Crime and Punishment

PENGUIN CLASSICS

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky was born in Moscow in 1821, the second of a physician's seven children. When he left his private boarding school in Moscow he studied from 1838 to 1843 at the Military Engineering College in St Petersburg, graduating with officer's rank. His first story to be published, Poor Folk (1846), was a great success. In 1849 he was arrested and sentenced to death for participating in the ‘Petrashevsky circle’; he was reprieved at the last moment but sentenced to penal servitude, and until 1854 he lived in a convict prison at Omsk, Siberia. Out of this experience he wrote The House of the Dead (1860). In 1860 he began the review Vremya (Time) with his brother; in 1862 and 1863 he went abroad, where he strengthened his anti-European outlook, met Mlle Suslova, who was the model for many of his heroines, and gave way to his passion for gambling. In the following years he fell deeply in debt, but in 1867 he married Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina (his second wife), who helped to rescue him from his financial morass. They lived abroad for four years, then in 1873 he was invited to edit Grazhdanin (The Citizen), to which he contributed his Diary of a Writer. From 1876 the latter was issued separately and had a large circulation. In 1880 he delivered his famous address at the unveiling of Pushkin's memorial in Moscow; he died six months later in 1881. Most of his important works were written after 1864: Notes from Underground (1864), Crime and Punishment (1865–6), The Gambler (1866), The Idiot (1868), The Devils (1871) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880).

David McDuff was born in 1945 and was educated at the University of Edinburgh. His publications comprise a large number of translations of foreign verse and prose, including poems by Joseph Brodsky and Tomas Venclova, as well as contemporary Scandinavian work; Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam; Complete Poems of Edith Sodergran; and No I'm Not Afraid by Irina Ratushinskaya. His first book of verse, Words in Nature, appeared in 1972. He has translated a number of nineteenth-century Russian prose works for the Penguin Classics series. These include Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, The House of the Dead, Poor Folk and Other Stories and The Idiot (forthcoming), Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories and The Sebastopol Sketches, and Nikolai Leskov's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. He has also translated Babel's Collected Stories and Bely's Petersburg for Penguin.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

Translated with an Introduction and Notes by

David McDuff

PENGUIN BOOKS

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This translation first published by Viking 1991
Published in Penguin Classics 1991
Reissued with revisions 2003

The moral right of the translator has been asserted

978-0-141-90835-9

Introduction

Note on the Translation

A Note on Money

PART ONE

PART TWO

PART THREE

PART FOUR

PART FIVE

PART SIX

EPILOGUE

Notes

Chronology

1821 Born Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, in Moscow, the son of Mikhail Andreyevich, head physician at Marlinsky Hospital for the Poor, and Marya Fyodorovna, daughter of a merchant family.

1823 Pushkin's Eugene Onegin.

1825 Decembrist uprising.

1830 Revolt in the Polish provinces.

1831–6 Attends boarding schools in Moscow together with his brother Mikhail (b. 1820).

1837 Pushkin is killed in a duel.

Their mother dies and the brothers are sent to a preparatory school in St Petersburg.

1838 Enters the St Petersburg Academy of Military Engineers as an army cadet (Mikhail is not admitted to the Academy).

1839 Father dies, apparently murdered by his serfs on his estate.

1840 Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time.

1841 Obtains a commission. Early works, now lost, include two historical plays, ‘Mary Stuart’ and ‘Boris Godunov’.

1842 Gogol's Dead Souls.

Promoted to second lieutenant.

1843 Graduates from the Academy. Attached to St Petersburg Army Engineering Corps. Translates Balzac's Eugénie Grandet.

1844 Resigns his commission. Translates George Sand's La dernière Aldini. Works on Poor Folk, his first novel.

1845 Establishes a friendship with Russia's most prominent and influential literary critic, the liberal Vissarion Belinsky, who praises Poor Folk and acclaims its author as Gogol's successor.

1846 Poor Folk and The Double published. While Poor Folk is widely praised, The Double is much less successful. ‘Mr Prokharchin’ also published. Utopian socialist M. V. Butashevich-Petrashevsky becomes an acquaintance.

1847 Nervous ailments and the onset of epilepsy. A Novel in Nine Letters published, with a number of short stories including ‘The Landlady’, ‘Polzunkov’, ‘White Nights’ and ‘A Weak Heart’.

1848 Several short stories published, including ‘A Jealous Husband’ and ‘A Christmas Tree Party and a Wedding’.

1849 Netochka Nezvanova published. Arrested and convicted of political offences against the Russian state. Sentenced to death, and taken out to Semyonovsky Square to be shot by firing squad, but reprieved moments before execution. Instead, sentenced to an indefinite period of exile in Siberia, to begin with eight years of penal servitude, later reduced to four years by Tsar Nicholas I.

1850 Prison and hard labour in Omsk, western Siberia.

1853 Outbreak of Crimean War.

Beginning of periodic epileptic seizures.

