Crime and Punishment Read Online Free Page A

had caught in the wheel of a machine that was now pulling him in.’ This striking contradiction stands at the heart of the novel’s innermost concerns, developed over the five hundred-odd pages that remain after Raskolnikov’s murders.
    III
    The nature of these deepest concerns, however, is far from obvious. The unusual construction of
Crime and Punishment
, which gives so much weight to the aftermath of the crime (five parts out of six) and only an epilogue to the punishment itself, has led many to see the novel as less a whodunnit than a whydunnit. According to Joseph Frank: ‘
Crime and Punishment
is focused on the solution of an enigma: the mystery of Raskolnikov’s motivation.’ 9 We may wonder, though, whether this ‘enigma’ is not itself a decoy planted by this most devious of writers.
    Certainly, there is no shortage of motivating factors. Raskolnikov is desperately poor and desperately proud, unable to countenance his own humiliating situation; nor can he accept the humiliations endured and imposed by his mother and sister, who send him remittances and sacrifice everything to their ‘priceless Rodya’. His intended victim, the withered pawnbroker, is a ‘noxious louse’ who does nothing but harm; killing her would yield a net gain for humankind (the utilitarian argument). He dreams of being a good man in the future, a benefactor of humanity (the philanthropic argument). He dreams of being a great man, one of the select few, like Lycurgus, Muhammad or Napoleon, ‘criminals to a man’, whose evil deeds in the present will be forgotten by grateful generations in the future (the heroic argument).
    All of these motivations are valid; but equally, none of them is. Raskolnikov’s initial crime is both over- and under-motivated; mere ‘casuistry’, as he calls it himself. Not for nothing does he overhear another student telling an officer, over tea after a game of billiards, not only about the self-same pawnbroker, but about why her murder would be morally justified. The student expounds the logic of such a hypothetical crime persuasively and at great length, but the conversation ends in bathos:
    â€˜Here you are speaking and speechifying, but tell me: are you going to kill the old woman
yourself
, or aren’t you?’
    â€˜Of course not! I’m talking about justice . . . It’s not about me . . .’
    â€˜Well, as I see it, if you don’t dare do it yourself, there’s no justice to speak of! Let’s have another game!’
    This coincidence – brazen in its technical ‘naivety’ even by Dostoyevsky’s standards (unless, of course, Raskolnikov is imagining the entire conversation) – serves to make a powerful point, just before Raskolnikov finally turns words into deed. A ‘why’ can always be found for a crime; much more difficult to explain is the ‘how’: how an intention becomes reality, how theory is enfleshed, how abstract reasoning ends in a sensitive, compassionate man slipping in ‘sticky, warm blood’. What state of mind is needed for this to happen?
    Leo Tolstoy ( 1828–1910 ) responded to this quandary in his late essay ‘Why Do People Stupefy Themselves?’ ( 1890 ), where he sought to explain the state of mental automatism in which Raskolnikov carried out his crime. But Tolstoy, an aggressive teetotaller by this stage in his life, was surely exaggerating when he implies that the glass of beer Raskolnikov consumes at the end of the first chapter ‘silences the voice of conscience’. Raskolnikov’s utter passivity, which makes him succumb to ‘ideas in the air’ and to gamble everything on one desperate act, reaches back far further than the glass of beer, deeper even than the question of ‘conscience’. Nor can it be reduced to the verdict of insanity, as Raskolnikov himself is aware (even when others are not).