Would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds? For one life thousands would be saved from corruption and decay. One death, and a hundred lives in exchange – it’s simple arithmetic! Besides, what value has the life of that sickly, stupid, ill-natured old woman in the balance of existence! No more than the life of a louse, of a black-beetle.
Crime and Punishment is yet another one of those classic novels that I hadn't read because I thought I knew exactly what it would be about (why did I assume it would spend its first half leading up to a crime and its second with the perp languishing in a gulag somewhere?), and once again, my preconceptions were unfounded: more than anything, Fyodor Dostoevsky has written a psychological profile of a twisted mind – someone so fevered with philosophical whatifism that he can't conceive of the human effects of his malicious thought experiments – and by reflection, shines a light on the twistedness within us all and within society at large. I enjoyed every bit of this, found many surprises in the narrative along the way, and after looking into what others have gleaned from this classic, I was pleased to discover this article in The Conversation that perfectly summarises the social and political influences that drove Raskolnikov to his self-absorbed madness. (I particularly enjoyed that article's history lesson and the line its author drew from the freeing of the serfs in Dostoevsky's day to the anti-liberalism of today, identity politics, Brexit, and even Russia's annexation of Crimea.) It's never too late to pick up a classic and see what everyone has been talking about for 150+ years; I'll still warn that there will be mild spoilers beyond this point.
If he has a conscience he will suffer for his mistake. That will be punishment – as well as the prison.Rodion Raskolnikov is twenty-two years old, has recently dropped out of school due to lack of money, and he is so world-weary and soul-sick that he wants nothing more than to shut himself up in his dingy garret room, refuse all visitors, and sleep and think and dream:
An anxiety with no object or purpose in the present, and in the future nothing but endless sacrifice, by means of which he would attain nothing – that was what his days on earth held in store for him... What good was life to him? What prospects did he have? What did he have to strive for? Was he to live merely in order to exist? But a thousand times before he had been ready to give up his existence for an idea, for a hope, even for an imagining. Existence on its own had never been enough for him; he had always wanted more than that. Perhaps it was merely the strength of his own desires that made him believe he was a person to whom more was allowed than others.Raskolnikov harbours a pet theory that the contributions of the great men of history are so monumental that they must be forgiven every crime they may have committed to put their ideas into action; even unto murder:
In my opinion, if, as the result of certain combinations, Kepler's or Newton's discoveries could become known to people in no other way than by sacrificing the lives of one, or ten, or a hundred or more people who were hindering the discovery, or standing as an obstacle in its path, then Newton would have the right, and it would even be his duty... to remove those ten or a hundred people, in order to make his discoveries known to mankind. It by no means follows from this, incidentally, that Newton should have the right to kill anyone he pleases, whomever happens along, or to steal from the market every day. Further, I recall developing in my article the idea that all... well, let's say, the lawgivers and founders of mankind, starting from the most ancient and going on to the Lycurguses, the Solons, the Muhammads, the Napoleons, and so forth, that all of them to a man were criminals, from the fact alone that in giving a new law, they thereby violated the old one, held sacred by society and passed down from their fathers, and they certainly did not stop at shedding blood either, if it happened that blood (sometimes quite innocent and shed valiantly for the ancient law) could help them.It isn't a far leap for Raskolnikov to liken his own ingenious mind to those of these historical greats, and he becomes fixated on the idea of committing a murder – one he feels he can justify on moral and logical grounds – mostly just to test his theories. In the crime's aftermath, he swoons for weeks in a nearly dissociative state, and his inner thoughts waver between guilt and fear of being caught and a stubborn sense of superiority. As other characters enter the story – his one friend, Razumihin, his mother and sister, the sister's suitors, a derelict and his family, the police – it's nicely frustrating to watch Raskolnikov spurn care and affection, to watch him torment a helpless young woman, to watch him both tease the investigators and elude their traps. The murder that Raskolnikov committed was both gruesome and indefensible, but since he's the protagonist, I didn't necessarily want him to get caught; and as every character in the story is neither wholly good or bad (except for maybe Luzhin, the soulless capitalist), Raskolnikov simply takes his place on the spectrum of human behaviour; he will make his choices and the reader can only wait and see how he will end up dealing with the consequences.
When I read War and Peace and Anna Karenina, I understood that Leo Tolstoy was a Count; that he was showing what he knew of genteel Russian society. By contrast, Dostoevsky was more middle-class – an engineer, a gambler, and writer; sent to Siberia for five years for his political associations, he knew and wrote of a different Russia. The Petersburg that we enter is filled with drunks, prostitutes, pawnbrokers and tight-fisted landlords; desperate, hungry people one step from begging on the streets. While Raskolnikov is justifiably touched by the sight of a young prostitute who is peddled out in order to feed her family, he also notes that his mother's plan (to marry off his sister to someone who promises to fund the rest of his own schooling) amounts to the same thing. This flipside was very interesting to me and goes some way to explain Raskolnikov's aberrant psychology. (I wish I knew more about the constant anti-German slurs, but I did smile, despite myself, at “You sausage eater...you trashy Prussian hen’s leg in a crinoline.”) This was a wonderful – interesting and educational – read; totally accessible and completely recommended.
You might object, "But I'm an atheist." No, you're not (and if you want to understand this, you could read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, perhaps the greatest novel ever written, in which the main character, Raskolnikov, decides to take his atheism with true seriousness, commits what he rationalized as a benevolent murder, and pays the price.) You're simply not an atheist in your actions, and it is your actions that most accurately reflect your deepest beliefs – those that are implicit, embedded in your being, underneath your conscious apprehensions and articulable attitudes and surface-level self-knowledge. You can only find out what you actually believe (rather than what you think you believe) by watching how you act. You simply don't know what you believe, before that. You are too complex to know yourself.And yet, Dostoevsky understood – and articulated – all of this, before Freud and Jung and Peterson himself. How interesting.