1854 Released from prison, but immediately sent to do compulsory military service as a private in the Seventh Line infantry battalion at Semipalatinsk, south-western Siberia. Friendship with Baron Wrangel, as a result of which he meets his future wife, Marya Dmitriyevna Isayeva.

1855 Alexander II succeeds Nicholas I as Tsar: some relaxation of state censorship.

Promoted to non-commissioned officer.

1856 Promoted to lieutenant. Still forbidden to leave Siberia.

1857 Marries the widowed Marya Dmitriyevna.

1858 Works on The Village of Stepanchikovo and its Inhabitants and ‘Uncle's Dream’.

1859 Allowed to return to live in European Russia; in December, the Dostoyevskys return to St Petersburg. First chapters of The Village of Stepanchikovo and its Inhabitants (the serialized novella is released between 1859 and 1861) and ‘Uncle's Dream’ published.

1860 Vladivostok is founded.

Mikhail starts a new literary journal, Vremya (Time). Dostoyevsky is not officially an editor, because of his convict status. First two chapters of The House of the Dead published.

1861 Emancipation of serfs. Turgenev's Fathers and Sons.

Vremya begins publication. The Insulted and the Injured and A Silly Story published in Vremya. First part of The House of the Dead published.

1862 Second part of The House of the Dead and A Nasty Tale published in Vremya. Makes first trip abroad, to Europe, including England, France and Switzerland. Meets Alexander Herzen in London.

1863 Winter Notes on Summer Impressions published in Vremya. After Marya Dmitriyevna is taken seriously ill, travels abroad again. Begins liaison with Apollinaria Suslova.

1864 First part of Tolstoy's War and Peace.

In March with Mikhail founds the journal Epokha (Epoch) as successor to Vremya, now banned by the Russian authorities. Notes from Underground published in Epokha. In April death of Marya Dmitriyevna. In July death of Mikhail.

1865 Epokha ceases publication because of lack of funds. An Unusual Happening published. Suslova rejects his proposal of marriage. Gambles in Wiesbaden. Works on Crime and Punishment.

1866 Dmitry Karakozov attempts to assassinate Tsar Alexander II.

The Gambler and Crime and Punishment published.

1867 Alaska is sold by Russia to the United States for $7,200,000.

Marries his nineteen-year-old stenographer, Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina, and they settle in Dresden.

1868 Birth of daughter, Sofia, who dies only five months old. The Idiot published.

1869 Birth of daughter, Lyubov.

1870 V. I. Lenin is born in the town of Simbirsk, on the banks of the Volga.

The Eternal Husband published.

1871 Moves back to St Petersburg with his wife and family. Birth of son, Fyodor.

1871–2 Serial publication of The Devils.

1873 First khozdenie v narod (‘To the People’ movement). Becomes contributing editor of conservative weekly journal Grazhdanin (The Citizen), where his Diary of a Writer is published as a regular column. ‘Bobok’ published.

1874 Arrested and imprisoned again, for offences against the political censorship regulations.

1875 A Raw Youth published. Birth of son, Aleksey.

1877 ‘The Gentle Creature’ and ‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man’ published in Grazhdanin.

1878 Death of Aleksey. Works on The Brothers Karamazov.

1879 Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (later known as Stalin) born in Gori, Georgia.

First part of The Brothers Karamazov published.

1880 The Brothers Karamazov published (in complete form). Anna starts a book service, where her husband's works may be ordered by mail. Speech in Moscow at the unveiling of a monument to Pushkin is greeted with wild enthusiasm.

1881 Assassination of Tsar Alexander II (1 March).

Dostoyevsky dies in St Petersburg (28 January). Buried in the cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery.

Note on the Translation

The text used for the present translation is that contained in Volume 6 of F. M. Dostoyevsky, Polnoye sobranie sochineniy v tridtsati tomakh (Leningrad, 1973). Use has also been made of the draft material and notes contained in Volume 7.

While the translation strives to retain as much of Dostoyevsky's style, syntax and sentence-structure as possible, it also tries to take account of the general literary context in which the author composed the novel. It is important for the reader of English to be aware, for example, that in certain passages and chapters Dostoyevsky wrote under the direct influence of Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Dickens, among other English-language authors, and at times the translation attempts to reflect their style, too. It also aims to provide as readable a text as possible, in keeping with the novel's background in the popular journalism of its time, and its engagement with topical issues.

A Note on Money

In 1865, the year in which the action of Dostoyevsky's novel takes place, the most commonly used items of currency were as follows:

the half-copeck piece (grosh)

the one-copeck piece (kopeyka)

the five-copeck piece (pyatak)

the ten-copeck piece (grivennik)

the twenty-copeck piece (dvugrivennyy)

the fifty-copeck piece (poltinnik)

the rouble, usually a yellow banknote (zholtyy bilet)

There is some play with this last expression in the novel – in Russian, it also means ‘the yellow card’ (la carte jaune) or ‘the yellow ticket’, which was a euphemism for the special passport carried by prostitutes. The old woman pawnbroker uses the term biletiki (literally, ‘little tickets’) as slang for ‘roubles’, something that serves to increase Raskolnikov's irritation.

