The Notebooks for Crime and Punishment (1866)

Whenever I read an amazing finished work like Crime and Punishment, I often imagine that the book, in all it’s brilliance, just plopped into Dostoevsky’s head, ready made.  I was reassured to find in his working notebooks that this was not the case.  He took many of the characters, situations, and stylistic choices through a halting, crooked path of trial and error before arriving at the masterpiece.  Only late in the process did some of the main characters emerge and did the ending take a clear direction.  Seeing this takes some pressure off my own writing—it gives me permission to struggle without feeling hopelessly inept.  If the Big D didn’t have to be a one-draft-wonder, neither do I.  

Yet with all the conundrums this novel presented him, he still did find a way, by the end, to make effective choices.  Reading the notebooks gave me a front-row seat to the development of those choices.

One of Dostoevsky’s most open struggles in the notebooks is with point of view.  Many of the plans in the notebooks are narrated by the main character, Raskolnikov, but the finished novel is by an semi-omniscient, invisible being who keeps always close to him.  This decision cost Dostoevsky much mental sweat.

It makes sense that Dostoevsky went into the project with I-form narration in mind.  He had recently written Notes from Underground in first person, to great success.  But he soon found that the needs of his new book were causing friction with this style.  In parsing this out, Dostoevsky gives insight into the advantages of each point of view.

Compared to Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment has lots of action.  By action, I mean people doing stuff that is integral to the story.  All of this action needs to be clearly communicated to the reader, and this is more easily done in third person.  If I’m questioning everything that the narrator is saying, and if the narrator is telling me a lot of bare facts about action, then I won’t be able to have much of a coherent experience.  

The third-person narrator is more easily assumed by the reader to be infallible.  In other words, if the narrator says something happened, I can trust that it happened.  This, obviously, wouldn’t be the case if Raskolnikov is narrating, because he spends much of the book in either self-deception or delirium.  

I wonder if this is not just the case with Raskolnikov, but if there is something inherent in I-narration that begs for irony.  The “I” is a subjective perspective, so when a story is written from that perspective, the reader naturally wants to question it.  It is, so to speak, only one person’s perspective.  The “I” suggests fallibility.  

Perhaps this is why Dostoevsky notes that for Crime and Punishment, the confessional I-form “in parts will not be chaste.”  I tend to think of unchaste thought as foggy and self-deceptive.  If Raskolnikov tells this story, the truth of the matter will be so obscured that the reader will be left confused and the effect of the novel will be more false than true.  A novel must always promote that which is true, and so for each story, a narrative technique must be found that helps communicate truth most profoundly.  A novel must find a way to capture subjective experience without swamping all sense of reality with it.  

This is the case even if by “unchaste” Dostoevsky only means plain old lewdness.  Lewdness has a tendency to swamp reality with the subjective.  For example, say Raskolnikov was having lewd thoughts about Sonia.  To capture these thoughts as he was having them would be to swamp the reality of Sonia with the way Raskolnikov’s lust was distorting her.  If the reader had no access to Sonia beyond Raskolnikov’s objectifying of her, any clear sense of a real Sonia would be lost to the reader.

This leads to another reason why Dostoevsky decided third person was best for this novel.  He tells himself to “narrate only what is necessary.”  In other words, he wishes to minimize narrator commentary.  This is a surprising choice in light of Dostoevsky’s previous success.  Notes from Underground is loaded with narrative commentary—it is a great strength of the book.  But here Dostoevsky has decided to intentionally minimize what he has previously shown to be his wheelhouse because it gets in the way of the goals of his current project.  This seems to go against the adage, “play to your strengths.”  

Why does he, then?  He spends a lot of time in the notebooks grappling with this issue.  He divides narration into two categories: “facts” and “reflections.”  I like to think of these two aspects of narration as they are heard on sports TV.  There are often two narrators: the play-by-play announcer and the color commentator.  The play-by-play announcer gives us the facts of what is physically happening in the game.  The advantage (from a story perspective) to play-by-play is that it is immersive.  It has a sense of immediacy that allows me to get lost in the game.  Getting lost in the game is key to any effective narrative.  This may be why sports fans can get annoyed with over-active color commentators—they disrupt the game.

The “game” in Crime and Punishment is drama.  Drama is most immersive when it has few intrusions from the more retrospective color commentator.  Perhaps this is why Dostoevsky keeps making notes to himself to minimize reflections.  He is trying to make space for his readers to experience the drama.

