Crime and Punishment Read Online Free PDF

notebook – I’ll show it to you one day), then a whole novella (I begged him to let me copy it out for him), and you should have seen how we prayed for them to be accepted . . . They weren’t!’
    Frustrated literary ambition is a powerful motif in
Crime and Punishment
, displayed in one form or another by several characters across society, especially Raskolnikov’s adversaries in the police and civil service. In particular, the investigator Porfiry Petrovich, who engages Raskolnikov in repeated, chapter-long verbal jousts, is a literary artist and actor manqué, who, like Dostoyevsky himself, reveres the comic genius of Gogol, citing liberally from his works. In Porfiry’s extraordinary rhetoric we see the interweaving of literary and legal discourse that was such a feature of the Russian judicial system before and after the legal reforms of 1864 , and which Dostoyevsky criticized in his journalism for distracting from the true purpose of the law: to discover the truth. 13 A graduate from the prestigious Imperial School of Jurisprudence, which produced an unusual quantity of eminent writers as well as lawyers, Porfiry imbues his words with Gogolian slipperiness. 14
    The saturation of Russian society in texts, furthermore, not only relates to modern, secular literature. Sonya used to meet with one of Raskolnikov’s victims to read from the Bible together, and later she will read out a passage to the murderer himself about the raising of Lazarus. Indeed, in
Crime and Punishment
all believers are fervent readers. Mikolka, the country lad who first confesses to Raskolnikov’s crime, ‘kept reading the old, “true” books and read himself silly’. The fact that Mikolka is introduced by Porfiry to Raskolnikov as a
raskolnik
 – an adherent of the ‘Old Belief’, which broke off from the official Orthodox Church in the seventeenth century – marks him out as one of the protagonist’s many alter egos in the novel, just as his reading habits suggest that Raskolnikov, too, ‘read himself silly’. This connection is further enriched if we bear in mind that the
raskolniki
were a prime target of the propaganda envisioned by the (proto-Communist) revolutionary faction into which Dostoyevsky himself was drawn in the late 1840 s. The revolution this secret society had in mind was decidedly textual. With the aid of an illegal hand press, assembled shortly before the arrest of the participants in the group, they set about composing revolutionary texts in the language and stylistic register (including the use of Old Church Slavonic) that serfs and ‘particularly, perhaps, the
raskolniki
’ would understand. 15
    As Porfiry goes on to say however:
    â€˜Mikolka’s not our man! What we’ve got here, sir, is a fantastical, dark deed, a modern deed, a deed of our time, when the heart of man has clouded over; when there’s talk of “renewal” through bloodshed; when people preach about anything and everything from a position of comfort. What we have here are bookish dreams, sir, a heart stirred up by theories [...]’
    The investigation leads (as the reader knows from the start) straight back to Raskolnikov, the modern man, who stands, from our twenty-first-century perspective, like a bridge between the advent of Russian Christianity a thousand years before, bringing with it books and an alphabet, and the no-less literary zeal of Russian Communism. ‘Bookish dreams’ bore terrible fruit in Soviet Russia, whose leaders (Lenin, Stalin, Brezhnev) doubled as prolific authors and fastidious literary critics, and whose drastic changes in policy could be ‘justified’ by reference to one or another line in one or another of the great books in the Chernyshevskian-Marxist-Leninist canon. As the one-time Bolshevik Victor Serge wrote in Moscow in 1933 , ‘No real intellectual inquiry is permitted in any sphere.