Dostoevsky (101 page)

⁶
Ibid., 129–130; August 10/22, 1865.

⁷
Ibid.

⁸
Ibid., 130–132; August 12/24, 1865.

⁹
Ibid.

¹⁰
Father Georgy Florovsky,
Puti Russkogo bogosloviya
(Paris, 1983), 390.

¹¹
N. N. Glubokovsky,
Russkaya bogoslovskiya nauka v eya istoricheskom razvitii i noveishem sostoyanii
(Warsaw, 1928), 17.

¹²
PSS
, 28/Bk. 2: 259; February 18/March 1, 1868.

¹³
Ibid., 136–138; September 15/27, 1865.

¹⁴
Ibid., 150; February 18, 1866.

¹⁵
Ibid.

¹⁶
Ibid., 151.

¹⁷
Dostoevsky,
The Gambler, with Polina Suslova’s Diary
, trans. Victor Terras, ed. Edward Wasiolek (Chicago, 1972), 301–302.

¹⁸
Cited in
PSS
, 7: 346.

¹⁹
Ibid., 349.

²⁰
PSS
, 28/Bk. 2: 150; February 18, 1866.

²¹
Ibid., 151.

²²
Ibid., 152.

²³
The incident is recounted in the memoirs of Dostoevsky’s niece Marya Ivanova. See
DVS
, 2: 48.

²⁴
See the reminiscences of Z. K. Ralli, who knew the Ishutin group and Karakozov himself, and cites this passage of Weinberg in his own recollections. “Iz vospominaniya Z. K. Ralli,” in
Revolyutsionnoe dvizhenie 1860–godov
, ed. B. I. Gorev and B. P. Kozmin (Moscow, 1932), 143.

²⁵
Cited in A. A. Kornilov,
Obshchestvennoe dvizhenie pri Alexander II, 1835–1881
(Moscow, 1909), 175.

²⁶
Cited in Henri Granjard,
Ivan Tourguénev et les courants politiques et sociaux de son temps
(Paris, 1954), 336.

²⁷
Cited in Kornei Chukovsky,
The Poet and the Hangman
, trans. R. W. Rotsel (Ann Arbor, MI, 1977), 40.

²⁸
Ibid., 40–41.

²⁹
Ibid., 18–19.

³⁰
PSS
, 28/Bk. 2: 154; April 25, 1866.

³¹
Franco Venturi,
The Roots of Revolution
, trans. Francis Haskell (New York, 1966), 332–334.

³²
Ishutin’s group prepared the way for Sergey Nechaev a few years later, and many of the people Nechaev recruited had been initiated into revolutionary activity by Ishutin. This earlier group was organized in two sections: one, called the “Organization,” was devoted to agitation and propaganda; the second, called “Hell,” was dedicated to terrorism against the landowning classes and government, and the final aim was the assassination of the tsar. “A member of ‘Hell,’ ” according to Ishutin, “must live under a false name and break all family ties; he must not marry; he must give up his friends; and in general he must live with one single exclusive aim: an infinite love and devotion for his country and its good.”

Ishutin and those like him were implacably opposed to the liberation of the serfs and to any attempt to promote or implement democratic reforms because they would prevent a more thoroughgoing revolution. Venturi remarks, “this violent opposition to reforms inevitably coincided with the opinion of the most reactionary nobles who always opposed the emancipation of the serfs and who now continued to criticize it.” (Ibid., 334–338) We shall see Dostoevsky making the same equation between left and right extremes in his letters and in
Demons
.

³³
PSS
, 28/Bk. 2: 154–155; April 25, 1866.

³⁴
Ibid., 155.

³⁵
Ibid., 156; April 29, 1866.

³⁶
Ibid., 157; May 9, 1866.

³⁷
M. A. Ivanova, “Vospominaniya,”
DVS
, 2: 41.

³⁸
PSS
, 28/Bk. 2: 160; June 17, 1866.

³⁹
Ivanova,
DVS
, 2: 41.

⁴⁰
N. Fon-Fokht, “K biografiya F. M. Dostoevskogo,”
DVS
, 2: 56.

⁴¹
PSS
, 28/Bk. 2: 166; July 10–15, 1866.

⁴²
Ibid.

⁴³
Cited in
PSS
, 7: 326.

⁴⁴
PSS
, 28/Bk. 2: 164; July 8, 1866.

⁴⁵
Ibid., 167; July 19, 1866.

The main outlines of Dostoevsky’s conception of
Crime and Punishment
were set early, but it was only as the work developed and expanded under his hands that it took on its multifaceted richness. In the splendid complete edition of Dostoevsky’s writings published by the Academy of Sciences of the former Soviet Union, the editors have reassembled the disorderly confusion of the notebooks that Dostoevsky kept while working on
Crime and Punishment
and printed them in a sequence roughly corresponding to the various stages of composition. Dostoevsky, as we know, was in the habit of casually flipping open his notebooks and writing on the first blank space that presented itself to his pen, and since he also used the same pages to record all sorts of memorabilia, the extraction of this material was by no means a simple task. Thanks to these meritorious labors, however, we now possess a working draft of the story or novella as originally conceived, as well as two other versions of the text. These have been distinguished as the Wiesbaden version, the Petersburg version, and the final plan embodying the change from a first-person narrator to the indigenous variety of third-person form invented by Dostoevsky for his purposes.

