Crime and Punishment (2 page)

1821
(
30
October)
*
Born Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky in Moscow, the son of Mikhail Andreyevich, head physician at Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor, and of Maria Fyodorovna, daughter of a merchant family.

1823
Pushkin begins
Eugene Onegin
.

1825
Death of Tsar Alexander I and accession of Nicholas I, followed by the revolt of several thousand officers and soldiers in St Petersburg (the ‘Decembrist Uprising').

1831
Mikhail Andreyevich, having risen to the status of nobleman, buys a small estate south of Moscow at Darovoe, where his wife and children now spend their summers. During this year he also takes his wife and elder sons to see Schiller's play
The Robbers
, which makes a great impression on the young Dostoyevsky. Pushkin finishes
Eugene Onegin
.

1834
Enrolled with his elder brother Mikhail (
b
.
1820
) at Chermak's, Moscow's leading boarding school.

1837
Pushkin killed in a duel. Maria Fyodorovna dies and the brothers are sent to preparatory school in St Petersburg.

1838
Enters the St Petersburg Academy of Military Engineers (Mikhail is not admitted).

1839
Father dies, apparently murdered by serfs on his estate.

1840
Publication of Lermontov's
A Hero of Our Time
.

1841
Obtains a commission. Works on two historical plays (
Mary Stuart
and
Boris Godunov
), both lost.

1842
Promoted to second lieutenant. Publication of Gogol's
Dead Souls
and ‘The Overcoat'.

1843
Graduates from the Academy. Attached to St Petersburg Army Engineering Corps.

1844
Resigns his commission. Publication of his translation of Balzac's
Eugénie Grandet
. Also translates George Sand's
La dernière Aldini
, only to find that another translation has already appeared. Works on
Poor Folk
, his first novel.

1845
Establishes a friendship with Russia's most prominent and influential literary critic, Vissarion Belinsky, who praises
Poor Folk
and acclaims its author as Gogol's successor.

1846
Poor Folk
and
The Double
published. While
Poor Folk
is widely praised,
The Double
is much less successful. ‘Mr Prokharchin' also published.

1846–7
Nervous ailments and the onset of epileptic seizures. Begins regular consultations with Dr Stepan Yanovsky. Utopian socialist and atheist M. V. Butashevich-Petrashevsky becomes an acquaintance; begins attending the ‘Petrashevsky circle'. ‘A Novel in Nine Letters' and ‘The Landlady' are published.

1848
Several short stories published, including ‘White Nights', ‘A Weak Heart', ‘A Christmas Party and a Wedding' and ‘An Honest Thief'.

1849
First instalments of
Netochka Nezvanova
published. Arrested along with other members of the Petrashevsky circle, convicted of political offences against the Russian state. Sentenced to death, taken out to Semyonovsky Square to be shot by firing squad, but reprieved moments before execution. Instead, sentenced to an indefinite period of exile in Siberia, to begin with eight years of penal servitude, later reduced to four years by Tsar Nicholas I.

1850
Prison and hard labour in Omsk, western Siberia.

1853
Outbreak of Crimean War.

1854
Released from prison and sent to serve in an infantry battalion at Semipalatinsk, south-western Siberia. Allowed to live in private quarters. Becomes a regular visitor at the home of Alexander Isayev, an alcoholic civil servant, and his wife Maria Dmitrievna Isayeva. Promoted to non-commissioned officer.

1855
Alexander
II
succeeds Nicholas I: some relaxation of state censorship.

1857
Marries the widowed Maria Isayeva after a long courtship, and soon after has a major seizure which leads to the first official confirmation of his epilepsy. Publication of ‘The Little Hero', written in prison during the summer of
1849
.

1858
Petitions Alexander
II
to be released from military service on medical grounds. Works on
The Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants
and
Uncle's Dream
.

1859
Allowed to return to live in European Russia; in December returns with his wife and stepson Pavel to St Petersburg. First chapters of
The Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants
and
Uncle's Dream
published.

