Crime and Punishment (4 page)

In opposition to the nihilists with their pride and
déracinement
, Dostoyevsky introduces the theme of the family. Raskolnikov's fatherless family also serves to de-subjectivize and universalize the image in which he appears to the reader. We can understand, not merely intellectually but also in emotional terms, Raskolnikov's desire to do something in order to secure
the fortunes of his mother and sister, to assert the strength that is lacking because of his father's absence. At the same time, we are kept aware of the extent to which Raskolnikov has broken away from the lifelines that bind him to existence. The climate of the family is one of humility, tolerance and mutual acceptance; by his thoughts and actions, Raskolnikov transgresses the laws by which it operates – yet only to a certain extent: as Dunya realizes the
reason
for what he has done, her attitude towards him softens, even though her determination that he should face the consequences of his actions is made resolute. As for Pulkheria Aleksandrovna, his mother, she passes from a state of uncomprehending rejection of her son to one of suffering acceptance. In overcoming his pride and taking upon himself the punishment decreed by the state and society, Raskolnikov re-enters the bosom of his family, which becomes a symbol of
narodnost
’ (national and folk identity), and love of neighbour in the Christian sense. This is made abundantly clear in the draft notes, where, for example, Raskolnikov's contempt for the old woman-‘louse’ is seen as a fatal lapse into the attitude of the nihilists, who really care only about themselves. From a study of the drafts, we can see that the novel's horizons are quite certainly intended to include a vision of a universal family as the longed-for ideal, in opposition to the ‘antheap’ or the socialist utopia, founded on theoretic abstractions and delusions of ‘progress’. In Raskolnikov's friendship with Razumikhin we can also perceive Dostoyevsky's conception of true brotherhood, as opposed to the ‘fraternity’ of the student body and the radical movement.

Raskolnikov's family has its counterpart in that of Sonya. The Marmeladov household, with its alcoholic father, consumptive mother and ultimately orphaned children, took its origins in the novel
The Drunkards
, which Dostoyevsky eventually merged with the Raskolnikov tale to produce
Crime and Punishment
, aware of the many parallels of characterization in the two works. For all the disasters that befall it, this menage is none the less a
family
, an integral unit with its own sacred symbols and objects, such as the green
drap-de-dames
shawl and the travelling-box. It is no coincidence that it should be Sonya, the
prostitute from a broken, destroyed home, who raises Raskolnikov from the ‘death’ of isolation and self-defilement and estrangement into which he has fallen, and restores him to the community of mankind; in order to be thus restored, he must suffer, and his return to humanity must take place in the sign of the Cross and the reality of the Russian earth:

‘What should you do?’ she exclaimed, leaping up from her chair, and her eyes, hitherto filled with tears, suddenly began to flash. ‘Get up!’ (She gripped him by the shoulder; slowly he began to get up, staring at her in near-amazement.) ‘Go immediately, this very moment, go and stand at the crossroads, bow down, first kiss the ground that you've desecrated, and then bow to the whole world, to all four points of the compass and tell everyone, out loud: “I have killed!” Then God will send you life again… You must accept suffering and redeem yourself by it, that's what.’

Sonya, who has suffered the loss of her parents, her honour and her dignity, yet has not abandoned her faith, understands the loss sustained by Raskolnikov, who has abandoned his. He has lost God, lost himself, the sanctity of his own personality, and he can recover this only by penal servitude and the living contact it will involve with the Russian people. Here Dostoyevsky explicitly points to his own biography, and to the transition from ‘coffin’ to regeneration experienced by Goryanchikov, the narrator of
The House of the Dead
. To reduce Sonya to a peripheral character in the way several Western critics have done, usually on philosophical or extra-literary grounds, is to deprive the novel of its central meaning. Sonya is Raskolnikov's good double, just as Svidrigailov is his evil one. Her criminality, which has been forced upon her by the demands of an unjust society, runs parallel to his, but shines with an innocence of which his does not partake. It is because of this that she is able to impart to him a will to believe and a will to live; it is also the reason for her spirituality and ‘remoteness’ – in a note, Dostoyevsky describes her as following Raskolnikov to Golgotha ‘at forty paces’. As she does so, she carries with her both Raskolnikov's past and childhood, and a vision of the man into
which he must grow. She is child and mother, family and nation, ‘holy fool’ and angel. The scene in
Part Four, Chapter IV
, where she reads aloud the story of the raising of Lazarus to Raskolnikov, is the central point of the novel – a moment of almost unbearable earthly anguish, distress and tension that nevertheless points heavenward, like some Gothic arch.

