Introduction
I
A ready-made title, ‘Crime and Punishment’ suggests a ready-made plot. A man will commit a crime. He will be caught. He will be punished. His fate will revolve around the conflicts between freedom and conscience, the delinquent individual and the punitive state. Justice, no doubt, will be done.
In January 1866, when the first instalment of Crime and Punishment appeared in The Russian Messenger (Russkii Vestnik), prospective readers might have indulged in further well-reasoned speculation. Here was a title steeped in the ferment of its time, an era marked on the one hand by the ambitious reforms of Tsar Alexander II (1818–81), not least to the entire judicial process, and on the other by mounting radicalism and nascent terrorism, prompted in large part by the perceived failure of these same reforms. Serfdom may have been consigned to history five years earlier, but the harsh terms of the serfs’ ‘emancipation’ had done little to alleviate social injustice. Would this, then, be a novel of political rebellion? Or perhaps, given the increasingly conservative leanings of the ageing Dostoyevsky (and of Mikhail Katkov, editor of The Russian Messenger), a satire of these revolutionary tendencies?
Inevitably, the novel would also be rooted in the bitter experience of its famous author. After all, he, too, in his free-thinking youth, had known crime and punishment at first hand. His chief ‘crime’ was to read out, more than once, Vissarion Belinsky’s letter to Nikolai Gogol (1809–52), in which Russia’s leading critic railed against Russia’s leading author, whose latest book had revealed him to be a ‘proponent of the knout’, of Church, State and serfdom. Dostoyevsky’s ‘punishment’ – and that of a disparate group of his associates, broadly linked by utopian-socialist sympathies – was to face the firing squad on St Petersburg’s Semyonovsky Square in December 1849. The sentence was commuted by Tsar Nicholas I (1796–1855) at the last possible moment and in the most theatrical manner. Instead, Dostoyevsky endured years of hard labour in Siberia, described upon his return to St Petersburg in the lightly fictionalized Notes from the Dead House (1860–2), the first masterpiece of his mature period.
Finally, Crime and Punishment would be imbued with ideas familiar to all readers of Dostoyevsky’s post-Siberian journalism: educated Russia needed to return to its roots, to the soil, to the people. Only thus could the warring tribes of Westernizers and Slavophiles, elites and commoners, be joined; only thus would the country’s ancient wounds be healed.
At one level the novel we go on to read satisfies all of these conventional expectations. At another all of them are unsettled, if not thoroughly undermined. We read of murders committed by a handsome young man whom it would be difficult to identify precisely with the radicals of the 1860s (though some offended young readers contrived to do so) or with its unhandsome author. Disturbingly, this man is unsure that his gruesome acts were crimes at all; unsure at times that they even happened. For much of the book he even seems to forget one of his murders entirely. The reality of punishment also eludes him for an unreasonably long time, despite his best efforts. In his mind everything begins to merge: past and future, right and wrong, perpetrator and victim, crime and punishment. The opposition stated by the title, so familiar and in its way so comforting, begins to dissolve for the reader, too; a dark joke, perhaps – like Dostoyevsky’s own ‘execution’? – yet no less serious for that.
Because it was written before The Idiot (1868), Demons (1871–2) and The Brothers Karamazov (1879–80), and because it is so often described as a version of the murder mystery or as a novel of religious conversion, Crime and Punishment has an entrenched reputation as the most straightforward of Dostoyevsky’s great quartet of late novels. Yet its puzzles and ambiguities, when fully entered into, allow the reader to share the same vertiginous confusion experienced by its protagonist, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov. In the words of Virginia Woolf: ‘Against our wills we are drawn in, whirled round, blinded, suffocated, and at the same time filled with a giddy rapture. Out of Shakespeare there is no more exciting reading.’1
II
The sources of the novel’s complexity can be traced to the opening sentences of the first detailed record we have of Dostoyevsky’s plans for the book. Originally envisioned as a long story, Crime and Punishment was proposed to Katkov in a letter from Wiesbaden, where the recently widowed, forty-three-year-old Dostoyevsky was enduring what his most comprehensive biographer, the late Joseph Frank, aptly calls a ‘period of protracted mortification’.2 His first wife, with whom he had rarely been happy, had succumbed to tuberculosis the previous year. Mikhail – his brother and soulmate – had also died in 1864, leaving enormous debts. This moral and financial destitution was further compounded by Dostoyevsky’s two uncontrollable manias: one for roulette, another (only marginally weaker) for his ex-mistress Apollinaria Suslova, a femme fatale eighteen years his junior. To top it all, he had recently signed a contract with the unscrupulous publisher Fyodor Stellovsky, requiring him, on pain of losing all rights to his own works, to complete an additional novel by 1 November 1866.
Yet for all this pressure and turmoil, the proposal for a ‘psychological record of a crime’ which Dostoyevsky submitted to Katkov is notable for its clarity, confidence and precision. It begins:
A contemporary setting, this current year [1865]. A young man, excluded from student status at university, of trading class, living in extreme poverty, succumbs, through frivolity and ricketiness of thought, to certain strange, ‘half-baked’ ideas in the air, and makes up his mind to get out of his foul situation in a single bound.3
A great deal changed between the conception of this story in a German spa town and the eventual birth of the novel in Russia. It expanded not only in size, but also in perspective, which grew from the confessional mode (often favoured by Dostoyevsky in his fiction hitherto) to a third-person viewpoint of virtual omniscience and deliberate ‘naivety’, as Dostoyevsky himself described it in his notebooks. Very little changed, however, about the two sentences quoted above.4 They contain in embryo the strange mixture of ingredients that will determine Raskolnikov’s half-real, half-theoretical drama: poverty and social exclusion on the one hand, and frivolous, ‘half-baked’ thoughts on the other. Only one element is missing – the element of psychogeography, as it would now be called. This is memorably supplied by St Petersburg, ‘the most premeditated and abstract city in the world’,5 built on a northern swamp by Western architects and Russian serfs. Here, too, we are in the realms of the semi-real and semi-theoretical, of rationalism and delusion – a tradition first developed in the St Petersburg texts of Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) and Gogol and now taken in new directions by their pupil, Dostoyevsky.
As we first see him, cooped up in his garret and barely able to rise from his couch, Raskolnikov exists (or thinks he exists) only in his own mind. For much of the novel that will remain the case, a sign of his catastrophic isolation from mankind. Yet at the same time, through a chain of spatial metaphors, Dostoyevsky makes us see how deeply his mental disarray is tied to the city that surrounds him. Such metaphors are characteristic of the novel’s curious artistic achievement: as subtle as the axe that Raskolnikov brings down on the head of his first victim, they are also freighted with the exceptional weight of association that makes us, as readers, share in the protagonist’s experience of suffocation from causes both abstract and real. Thus, Raskolnikov’s mental state finds its external embodiment in his low-ceilinged, cramped garret. This garret, in turn, is a ‘cupboard’, a ‘ship’s cabin’, a ‘cell’, and even, as perceived by his mother, a ‘coffin’.