Crime and Punishment Read Online Free

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Razumikhin mistakes him for, and he is certainly no leader of men; perhaps he is just a belated Romantic, framing his outdated, somewhat comical delusions in the language of his day?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.
    Nor is it a place for a ‘player’ (
igrok
), to give the literal translation of the Russian word for ‘gambler’. For Raskolnikov – like Pushkin’s Hermann in ‘The Queen of Spades’ ( 1834 ), and like Dostoyevsky himself – is obsessed by the mirage of a winning formula, and it should be no surprise that the short novel for which Dostoyevsky had to break off work on
Crime and Punishment
bears the title
Igrok
(
The Gambler
). Produced to fulfil his contract with Stellovsky, it was dictated to a young stenographer, Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina, and completed in less than four weeks. 8 But if
The Gambler
is set in a Wiesbaden-esque ‘Roulettenburg’, where rich and poor throw caution to the winds,
Crime and Punishment
is set in St Petersburg, where numbers are calculated coldly and old pawnbrokers make sure to take their interest in advance. In such a city, murder, too, must be ‘premeditated and abstract’, and Raskolnikov’s first crime, however risky, is both those things; he even counts the steps from his room to the home of his victim. Yet when the crime is actually set in motion he is barely aware of what he is doing: ‘As if a scrap of his clothing