Mention is also made in the text of paper ‘credit bills’ (kreditki) or banknotes worth five roubles (sinie bilety, or ‘bluebacks’) and ten roubles (krasnye bilety, or ‘redbacks’).

The hundred-rouble note was known as a raduzhnyy bilet, or ‘rainbow note’, from its rainbow colouring.

IOU's (‘promissory notes’), Government bonds and lottery tickets were also in circulation, together with regular currency.

Silver roubles had a fluctuating and inconstant value; following the recent devaluation of silver, they were actually worth less than paper roubles.

Introduction

When in 1866 the first part of Crime and Punishment was published in the January and February issues of Mikhail Katkov's journal the Russian Messenger, it met with instant public success. The remaining parts of the novel had still to be written, its author was struggling through poverty and debt to meet deadlines that loomed ever closer, yet both he and his readers sensed that this was a work that possessed an inner momentum of its own, one that was linked both to the inexorable processes of outer, social change and to those of an inner, spiritual awakening. ‘The novel promises to be one of the most important works of the author of The House of the Dead,’ an anonymous reviewer wrote.

The terrible crime that forms the basis of this tale is described with such staggering veracity, in such subtle detail, that one finds oneself involuntarily experiencing the peripeteias of this drama with all its psychic springs and devices, traversing the heart's maze from the first inception within it of the criminal idea to its final development … Even the author's subjectivity, from which the characterization of his heroes has on occasion suffered, in this instance produces no harm whatsoever, as it is focused on a single character and is permeated by a typological clarity, artistic in nature.

As the subsequent parts of the novel began to appear it acquired the status of a social and public event. In his memoirs, the critic N. N. Strakhov recalled that in Russia Crime and Punishment was the literary sensation of the year, ‘the only book the addicts of reading talked about. And when they talked about it they generally complained of its overmastering power and of its having such a distressing effect upon readers that those with strong nerves almost grew ill, while those with weak nerves had to put it aside.’ The ‘distressing’ features of the novel were many. Quite apart from the analysis of social wretchedness and psychological disease, shocking even to readers of Victor Hugo's recently published Les Misérables, on which Dostoyevsky had drawn for some of his structural and panoramic inspiration,¹ there was the fact that the book appeared to constitute yet another attack on the Russian student body, smearing it with the taint of being allied to the young radicals and nihilists who had placed themselves in violent opposition to the established social and political order. In early reviews, liberal and left-wing critics, who sensed the parallel between the murder of the old woman and the talk of political assassination that was in the air, saw the novel as a particularly virulent contribution to the flood of ‘anti-nihilist’ literature that had begun to appear in the 1860s, and sprang to the defence of ‘the Russian student corporations’: ‘Has there ever been a case of a student committing murder for the sake of robbery?’ asked the critic G. Z. Yeliseyev, writing in the Contemporary.

And even if there had been such a case, what would it prove regarding the general mood of the student corporations? … Was it not Belinsky who once drew Dostoyevsky's attention to the fact that the fantastic belonged ‘in the madhouse, not in literature’? … What would Belinsky have had to say about this new fantasticism of Mr Dostoyevsky, a fantasticism in consequence of which the entire corporation of young men stands accused of a wholesale attempt at robbery with murder?

This cry was taken up by an anonymous reviewer in the newspaper the Week (normally reflecting a liberal-conservative viewpoint), who wrote:

… while taking full account of Mr Dostoyevsky's talent, we cannot pass over in silence those melancholy symptoms which in his latest novel manifest themselves with particular force … Mr Dostoyevsky is at present displeased with the younger generation. In itself that is not worthy of comment. The generation in question does indeed possess defects that merit criticism, and to expose them is most praiseworthy, as long, of course, as it is done in an honourable fashion, without casting stones from round corners. That is the way it was done, for example, by Turgenev when he depicted (rather unsuccessfully, it should be said) the faults of the younger generation in his novel Father and Sons; Mr Turgenev, however, conducted the matter cleanly, without having recourse to sordid insinuations … That is not the way it has been done by Mr Dostoyevsky in his new novel. While not openly declaring that liberal ideas and the natural sciences lead young men to murder and young women to prostitution, in an oblique fashion he makes us feel that this is so.