The Wiesbaden version coincides roughly with the story that Dostoevsky described in his letter to Katkov, and a draft of six short chapters has been reconstructed from his notes. Written in the form of a diary or journal, the events it records correspond to what eventually became the conclusion of
Part I
and
Chapters 1
–
6
of
Part II
in the definitive redaction. (The action of this part of the novel begins with Raskolnikov’s return to his room after the murder, and it ends as he reads a newspaper account of the crime and encounters the police clerk Zametov.) What strikes one about the six Wiesbaden chapters is how much of the later text they already contain. Here are almost all of the secondary characters in their final form; details suggesting a bloody criminal deed are given and the terror of the narrator vividly conveyed; but it is not indisputable that the missing first chapter contained a depiction of the murder itself. It is possible that the story began
after
the crime, whose events would be gradually disclosed
retrospectively through the narrator’s account of its unbearable effects on his emotions.
¹

This first draft concentrates entirely on the moral-psychic reactions of the narrator after the murder—his panic, his terror, his desperate attempts to control his nerves and pretend to behave rationally while consumed by a raging fever and constantly at the mercy of his wildly agitated emotions. What continually haunts him, in moments of lucidity, is his total estrangement from his former self and from the entire universe of his accustomed thoughts and feelings. And it gradually dawns on him that he has been severed from all this by one stroke—the stroke that killed the repulsive pawnbroker and, by a horrible mischance, her long-suffering and entirely blameless sister Lizaveta, who, to make matters worse, is said to have been pregnant. This emphasis, of course, corresponds to the original motivation that Dostoevsky gave Katkov for the criminal’s surrender: “The feelings of isolation and separation from humanity, which he felt right after completing the crime, has tortured him.”

This theme dominates in the early draft and is expressed in three scenes of a growing order of magnitude. The first takes place at the police station, when the narrator responds to official insolence with anger, oblivious of the total change in his relations to others, and then, weighed down as he was by the terrible burden of the crime he had committed, gradually realizes that no longer could he morally assert a right to be treated with respect. This realization comes to the narrator only in hindsight, but a more instant recognition occurs when, after concealing the spoils of the crime, he decides to pay a visit to his friend, Razumikhin. As the narrator climbs the stairs, he feels a sensation that “if there is (now) for me on earth something (especially) hard (and impossible) then it is to talk and have relations . . . with other (people . . .). And (the consciousness of all that) was my instant of the most oppressive anguish for perhaps all that month, in which I went through so much endless torture” (7: 35–36). The words printed in parentheses are corrections and additions that Dostoevsky made in the various drafts of his text. These words indicate the moment at which the narrator realizes that even the simplest and most ordinary human relations have now become impossible for him, and Dostoevsky drew a circle around the paragraph to indicate its importance. The final epiphany of this experience occurs in a
sequence that begins when the narrator, quitting Razumikhin and walking through the busy streets on the way home, is lashed by the whip of a passing coachman whose path he is blocking. Just as in the police station, his first reaction is one of outraged pride, but he realizes almost at once how inappropriate such a response was in his present predicament. “The thought came to me immediately that it would have been a lot better (perhaps even good) if the carriage had crushed me (completely)” (7: 38).

Among the onlookers were a merchant’s wife and her little daughter, who slip a twenty-kopek piece into the narrator’s hand because “the blow had awakened their pity for me.” Clutching the coin, the narrator walks toward the Neva in the direction of the Winter Palace while gazing at the cupola of St. Isaacs’s Cathedral and “all that splendid panorama.” As a student, he had walked by the same vista many times. Now, as he stands in the same place that he knew so well, “suddenly the same (painful) sensation which oppressed my chest at Razumikhin’s half an hour ago, the same sensation oppressed my heart here.” He realizes that “there was no reason for me (any longer) to stop here (or anywhere). . . . [A]ll those former sensations and interests and people were far away from me as if from another planet” (7: 39–40). As he leans over the railing of a canal, the narrator lets the twenty-kopek piece slip into the water, thus symbolizing his break with all these emotions and values of the past.

Although the effects of estrangement are clearly intended to dominate in the resolution of the action, they are reinforced by other episodes. One such is the narrator’s half-dream, half-hallucination, kept almost unchanged in the novel, which reveals both his self-revulsion at the crime and his fear of pursuit. Lying in bed, he suddenly hears “a terrible cry” and opens his eyes; slowly he realizes that it is one of the police officials he has just met who is beating the landlady on the staircase. “I had never heard such unnatural sounds, such yelling, grinding of teeth, curses, and blows. . . . What is it all about, I thought, why (is he beating her), why? Fear like ice penetrated me to the core . . . (soon they will come for me (also) I thought). . . .” Imagining all this to be real, the narrator asks Nastasya about the frightening occurrence; but he is told that nothing of the sort had happened—it had all been a delusion, despite the narrator’s conviction that he had been fully awake. “A yet greater tremor seized me,” he writes, presumably at this evidence of his derangement. When Nastasya tells him “(that) is the blood in you crying out” (7: 41–43), she takes this bit of folk wisdom literally, while to the narrator the word “blood” immediately evokes the crime. Such an experience, added to his estrangement, was surely meant to provide further incentive for the narrator’s eventual confession.

Why Dostoevsky abandoned this story can only remain a matter for speculation, but one possibility is that his protagonist began to develop beyond the boundaries in which he had first been conceived. All through the extant text, the
narrator is crushed and overcome by the moral-psychic consequences of his murderous deed, but just as the manuscript breaks off, he begins to display other traits of character. Instead of fear and anguish, he now exhibits rage and hatred against all those who have been looking after him in his illness and decides to slip away from their oppressive care. The conversation about the murder at his bedside, he explains, “made me feel unbearable malice . . . and what is more remarkable still is that during these agonies, this terror, I never thought a single time with the slightest compassion about the murder I had committed” (7: 73). Here is a character entirely different from the one previously portrayed, and Dostoevsky may have stopped writing at this point because this figure had begun to evolve beyond his initial conception. In some notes for the immediate continuation of this version, he jots down: “Recovered. Cold fury, calculation. Why so much nerves?” (7: 76). This last phrase is obviously a scornful question of the narrator addressed to himself.