1861
Emancipation of the serfs. Launch of
Time
(
Vremya
), a monthly journal of literature and socio-political affairs edited by Dostoyevsky and his elder brother Mikhail. In the first issues he publishes his first full-length novel,
The Insulted and the Injured
, and the first part of
Notes from the Dead House
, based on his experience in Omsk.

1862
Second part of
Notes from the Dead House
and
A Nasty Tale
published in
Time
. Makes first trip abroad, to Europe, visiting Germany, France, England, Switzerland, Italy. Gambles in Wiesbaden. Meets Alexander Herzen in London. Turgenev's
Fathers and Sons
.

1863
Winter Notes on Summer Impressions
, based on his European travels, published in
Time
. Liaison with Apollinaria Suslova begins at about this time. After Maria Dmitrievna is taken seriously ill, he travels abroad again, gambles and visits Italy with Suslova. Publication of Nikolai Chernyshevsky's novel
What Is to Be Done?

1864
In March launches with Mikhail the journal
Epoch
(
Epokha
) as successor to
Time
, now banned by the Russian authorities.
Notes from Underground
published in
Epoch
. In April death of Maria Dmitrievna. In July death of Mikhail. The International Workingmen's Association (the First International) founded in London.

1865
Epoch
ceases publication owing to lack of funds. Courts Anna Korvin-Krukovskaya, a contributor to
Epoch
and future revolutionary activist; she turns down his proposal of marriage. To meet his debts, signs very unfavourable contract with the publisher Stellovsky. Gambles in Wiesbaden. Works on
Crime and Punishment.
First fragment of Tolstoy's
War and Peace
.

1866
Dmitry Karakozov attempts to assassinate Alexander
II
. Interrupts writing of
Crime and Punishment
to write
The Gambler
, promised to Stellovsky by
1
November. Hires young stenographer Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina (
b
.
1846
), who helps him complete the novel in twenty-six days.
The Gambler
published in December.
Crime and Punishment
serialized in eight issues of
The Russian Messenger
(
Russkii Vestnik
).

1867
Marries Anna. Hounded by creditors, they leave for Western Europe, where they will spend the next four years.

1868
Birth of daughter Sofya, who dies at three months.
The Idiot
published in serial form in
The Russian Messenger
.

1869
Birth of daughter Lyubov in Dresden. The Nechayev Affair: Ivan Ivanov is murdered by fellow members of a clandestine revolutionary cell led by Sergei Nechayev.

1870
Starts work on
Demons
. V. I. Ulyanov (later known as Lenin) is born in the town of Simbirsk on the banks of the Volga.
The Eternal Husband
published.

1871
Moves back to St Petersburg with his wife and family. Birth of son, Fyodor.

1871–2
Serial publication of
Demons
.

1873
Becomes contributing editor of conservative weekly journal
Citizen
(
Grazhdanin
), where his
A Writer's Diary
is published as a regular column. ‘Bobok' published.

1875
The Adolescent
published. Birth of son, Alexei.

1876
‘The Meek One' published in
A Writer's Diary
.

1877
‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man' published in
A Writer's Diary
.

1878
Death of son Alexei after an epileptic fit. Works on
The Brothers Karamazov
.

1879
Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (later known as Stalin) born in Gori, Georgia. First part of
The Brothers Karamazov
published.

1880
The Brothers Karamazov
published in complete form. Speech in Moscow at the unveiling of a monument to Pushkin is greeted with wild enthusiasm.

1881
Dostoyevsky dies in St Petersburg after repeated pulmonary haemorrhage (
28
January). Buried in the cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery. The funeral procession from the author's apartment numbers over
30
,
000
. Assassination of Alexander
II
(
1
March).

I

A ready-made title, ‘Crime and Punishment' suggests a ready-made plot. A man will commit a crime. He will be caught. He will be punished. His fate will revolve around the conflicts between freedom and conscience, the delinquent individual and the punitive state. Justice, no doubt, will be done.

