Crime and Punishment

The next great novel of Dostoyévskiy, Crime and Punishment, produced quite a sensation. Its hero is a young student, Raskólnikoff, who deeply loves his mother and his sister — both extremely poor, like himself — and who, haunted by the desire of finding some money in order to finish his studies and to become a support to his dear ones, comes to the idea of killing an old woman — a private money-lender whom he knows and who is said to possess a few thousand roubles. A series of more or less fortuitous circumstances confirms him in this idea and pushes him this way. Thus, his sister, who sees no escape from their poverty, is going at last to sacrifice herself for her family, and to marry a certain despicable, elderly man with much money, and Raskólnikoff is firmly decided to prevent this marriage. At the same time he meets with an old man — a small civil service clerk and a drunkard who has a most sympathetic daughter from the first marriage, Sónya. The family are at the lowest imaginable depths of destitution — such as can only be found in a large city like St. Petersburg, and Raskólnikoff is brought to take interest in them. Owing to all these circumstances, while he himself sinks deeper and deeper into the darkest misery, and realises the depths of hopeless poverty and misery which surround him, the idea of killing the old money-lending woman takes a firm hold of him. He accomplishes the crime and, of course, as might have been foreseen, does not take advantage of the money: he even does not find it in his excitement; and, after having lived for a few days haunted by remorse and shame — again under the pressure of a series of various circumstances which add to the feeling of remorse — he goes to surrender himself, denouncing himself as the murderer of the old woman and her sister.

This is, of course, only the framework of the novel; in reality it is full of the most thrilling scenes of poverty on the one hand and of moral degradation on the other, while a number of secondary characters — an elderly gentleman in whose family Raskólnikoff’s sister has been a governess, the examining magistrate, and so on — are introduced. Besides, Dostoyévskiy, after having accumulated so many reasons which might have brought a Raskólnikoff to commit such a murder, found it necessary to introduce another theoretical motive. One learns in the midst of the novel that Raskólnikoff, captivated by the modern, current ideas of materialist philosophy, has written and published a newspaper article to prove that men are divided into superior and inferior beings, and that for the former — Napoleon being a sample of them — the current rules of morality are not obligatory.

Most of the readers of this novel and most of the literary critics speak very highly of the psychological analysis of Raskólnikoff’s soul and of the motives which brought him to his desperate step. However, I will permit myself to remark that the very profusion of accidental causes accumulated by Dostoyévskiy shows how difficult he felt it himself to prove that the propaganda of materialistic ideas could in reality bring an honest young man to act as Raskólnikoff did. Raskólnikoffs do not become murderers under the influence of such theoretical considerations, while those who murder and invoke such motives, like Lebiès at Paris, are not in the least of the Raskólnikoff type. Behind RaskólnIkoff I feel Dostoyévskiy trying to decide whether he himself, or a man like him, might have been brought to act as Raskólnikoff did, and what would be the psychological explanation if he had been driven to do so. But such men do not murder. Besides, men like the examining magistrate and M. Swidrigailoff are purely romantic inventions.

However, with all its faults, the novel produces a most powerful effect by its real pictures of slum-life, and inspires every honest reader with the deepest commiseration towards even the lowest sunken inhabitants of the slums. When Dostoyévskiy comes to them, he becomes a realist in the very best sense of the word, like Turguéneff or Tolstóy. Marmeládoff — the old drunken official — his drunken talk and his death, his family, and the incidents which happen after his burial, his wife and his daughter Sónya — all these are living beings and real incidents of the life of the poorest ones, and the pages that Dostoyévskiy gave to them belong to the most impressive and the most moving pages in any literature. They have the touch of genius.