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an inner chaos and barbarism. In the Winter Notes ’ descriptions of the London brothels and gin-palaces, the gaslit, Poe-like streetscapes with their doomed inhabitants, we are given a foretaste of the street scenes in Crime and Punishment , which are presided over by the spirit of the Antichrist in the person of Svidrigailov. The evil of the ‘Crystal Palace’, the mass industrial society that breeds rootless anonymity and criminal mania, finds its counterpart in the cynical, alienated behaviour of Svidrigailov, to whom all things are possible and permissible, and who therefore suffers from total indifference and a total inability to engage with his own life, to decide what to do with it. Haunted by the ghost of his own wrecked humanity, he tortures, intimidates and murders, he toys with schemes of ballooning and Arctic exploration, of emigration to America (an echo of Balzac's Vautrin) and in the end he commits suicide, for want of any other solution to his boredom. In his conversations with Raskolnikov we hear the surging of this ocean of faithlessness and betrayal from afar as an unsteady scurrying of sudden changes of mood, the meanderings, perhaps, of some tormented political despot, of a Caesar, a Nero, a Napoleon. It is significant that in the early drafts of the novel, both Svidrigailov and Raskolnikov were intended to commit suicide; in the novel's final version, Raskolnikov survives his own evil genius.
    Above all, the portrayal of Raskolnikov's character concerns the theme and the problem of personality . What is under threat from bourgeois utilitarianism and radical socialism alike is the image of the human self, and its potential for change and transformation.What those ideologies deny to the personality is its freedom, which as Nicholas Berdyaev observed ‘is the way of suffering. It is always tempting to free man from suffering after robbing him of his freedom. Dostoyevsky is the defender of freedom. Consequently he exhorts man to take suffering upon himself as an inevitable consequence of freedom.’ In itself, freedom is neither good nor evil: it involves a choice of one or the other. Svidrigailov's freedom, the ‘liberty’ propounded by Western philosophy, political economy and socialist theory as an absolute good, is a false one – in it he reveals himself to be at the mercy of his own animal instincts: without God he is a slave to the impersonal forces of nature, and his personality shrivels and dies. Sonya, on the other hand, who has accepted the necessity and inevitability of suffering, exists in true freedom – she is equally aware of the possibilities for destruction and creation that exist around her, and would concur with Berdyaev's dictum that ‘the existence of evil is a proof of God's existence. If the world consisted solely and exclusively of goodness and justice, God would not be necessary, for then the world itself would be God. God exists because evil exists. And this means that God exists because freedom exists.’ It is towards this freedom that Raskolnikov makes his way through the pages of Crime and Punishment and the swirling alternations of night and day, dream and waking, timelessness and time. His dreams disclose to him the possibilities that hang in the balance: everything may be lost, as in the nightmare of the flogged horse, which stands for his own denied self, or everything may be gained, as in the fantasy of the Egyptian oasis, where he drinks the water of life:
    A caravan was resting, the camels were lying down peacefully; all around there were palm trees, an entire circle of them; everyone was eating their evening meal. He, however, kept drinking water, straight from the spring that flowed murmuring right by his side. It was so cool, and the water was so wonderfully, wonderfully cold and blue, hurrying over various-coloured stones, and sand that was so pure, with spangles of gold…
    Raskolnikov, far from being a madman or psychopathic outcast, is an image of