In January
1866
, when the first instalment of
Crime and Punishment
appeared in
The Russian Messenger
(
Russkii Vestnik
), prospective readers might have indulged in further well-reasoned speculation. Here was a title steeped in the ferment of its time, an era marked on the one hand by the ambitious reforms of Tsar Alexander
II
(
1818–81
), not least to the entire judicial process, and on the other by mounting radicalism and nascent terrorism, prompted in large part by the perceived failure of these same reforms. Serfdom may have been consigned to history five years earlier, but the harsh terms of the serfs' ‘emancipation' had done little to alleviate social injustice. Would this, then, be a novel of political rebellion? Or perhaps, given the increasingly conservative leanings of the ageing Dostoyevsky (and of Mikhail Katkov, editor of
The Russian Messenger
), a satire of these revolutionary tendencies?

Inevitably, the novel would also be rooted in the bitter experience of its famous author. After all, he, too, in his free-thinking youth, had known crime and punishment at first hand. His chief ‘crime' was to read out, more than once, Vissarion Belinsky's letter to Nikolai Gogol (
1809–52
), in which Russia's leading critic railed against Russia's leading author, whose latest book had revealed him to be a ‘proponent of the knout', of Church, State and serfdom. Dostoyevsky's ‘punishment' – and that of a disparate group of his associates, broadly linked by utopian-socialist sympathies – was to face the firing squad on St Petersburg's Semyonovsky Square in December
1849
. The sentence was commuted by Tsar Nicholas I (
1796–1855
) at the last possible moment and in the most theatrical manner. Instead, Dostoyevsky endured years of hard labour in Siberia, described upon his return to St Petersburg in the lightly fictionalized
Notes from the Dead House
(
1860–2
), the first masterpiece of his mature period.

Finally,
Crime and Punishment
would be imbued with ideas familiar to all readers of Dostoyevsky's post-Siberian journalism: educated Russia needed to return to its roots, to the soil, to the people. Only thus could the warring tribes of Westernizers and Slavophiles, elites and commoners, be joined; only thus would the country's ancient wounds be healed.

At one level the novel we go on to read satisfies all of these conventional expectations. At another all of them are unsettled, if not thoroughly undermined. We read of murders committed by a handsome young man whom it would be difficult to identify precisely with the radicals of the
1860
s (though some offended young readers contrived to do so) or with its unhandsome author. Disturbingly, this man is unsure that his gruesome acts were crimes at all; unsure at times that they even happened. For much of the book he even seems to forget one of his murders entirely. The reality of punishment also eludes him for an unreasonably long time, despite his best efforts. In his mind everything begins to merge: past and future, right and wrong, perpetrator and victim, crime and punishment. The opposition stated by the title, so familiar and in its way so comforting, begins to dissolve for the reader, too; a dark joke, perhaps – like Dostoyevsky's own ‘execution'? – yet no less serious for that.

Because it was written before
The Idiot
(
1868
),
Demons
(
1871–2
) and
The Brothers Karamazov
(
1879–80
), and because it is so often described as a version of the murder mystery or as a novel of religious conversion,
Crime and Punishment
has an entrenched reputation as the most straightforward of Dostoyevsky's great quartet of late novels. Yet its puzzles and ambiguities, when fully entered into, allow the reader to share the same vertiginous confusion experienced by its protagonist, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov. In the words of Virginia Woolf: ‘Against our wills we are drawn in, whirled round, blinded, suffocated, and at the same time filled with a giddy rapture. Out of Shakespeare there is no more exciting reading.'
1

II

The sources of the novel's complexity can be traced to the opening sentences of the first detailed record we have of Dostoyevsky's plans for the book. Originally envisioned as a long story,
Crime and Punishment
was proposed to Katkov in a letter from Wiesbaden, where the recently widowed, forty-three-year-old Dostoyevsky was enduring what his most comprehensive biographer, the late Joseph Frank, aptly calls a ‘period of protracted mortification'.
2
His first wife, with whom he had rarely been happy, had succumbed to tuberculosis the previous year. Mikhail – his brother and soulmate – had also died in
1864
, leaving enormous debts. This moral and financial destitution was further compounded by Dostoyevsky's two uncontrollable manias: one for roulette, another (only marginally weaker) for his ex-mistress Apollinaria Suslova, a femme fatale eighteen years his junior. To top it all, he had recently signed a contract with the unscrupulous publisher Fyodor Stellovsky, requiring him, on pain of losing all rights to his own works, to complete an additional novel by
1
November
1866
.

