Crime and Punishment (1866)

Because he can spin a yarn with such suspense, such innuendoes, Dostoevski used
to be eagerly read by schoolboys and schoolgirls in Russia, together with Fenimore
Cooper, Victor Hugo, Dickens and Turgenev. I must hve been twelve when forty-five
years ago I read Crime and Punishment for the first time and thought it a wonderfully
powerful and exciting book, I read it again at nineteen, during the awful years of civil
war in Russia, and thought it long-winded , terribly sentimental, and badly written. I
read the thing again when preparing to speak about him in American universities. And
only quite recently did I realize what is so wrong with this book.
The flaw, the crack in it, which in my opinion causes the whole edifice to crumble
ethically and esthetically may be found in part ten, chapter 4. It is in the beginning of
the redemption scene when Raskolnikov, the killer, discovers through the girl Sonya the
New Testament. She has been reading to him about Jesus and the raising of Lazarus. So
far so good. But then comes this singular sentence that for sheer stupidity has hardly
the equal in world-famous literature: "The candle was flickering out, dimly lighting up
in the poverty-stricken room the murderer and the harlot who had been reading
together the eternal book." "The murderer and the harlot" and the "eternal book" - what
a triangle. This is a crucial phrase, of a typical Dostoevskian rhetorical twist. Now what
is so dreadfully wrong about it? Why is it so crude and so inartistic?
I suggest that neither a true artist nor a true moralist — neither a good Christian nor
a good philosopher - neither a poet nor a sociologist - should have placed side by side ,
in one breath, in one gust of false eloquence, a killer together with whom? — a poor
streetwalker, bending their completely different heads over that holy book. The
Christian God, as understood by those who believe in the Christian God, has pardoned
the harlot nineteen centuries ago, The killer, on the other hand, must be first of all
examined medically. The two are on completely different levels. The inhuman and
idiotic crime of Raskolnikov cannot be even remotely compared to the plight of a girl
who impairs human dignity by selling her body. The murderer and the harlot reading
the eternal book — what nonsense. There is no rhetorical link between a filthy
murderer, and this unfortunate girl. There is only the conventional link of the Gothic
novel and the sentimental novel. It is a shoddy literary trick, not a masterpiece of pathos
and piety. Moreover, look at the absence of artistic balance. We have been shown
Raskolnikov’s crime in all sordid detail and we also have been given half a dozen
different explanations for his exploit. We have never been shown Sonya in the exercise
of her trade. The situation is a glorified cliché. The harlot’s sin is taken for granted. Now
I submit that the true artist is the person who never takes anything for granted.
 Why did Raskolnikov kill? The motivation is extremely muddled.
Raskolnikov was, as we believe what Dostoevski rather optimistically wants us to
believe, a good young man , loyal to his family , on the one hand, and to high ideals on
the other, capable of self-sacrifice, kind, generous, and industrious, though very
conceited and proud , even to the point of entirely retiring into his inner life without
feeling the need of any human heart-to-heart relations. This very good, generous, and
proud young man is dismally poor. Why did Raskolnikov murder the old money-
lending woman and her sister?
Apparently to save his family from misery, to spare his sister, who, in order to help
him get through college, was about to marry a rich but brutal man.
But he also committed this murder to prove to himself that he was not an ordinary
man abiding by the moral laws created by others, but capable of making his own law
and of bearing the tremendous spiritual load of responsibility, of living down the pangs
of conscience and of using this evil means (murder) toward attaining a good purpose
(assistance to his own family, his education which will enable to become a benefactor of
the human kind) without any prejudice to his inner balance and virtuous life.
