Crime and Punishment (3 page)

Nor is it a place for a ‘player' (
igrok
), to give the literal translation of the Russian word for ‘gambler'. For Raskolnikov – like Pushkin's Hermann in ‘The Queen of Spades' (
1834
), and like Dostoyevsky himself – is obsessed by the mirage of a winning formula, and it should be no surprise that the short novel for which Dostoyevsky had to break off work on
Crime and Punishment
bears the title
Igrok
(
The Gambler
). Produced to fulfil his contract with Stellovsky, it was dictated to a young stenographer, Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina, and completed in less than four weeks.
8
But if
The Gambler
is set in a Wiesbaden-esque ‘Roulettenburg', where rich and poor throw caution to the winds,
Crime and Punishment
is set in St Petersburg, where numbers are calculated coldly and old pawnbrokers make sure to take their interest in advance. In such a city, murder, too, must be ‘premeditated and abstract', and Raskolnikov's first crime, however risky, is both those things; he even counts the steps from his room to the home of his victim. Yet when the crime is actually set in motion he is barely aware of what he is doing: ‘As if a scrap of his clothing had caught in the wheel of a machine that was now pulling him in.' This striking contradiction stands at the heart of the novel's innermost concerns, developed over the five hundred-odd pages that remain after Raskolnikov's murders.

III

The nature of these deepest concerns, however, is far from obvious. The unusual construction of
Crime and Punishment
, which gives so much weight to the aftermath of the crime (five parts out of six) and only an epilogue to the punishment itself, has led many to see the novel as less a whodunnit than a whydunnit. According to Joseph Frank: ‘
Crime and Punishment
is focused on the solution of an enigma: the mystery of Raskolnikov's motivation.'
9
We may wonder, though, whether this ‘enigma' is not itself a decoy planted by this most devious of writers.

Certainly, there is no shortage of motivating factors. Raskolnikov is desperately poor and desperately proud, unable to countenance his own humiliating situation; nor can he accept the humiliations endured and imposed by his mother and sister, who send him remittances and sacrifice everything to their ‘priceless Rodya'. His intended victim, the withered pawnbroker, is a ‘noxious louse' who does nothing but harm; killing her would yield a net gain for humankind (the utilitarian argument). He dreams of being a good man in the future, a benefactor of humanity (the philanthropic argument). He dreams of being a great man, one of the select few, like Lycurgus, Muhammad or Napoleon, ‘criminals to a man', whose evil deeds in the present will be forgotten by grateful generations in the future (the heroic argument).

All of these motivations are valid; but equally, none of them is. Raskolnikov's initial crime is both over- and under-motivated; mere ‘casuistry', as he calls it himself. Not for nothing does he overhear another student telling an officer, over tea after a game of billiards, not only about the self-same pawnbroker, but about why her murder would be morally justified. The student expounds the logic of such a hypothetical crime persuasively and at great length, but the conversation ends in bathos:

‘Here you are speaking and speechifying, but tell me: are you going to kill the old woman
yourself
, or aren't you?'

‘Of course not! I'm talking about justice . . . It's not about me . . .'

‘Well, as I see it, if you don't dare do it yourself, there's no justice to speak of! Let's have another game!'

This coincidence – brazen in its technical ‘naivety' even by Dostoyevsky's standards (unless, of course, Raskolnikov is imagining the entire conversation) – serves to make a powerful point, just before Raskolnikov finally turns words into deed. A ‘why' can always be found for a crime; much more difficult to explain is the ‘how': how an intention becomes reality, how theory is enfleshed, how abstract reasoning ends in a sensitive, compassionate man slipping in ‘sticky, warm blood'. What state of mind is needed for this to happen?

Leo Tolstoy (
1828–1910
) responded to this quandary in his late essay ‘Why Do People Stupefy Themselves?' (
1890
), where he sought to explain the state of mental automatism in which Raskolnikov carried out his crime. But Tolstoy, an aggressive teetotaller by this stage in his life, was surely exaggerating when he implies that the glass of beer Raskolnikov consumes at the end of the first chapter ‘silences the voice of conscience'. Raskolnikov's utter passivity, which makes him succumb to ‘ideas in the air' and to gamble everything on one desperate act, reaches back far further than the glass of beer, deeper even than the question of ‘conscience'. Nor can it be reduced to the verdict of insanity, as Raskolnikov himself is aware (even when others are not). This passivity is a state of spiritual death and it is this that enables the crime. Dostoyevsky shows how a man who feels as if he is not alive and not truly capable of affecting reality will affect it for precisely that reason – and with catastrophic results. In his own estranged perception, not only is his sense of his own reality attenuated, so too is his sense of the reality of his fellow human beings, of the boundaries between separate lives. The eerie astonishment that overcomes Raskolnikov throughout his crime is the eeriness of a dead man meeting and muffling life.

