FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY. CRIME AND PUNISHMENT. Foreword

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FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

Foreword

“I want to do an unprecedented and eccentric thing, to write thirty printed sheets [480 printed pages] within the space of four months, forming two separate novels, of which I will write one in the morning and the other in the evening, and to finish them by a fixed deadline. Do you know, my dear Anna Vasilievna, that even now such eccentric and extraordinary things utterly delight me. I simply don't fit into the category of staid and conventional people. . . ” In this typically ebullient fashion, Dostoevsky described to a friend the predicament he found himself in during the summer of 1866. He was then forty-five, and had behind him ten years of imprisonment and exile for “antigov-ernment activities, ” the death of his first wife and of his closest brother Mikhail, and debts amounting to some 43, 000 roubles. A year earlier he had gone abroad to escape his creditors with 175 roubles in his pocket and an agreement with an unscrupulous bookseller, F. T. Stellovsky, to produce a new novel for him by November 1, 1866, failing which (and Stellovsky hoped he would fail) all his existing and future works would become the bookseller's property.

Fortunately, Dostoevsky managed to bring off this “unprecedented... thing, ” though not quite in the way he envisaged. Work on one novel, which had been appearing serially in the Russian Herald since January 1866, continued to preoccupy him into the fall, and meanwhile not a word of the book for Stellovsky got written. Finally, on the advice of friends, he hired a stenographer, the young Anna Grigo-rievna Snitkin, who soon became his second wife. The Gambler, dictated to her in October, was handed to the bookseller on time, and in November he went on to finish the longer, serialized work—Crime and Punishment, the first of the five great novels that crowned Dostoevsky's artistic labors during the final fifteen years of his life.

The attempts of critics and literary scholars to define, or simply account for, what they have found in these novels may remind one of the Hindu parable of the blind men describing an elephant, each by feeling a different part—”a snake, ” “a hog weed, ” “a tree, ” “a broom, ” “a wall. ” Dostoevsky's own summaries in his letters and notebooks tend to be dry, schematic, and therefore misleading, because no novels are less dry or schematic than these. Furthermore, he was always ready to revise his plans when new material, discovered in the process of writing, demanded it. Thus he wrote to his friend Baron Vrangel, in December 1865, that the story he had been working on for several months (the first version of Crime and Punishment) had grown into “a big novel, in six parts. I had much of it written and ready by the end of November. / burned it all. Now I can confess it. I wasn't pleased with it myself. A new form, a new plan captivated me and so I began over again. I'm working day and night, and for all that I'm not working very much. A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression. . . ”A novel, at least a Dostoevsky novel, is a “work of poetry”—that is, a simultaneous composition on multiple planes—and the critics can therefore be forgiven their perplexity about where to take hold of it, since the first perplexity of criticism is that it must speak monosemantically of the polysemous.

But besides that, these were novels of a new kind, their multiple planes so divergent and even contradictory as to all but baffle definition. So much so that one line of criticism, rightly noting the dramatic technique and high seriousness of Dostoevsky's writing, has called his late works “novel-tragedies, ” while another, with equal Tightness, finds their roots in M& #233; nippean satire and a carnival sense of the world. Dostoevsky's uniqueness as an artist lies in his invention of a form capable of combining such opposites, of sounding such depths (carnival laughter has as much depth as tragedy), while never ceasing to portray the contemporary world, the everyday in all the detail of its everydayness. What's more, Dostoevsky's novels refuse to stay put in their own period, where the novels of Tolstoy, Turgenev, Goncharov have settled; they leap out of their historical situation and confront us as if they had not yet spoken their final word.

The question is what inspired this form-making impulse in Dostoevsky, what reality do his novels imitate, or can we still speak here of an “imitation of reality”? To suggest an answer, we must turn to Notes from Underground, published in 1864, just a year before he began work on Crime and Punishment. This paradoxical little novel marked a break, a new beginning in his art, and in a sense all his later works grew out of it. It seems to have come almost as a surprise to Dostoevsky himself. He had been attempting to write a critical response to the Utopian communist N. G. Chernyshevsky, whose programmatic novel, What Is to Be Done?, appeared in 1863. Instead of an article, he produced the tale—at once apologia and confession—of the nameless man from underground.

