Crime and Punishment Read Online Free PDF

own biography, and to the transition from ‘coffin’ to regeneration experienced by Goryanchikov, the narrator of The House of the Dead . To reduce Sonya to a peripheral character in the way several Western critics have done, usually on philosophical or extra-literary grounds, is to deprive the novel of its central meaning. Sonya is Raskolnikov's good double, just as Svidrigailov is his evil one. Her criminality, which has been forced upon her by the demands of an unjust society, runs parallel to his, but shines with an innocence of which his does not partake. It is because of this that she is able to impart to him a will to believe and a will to live; it is also the reason for her spirituality and ‘remoteness’ – in a note, Dostoyevsky describes her as following Raskolnikov to Golgotha ‘at forty paces’. As she does so, she carries with her both Raskolnikov's past and childhood, and a vision of the man intowhich he must grow. She is child and mother, family and nation, ‘holy fool’ and angel. The scene in Part Four, Chapter IV , where she reads aloud the story of the raising of Lazarus to Raskolnikov, is the central point of the novel – a moment of almost unbearable earthly anguish, distress and tension that nevertheless points heavenward, like some Gothic arch.
    In the argument of ‘pro and contra’ (it is significant that this is the title Dostoyevsky later gave to Book V of The Brothers Karamazov , which contains Ivan's exposition of the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor), Svidrigailov plays the role of devil's advocate. Joseph Brodsky has likened Dostoyevsky's technique in this respect to the classical dictum that ‘before you come forth with your argument, however right or righteous you may feel, you have to list all the arguments of the opposite side’. As he worked at the development of Svidrigailov's personality, Dostoyevsky went to such pains to make it both humanly credible and demonic that some readers of the novel have been misled into thinking that Svidrigailov is a mouthpiece for Dostoyevsky's own views. The draft notes, however, make it clear that the character of Svidrigailov is based on that of ‘A–v’ (Aristov), one of the convicts described in The House of the Dead . Aristov, we may remember, is the young nobleman who was ‘the most revolting example of the degree to which a man can lower and debase himself and of the degree to which he is capable of killing every moral feeling in himself, without effort or remorse’, ‘a kind of lump of meat, with teeth and a stomach and an insatiable craving for the coarsest, most bestial physical pleasures’, ‘an example of what the physical side of man on its own can produce if unrestrained by any inner norms or set of laws’. In the character of Svidrigailov, Aristov's murderous cynicism is clothed in a mantle of ‘civilization’ – his speech is studded with Gallicisms and French quotations, with learned references and allusions to the latest fashionable ideas and events. Dostoyevsky's draft notebooks are crowded with jottings and sketches for this character, who in many ways represents the essence of criminality, and the mortal danger to which Raskolnikov has exposed himself by his abandonment of faith and surrender to self-will and the Zeitgeist . ‘Svidrigailovhas secret horrors behind him, horrors which he relates to nobody, but which he betrays by the facts of his behaviour and his convulsive, animal need to torture and kill. Coldly impassioned. A wild beast. A tiger.’ This predatory sensualist is intended by Dostoyevsky to show what can happen to a Russian who turns his back on his own country, his own roots and origins, as the writer believed the liberal ‘Westernizers’ had done, with Turgenev at their head. In Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (1863), Dostoyevsky had written, under the guise of a travel diary, an energetic attack on Western values and ‘civilization’, which he saw as a thin and artificial veneer masking