Where does this state of spiritual death come from, and why is this wretched man-child, Raskolnikov, buried alive in his youth? Here, perhaps, is the true ‘enigma' to which Dostoyevsky applies himself in
Crime and Punishment
, both before and after the murders. In so doing, he scatters clues and red herrings to enlighten and confound us. Family pressures, societal pressures, illness, loss of faith: all of these possible explanations are deepened in the course of the novel, but also, at various times, ironized and presented as somehow dishonest. Psychoanalytic, religious, sociological and other interpretations all have much to offer us, but all are also limited, in the final analysis, by Dostoyevsky's strategy of ambivalence in both literature and life. Here was a talented actor who could ask his interrogators what proof they had that he was on the side of the critic and not the author, when he read out Belinsky's letter to Gogol, and who infused the words of his fictional characters with an exceptional ambiguity of meaning and intonation, employing humour less to lighten their arguments than to complicate them. The regrettable division of much Dostoyevsky scholarship (Soviet and post-Soviet) into secular and religious camps ignores the fact that in his fiction Dostoyevsky always thought in terms of
pro
and
contra
 – not just in his final masterpiece
The Brothers Karamazov
, with its legendary dramatization of atheism versus Orthodoxy, but equally in
Crime and Punishment.
The vector of Dostoyevsky's intentions – to judge from his notebooks, letters and (arguably) the final pages of this novel – may have tended towards faith and self-abnegation, but the reality of his artistic achievement is very different. Some will be moved by Sonya's selflessness, forgiveness and acceptance of God's world, whatever its injustices, but many readers will be even more struck by the defiance shown by another woman, Katerina Ivanovna – a drunkard's widow with three children on her hands, consumption and no money – towards the priest summoned against her will at her dying hour. The fire of self-abnegating faith and the fire of injured pride blaze with equal strength from the first chapter of the novel to the last, sometimes within the same hearts, and there is no guarantee which will burn the reader more fiercely.

There is, perhaps, only one chain of clues whose validity seems beyond question in helping us approach the enigma mentioned above: the determinative role of literature itself in shaping Raskolnikov's plight. Incongruous though it may sound in the context of a novel about murder, such a claim will come as less of a surprise to readers of Dostoyevsky's earlier works, which are filled with writers or would-be writers, or of his journalism of the early
1860
s, with its recurrent concern with the effects of
knizhnost'
(or bookishness) on Russian society.
10

IV

Though never, to my knowledge, presented as such,
Crime and Punishment
is one of the most self-reflexive classics of pre-Modernist European literature, continuing – and developing – a line that stretches from Cervantes's
Don Quixote
(
1605
) to Pushkin's
Eugene Onegin
(
1823–31
). It is a novel about words and texts as much as deeds and life, and it is correspondingly saturated with self-quotation and misquotation. The apparently simple line of Raskolnikov's destiny – crime, then punishment – is interwoven with hints about the complicit and complicating role of literature itself.

This self-reflexivity is not just a matter of the belatedness and imitativeness already discussed, the possibility that Raskolnikov, like Pushkin's Onegin, might be a ‘parody' of earlier bookish types and ideas. Nor can it be fully contained by Mikhail Bakhtin's pioneering analysis of the ‘polyphony' of Dostoyevsky's fiction, the interpenetration of characters' thoughts and speech with each other's words and consciousness, as constantly exhibited by Raskolnikov's monologues, which are, in fact, dialogues with the words of others.
11
Rather, it is about the immersion of an entire society in texts and in literary dreams, and the baneful consequences for Raskolnikov in particular.