Yet for all this pressure and turmoil, the proposal for a ‘psychological record of a crime' which Dostoyevsky submitted to Katkov is notable for its clarity, confidence and precision. It begins:

A contemporary setting, this current year [
1865
]. A young man, excluded from student status at university, of trading class, living in extreme poverty, succumbs, through frivolity and ricketiness of thought, to certain strange, ‘half-baked' ideas in the air, and makes up his mind to get out of his foul situation in a single bound.
3

A great deal changed between the conception of this story in a German spa town and the eventual birth of the novel in Russia. It expanded not only in size, but also in perspective, which grew from the confessional mode (often favoured by Dostoyevsky in his fiction hitherto) to a third-person viewpoint of virtual omniscience and deliberate ‘naivety', as Dostoyevsky himself described it in his notebooks. Very little changed, however, about the two sentences quoted above.
4
They contain in embryo the strange mixture of ingredients that will determine Raskolnikov's half-real, half-theoretical drama: poverty and social exclusion on the one hand, and frivolous, ‘half-baked' thoughts on the other. Only one element is missing – the element of psychogeography, as it would now be called. This is memorably supplied by St Petersburg, ‘the most premeditated and abstract city in the world',
5
built on a northern swamp by Western architects and Russian serfs. Here, too, we are in the realms of the semi-real and semi-theoretical, of rationalism and delusion – a tradition first developed in the St Petersburg texts of Alexander Pushkin (
1799–1837
) and Gogol and now taken in new directions by their pupil, Dostoyevsky.

As we first see him, cooped up in his garret and barely able to rise from his couch, Raskolnikov exists (or thinks he exists) only in his own mind. For much of the novel that will remain the case, a sign of his catastrophic isolation from mankind. Yet at the same time, through a chain of spatial metaphors, Dostoyevsky makes us see how deeply his mental disarray is tied to the city that surrounds him. Such metaphors are characteristic of the novel's curious artistic achievement: as subtle as the axe that Raskolnikov brings down on the head of his first victim, they are also freighted with the exceptional weight of association that makes us, as readers, share in the protagonist's experience of suffocation from causes both abstract and real. Thus, Raskolnikov's mental state finds its external embodiment in his low-ceilinged, cramped garret. This garret, in turn, is a ‘cupboard', a ‘ship's cabin', a ‘cell', and even, as perceived by his mother, a ‘coffin'.

Raskolnikov's mind also stands in metaphorical relation to the broader topography in which his fate is to be played out: the overcrowded, shabby area of St Petersburg's Haymarket district, with its narrow, twisting streets, its fetid canal (or ‘Ditch') and its filthy stairwells, drinking dens and connecting courtyards, through which tradesmen, girl-prostitutes and criminals ‘hurry and scurry'. Only a stone's throw from the imperial majesty of the Neva River and Nevsky Prospect (associated with Pushkin and Gogol respectively), this is the shadow St Petersburg, airless and coffin-like in the height of summer, that Dostoyevsky made his own in both literature and life. In place of the sober ‘military capital' evoked by Pushkin in
The Bronze Horseman
(
1833
) – with its ‘severe, elegant appearance', its perfection of form – Dostoyevsky's Haymarket is drunken and unkempt. Here, Baltic Germans shout atrocious Russian, villagers pour in to sub-rent ‘corners', and students and officers spout caricatured versions of Bentham and Mill. This, too, is a prison of sorts: not the prison of Pushkin's military autocracy, nor the bureaucratic nightmare of Gogol, but the false freedom of those torn from their roots, left with nothing but words and borrowed ideas.

