Crime and Punishment (1866)

Crime and Punishment is one of the most powerful reading experiences I’ve ever had. It hits me in a deeper way than most novels do. Why? I can’t answer that fully, but I think a factor that may be contributing to this soul-level experience has to do with the novel’s sense of possibility.  

The Petersburg of Crime and Punishment is a place where heaven and hell stand side-by-side, demanding that a choice must be made between them.  In the world of this novel, heaven is connection, hell is separation.

After Raskolnikov, the novel’s hero, commits murder, Svidrigailov tells Sonya that “there are only two paths open” to him: suicide or surrender.  That this phrase is spoken between these two characters is fitting because they are the clearest representatives of each path.  Svidrigailov’s life is characterized by violence, deception, rape, and murder—all acts of separation.  He’s a man from whom children (who, in the novel, instinctively seek connection) flee in horror.  His story ends in suicide—the ultimate act of separation.

Sonya is characterized by a generous commitment to others.  She gives so freely that she even funds her father’s drinking, and she gives so completely that she even sells her body.  Raskolnikov seeks her out as his only confidant, which is a significant step for him toward connection, and she is so adamant that he give himself up to both civil and divine authority that by the end, going to her becomes for Raskolnikov the same as confessing to all.  Children gather around her, and her story ends with love and reconciliation.

Raskolnikov is desperate to prove that there are not only two paths open to him.  He wants to believe in a third option, which he describes as becoming like Napoleon. Raskolnikov can’t bear the thought of being merely like everyone else.  He must have some sort of superpower that separates him.  His mother also needs him to be exceptional.  When he gets an article published, she convinces herself that he’s the first scholar in Russia.  When she learns that he’s an ordinary criminal, she clamps down so hard onto denial that she has a psychotic break.  

At the heart of Raskolnikov’s Napoleonic idea is his desire to separate from others enough to be exceptional, but not so much that he can no longer live among them.  He wants, by strength of will, to forge for himself a life built on the contradiction of being both connected and separated.  

In the very first sentence of the book, I learn that Raskolnikov is “in two minds.”  These two minds drive the tension of the novel.  In Part One, a single question consumes both Raskolnikov and me: will he murder?  

Each event in this section pushes him either toward or away from the murder.  After he visits Alyona Ivanovna, his intended victim, he is so disgusted by the thought of murder that it drives him to seek out a human connection, which leads him to meet Marmeladov and to generously help his family.  But then he receives a letter from his mother intimating that Dunya is going to marry an unworthy man to help secure Raskolnikov’s career.  This letter humiliates him, which makes him want to prove himself capable at all costs.

He again moves toward the murder until he encounters a teenage girl who has been exploited and made drunk and who is being pursued by a predator.  This girl makes a deep, unconscious impression on Raskolnikov.  He soon falls asleep, and in a dream, recalls seeing, as a child, an old mare beaten to death.  He then prays and renounces the murder.  But when he overhears that Alyona Ivanovna, the woman he wishes to murder, will definitely be alone the next day, he’s compelled to go through with it because he attaches superstitious value to this coincidence, as if he wishes to be aided by demonic power.  

This section is characterized by a remarkable sense of possibility.  He might go through with the murder, he might not.  But this possibility is complicated by the murkiness of Raskolnikov’s agency.  Marmeladov, when describing his alcoholism to Raskolnikov, says, “Do you really understand what that means, to have nowhere left to go?”  In this statement, Marmeladov articulates his despair in the face of being at the mercy of forces larger than himself.  Raskolnikov seems to resonate with this experience.  He repeatedly describes himself on the way to the murder as one sentenced to death.  When he rings his victim’s doorbell, “he couldn’t resist,” and while waiting for her to answer, “there were moments when his mind seemed to go dark, and as for his body, he could barely feel it.”  When he swings the axe onto her head, he does it “almost effortlessly, almost mechanically . . . as if he were not even using his strength.”  In short, he describes the murder as a sort of compulsion.  Later on, he reveals that he knew ahead of time that the murder would not achieve what he wanted out of it, yet he bafflingly did it anyway.

This strange mix of possibility and compulsion contributes to the novel’s quality of soul-resonance.  Possibility isn’t meaningful without consequences.  A consequence is when something significant is lost irrevocably.  But irrevocable loss implies loss of possibility.  Thus, for a situation to have possibility, it must have a point of no return at which a level of possibility is lost.

Whenever I drive my car, I risk the possibility of crashing and losing my legs.  But if I lose my legs, then jump-roping, which was once possible for me, is no longer possible.  The adventure of living is characterized by an interplay of possibility and limitation.  Choice today is tomorrow’s fate.

When Raskolnikov murders, he makes a real choice, one with horrific consequences on every level of his being, consequences that cannot be undone.  But what his crucial choice is and when it’s made is unclear, which is one of the most disturbing parts about it.  The murder itself might not have been the crucial choice, but only a consequence of it.  Sonya, when she observes this, describes it as: “You walked away from God and God struck you and gave you away to the devil!”  

Parts Two through Six revolve around a different question: will Raskolnikov confess?  In other words, will he follow Svidrigailov to the end of his path, or Sonya to the end of hers?  After the murder, he has a strong impulse to confess.  When he’s summoned to the police station, he’s almost determined to surrender.  But when he overhears that the police are on his trail, he decides not to.  He overrides his impulse because the thought of being chased stokes his sense of competition and makes him want to outsmart them and to not seem a fool.  

