Crime and Punishment Read Online Free PDF Page A

self-quotation and misquotation. The apparently simple line of Raskolnikov’s destiny – crime, then punishment – is interwoven with hints about the complicit and complicating role of literature itself.
    This self-reflexivity is not just a matter of the belatedness and imitativeness already discussed, the possibility that Raskolnikov, like Pushkin’s Onegin, might be a ‘parody’ of earlier bookish types and ideas. Nor can it be fully contained by Mikhail Bakhtin’s pioneering analysis of the ‘polyphony’ of Dostoyevsky’s fiction, the interpenetration of characters’ thoughts and speech with each other’s words and consciousness, as constantly exhibited by Raskolnikov’s monologues, which are, in fact, dialogues with the words of others. 11 Rather, it is about the immersion of an entire society in texts and in literary dreams, and the baneful consequences for Raskolnikov in particular.
    Raskolnikov has blood on his socks and ink on his fingers. He prepares for his crime not only by extensive reading, but also, we later learn, by attempting his first literary debut – a scholarly article with the same theme as the drama in which he plays the starring role. Published without his knowledge, this article is shown to him much later by his proud mother, whereupon, despite the grotesque incongruity with his current situation, he experiences ‘that strange and caustically sweet sensation which every author feels on seeing himself published for the first time, especially at only twenty-three years of age’. Raskolnikov’s achievements as an author may be modest, but his readerly habits are unshakeable. After committing his murders he visits a tavern to hunt through a pile of recent newspapers for textual evidence of his crime, which itself evokes dozens of other crimes from Russia and Europe widely reported in the Russian press in the 186 0s – and especially in Dostoyevsky’s own journal
Time
(
Vremya
). 12 The trail of his crime is not only physical, but also (and much more elusively) textual, keeping Dostoyevsky scholars busy for many decades to come.
    Raskolnikov is himself a textual sleuth, an inveterate literary critic. Before and after his crime he shows an uncommon analytical interest in written communications, which are shared with the reader in their entirety: a ten-page letter from his mother, a much curter missive from his sister’s odious suitor. He reads between the lines (thereby encouraging us, as readers, to do the same) and judges character by style, surprising those around him by picking on apparently trivial choices of words and phrase at moments when far weightier issues seem to be at stake. For Raskolnikov, life is a text to be understood, and even, at times, a text that has already been written. At the novel’s end he imagines what the future has in store for him and asks himself, ‘So why live? Why? Why am I going there now, when I know myself that this is exactly how it will be, as it is writ?’
    In his bookishness, as in his other characteristics, Raskolnikov is the type of eccentric who, at the deepest level, is most exemplary of his society (a paradox Dostoyevsky explicitly formulated in his prologue to his last novel,
The Brothers Karamazov
). Subtly, insistently, we are encouraged to see that Raskolnikov’s addiction to the written word is a symptom of a general, albeit less pathological condition that eddies out from the hero to encompass his family and the country at large. One might not want to make too much of the fact that Raskolnikov’s patronymic – Romanovich – etymologically suggests not just ‘son of Roman’ (a perfectly common name), but also ‘son of the novel’, were it not for Raskolnikov’s mother telling us that his father ‘when he was still alive, twice tried sending work to the journals: first some poems (I still have the