In the argument of ‘pro and contra’ (it is significant that this is the title Dostoyevsky later gave to Book V of The
Brothers Karamazov
, which contains Ivan's exposition of the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor), Svidrigailov plays the role of devil's advocate. Joseph Brodsky has likened Dostoyevsky's technique in this respect to the classical dictum that ‘before you come forth with your argument, however right or righteous you may feel, you have to list all the arguments of the opposite side’. As he worked at the development of Svidrigailov's personality, Dostoyevsky went to such pains to make it both humanly credible
and
demonic that some readers of the novel have been misled into thinking that Svidrigailov is a mouthpiece for Dostoyevsky's own views. The draft notes, however, make it clear that the character of Svidrigailov is based on that of ‘A–v’ (Aristov), one of the convicts described in
The House of the Dead
. Aristov, we may remember, is the young nobleman who was ‘the most revolting example of the degree to which a man can lower and debase himself and of the degree to which he is capable of killing every moral feeling in himself, without effort or remorse’, ‘a kind of lump of meat, with teeth and a stomach and an insatiable craving for the coarsest, most bestial physical pleasures’, ‘an example of what the physical side of man on its own can produce if unrestrained by any inner norms or set of laws’. In the character of Svidrigailov, Aristov's murderous cynicism is clothed in a mantle of ‘civilization’ – his speech is studded with Gallicisms and French quotations, with learned references and allusions to the latest fashionable ideas and events. Dostoyevsky's draft notebooks are crowded with jottings and sketches for this character, who in many ways represents the essence of criminality, and the mortal danger to which Raskolnikov has exposed himself by his abandonment of faith and surrender to self-will and the
Zeitgeist
. ‘Svidrigailov
has secret horrors behind him, horrors which he relates to nobody, but which he betrays by the facts of his behaviour and his convulsive, animal need to torture and kill. Coldly impassioned. A wild beast. A tiger.’ This predatory sensualist is intended by Dostoyevsky to show what can happen to a Russian who turns his back on his own country, his own roots and origins, as the writer believed the liberal ‘Westernizers’ had done, with Turgenev at their head. In
Winter Notes on Summer Impressions
(1863), Dostoyevsky had written, under the guise of a travel diary, an energetic attack on Western values and ‘civilization’, which he saw as a thin and artificial veneer masking an inner chaos and barbarism. In the
Winter Notes
’ descriptions of the London brothels and gin-palaces, the gaslit, Poe-like streetscapes with their doomed inhabitants, we are given a foretaste of the street scenes in
Crime and Punishment
, which are presided over by the spirit of the Antichrist in the person of Svidrigailov. The evil of the ‘Crystal Palace’, the mass industrial society that breeds rootless anonymity and criminal mania, finds its counterpart in the cynical, alienated behaviour of Svidrigailov, to whom all things are possible and permissible, and who therefore suffers from total indifference and a total inability to engage with his own life, to decide what to do with it. Haunted by the ghost of his own wrecked humanity, he tortures, intimidates and murders, he toys with schemes of ballooning and Arctic exploration, of emigration to America (an echo of Balzac's Vautrin) and in the end he commits suicide, for want of any other solution to his boredom. In his conversations with Raskolnikov we hear the surging of this ocean of faithlessness and betrayal from afar as an unsteady scurrying of sudden changes of mood, the meanderings, perhaps, of some tormented political despot, of a Caesar, a Nero, a Napoleon. It is significant that in the early drafts of the novel, both Svidrigailov and Raskolnikov were intended to commit suicide; in the novel's final version, Raskolnikov survives his own evil genius.