The nihilist critic D. I. Pisarev, aware with others of the work's artistic vitality and absolute, undismissible topicality, tried another approach. Basing his critique on a ‘social’ interpretation of the novel, he argued that Raskolnikov was a product of his environment, and that the radical transformation of society Dostoyevsky seemed to be calling for could be achieved, not by the kind of Christianity Sonya had to offer, but by revolutionary action, the building of a new society. Almost alone, Strakhov attempted to draw his readers’ attention to the novel's universal, tragic dimension as a parable of how, after terrible personal sufferings largely caused by society, a gifted young man is ruined by ‘nihilistic’ ideas, and has to undergo a process of atonement and redemption. Strakhov pointed to Dostoyevsky's compassionate treatment of his hero, and commented: ‘This is not mockery of the younger generation, neither a reproach nor an accusation – it is a lament over it.’

Dostoyevsky's well-known response to Strakhov's article – ‘You alone have understood me’ – has continued to echo down the years; for Crime and Punishment has not ceased to present difficulties of interpretation. Even in the second half of the twentieth century critical studies of the novel have been written in which its central, underpinning ideas are either ignored as expressions of ideology which the writer's imaginative art ‘overcame’, or are distorted into unrecognizable caricatures of themselves. Thus, for example, the American critic Philip Rahv, in an essay that otherwise throws a good deal of light on the sources and background material associated with the novel, maintains that ‘Sonya's faith is not one that has been attained through struggle,’ and that ‘it offers no solution to Raskolnikov, whose spiritual existence is incommensurable with hers,’ describing the book's epilogue as ‘implausible and out of key with the work as a whole’.² While it is true that a definitive comprehension of any work of art is impossible, as so much depends upon the possibilities of interpretation, which may be infinite, it is hard in the case of Dostoyevsky not to suspect that in many of the critical analyses of his work the operative factors are of an ideological rather than a purely aesthetic nature. This is hardly surprising, as in the work of Dostoyevsky's maturity thought and image, idea and form are always intertwined. For all this, it may still be useful to recapitulate the original ‘idea’ of Crime and Punishment as it was conceived by its author.

Possibly the clearest explanation of Dostoyevsky's intentions in writing the novel was given by the philosopher Vladimir S. Solovyov (1853–1900), who knew Dostoyevsky as a friend and in the summer of 1878 accompanied him on a pilgrimage to the monastery of Optina Pustyn. In the first of his three commemorative speeches (1881–3, published in 1884), Solovyov states the matter with utter simplicity. In a discussion of Crime and Punishment and The Devils he writes:

The meaning of the first of these novels, for all its depth of detail, is very clear and simple, though many have not understood it. Its principal character is a representative of that view of things according to which every strong man is his own master, and all is permitted to him. In the name of his personal superiority, in the name of his belief that he is a force, he considers himself entitled to commit murder and does in fact do so. But then suddenly the deed he thought was merely a violation of a senseless outer law and a bold challenge to the prejudice of society turns out, for his own conscience, to be something much more than this – it turns out to be a sin, a violation of inner moral justice. His violation of the outer law meets its lawful retribution from without in exile and penal servitude, but his inward sin of pride that has separated the strong man from humanity and has led him to commit murder – that inward sin of self-idolatry can only be redeemed by an inner moral act of self-renunciation. His boundless self-confidence must disappear in the face of that which is greater than himself, and his self-fabricated justification must humble itself before the higher justice of God that lives in those very same simple, weak folk whom the strong man viewed as paltry insects.

Solovyov sees the central meaning of Dostoyevsky's early work, which is preoccupied above all with those ‘simple, weak folk’, as a perception of ‘the ancient and eternally new truth that in the established order of things the best people (morally) are at the same time the worst in the view of society, that they are condemned to be poor folk, the insulted and the injured’. Yet if Dostoyevsky had remained content merely to treat this problem as the subject of fiction, Solovyov maintains, he would have been no more than a glorified journalist. The important point is that Dostoyevsky saw the problem as part of his own life, as an existential question that demanded a satisfactory answer. The answer was an unambiguous one: ‘The best people, observing in others and feeling in themselves a social injustice, must unite together, rise up against it and recreate society in their own way.’ It was in pursuit of this goal that Dostoyevsky had joined the Petrashevists in their social conspiracy; his first, naïve attempt at a solution to the problem of social injustice led Dostoyevsky to the scaffold and to penal servitude. It was amidst the horrors of the ‘House of the Dead’ that he began to revise his notions concerning an uprising that was needed, not by the Russian people as a whole, but only by himself and his fellow conspirators.