Dostoevsky's polemics with the radicals of the 1860s appear to represent a change in his convictions, though such questions are never simple. He had started out in literary life as a liberal, critical of the imperial autocracy, sympathizing with the little man, drawn to the ideas of the French Utopians Fourier and Saint-Simon. In the late 1840s he had attended meetings of the clandestine Petrashevsky circle, which owned a printing press and planned to publish Fourier's writings. This had led to his arrest in 1849, to penal servitude and exile. In Notes from the Dead House, a semi-fictional account of his prison experiences first published in 1860, a year after his return to Petersburg, he describes how he would sit looking at a corner of blue sky and think that there, beyond the prison walls, was another life, there was freedom, and one day he would leave his prison behind and find that free life waiting for him, and he would then live nobly, gratefully, and make no more mistakes.

Was Dostoevsky's opposition to the radical ideology of the 1860s the expression of a repentant sinner, ready to embrace monarchy and orthodoxy and the goodness of this world that he had not appreciated before? Not at all, if we judge by Notes from Underground. Something else rose up in him in the person of the underground man, this “man of heightened consciousness, ” with his mocking attacks on the laws of nature and arithmetic, on sensibleness, utility, profit, on development, civilization, and reason itself. He puts his tongue out at the “crystal palace” of Chernyshevsky's scientific-Utopian future, but he goes beyond that when he declares: “Two times two is four is no longer life, gentlemen, but the beginning of death. ” It should be noted that the early 1860s saw the reforms brought about by the tsar-liberator Alexander II—the abolition of serfdom, the institution of public trial by jury, land reform, the relaxation of censorship—changes that the liberals of the 1840s had only dreamed of. It is by no means clear that the underground man, if he paid attention to such things, would find this reformed society any more to his liking than the “future reasonableness” of the radicals. To all such worlds he prefers his underground. And yet at one point he cries out, “But here, too, I'm lying! Lying, because I myself know, like two times two, that it is not at all the underground that is better, but something different, completely different, which I thirst for but cannot ever find! ”

Clearly, the terms of this polemic, if polemic it is, go beyond the opposing of one set of ideas with another. Something strange seems to have happened to Dostoevsky after his return from exile. It is as if the world he had imagined in prison, the world of the blue sky and freedom, ceased to be recognizable to him, and another reality appeared in its place, one he was unprepared for and could only search out gropingly. In fact, he once described his experience of such an uncanny moment of vision, but he placed it in his past. The description, however, appeared in Petersburg Visions in Verse and Prose, a short work written in 1861. As a young man, he was returning home one evening and stopped to look along the Neva:

It seemed, in the end, that all this world, with all its inhabitants, both the strong and the weak, with all their habitations, whether beggars' shelters or gilded palaces, at this hour of twilight resembled a fantastic, enchanted vision, a dream which in its turn would instantly vanish and waste away as vapor into the dark blue heaven. Suddenly a certain strange thought began to stir inside me. I started and my heart was as if flooded in that instant by a hot jet of blood which had suddenly boiled up from the influx of a mighty sensation which until now had been unknown to me. In that moment, as it were, I understood something which up to that time had only stirred in me, but had not as yet been fully comprehended. I saw clearly, as it were, into something new, a completely new world, unfamiliar to me and known only through some obscure hearsay, through a certain mysterious sign. I think that in those precise minutes, my real existence began. . .

Most important are the further details of this experience:

I began to look about intently and suddenly I noticed some strange people. They were all strange, extraordinary figures, completely prosaic, not Don Carloses or Posas to be sure, rather down-to-earth titular councilors and yet at the same time, as it were, sort of fantastic titular councilors. Someone was grimacing in front of me, having hidden himself behind all this fantastic crowd, and he was fidgeting some thread, some springs through, and these little dolls moved, and he laughed and laughed away.

The ambiguous laughter of this demiurge or demon can be heard in all of Dostoevsky's later works. Here, in germ, was the reality that challenged his powers of imitation, an indefinite “something new, ” a completely new and unfamiliar world, prosaic and at the same time fantastic, which could have no image until he gave it one, but was more real than the vanishing spectacle he contemplated on the Neva. That he recorded this moment of vision when he did suggests that in some way he was reliving it.