Raskolnikov has blood on his socks and ink on his fingers. He prepares for his crime not only by extensive reading, but also, we later learn, by attempting his first literary debut – a scholarly article with the same theme as the drama in which he plays the starring role. Published without his knowledge, this article is shown to him much later by his proud mother, whereupon, despite the grotesque incongruity with his current situation, he experiences ‘that strange and caustically sweet sensation which every author feels on seeing himself published for the first time, especially at only twenty-three years of age'. Raskolnikov's achievements as an author may be modest, but his readerly habits are unshakeable. After committing his murders he visits a tavern to hunt through a pile of recent newspapers for textual evidence of his crime, which itself evokes dozens of other crimes from Russia and Europe widely reported in the Russian press in the
186
0s – and especially in Dostoyevsky's own journal
Time
(
Vremya
).
12
The trail of his crime is not only physical, but also (and much more elusively) textual, keeping Dostoyevsky scholars busy for many decades to come.

Raskolnikov is himself a textual sleuth, an inveterate literary critic. Before and after his crime he shows an uncommon analytical interest in written communications, which are shared with the reader in their entirety: a ten-page letter from his mother, a much curter missive from his sister's odious suitor. He reads between the lines (thereby encouraging us, as readers, to do the same) and judges character by style, surprising those around him by picking on apparently trivial choices of words and phrase at moments when far weightier issues seem to be at stake. For Raskolnikov, life is a text to be understood, and even, at times, a text that has already been written. At the novel's end he imagines what the future has in store for him and asks himself, ‘So why live? Why? Why am I going there now, when I know myself that this is exactly how it will be, as it is writ?'

In his bookishness, as in his other characteristics, Raskolnikov is the type of eccentric who, at the deepest level, is most exemplary of his society (a paradox Dostoyevsky explicitly formulated in his prologue to his last novel,
The Brothers Karamazov
). Subtly, insistently, we are encouraged to see that Raskolnikov's addiction to the written word is a symptom of a general, albeit less pathological condition that eddies out from the hero to encompass his family and the country at large. One might not want to make too much of the fact that Raskolnikov's patronymic – Romanovich – etymologically suggests not just ‘son of Roman' (a perfectly common name), but also ‘son of the novel', were it not for Raskolnikov's mother telling us that his father ‘when he was still alive, twice tried sending work to the journals: first some poems (I still have the notebook – I'll show it to you one day), then a whole novella (I begged him to let me copy it out for him), and you should have seen how we prayed for them to be accepted . . . They weren't!'

Frustrated literary ambition is a powerful motif in
Crime and Punishment
, displayed in one form or another by several characters across society, especially Raskolnikov's adversaries in the police and civil service. In particular, the investigator Porfiry Petrovich, who engages Raskolnikov in repeated, chapter-long verbal jousts, is a literary artist and actor manqué, who, like Dostoyevsky himself, reveres the comic genius of Gogol, citing liberally from his works. In Porfiry's extraordinary rhetoric we see the interweaving of literary and legal discourse that was such a feature of the Russian judicial system before and after the legal reforms of
1864
, and which Dostoyevsky criticized in his journalism for distracting from the true purpose of the law: to discover the truth.
13
A graduate from the prestigious Imperial School of Jurisprudence, which produced an unusual quantity of eminent writers as well as lawyers, Porfiry imbues his words with Gogolian slipperiness.
14

The saturation of Russian society in texts, furthermore, not only relates to modern, secular literature. Sonya used to meet with one of Raskolnikov's victims to read from the Bible together, and later she will read out a passage to the murderer himself about the raising of Lazarus. Indeed, in
Crime and Punishment
all believers are fervent readers. Mikolka, the country lad who first confesses to Raskolnikov's crime, ‘kept reading the old, “true” books and read himself silly'. The fact that Mikolka is introduced by Porfiry to Raskolnikov as a
raskolnik
 – an adherent of the ‘Old Belief', which broke off from the official Orthodox Church in the seventeenth century – marks him out as one of the protagonist's many alter egos in the novel, just as his reading habits suggest that Raskolnikov, too, ‘read himself silly'. This connection is further enriched if we bear in mind that the
raskolniki
were a prime target of the propaganda envisioned by the (proto-Communist) revolutionary faction into which Dostoyevsky himself was drawn in the late
1840
s. The revolution this secret society had in mind was decidedly textual. With the aid of an illegal hand press, assembled shortly before the arrest of the participants in the group, they set about composing revolutionary texts in the language and stylistic register (including the use of Old Church Slavonic) that serfs and ‘particularly, perhaps, the
raskolniki
' would understand.
15