In penal servitude, Solovyov asserts, Dostoyevsky came consciously face to face for the first time with representatives of true Russian national – popular feeling, in the light of which ‘he clearly saw the falsehood of his revolutionary strivings’:

Dostoyevsky's companions in the labour camp were, the vast majority of them, members of the common Russian people and were all, with a few striking exceptions, the worst members of that people. But even the worst members of the common people generally retain what members of the intelligentsia usually lose: a faith in God and a consciousness of their sinfulness. Simple criminals, marked out from the popular mass by their evil deeds, are in no way marked out from it in terms of their views and feelings, of their religious world-outlook. In the House of the Dead Dostoyevsky found the real ‘poor (or, in the popular expression, “unlucky”) folk’. Those earlier ones, whom he had left behind, had still been able to take refuge from social injustice in a sense of their own dignity … This was denied to the convicts, but instead they had something more than this. The worst members of the House of the Dead restored to Dostoyevsky what the best members of the intelligentsia had taken from him. If there, among the representatives of enlightenment, a vestige of religious feeling had made him grow pale before the blasphemy of a leading littérateur, here, in the House of the Dead, that feeling was bound to revive and be renewed under the influence of the convicts’ humble and devout faith.

Solovyov's analysis is doubtless coloured by his theories concerning the Russian Church and people, but even so, in its simplicity and straightforwardness, based on a personal knowledge of Dostoyevsky, it is hard to refute. Far from moving towards a religious dogmatism or alignment with reactionary political views, in the period that followed his incarceration Dostoyevsky began to discover a ‘true socialism’ – the sobornost’ (‘communion’) of the human spirit as it expressed itself in the shared identity of the Russian people and their self-effacing acceptance of God.

The concluding chapters of The House of the Dead describe the reawakening of the central character's personality. This personality is not the same as the one that predominates in Dostoyevsky's earlier fiction – its experience of real physical and mental suffering, shared hardship and religious enlightenment lends it a universal dimension. For all its cramped, sardonic wretchedness, the ‘I’ of Notes from Underground inhabits a very different universe from that of Makar Devushkin or Ordynov. In its liberation from a half-asleep, romantic–sentimental vision of the world, in its consciousness of its own consciousness and of the depths of weakness and subterfuge that lie concealed within it, it acquires the status of a ‘we’: ‘As for myself,’ the Underground Man declares to his readers, ‘all I have really done in my life is to take to an extreme that which you would not dare to take even halfway, interpreting your own cowardice as “good sense” and taking comfort in it, deceiving yourselves.’ The first person narrative, far from dividing the narrator from his readers, as it does in some of Dostoyevsky's earlier works (White Nights, for example), actually draws him closer to them; by provoking them with a confession that goes to the root of each individual's ultimate helplessness and spiritual bankruptcy – a ‘poverty’ that can only be surmounted through an acceptance of God's grace – the Underground Man acts as a unifying voice of repentance. ‘At any rate,’ he writes, ‘I have felt ashamed all the time I have been writing this “tale”: it is probably not literature at all, but rather a corrective punishment.’

From the drafts and notebooks for Crime and Punishment we know that Dostoyevsky originally planned the novel as a confessional work in the same vein as Notes from Underground, which was published in 1864. The basis of the novel had already been laid in the Notes, where towards the end of Part Two, following the narrator's humiliation at the hotel dinner, his visit to the brothel and cynical manipulation of the prostitute Liza, we come across the following passage:

Towards evening I went out for a walk. My head was still aching and spinning from the previous night. But the further the evening wore on and the thicker the twilight became, the more my impressions, too, grew altered and confused, and after them my thoughts. Something within me, within my heart and my conscience, refused to die away, and burned there with a searing anguish. I loitered my way for the most part through the busiest, most crowded streets, through the Meshchanskayas, Sadovaya, the area near Yusupov Park. I was particularly fond of walking through these streets at dusk, at the very time when the crowd of passers-by of all kinds is at its densest, as industrial workers and craftsmen, their faces preoccupied to the point of hatred, return home from their daily employments … On the present occasion all this busy street life made me even more irritable. No matter how hard I tried, I could not get a grip on myself, put two and two together. Something was rising, rising within me without cease, causing me pain, and would not quieten down. In a state of complete frustration I returned to my rooms. It was as though some crime lay on my soul.

This could come straight from one of the first drafts of the early chapters of Crime and Punishment. Indeed, the two works are in many ways interdependent, the Notes constituting a philosophical prologue to the novel. The twenty-three-year-old ex-student who emerges on to the Petersburg street on an evening in early July is a spiritual relative of the Underground Man – we are meant to assume that the weeks of isolation and ‘hypochondria’ he has spent indoors have been accompanied by the kind of deliberations that fill the pages of the Notes. In the early drafts of the novel, the narrative is in the first person, and has the same obsessive, confessional quality familiar from the earlier work. The principal difference is that while the crime of the Underground Man is of an exclusively moral and personal nature, a sin against another human being and against himself, that of Raskolnikov is in the first instance an outright challenge to the fabric of society, though it also involves the moral and personal dimension.