Behind the ideas of radicals like Chernyshevsky, Dostoevsky could hear the demiurge's laughter (not that he underestimated the serious consequences of these ideas; he foresaw them only too clearly). His response was the world as viewed by the man from underground, whose ruminations are circumscribed by the same ideas, but who has recognized that his life cannot be accounted for by them, that in fact it cannot be accounted for by any laws or with any logical consistency. Nor can it be narrated as a meaningful sequence of events, in harmonious and dignified prose. It is all discontinuous, full of the sudden and the unexpected, disharmonious and undignified, terrible and at the same time comical. From this basis he generalizes his attack on the world view of enlightened Europe, particularly as adopted by the Russian intelligentsia.

No one before Dostoevsky had ever written such a book. That it failed in its immediate purpose, as a reply to the radical ideology of the day, is not surprising: its dialectic was much too complex for the purpose, and artistically it was too strange, even offensive, for the common reader. Indeed, to make such admissions about oneself as the underground man does, and to lash out with such sarcastic wit at the most self-evident “truths” of society and human reason, is more a transgression than an argument, as the nameless hero is aware. Notes from Underground gives voice to the double-mindedness, at once guilty and defiant, of the conscious transgressor. But the man from underground transgresses only inwardly, philosophically, for the sake of a truth that he clings to although he cannot name it, knowing that the limits he is violating are false in any case, even if he can never find the “something different” that is better than his underground.

In Crime and Punishment, published two years later, the hero is an actual transgressor—the “theoretician-murderer” Raskolnikov. And the relations between the viewer, the spectacle of the world, and this “something new” or “something different” (betrayed by the demiurge's laughter), essentially the same in Notes from Underground and in the “vision on the Neva, ” appear once again. Indeed, there is a passage in part two of Crime and Punishment that almost exactly parallels the moment Dostoevsky had described in Petersburg Visions. The day after he commits the murder, Raskolnikov is crossing a bridge over the Neva and stops to gaze at the city:

He stood and looked long and intently into the distance; this place was especially familiar to him. While he was attending the university, he often used to stop, mostly on his way home, at precisely this spot (he had done it perhaps a hundred times), and gaze intently at the indeed splendid panorama, and to be surprised almost every time by a certain unclear and unresolved impression. An inexplicable chill always breathed on him from this splendid panorama; for him the magnificent picture was filled with a mute and deaf spirit... He marveled each time at this gloomy and mysterious impression, and, mistrusting himself, put off the unriddling of it to some future time. Now suddenly he abruptly recalled these former questions and perplexities, and it seemed no accident to him that he should recall them now.

The loud laughter has here become a chill breath, the demiurge a “mute and deaf spirit”—the riddle remains, but the tonality has darkened considerably. Raskolnikov received this impression many times; it does not come as the result of his crime; on the contrary, he recalls it now as if his act were somehow the first step in its unriddling. Crime and Punishment is a highly unusual mystery novel: the most mystified character in it is the murderer himself.

We know a good deal about the genesis of the novel from Dostoevsky's letters and notebooks. When he went abroad in July 1865, he had plans in mind for two separate works—one, a long novel to be called The Drunkards, dealing with “the current problem of drunkenness, ” as he wrote when proposing it to the editor of Fatherland Notes (who turned it down); the other, “the psychological account of a crime, ” an idea that had first come to him in prison fifteen years earlier. He hoped to finish The Drunkards quickly, but instead got carried away by the other story. In September 1865 he was able to send a detailed outline of it to Mikhail Katkov, editor of the Russian Herald. Originally he conceived of it as a short work, written in the first person—the confession of the criminal himself. The murderer, as he wrote to Katkov, would be “an intellectually developed young man who even has good inclinations” and who kills “under the influence of some of those strange, 'incomplete' ideas which go floating about in the air. . . ” In other words, the tale was to be a further exploration of the consequences of Russian radical ideology, particularly the ideology of the so-called Nihilists who emerged in the mid-1860s. In form it would have been similar to Notes from Underground. This was the version that Dostoevsky eventually burned.