But he still can’t manage to commit.  He walks distractedly on a bridge over the Neva river and almost gets run over by a coach.  Many deride him for it, but a sympathetic woman gives him a coin.  He turns and sees a beautiful panorama across the river.  He’d often admired this scene before he became obsessed with the murder.  Seeing the view again reminds him of what life had been like before.  This makes the consequences of his new path hit him harder.  He feels cut off from that old life when he was a part of the world.  He threw the woman’s coin into the river, and in so doing “felt as if he’d taken a pair of scissors and cut himself off from everyone and everything, there and then.”  Thus he moves away from confessing.  

But then, not long after, Marmeladov does get trampled by a coach and dies.  That they were both so mentally removed as to be in the way of coaches makes Raskolnikov identify with Marmeladov.  He, too, is a financial burden on his family.  He, too, has a family member that is selling herself to support him.  Raskolnikov gives all the money he has to the family for the funeral.  This gush of generosity has an interesting effect on him—he is “filled by a new, boundless sensation of life surging over him suddenly in all its strength.”  When afterward, the child Polenka follows him, kisses him, and says she loves him, he feels a sense of belonging.  He renounces suicide, which he had been seriously considering only a little while before.  But he still can’t admit that, in order to stay alive, he needs the connection that can only be achieved by confession.  Buoyed by his invigorating experience, he convinces himself that there still may yet be a third path for him.  

This resolution to be strong enough to carve a life out for himself while maintaining his murderous secret is soon challenged by his conference with his mother and his sister.  He can’t be at ease with them.  He loves them, but he can’t be sure they truly accept and love him because they don’t know about his secret.  He feels that the only way he can continue to live on this third path is to cut himself off from his family.  

Raskolnikov’s hope of having life while keeping his secret is further threatened by meeting Svidrigailov.  This man is someone who has gotten away with murder and has not yet killed himself, but he is in every way repulsive.  He’s also a serious threat to Raskolnikov’s sister, Dunya, whom Raskolnikov dearly loves.  Raskolnikov wants to find a way to live in the world with his secret without being a threat to Dunya and those like her.  Svidrigailov’s presence disturbs Raskolnikov—he seems to say, “This is what a life of overstepping morality leads to; if you continue to do so, what is going to prevent you from becoming as monstrous as me?”  

Raskolnikov can’t accept this.  He helps defend his sister against Luzhin, another threat to her, and again tries to cut himself off from his family.  

To further his willed third option, he goes to Sonya and tries to form a new family with her, to form a little circle of acceptance between themselves who have both overstepped morality (he through murder, she through prostitution).  He sees life with Sonya as a loving band of moral outsiders and as an alternative to becoming like Svidrigailov.  Sonya, too, has overstepped morality and has retained a sense of goodness.  But Sonya won’t have any of this project.  She makes clear that if she continues in prostitution, then becoming as depraved as Svidrigailov or committing suicide are real possibilities for her (again, that chilling sense of possible loss), and she reveals to Raskolnikov that the only way she has survived so far is through the hope of a miracle.  

Raskolnikov’s hope of surviving with his secret is further weakened by the presence of Lebezyatnikov, who believes that Sonya’s sexual deviance is a righteous protest against an unjust society.  This belief so absurdly jars with who Sonya is and what her actual sufferings are that it makes Raskolnikov’s parallel hope appear absurd by association.  After being around Lebezyatnikov, Raskolnikov starts to sense that his merry-band-of-outsiders plan is a fanciful sandcastle. 

Raskolnikov then confesses his crime to Sonya, at least half-hoping that he’ll be able to convince her that they can be exceptional together.  But her strange power has more and more ascendency over him—she takes an unshakable stance that he must give himself up.  

Svidrigailov overhears the confession, which he leverages to put Dunya in a situation where she could be raped.  Razumikhin tells Raskolnikov this, and Razumikhin threatens to give himself over to drink.  Again, the possibility of horrific consequence is gripping—I know that Razumikhin really could do this, which could cause great suffering for many people.  But key here is that Raskolnikov realizes that his plan to keep both his family and his secret safe by bequeathing his family to Razumikhin is crumbling.  He may now have to choose between Dunya’s safety and giving up his dream of being a moral exception.  

He decides to turn himself in, and in another moment of painful possibility, Dunya loves and accepts him as a murderer, while his mother can’t.  She loses her sanity trying to remain in denial.  

Raskolnikov’s surrender to the police is powerful because when he goes into the station to do it, he finds it too humiliating and goes to leave.  He almost doesn’t do it.  But he sees Sonya at the right moment and returns.

But even as Raskolnikov makes these choices, they still contain a compulsive element.  When he confesses to Sonya, he does so mechanically—a word that echoes the way he hit Alyona Ivanovna’s head.  When he was in his fever right after the murder, he also seems like he’s fighting against a compulsive need to confess.  And even when he does make his big decision to surrender, he does it, so to speak, off-camera.  The crucial moment of the novel is skipped over without narration.  Dostoevsky seems to recognize that such shifts are so mysterious that it would be wiser to not attempt to describe them.

This subtlety of experience blows the lid off the normal free-will versus determinism debate.  A fiction writer is different than a thinker.  A thinker’s medium is ideas, an artist’s, experiences.  Because of this, great fiction has the ability, according to George Pattison, “to articulate those complexities and obscurities of lived action and experience that reduce philosophy and theology to an embarrassed silence.”  

Ideas are dead things, they’re too rock-solid to breathe.  Art has the ability to reach toward a more living truth because it can cast a wider net than the linear, logical plod of propositions.  It speaks, as Joseph Conrad puts it, “to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives.”

Ideas, because of their monologic, linear nature, are also divisive.  Ideas can cause conflict and schism.  Because fiction does not appeal to, as Conrad says, “the changing wisdom of successive generations,” but speaks to the more universal aspects of ourselves like pity and wonder, pain and beauty.  Because of this, fiction can be a bridge of communication between peoples of radically different ideas.  Fiction at its best can bypass debate and resonate on a more primal level.