book to the next. When we note the fact that
Poor Folk
and
The Double
(both written before the years in Siberia) are also about the Outsider, and about Outsiders even weaker and stupider than the beetle-man; we might hazard a generalization, and say that the Outsider theme was one of Dostoevsky
’
s central preoccupations, and that, as he grew more mature as an artist, his Outsiders tended to grow in stature.

This is borne out by a glance at the later novels: even Mysh-kin in
The Idiot
is an Outsider, although in a different sense than anyone we have dealt with so far. He is an imaginative picture of the Chinese
^‘
man of Tao
’
:

He is modest, like one who is a guest,

He is yielding, like ice that is going to melt,

He is simple, like wood that is unplaned,

He is vacant, like valleys that are hollow,

He is dim, like water that is turbid.
...
[
Tao Te Ching, XV
]

This is Myshkin, described by Lao Tze 500 years before Christianity. His secret is simple: he is still a child. Men do evil because they attach importance to the wrong things, because they are
‘
grown-up
’
. Myshkin has perfect
instinctive
simplicity. But the criticism we can aim at him has already been developed in this study: you cannot solve the problem of evil by remaining a child. Chaos must be faced; there must be a descent into the dark world. In
The Idiot,
there are, as for Emil Sinclair, two worlds—the light world of the General
’
s family (especially Aglaya), and the world of nervous tension, guilt,
chaos (Nastasia and Rogojin). Myshkin cracks up under the strain between the two; like Vaslav Nijinsky, he goes insane. Clearly, the lesson here is the same as in
Demian:
childlike innocence is no solution of the Outsider
’
s problems.

There are two more major novels of Dostoevsky which we must analyse in detail (if we except
A Raw Youth,
which is technically so botched as to be almost unreadable). Both of these make a completely new attack on the Outsider
’
s problems. From the nature of Dostoevsky
’
s achievement so far, from the fertility of his intellect and his tremendous creative impulse, we can expect some important new treatment of the theme; and in fact we shall find that in
Devils
and
The Brothers Karamazov
Dostoevsky succeeds in analysing the problems as no one else has.

Of these two novels
Devils
develops the idea of
Crime and Punishment,
and must be examined in the remainder of this chapter. The greatest attack on the Outsider problems—the last great novel—will carry us forward into an entirely new field, and must be reserved for the next chapter. For in
Devils,
as in
Crime and Punuiment
and
Notes from Underground,
the ethical ideas are still in solution as it were. In
The Brothers Karamazov
they have crystallized in concrete concepts of good and evil.

Devils
is a logical development from the earlier novels: this is to be expected. Dostoevsky simplifies his treatment of the Outsider by dividing it in two, and distributing the parts between the two chief characters, Stavrogin and Kirilov. Before we speak of these, it may be advisable to say something about the genesis of the book.

Its original idea sprang from the
‘
Netchaev affair
’
. Netchaev was an anarchist-nihilist who undoubtedly deserves to be the subject of a detailed biography. Where anarchism was concerned he was a fanatical idealist; apart from this, his personal character was as base and immoral as anything in criminal history. His intrigues show him to have been as degraded as Lacenaire, and he was as ruthless and brutal as any Nazi thug. Yet his life shows an extraordinary, perverted heroism. There is even a story that he helped to plan the assassination of Alexander II while he was imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress (Russia
’
s
‘
Devil
’
s Island
’
), and that when his associates asked whether they should concentrate on rescuing him or on killing the Tsar, he answered without hesitation,
‘
Remove the
oppressor
’
. The
‘
oppressor
’
was removed, and Netchaev died of scurvy in prison.

Netchaev,
‘
the tiger cub
⁵
, was one of the world
’
s most remarkable deceivers; he tried to build up a vast revolutionary movement solely on lies, bluff and play-acting. He deceived everybody (including the arch-revolutionaries Bakunin and Herzen) and might easily, with a little more luck, have intrigued his way to absolute dictatorship of Russia (which was obviously his ideal).

The affair that provided the plot of
Devils
led to Netchaev
’
s downfall. In Moscow, posing as the representative of a certain
‘
European Revolutionary Alliance
’
, Netchaev organized small groups of students and disillusioned ex-Army officers into
‘
revolutionary committees
’
. A student named Ivanov was suspected of planning to betray them, and was murdered by Netchaev, with the complicity of the
‘
group
’
. The murder was soon discovered; arrests followed. Netchaev escaped to Switzerland, then to England, while the affair occupied the front pages of Russia
’
s newspapers. Later, Netchaev, with misplaced confidence in the authorities
’
short memory, walked back into the lion
’
s mouth, and ended in the Peter and Paul Fortress.

Another interesting point was utilized in the novel. It transpired in the trials that a certain student who intended to kill himself had agreed to await the convenience of the
‘
European Revolutionary Alliance
’
, and was to leave a death note in which he would take responsibility for any crimes the
‘
Alliance
’
cared to saddle him with. Out of this episode came the conception of Kirilov, the
‘
suicide maniac
’
, and, incidentally, one of the most important treatments of the Outsider theme in Dostoevsky.

The structure of the novel is loose and unsatisfying. It opens with a long section about an old Russian liberal of the 40
’
s, and the General
’
s widow who supports him. These two are typical inhabitants of the small town where the action takes place. Having carefully set the scene and provided the background, Dostoevsky is then prepared to allow his terrible, maniacal characters to erupt into it. Enter Netchaev,
[
called Pyotr Verkovensky in the novel
]
who is the old liberal
’
s son, and Stavrogin, who is the widow
’
s son.

Netchaev
’
s part of the novel provides the
‘
plot
’
and continuity of the story; in spite of which, it has an odd air of
irrelevancy. Stavrogin is the
‘
hero
’
of the novel, but there is no counterpart between him and Netchaev as hero and villain; from the point of view of the Netchaev affair, Stavrogin is irrelevant. Actually, the novel is really absorbing only when Stavrogin (or Kirilov) is on the scene, and it is Netchaev who seems to have intruded where he has no business.

The horrors and mystifications reach a climax when Netchaev
’
s terrorists set the town on fire and murder an ex-Captain and his imbecile sister (who is also Stavrogin
’
s wife). The old Russian liberal leaves home and dies; the student Shatov (Ivanov) is murdered, Kirilov commits suicide to Netchaev
’
s specification and Netchaev catches a train to Switzerland.

The Stavrogin story is the centre of gravity of the novel. Stavrogin is the outcome of a much earlier project of Dostoev-sky
’
s to write
The Life of A Great Sinner.
Dostoevsky always found crime absorbing; it is one of those limits of human character that can spring from the Outsider
’
s sense of exile. The great criminal is as distant from the average bourgeois as the great saint. In practice, of course, most
‘
great criminals
’
turn out to be mindless gorillas or Freudian neurotics; still, in theory, in the imagination of the artist, they could easily be men of unusually independent mind who simply give a different expression to the greatness of the saint or artist. In
The House of the Dead,
Dostoevsky gives accounts of the criminals he met in Siberia; and there is about all these men, mostly murderers, that slight element of the more-than-human that instantly grips the reader
’
s interest (in contrast with the all-too-human characters of most modern novelists, who produce acute intellectual constipation after fifty pages). At the same time, the criminal, in choosing crime (if he chooses it, and doesn
’
t just drift into it from laziness), has made the voluntary descent into the dark world which places him a step nearer the resolution of good and evil that the saint achieves. Salvation through sin recurs constantly in Dostoevsky
’
s work.