In its new form, the novel retained the general features of the hero as he had outlined them for Katkov, but the material was greatly expanded, and it was no longer cast as a confession. By chance, close to the beginning of Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov makes the acquaintance of a certain Semyon Zakharovich Marmeladov. The story of this unemployed official, his consumptive wife Katerina Iva-novna, and their family came to the novel from the abandoned pages of The Drunkards; the organic link between the two initially unrelated works would be Marmeladov's daughter Sonya. Just after this meeting, Raskolnikov receives a long letter from his mother, introducing yet another story involving his sister, Dunya, the man of affairs Luzhin, and the sinister but charming Svidrigailov. There were now three plots instead of one; and we begin to see something of Dostoevsky's method of composition in this juxtaposition—within an extremely foreshortened narrative time—of large scale, self-dramatizing speakers. Part one ends with the murder itself but is already rich in possibilities for future encounters, exchanges, conflicts.

Important questions remained unresolved in Dostoevsky's mind when the first part of the novel appeared in the January 1866 issue of the Russian Herald. His notebook for February shows him still working out Sonya's role and, more significantly, Raskolnikov's real motive for his crime. In some sketches, he was to be a much more articulate spokesman for the Nihilists, who combined “rational egoism” with a view of themselves as benefactors of mankind. This idea was supplanted by the Napoleonic figure of the “strong individual” who acts for the sake of his own power. In one version, Raskolnikov was to end with a vision of Christ and a heroic deed of self-sacrifice and reconciliation; in the other, his rebellion would become truly demonic, and he would finally shoot himself. Dostoevsky eventually decided against both outcomes, and Raskolnikov's motives were left unresolved, to the great advantage of the novel. And to Sonya, whom he had thought of making a more articulate opponent of Raskolnikov's idea, who would confront him sharply and even write him letters “possessing high artistic qualities, ” he finally gave only the almost mute witness of example. Instead of the vision of Christ, there is her reading of the Gospel account of the raising of Lazarus in part four. The rational egoism goes mostly to the miserly Luzhin, the bullet to Svidrigailov.

As the material of the novel grew into its new form, emphasis shifted away from Dostoevsky's original idea of “the psychological account of a crime” and from his ongoing polemics with the Nihilists. The point-edness of Notes from Underground had yielded to an inclusive, expanding image of the world caught in a moment of time—a world of rather down-to-earth and yet at the same time fantastic tradesmen, tavern keepers, house painters, money-lenders, the easily amused servant Nastasya, the open-palmed policeman Zamyotov, the fanatic little radical Lebezyatnikov, the explosive Lieutenant Gunpowder. Dostoevsky's art gives even the most minor characters a spectacular presence, and they are constantly upstaging each other.

Yet Crime and Punishment is still the most singly focused of Dostoevsky's later novels. Its characters and events all converge on the enigma of Raskolnikov. He appears in thirty-seven of the novel's forty scenes, and we are allowed entry only into his consciousness and, more briefly, Svidrigailov's. On the other hand, the plane of happening is considerably enlarged; or, rather, the limits of accountable reality, the limits of man-in-nature, fall away. Dreams, waking visions, even ghosts, are as much a part of this world as are the buildings, bridges, and canals of Petersburg; the line dividing the outer from the inner, the solid from the fantasmagorical, wavers. This is a fluid world, full of coincidences, chance but fatal meetings, crucial words accidentally overheard, embodied in the communicating streets and squares, the adjoining rooms and apartments of the city. Petersburg is not a backdrop for the events Dostoevsky narrates, but a constant participant in them, and a mirror of Raskolnikov's soul. The enigma of the city and the enigma of the hero are one.

This is not to say that Raskolnikov is a neurotic who cannot keep from projecting his inner states upon the world. The truth is that we all see as we feel, or, better, that our vision is always complex, always moral, always spiritual: we “see” beauty and ugliness, we “see” good and evil. The struggle to empty himself of such complexities leads to the terrible splits and estrangements in Raskolnikov. His name comes from the word raskolnik, meaning “schismatic, ” one who has split away from the body of the Church; but he is also divided against himself. He is, as the critic Konstantin Mochulsky wrote, “a demon embodied in a humanist. ” Reason, in which he trusts, leads him to murder, yet reason cannot provide him with an axe when he needs one. Chance does that, and chance continues to abet him and to mock him. His transgression, his step over (the Russian word for “crime” means literally “over-stepping”), confronts him with dimensions of the world and of himself that he did not anticipate and cannot understand. He had been studying law at the university, but it is a representative of the law, that most unlikely and fascinating of investigators, Porfiry Petrovich, who says to him:

It must be observed that the general case, the one to which all legal forms and rules are suited, and on the basis of which they are all worked out and written down in the books, simply does not exist, for the very reason that every case, let's say, for instance, every crime, as soon as it actually occurs, turns at once into a completely particular case, sir; and sometimes, just think, really completely unlike all the previous ones, sir.

