Crime and Punishment Read Online Free PDF Page B

Everything is reduced to a casuistry nourished on quotations.’ 16
    Demons
is usually seen as Dostoyevsky’s great prophetic novel, but
Crime and Punishment
, written half a dozen years earlier, is no less so. Analysing the sealed space of Raskolnikov’s mind, Dostoyevsky shows how theory estranges life, and casuistry – wisdom; how reality becomes a game, at once trivial and fatal, in the mind of the reader (writer, artist), the domain of a self-appointed king. In this space the invisible links that hold both the individual psyche and communal life in some sort of balance dissolve. Not just the arguably relative notions of good and evil, but more seemingly fixed dichotomies collapse: here, mere words become murderous deeds, almost without the thinker’s awareness; an aesthete becomes a ‘louse’; subject becomes object. ‘It was myself I killed,’ Raskolnikov later reflects. His murders are at once a suicide, his crime is his punishment. The word ‘Raskolnikov’ may suggest schism (
raskol
), but the point about his modernity, his novelty, is not that he is divided – in Dostoyevsky’s world everyone is divided – but that he divides himself, taking an axe to his own humanity.
    V
    And yet, although he commits suicide of the spirit, Raskolnikov does not commit suicide of the body; like Lazarus, he is given – or does he find? – new life. In a characteristic move that would be repeated in
The Brothers Karamazov
, Dostoyevsky argues against his novel’s own pessimism, writing a book against bookishness and setting ‘living life’ against the coffin-life of Raskolnikov. 17 This second narrative is the novel that eventually grew from the story pitched to Katkov. It is a journey that will be negotiated not through texts, but through people – the same people whose company Raskolnikov wants to avoid from the opening page. In them, opposites do not collapse, but are held in tension, as the novel’s gallery of physical and psychological portraits, riven with contradiction, often attests.
    In these encounters the worlds of theory and life finally intersect, and their meeting place is the workshop of human intentions. Dostoyevsky, indeed, is the great novelist of intentions. His characters are always defined, to an unusual degree, by the futures that they, like authors, construct for themselves, whether secretly or in public, and which, like Don Quixote, they try to coax into being through language. Now, on his second journey, Raskolnikov is brought face to face with the intentions (good, evil or confused) of other living beings, who represent not so much doubles for him, as is so often stated, but possibilities: different paths between which he must choose.
    It is at this intersection that the universal aspect of Raskolnikov’s fate emerges most forcefully, for it is only among people that his analysis of his own fateful intentions attains a degree of clarity and honesty. He tells Sonya:
    â€˜Try to understand: taking that same road again, I might never have repeated the murder. There was something else I needed to find out then, something else was nudging me along: what I needed to find out, and find out quickly, was whether I was a louse, like everyone else, or a human being? Could I take that step or couldn’t I? Would I dare [...]?’
    To the end, Raskolnikov’s ‘Satanic pride’ remains with him, but the reader can strip away the rhetoric and see that his fundamental motivation may have been little more than that of a child all along: could he ‘dare’? As Raskolnikov himself is painfully aware, this would make a mockery of any claims to lofty morality, but it also renders his story universal: a story of the passage from childhood to maturity. Etymologically, a crime in Russian is a ‘stepping-over’ (
pre-stuplenie
), a transgression. To feel alive and free, every person must ‘step