Quarrel & Quandary Read Online Free PDF Page B

a continuum of sensibility may be even stronger than that. After a plunge into the period’s dominant cultural milieu, the son of an authoritarian father—authoritarianpersonally, religiously, nationally—returns to the father. It is common enough that an intellectual progression will lead to a recovery of the voices around the cradle.
    In January of 1881, Dostoyevsky, now an honored literary eminence more celebrated than Turgenev, died of a hemorrhage of the throat. Two months later, Czar Alexander II—Russia’s earnest liberalizer and liberator—was assassinated. From the last half of the nineteenth century until the Bolshevik defeat of the liberal Kerensky government in the second decade of the twentieth, revolution continued to overcome reform. In this guise—injury for the sake of an ideal—Raskolnikov lives on. For seventy years he was victorious in Russia. And even now, after the death of the Soviet Union, auguring no one knows what, his retributive figure roves the earth. If he is currently mute in Russia, he remains restive in Northern Ireland, and loud in the Middle East; he has migrated to America. He survives in the violence of humanitarian visionaries who would seize their utopias via ax, Molotov cocktail, or innocent-looking packages sent through the mail.
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    Raskolnikov as monster of ruination, reason’s avenging angel: here speaks the ideologue Dostoyevsky, scourge of the radicals. But this single clangorous note will not hold. Dostoyevsky the novelist tends toward orchestration and multiplicity. Might there be other reasons for the murder of the old woman? Raskolnikov has already been supplied with messianic utilitarianism, a Western import, carried to its logical and lethal end. On second thought (Dostoyevsky’s second thought), the killing may have a different and simpler source—family solidarity. A university dropout, unable to meet his tuition payments, Raskolnikov,alienated and desperate, has been guiltily taking money from his adoring mother and sister in the provinces. At home there is crisis: Dunya, his sister, has been expelled from her position as governess in the Svidrigailov household, where the debauched husband and father had been making lecherous advances. To elude disgrace and to ease her family’s poverty—but chiefly to secure a backer for her brother’s career—Dunya becomes engaged to a rich and contemptible St. Petersburg bureaucrat. In this version of Raskolnikov’s intent, it is to save his sister from a self-sacrificial marriage that he robs the old woman and pounds her to death.
    Dostoyevsky will hurry the stealing-for-sustenance thesis out of sight quickly enough. As a motive, it is too narrow for his larger purpose, and by the close of the novel it seems almost forgotten, and surely marginal—not only because Raskolnikov hides the stolen money and valuables and never touches them again, but because such an obvious material reason is less shattering than what Dostoyevsky will soon disclose. He will goad Raskolnikov to a tempestuousness even past nihilism. Past nihilism lies pure violence—violence for is own sake, without the vindication of a superior future. The business of revolution is only to demolish, the anarchist theorist and agitator Mikhail Bakunin once declared. But in Raskolnikov’s newest stand, not even this extremist position is enough:
    Then I realized … that power is given only to the one who dares to reach down and take it. Here there is one thing, one thing only: one has only to dare!… I wanted to
dare
, and I killed … that’s the whole reason!… I wanted to kill without casuistry … to kill for myself, for myself alone! I didn’t want to lie about it even to myself! It was not to help my mother that I killed—nonsense! I did not kill so that, having obtained means and power, I could become a benefactor of mankind. Nonsense!… And it was not money above allthat I wanted when I killed … I wanted to find out then, and find