So if facts are more immersive than reflections, why have any reflections?  Why not write a book that’s only facts?  Crime and Punishment is not this.  In sports, color commentators serve a purpose—context.  This announcer can give us behind-the-scenes information that makes the play-by-play more meaningful.  For example, if a linebacker runs an interception, learning that player’s backstory—that he had spent is career as a benchwarmer—makes the interception more significant.  The color commentator is able to provide a wider vantage than the immediate.

Reflective narration gives us the context of thoughts.  Much of the significance of Crime and Punishment happens within Raskolnikov, so to be deprived of his thoughts would be to lose much of the story’s meaning.  Much of the art of narrative comes from deciding when to give facts and when reflections.  What makes Crime and Punishment meaningful is Raskolnikov’s subjective experience.

Dostoevsky also mentions another problem with using first person for this project: “It will be difficult to imagine why it was written.”  Why would Raskolnikov bother to write all this incriminating information down?  In the notes, Dostoevsky toys with Raskolnikov keeping a journal and hiding it in a window ledge, but this seems absurd in light of Raskolnikov’s extreme paranoia.  For what reason would he run such a risk?

When a story is written in first person, a reader naturally wonders: at what point did the guy communicate all these thoughts?  To report them as they’re happening, like a play-by-play announcer, often feels goofy (unless Faulkner’s doing it).  Who would narrate everything they’re doing?  “I go to the kitchen, and I make a sandwich” feels affectatious.  The I-form is inherently reflective.  So the question then becomes, reflective from which point?  This is problematic if the narrator changes significantly over the course of the story.  The more the story feels the property of an older, wiser “I,” the less sense of immediate, subjective experience the reader will be able to have.

To a certain extent, this is also true of third person narration.  Storytelling is perhaps inherently a retrospective act, yet the story will likely fail to engage the reader without immediacy.  This means there’s always a rift within the telling—some narration coming from the moment and some reflecting on the moment.  Artfully navigating this rift is one of the great challenges of novel writing.

Questions of how to narrate the novel weren’t the only issues Dostoevsky had to struggle through.  He was also often unsure of the identity of the characters.  Many of them morphed as the notes evolved.  This is particularly true of Sonya.  She started out as a typically Dostoevksian character—one full of contradictions.  She was both good and bad.  But as the notes progressed, her badness fell away.  Here is a particularly telling note: Sonya “answers him modestly and proudly.”  Dostoevsky had written that she answered “modestly and proudly,” but then crossed out “proudly.”  

This is a remarkable moment in Dostoevsky’s development as a writer.  Up until this time, he hasn’t really written any good characters (although, one could argue that Notes from Underground’s Liza and The Gambler’s Polina were forerunners to Sonya, but they haven’t her strength).  Most of his characters were full of paradoxes and normally veered toward being darker than not.  The main exceptions to this were children, whose personalities were still undeveloped.  Thus Sonya seems to represent a shift in Dostoevsky’s thought.  Telling of this shift is another note: 

“How disgusting people are!”

“But there are good ones, too!”

I get the impression that the first line was spoken by Raskolnikov and the second by Sonya.  Sonya emerges a voice for the goodness in people. 

The creation of a new character type opens up possibilities for Dostoevsky.  He notes that Raskolnikov would go to Sonya “as if to Providence.”  Sonya, in her goodness, starts functioning  to Raskolnikov as a sort of icon, a physical surrogate for God.  This is a breakthrough for Dostoevsky.  After experimenting with romanticism in his younger years, he committed himself to literary realism.  Perhaps he found that he could get closer to exploring the human enigma in this mode.  The problem with literary realism, though, is that it limits itself to the material world.  This is a hinderance to investigating the human enigma because it forbids exploration of the spiritual side of humanity.  Setting up a character as a spiritual surrogate solves this problem.  Sonya, while just another human character and not God, is able to interact with Raskolnikov on a spiritual level because of what she represents to him.  It’s not a coincidence that not only is Crime and Punishment Dostoevsky’s first novel with a character like this, it’s also his first novel that significantly and overtly deals with the spiritual. 

His first but not his last.  He goes on to develop this scene where a character goes to another “as if to Providence” in his later novels—with Tikhon in Demons and Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov.  

This is characteristic of Dostoevsky.  With each artistic breakthrough, he is never content to merely repeat it, but he keeps pressing forward.  This means that no matter how high he climbs, he’s always willing to struggle and risk failure.