The opening pages acquaint us with these borrowed ideas in the recurring themes of Raskolnikov's wretched soliloquies: how to overcome his cowardice and indecisiveness, how to utter ‘a new word', to take a ‘new step'; above all, how to stop talking and start doing. Before us is a Hamlet without a clearly identifiable cause, a man-child who fears the frivolity of his own thoughts (mere ‘toys'), which he is unable to arrange in satisfactory order. A penchant for self-contradiction lends a rebarbative texture to his ruminations, marked by the frequency of ‘but' and ‘still' and tapering off in rows of dots. It is the self-lacerating language familiar from the narrator of Dostoyevsky's
Notes from Underground
(
1864
), but spoken now from beneath the eaves, rather than from beneath the floorboards. The masochism of the mouse-man of the Underground is replaced by Raskolnikov's ‘Satanic pride'.
6

This pride, however, is knowingly misplaced. Raskolnikov's thoughts are evidently as stale to him as they would have been to contemporary readers, for whom the anxieties of the ineffectual intellectual had long been familiar from novels set on country estates among gifted young men too weak or too comfortable to address the malign status quo. By
1865
the idle moral torments of the ‘superfluous men' of Ivan Goncharov (
1812–91
) and Ivan Turgenev (
1818–83
) had filtered down to the new breed of déclassé, de-Christianized intellectuals, the most influential of whom, such as the socialist Nikolai Chernyshevsky (
1828–89
) and the nihilist Dmitry Pisarev (
1840–68
), were inspiring a generation of revolutionaries with their heavily ideological fiction and criticism. For both of these men, prison was more than a metaphor.

In this context, Raskolnikov's vacillations and ruminations are decidedly old-school, and not infrequently derivative. Thus, Pisarev, in response to Bazarov, the anti-hero of Turgenev's
Fathers and Sons
(
1862
), had already set out a division between the conformist masses and the select few to whom all is permitted and who may be prevented only by ‘personal taste' from murder and robbery.
7
Now, three years later, this idea is plagiarized by Raskolnikov. Nor does Dostoyevsky want us to ignore, from the opening page, the belated echoes of the title of Chernyshevsky's hymn to the emancipatory power of ‘rational egoism', the novel
What Is to Be Done?
(
1863
). Later, Raskolnikov will address the same question verbatim to his good angel, Sonya, and she, in turn, will pose it to him. Raskolnikov's answer will again be an act of plagiarism: we must break what must be broken – an almost direct quote from Pisarev, recycled many years later by Lenin. But Raskolnikov is an unlikely revolutionary. He is too much a loner to be the ‘political conspirator' his friend Razumikhin mistakes him for, and he is certainly no leader of men; perhaps he is just a belated Romantic, framing his outdated, somewhat comical delusions in the language of his day?

Dostoyevsky also introduces in the early chapters a further element latent in his pitch to Katkov: the impatience of his protagonist, who ‘makes up his mind to get out of his foul situation in a single bound'. This is brought to the surface by the maid and country girl Nastasya, who, endowed with the intuition that Dostoyevsky often reserves for his less educated characters, divines that Raskolnikov is too lazy to work and wants his fortune ‘right now'. Unimpressed by ‘eggheads' who never do a stroke of work, she nevertheless feels a rough tenderness towards him as a human being, foreshadowing the much deeper feelings and intuition that will be shown by Sonya, who similarly opposes her own unconscious wisdom (Sonya: Sophia) to the sophistry of Raskolnikov.

In the folkloric context that would have constituted Nastasya's own education, Raskolnikov might be cast as Ivan the Fool, who sits on the stove all day and waits for a pretty maiden and a crock of gold to fall into his lap. Raskolnikov, who also hails from the provinces, has himself kept one foot in the cuckoo land of magic tales, as an early, jarring reference to King Pea (
Tsar Gorokh
, associated with bygone happiness) makes plain. But St Petersburg, he will find, is no place for childish dreams.