The ‘stone wall’ that so irks the Underground Man is also present in Crime and Punishment. Yet now it stands not only for ‘the laws of nature, the conclusions of the natural sciences and mathematics’ – it is also a symbol of the laws of society. The walls that surround Raskolnikov and hold him within his coffinlike room are not simply the bounds of ‘possibility’: they are also society's protection against its own members. In Dostoyevsky's view there is something profoundly wrong with a social order that needs to imprison, impoverish and torture the best people in it. Yet this does not excuse Raskolnikov's crime (the Russian word prestuplenie is much more graphic, suggesting the ‘stepping across’ or ‘transgression’ that he so desires to make). It is people who are responsible for the society in which they live, and whether they are in the grip of ‘radical’, atheistic ideas like those of Raskolnikov, or ‘bourgeois’, utilitarian, but also atheistic ideas, like those of Pyotr Petrovich Luzhin, they will abdicate their responsibility to their fellow creatures and destroy them in one way or another. Just as the Underground Man expresses his contempt for the ‘antheap’, the ‘Crystal Palace’ of modern ‘civilization’ which gives rise mostly to ‘rivers of blood’, so Raskolnikov acts out of the same convictions. He also intends, however, to enter the arena of history. It is in this respect above all that Crime and Punishment marks a significant development in Dostoyevsky's creative thinking.

The philosopher and literary critic Vasily Rozanov (1856–1919) – another Russian thinker with a close and intuitive understanding of Dostoyevsky – was one of the first to point to this aspect of the writer's art. At the beginning of a ‘critical-biographical profile’ written in 1893 as an introduction to the publication of Dostoyevsky's complete works in the journal Niva, he discusses the function of literature, perceiving it to be the means whereby the individual person is able to withdraw ‘from the details of his own life’ and to understand his existence in terms of its general significance. History takes its origins in the individual, and man is distinguished from the animals by the fact that he is always a person, unique and never-to-be-repeated. This, in Rozanov's view, is why conventional, ‘positivist’ science and philosophy will never be able to understand ‘man, his life and history’. The laws that govern the natural universe do not apply to man. ‘Is the most important thing about Julius Caesar, about Peter the Great, about you, dear reader, the way in which we do not differ from other people? In the sense that the most important thing about the planets is not their varying distance from the sun but the shape of their ellipses and the laws according to which they all move equally along them …’ Unlike science and natural philosophy, art and religion address themselves to the individual person, to his heart and soul. They are concerned with the phases of the inner life, not all of which each individual may experience, but which are characteristic of the history of mankind: a period of primordial serenity, a fall from that serenity and a period of regeneration. The ‘fall’ is the phase that predominates over the other two – most of history is taken up with ‘crime and sin’, which is, however, always directed against the serenity that went before and also points towards the process of regeneration as the only way towards the recovery of that serenity. In the darkness of history lies the hope of light:

The darker the night – the brighter the stars,

The deeper the grief – the closer is God.

‘In these two lines of verse,’ Rozanov says, ‘is the meaning of all history, and the history of the spiritual development of thousandfold souls.’ Raskolnikov, with his Napoleon-fixation and muddled, radical ideas, does no more than enter into the historical arena of his times – like Napoleon, he is at once an individual soul and an agent of world history, and as such he is able to draw the reader with him on his exploration of the ‘dark night’. The ‘power over the antheap’ he talks of is in reality the power of Dostoyevsky's own artistic persona over the readers of the novel. As Rozanov points out:

In this novel we are given a depiction of all those conditions which, capturing the human soul, draw it towards crime; we see the crime itself; and at once, in complete clarity, with the criminal's soul we enter into an atmosphere, hitherto unknown to us, of murk and horror in which it is almost as hard for us to breathe as it is for him. The general mood of the novel, elusive, undefinable, is far more remarkable than any of its individual episodes: how this comes to be is the secret of the author, but the fact remains that he really does take us with him and lets us feel criminality with all the inner fibres of our being; after all, we ourselves have committed no crime, and yet, when we finish the book it is as if we emerge into the open air from some cramped tomb in which we have been walled up with a living person who has buried himself in it, and together with him have breathed the poisoned air of dead bones and decomposing entrails …

Because of his existence on a historical plane as a psychosocial and moral–intellectual type, as a part of the fabric of the time in which he lives, Raskolnikov is able to speak to the collective human reality in all of us. Just as each person contains a tyrant, a Napoleon (or, in a twentieth-century perspective, a Hitler or Stalin), so each contains a suffering victim. The tyrant's crime is punished by that suffering, which alone can redeem it. What Dostoyevsky is pointing to is the possibility, less of social, material change from without than of a transformation of humanity from within. The drafts and notes for the novel speak very clearly of this: the book was originally planned as a novel of ‘the Orthodox outlook’, expressing ‘the essence of Orthodoxy’, this being summed up in the notion that ‘happiness is bought with suffering’, a state of affairs in which ‘there is no injustice, for a knowledge of life and an awareness of it (i.e. one spontaneously experienced in body and spirit, i.e. as a part of the integral process of life) are acquired by the experience of pro and contra, which one must carry around with one’.