Above all, the portrayal of Raskolnikov's character concerns the theme and the problem of
personality
. What is under threat from bourgeois utilitarianism and radical socialism alike is the image of the human self, and its potential for change and transformation.
What those ideologies deny to the personality is its freedom, which as Nicholas Berdyaev observed ‘is the way of suffering. It is always tempting to free man from suffering after robbing him of his freedom. Dostoyevsky is the defender of freedom. Consequently he exhorts man to take suffering upon himself as an inevitable consequence of freedom.’ In itself, freedom is neither good nor evil: it involves a choice of one or the other. Svidrigailov's freedom, the ‘liberty’ propounded by Western philosophy, political economy and socialist theory as an absolute good, is a false one – in it he reveals himself to be at the mercy of his own animal instincts: without God he is a slave to the impersonal forces of nature, and his personality shrivels and dies. Sonya, on the other hand, who has accepted the necessity and inevitability of suffering, exists in true freedom – she is equally aware of the possibilities for destruction and creation that exist around her, and would concur with Berdyaev's dictum that ‘the existence of evil is a proof of God's existence. If the world consisted solely and exclusively of goodness and justice, God would not be necessary, for then the world itself would be God. God exists because evil exists. And this means that God exists because freedom exists.’ It is towards this freedom that Raskolnikov makes his way through the pages of
Crime and Punishment
and the swirling alternations of night and day, dream and waking, timelessness and time. His dreams disclose to him the possibilities that hang in the balance:
everything
may be lost, as in the nightmare of the flogged horse, which stands for his own denied self, or
everything
may be gained, as in the fantasy of the Egyptian oasis, where he drinks the water of life:

A caravan was resting, the camels were lying down peacefully; all around there were palm trees, an entire circle of them; everyone was eating their evening meal. He, however, kept drinking water, straight from the spring that flowed murmuring right by his side. It was so cool, and the water was so wonderfully, wonderfully cold and blue, hurrying over various-coloured stones, and sand that was so pure, with spangles of gold…

Raskolnikov, far from being a madman or psychopathic outcast, is an image of Everyman. His pilgrimage towards salvation is chronicled by Dostoyevsky in terms of the biblical myth of original sin – he has fallen from grace, and must regain it. In his own knowledge of the sacredness of his own person, and of the violation of that sacredness inherent in his crime, he bears within him the seeds of a new life which grows out of the conflict of ‘for’ and ‘against’. The entire ‘detective story’ form of the novel is intended to simulate the circumstances of an inquisition. Porfiry Petrovich, Zamyotov and the rest of the police apparatus are concerned in the first instance to probe Raskolnikov's soul and to make him aware that the crime he has committed is a sin against the divine presence within himself. Raskolnikov feels little remorse for having killed the old woman, but suffers under a crushing, life-destroying weight of misery at what he has ‘done to himself’, to use Sonya's words.

One aspect of Raskolnikov's revolt against God that has sometimes been neglected by critics is to be seen in his name: the
Raskol
, or ‘Schism’, is the term used to describe the split that took place in the Russian Orthodox Church in the mid seventeenth century, when certain liturgical reforms were introduced by Patriarch Nikon. The
raskol
'
niki
were sectarians who clung to the old rituals, putting themselves at variance with the civil and ecclesiastical authorities, with whom they came into violent and sometimes bloody conflict. Dostoyevsky had met these ‘Old Believers’ and their descendants in the labour camp at Omsk, and wrote about them in
The House of the Dead
. In an essay on the Schism, V. S. Solovyov characterized it as a form of ‘Russian Protestantism’, a disease of true Christianity, diagnosing its central error as a tendency to confuse the human with the divine, the temporal with the eternal, the particular with the universal; denying the supremacy of Christianity's collective principle and reality, the Church, it tended towards a divinization of the individual:

Containing within it a germ of Protestantism, the Russian Schism cultivated it to its limits. Even among the Old Believers, the true preserver of the ancient heritage and tradition is the individual person.
This person does not live in the past, but in the present; the adopted tradition, here shorn of an advantage over the individual in terms of living wholeness or catholicity (as in the Universal Church) and being in itself no more than a dead formality, is revitalized and reanimated merely by the faith and devoutness of its true preserver – the individual person. No sooner, however, does a position of this kind start to be aware that the centre of gravity is shifting from the dead past to the living present, than the conventional objects of tradition lose all value, and all significance is transferred to the independent, individual bearer of that tradition; from this there proceeds the direct transition to those free sects which notoriously claim personal inspiration and personal righteousness as the basis of religion.