Crime and Punishment Read Online Free Page B

This passivity is a state of spiritual death and it is this that enables the crime. Dostoyevsky shows how a man who feels as if he is not alive and not truly capable of affecting reality will affect it for precisely that reason – and with catastrophic results. In his own estranged perception, not only is his sense of his own reality attenuated, so too is his sense of the reality of his fellow human beings, of the boundaries between separate lives. The eerie astonishment that overcomes Raskolnikov throughout his crime is the eeriness of a dead man meeting and muffling life.
    Where does this state of spiritual death come from, and why is this wretched man-child, Raskolnikov, buried alive in his youth? Here, perhaps, is the true ‘enigma’ to which Dostoyevsky applies himself in
Crime and Punishment
, both before and after the murders. In so doing, he scatters clues and red herrings to enlighten and confound us. Family pressures, societal pressures, illness, loss of faith: all of these possible explanations are deepened in the course of the novel, but also, at various times, ironized and presented as somehow dishonest. Psychoanalytic, religious, sociological and other interpretations all have much to offer us, but all are also limited, in the final analysis, by Dostoyevsky’s strategy of ambivalence in both literature and life. Here was a talented actor who could ask his interrogators what proof they had that he was on the side of the critic and not the author, when he read out Belinsky’s letter to Gogol, and who infused the words of his fictional characters with an exceptional ambiguity of meaning and intonation, employing humour less to lighten their arguments than to complicate them. The regrettable division of much Dostoyevsky scholarship (Soviet and post-Soviet) into secular and religious camps ignores the fact that in his fiction Dostoyevsky always thought in terms of
pro
and
contra
 – not just in his final masterpiece
The Brothers Karamazov
, with its legendary dramatization of atheism versus Orthodoxy, but equally in
Crime and Punishment.
The vector of Dostoyevsky’s intentions – to judge from his notebooks, letters and (arguably) the final pages of this novel – may have tended towards faith and self-abnegation, but the reality of his artistic achievement is very different. Some will be moved by Sonya’s selflessness, forgiveness and acceptance of God’s world, whatever its injustices, but many readers will be even more struck by the defiance shown by another woman, Katerina Ivanovna – a drunkard’s widow with three children on her hands, consumption and no money – towards the priest summoned against her will at her dying hour. The fire of self-abnegating faith and the fire of injured pride blaze with equal strength from the first chapter of the novel to the last, sometimes within the same hearts, and there is no guarantee which will burn the reader more fiercely.
    There is, perhaps, only one chain of clues whose validity seems beyond question in helping us approach the enigma mentioned above: the determinative role of literature itself in shaping Raskolnikov’s plight. Incongruous though it may sound in the context of a novel about murder, such a claim will come as less of a surprise to readers of Dostoyevsky’s earlier works, which are filled with writers or would-be writers, or of his journalism of the early 1860 s, with its recurrent concern with the effects of
knizhnost’
(or bookishness) on Russian society. 10
    IV
    Though never, to my knowledge, presented as such,
Crime and Punishment
is one of the most self-reflexive classics of pre-Modernist European literature, continuing – and developing – a line that stretches from Cervantes’s
Don Quixote
( 1605 ) to Pushkin’s
Eugene Onegin
( 1823–31 ). It is a novel about words and texts as much as deeds and life, and it is correspondingly saturated with