The experience of pro and contra, the ancient mystery of good and evil dressed in the contemporary costume of the mid nineteenth century yet none the less terrifying and elemental for that, is what Crime and Punishment is ‘about’. The novel represents the first act in a gigantic Shakespearian tragedy, the other three acts of which are The Idiot, The Devils and The Brothers Karamazov. In this first act the themes of guilt and punishment are established, the terrain of Hell and Purgatory are mapped out, and the goal of Paradise dimly glimpsed. Just how intense was the duel of ‘for’ and ‘against’ that raged within Dostoyevsky's soul may again be seen in the draft notes and jottings. ‘Svidrigailov – despair, the most cynical. Sonya – hope, the most unrealizable. (This must be said by Raskolnikov himself.) He has passionately attached himself to them both,’ reads an entry in the notes for the ‘Finale of the Novel’. The pages of the notebooks teem with lists of contraries, seeds of conflict, the preliminaries to catastrophe. While many of the episodes and allusions are familiar from one's knowledge of the novel in its final form, there are others which do not appear in it, or appear in a less sharply defined way. Such, for example, is the conflict motif ‘socialism–cynicism’. In the final version of the novel, the theme of socialism is kept muted, mostly confined to satirical observations about Fourierist ‘phalansteries’ and theories of diminished responsibility – it does not emerge in full force until The Devils. Yet in Dostoyevsky's notes for Crime and Punishment it is well to the fore, and helps us both to establish the link between the Underground Man and Raskolnikov, and to understand the nature of the demonism that drives Raskolnikov to commit his crime. Socialism, in Dostoyevsky's view, suffers from an inherent paradoxical flaw – while professing ‘brotherhood’ it is in essence cynical, expressing ‘the despair of ever setting man on the right road. They, the socialists, are intent on doing it by means of despotism, while claiming that this is freedom!’ The Underground Man's confession that ‘without power and tyranny over someone else I simply cannot live’ is amplified into Raskolnikov's Maratism: the corpses of the old woman moneylender and her sister stand for those of the tyrannized victims on which he will build the new, ‘reformed’ world.

That these ideological polemics were an integral part of the novel's original conception is amply evidenced by the notebooks. The satire on the nihilists that is worked around the person of Lebezyatnikov is not a superfluous, period-determined ornament to the general flow of the narrative. It is rather a caustic, though humorous, attack on a whole generation, and on human nature itself. In many ways, Yeliseyev's instincts did not deceive him: the novel is a work in which ‘the entire corporation of young men stands accused of a wholesale attempt at robbery with murder’. What he failed to perceive, however, is that in those nihilists Dostoyevsky saw himself at an earlier phase of his development, and that it is also himself he is satirizing. It is significant that Dostoyevsky's real venom is reserved for the respectable bourgeois who laid the groundwork for the theories of the nihilists and made them possible – the utilitarians like Bentham, who inspire the conduct of a Luzhin. In the account of Raskolnikov's dream in the final chapter of the novel, a dream that is in every sense prophetic in its horror, we are made aware of how great are the dangers to mankind that are involved in the abandonment of God:

In his illness he had dreamt that the entire world had fallen victim to some strange, unheard of and unprecedented plague that was spreading from the depths of Asia into Europe. Everyone was to perish, apart from a chosen few, a very few. Some new kind of trichinae had appeared, microscopic creatures that lodged themselves in people's bodies. But these creatures were spirits, gifted with will and intelligence. People who absorbed them into their systems instantly became rabid and insane. But never, never had people considered themselves so intelligent and in unswerving possession of the truth as did those who became infected. Never had they believed so unswervingly in the correctness of their judgements, their scientific deductions, their moral convictions and beliefs. Entire centres of population, entire cities and peoples became smitten and went mad. All were in a state of anxiety and no one could understand anyone else, each person thought that he alone possessed the truth and suffered agony as he looked at the others, beating his breast, weeping and wringing his hands. No one knew who to make the subject of judgement, or how to go about it, no one could agree about what should be considered evil and what good. No one knew who to blame or who to acquit. People killed one another in a kind of senseless anger. Whole armies were ranged against one another, but no sooner had these armies been mobilized than they suddenly began to tear themselves to pieces, their ranks falling apart and their soldiers hurling themselves at one another, gashing and stabbing, biting and eating one another. All day in the cities the alarm was sounded: everyone was being summoned together, but who was calling them and for what reason no one knew, but all were in a state of anxiety. They abandoned the most common trades, because each person wanted to offer his ideas, his improvements, and no agreement could be reached; agriculture came to a halt. In this place and that people would gather into groups, agree on something together, swear to stick together – but would instantly begin doing something completely different from what had been proposed, start blaming one another, fighting and murdering. Fires began, a famine broke out. Everyone and everything perished. The plague grew worse, spreading further and further. Only a few people in the whole world managed to escape: they were the pure and chosen, who had been predestined to begin a new species of mankind and usher in a new life, to renew the earth and render it pure, but no one had seen these people anywhere, no one had heard their words and voices.