And he also committed his murder because one of Dostoevski’s pet ideas was that
the propagation of materialistic ideas is bound to destroy moral standards in the young
and is liable to make a murderer out of a fundamentally good young man who would
be easily pushed towards crime by an unfortunate concurrence of circumstances. Note
the curiously fascist ideas developed by Raskolnikov in an “article” he wrote: namely
that mankind consists of two parts — the herd and the supermen – and the the majority
should be bound by the established moral laws but that the few who are far above the
majority ought to be at liberty to make their own law. Thus Raskolnikov first declared
that Newton and other great discoverers should not have hesitated to sacrifice scores or
hundreds of individual lives had those lives stood in their way toward giving mankind
the benefit of their discoveries. Late he somehow forgets these benefactors of humanity
to concentrate on an entirely different ideal. All his ambition suddenly centers in
Napoleon in whom he sees characteristically the strong man who rules the masses
through his daring to “pick up” power which lies there awaiting the one who “dares”.
This is fast transition from an aspiring benefactor of the world toward an aspiring
tyrant for the sake of his own power. A transformation which is worth a more detailed
psychological analysis that Dostoevski, in his hurry, can afford to make.
The next pet idea of our author happens to be that a crime brings the man who
commits it that inner hell which is the inevitable lot of the wicked. This inner solitary
suffering, however, for some reason does not lead to redemption. What does bring
redemption is the actual suffering openly accepted, suffering in public, the deliberate
self-abasement and humiliation before his fellow humans — this can bring the sufferer
the absolution of his crime, redemption new life and so on. Such actually is to be the
road which Raskolnikov will follow, but whether he will kill again is impossible to say.
And finally there is the idea of free will, of a crime just for the sake of performing it.
Did Dostoevski succeed in making it all plausible? I doubt it.
 Now, in the first place, Raskolnikov is a neurotic, hence the effect that any
philosophy can have upon a neurotic does not help to discredit that philosophy.
Dostoevski would have better served his purpose if he could have eventually brought
to perdition by a too candid acceptance of materialistic ideas. But Dostoevski of course
realized too well that this would never work, that even if that sort of a sturdy young
man did accept the absurd ideas which balk before the perpetration of deliberate
murder. For it is no accident that all the criminal heroes of Dostoevski (Smerdyakov in
The Brother Karamazov, Fedka in The Possessed, Rogozhin in The Idiot) are not quite sane 1.
Feeling the weakness of his position, Dostoevski dragged in every possible human
incentive to push his Raskolnikov to the precipice of that temptation to murder which
we must presume was opened to him by the German philosophies he had accepted. The
dismal poverty, not only his own but that of his dearly beloved mother and sister, the
impending self-sacrifice of his sister, the utter moral debasement of the intended victim
— this profusion of accidental causes show how difficult Dostoevski himself felt it to
prove his point. Kropotkin very aptly remarks: “Behind Raskolnikov one feels
Dostoevski trying to decide whether he himself, or a man like him, might have been
brought to perform personally the act as Raskolnikov did . . . . But writers do not
murder.”
I also entirely subscribe to Kropotokin’s statement that “. . . men like the examining
magistrate and Svidrigailov, the embodiment of evil, are purely romantic invention.” I
would go further and add Sonya to the list. Sonya is a good descendent of those
romantic heroines who, for no fault of their own, were to live a life outside the bounds
established by society and were made by that same society to bear all the burden of
shame and suffering attached to such a way of life. These heroines were never extinct in
world literature ever since the good Abbé Prévost introduced to his readers the far
better written and thereafter the far more moving Manon Lescaut (1731). In Dostoevski
the theme of degradation, humiliation, is with us from the start, and in this sense
Raskolnikov’s sister Dunya and the drunken girl glimpsed on the boulevard, and Sonya
the virtuous prostitute, are sisters within the Dostoevskian family of hand-wringing
characters.
The passionate attachment of Dostoevski to the idea that physical suffering and
humiliation improve the moral man may lie in a personal tragedy: he must have felt
that in him the freedom-lover, the rebel, the individualist, had suffered a certain loss,
and impairing of spontaneity if nothing else, through his sojourn in his Siberian prison;
but he stuck doggedly to the idea that he returned “a better man.”

1 Nabokov deleted the next sentence: “It is further ni accident that the rulers of Germanyʼs recently fallen
regime based on the theory of Superman and his special rights were, too, either neurotics or ordinary
criminals, or both.” Ed