This may be taken to apply to the laws of reason and nature as well. The world Raskolnikov begins to discover when he leaves his “closet” and goes to commit his rational crime does not stand upon any laws, but, again, on “something different. ” It is the same Porfiry Petrovich who tells him, near the end of the novel, that he still has many years ahead of him, and that he should “embrace suffering” and live: “Don't be too clever about it, just give yourself directly to life, without reasoning. ” But there is perhaps no scene in all of Dostoevsky more perfectly ambiguous than this one.

Ambiguity is not incidental to Dostoevsky's vision. It is most obvious here in the comical, even farcical, scandals and absurdities surrounding the gruesome death of Marmeladov and the memorial meal following his funeral. But comical incidents abound throughout the novel. Even the central story of Raskolnikov and his struggle with “fate” keeps verging on comedy. Then, too, much of the action has an oddly theatrical quality, and Dostoevsky often uses stage terminology for setting scenes (he refers a number of times to “the public, ” so unexpectedly that earlier translators have paraphrased the term away). Are these real people, or actors in some sort of show? It is essential to Dostoevsky's art that the “view” is constantly shifting and may drop into horror or rise into laughter at any moment. Yet this ambiguity does not make light of suffering. On the contrary, what writer has ever revealed it so nakedly? And that precisely because he does not allow us our usual rational or sentimental evasions. Suffering is unmitigated in Crime and Punishment; there is no answer to it; there is no law of suffering. Ambiguity touches its essence but not its reality.

Evil is the final ambiguity. Reason cannot accept it; rationalizing ideologies deny its existence. No one calls it by name, and this silence weighs heavily on the novel, because the world of Crime and Punishment is saturated with evil, so much so that it becomes palpable. It is the dense element through which Raskolnikov moves without recognition. The vision of evil, which he lacks, seems to be granted in the end to Svidrigailov. The action in the second to last chapter of the novel is literally and metaphysically drenched—with a torrential downpour, with Svidrigailov's fear of water, with his dreams of the flooding of the Neva, the drowned girl, the wet child he tries to help. The “natural man, ” the man of instinct and appetite, thinks he can reach the point at which evil turns into innocence, but what is possible for a stone or a tiger is not possible for a human being. Svidrigailov is soaked through with what Simone Weil described as “the monotony of evil: never anything new, everything here is equivalent. Never anything real, everything here is imaginary. It is because of this monotony that quantity plays so great a part. . . Condemned to a false infinity. This is hell itself. ” Svidrigailov cannot get out of it. Raskolnikov, though he is full of lies and self-deceptions, may still “lie his way to the truth, ” as his friend Razumikhin puts it. There is movement in his soul. There is none in Svidrigailov's, for all his winning honesty.

Only one “event” answers to the overwhelming presence of evil in the novel. This is the raising of Lazarus. And, of course, it is only quoted, only read into the text by Sonya. Reason cannot accept this either. In what sort of world can Lazarus be raised from the dead? Such an event violates all the laws of reason and nature. It is the quintessential “particular case. ” Raskolnikov the schismatic, the man of reason, the would-be “strong individual, ” stands between Sonya and Svidrigailov and cannot make up his mind. Even at the end his pride rises up against this world that he thinks has defeated him by means of some blind mechanism. But the part of him which is not bound by reason, and from which he is so terribly separated, has begun to work against his will. He spends the night in the same drenching rainstorm as Svidrigailov, yet he cannot resolve to take the same way out. He turns to Sonya, and with painfully slow steps begins to move toward “a new, hitherto completely unknown reality. ” There Dostoevsky leaves him.

And here we shall leave the reader of this foreword, with everything still to be said—for the life of a novel is not in the conception but in the performance, which eludes summary. In every cadence, every tone, the realization of every character and scene of this densely composed “work of poetry, ” Dostoevsky shows his mastery. If our translation has managed to follow him attentively enough, it will be the best commentary.

—Richard Pevear

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