In opposition to the nihilists with their pride and déracinement, Dostoyevsky introduces the theme of the family. Raskolnikov's fatherless family also serves to de-subjectivize and universalize the image in which he appears to the reader. We can understand, not merely intellectually but also in emotional terms, Raskolnikov's desire to do something in order to secure the fortunes of his mother and sister, to assert the strength that is lacking because of his father's absence. At the same time, we are kept aware of the extent to which Raskolnikov has broken away from the lifelines that bind him to existence. The climate of the family is one of humility, tolerance and mutual acceptance; by his thoughts and actions, Raskolnikov transgresses the laws by which it operates – yet only to a certain extent: as Dunya realizes the reason for what he has done, her attitude towards him softens, even though her determination that he should face the consequences of his actions is made resolute. As for Pulkheria Aleksandrovna, his mother, she passes from a state of uncomprehending rejection of her son to one of suffering acceptance. In overcoming his pride and taking upon himself the punishment decreed by the state and society, Raskolnikov re-enters the bosom of his family, which becomes a symbol of narodnost’ (national and folk identity), and love of neighbour in the Christian sense. This is made abundantly clear in the draft notes, where, for example, Raskolnikov's contempt for the old woman-‘louse’ is seen as a fatal lapse into the attitude of the nihilists, who really care only about themselves. From a study of the drafts, we can see that the novel's horizons are quite certainly intended to include a vision of a universal family as the longed-for ideal, in opposition to the ‘antheap’ or the socialist utopia, founded on theoretic abstractions and delusions of ‘progress’. In Raskolnikov's friendship with Razumikhin we can also perceive Dostoyevsky's conception of true brotherhood, as opposed to the ‘fraternity’ of the student body and the radical movement.

Raskolnikov's family has its counterpart in that of Sonya. The Marmeladov household, with its alcoholic father, consumptive mother and ultimately orphaned children, took its origins in the novel The Drunkards, which Dostoyevsky eventually merged with the Raskolnikov tale to produce Crime and Punishment, aware of the many parallels of characterization in the two works. For all the disasters that befall it, this menage is none the less a family, an integral unit with its own sacred symbols and objects, such as the green drap-de-dames shawl and the travelling-box. It is no coincidence that it should be Sonya, the prostitute from a broken, destroyed home, who raises Raskolnikov from the ‘death’ of isolation and self-defilement and estrangement into which he has fallen, and restores him to the community of mankind; in order to be thus restored, he must suffer, and his return to humanity must take place in the sign of the Cross and the reality of the Russian earth:

‘What should you do?’ she exclaimed, leaping up from her chair, and her eyes, hitherto filled with tears, suddenly began to flash. ‘Get up!’ (She gripped him by the shoulder; slowly he began to get up, staring at her in near-amazement.) ‘Go immediately, this very moment, go and stand at the crossroads, bow down, first kiss the ground that you've desecrated, and then bow to the whole world, to all four points of the compass and tell everyone, out loud: “I have killed!” Then God will send you life again … You must accept suffering and redeem yourself by it, that's what.’

Sonya, who has suffered the loss of her parents, her honour and her dignity, yet has not abandoned her faith, understands the loss sustained by Raskolnikov, who has abandoned his. He has lost God, lost himself, the sanctity of his own personality, and he can recover this only by penal servitude and the living contact it will involve with the Russian people. Here Dostoyevsky explicitly points to his own biography, and to the transition from ‘coffin’ to regeneration experienced by Goryanchikov, the narrator of The House of the Dead. To reduce Sonya to a peripheral character in the way several Western critics have done, usually on philosophical or extra-literary grounds, is to deprive the novel of its central meaning. Sonya is Raskolnikov's good double, just as Svidrigailov is his evil one. Her criminality, which has been forced upon her by the demands of an unjust society, runs parallel to his, but shines with an innocence of which his does not partake. It is because of this that she is able to impart to him a will to believe and a will to live; it is also the reason for her spirituality and ‘remoteness’ – in a note, Dostoyevsky describes her as following Raskolnikov to Golgotha ‘at forty paces’. As she does so, she carries with her both Raskolnikov's past and childhood, and a vision of the man into which he must grow. She is child and mother, family and nation, ‘holy fool’ and angel. The scene in Part Four, Chapter IV, where she reads aloud the story of the raising of Lazarus to Raskolnikov, is the central point of the novel – a moment of almost unbearable earthly anguish, distress and tension that nevertheless points heavenward, like some Gothic arch.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

Translated with an Introduction and Notes by

David McDuff

PENGUIN BOOKS

Contents

Chronology

Further Reading

Note on the Translation

A Note on Money

Introduction