This blog has been dominated so
far by amateur art criticism, accidentally so in that two interesting
exhibitions happened to come along at the same time to galleries near my home.
Since nothing else is likely to open now before Christmas, here’s a change of
tack.
I first read Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s
great novel Crime and Punishment in 1979, when I was barely 20. I only returned
to it about a fortnight ago, with 32 years’ more life and a great many additional
books behind me. I’ve often reread things which affected me when younger, discovering in them ideas I’d been in no
position to appreciate first time around, owing either to a lack of experience
or the paucity of imagination that often afflicts those who have yet to find or
reconcile themselves to a perspective on the world. Sometimes it’s almost as
though it were an entirely different book from the one I remembered. My
revisiting of Crime and Punishment is a
good example of both types of experience. It’s not the first instance, but it’s
the first I’ve thought to write about in a semi-public forum. Perhaps that,
too, says something about me.
The novel I remembered was the
story of the student dropout Raskolnikov, living in squalor in 19thcentury
St Petersburg, who conceives the Nietzschean idea that murder might be
justified if it furthers the will and ambition of a superior man, citing what
was then the near-contemporary example of Napoleon Bonaparte. To test himself
he dispatches, brutally, with an axe, an elderly pawnbroker whom he despises
for her avarice. There is business involving Raskolnikov’s mother and sister –
decent but innocent bourgeois folk from the provinces – and a ‘tart with a
heart’, the unwilling prostitute Sonya, who preaches religion at him.
Raskolnikov is eventually caught out by the psychological acuity of examining
attorney Porfiry Petrovitch, who plays on his guilt and extracts a confession.
Raskolnikov is sent to Siberia, where he undergoes a religious epiphany and is
saved. The End.
Now I suppose it’s pretty obvious
that one impoverished, egotistical student living in a capital city for the
first time away from his folks is going to be immediately impressed by the tale
of another in the same position. A scepticism about conventional morals, and a
desire for the decisive existential act are, I’d guess, pretty commonplace in
such cases. Add to that the encounter with individuals from worlds he has never
previously entered, and a nascent unease about the validity of his
self-justifications, and Raskolnikov –
as remembered – might well seem to any
reasonably-educated, directionless young man a fairly accurate portrait of
himself. Leaving aside for a moment the
greater part of the novel – say 500 pages – which unfolds between the murder
and the confession, I was therefore more than a little disappointed by the
apparent submission of the imprisoned hero to what I thought I was supposed to
take for Divine Grace, but which at the time felt more like The Establishment.
I was, after all, one of those who cheered for Camus’s Meursault at the end of L’Étranger.
But on rereading the book, there
was the small matter of those forgotten 500 pages. Crime and Punishment is, among its more obvious attributes, a hefty 19th century novel, which fact brings me to my initial impetus
for picking it up again. In Claire Tomalin’s recent biography of Charles
Dickens I came across an anecdote of which I’d previously been unaware, that Dostoyevsky met Dickens in 1862, expressing to him great admiration for his work, which he
claimed to have read in prison. This was an unexpected conjunction. In the
1970s Dickens was out of fashion among
younger British literary aspirants, perhaps as a result of the Leavisite
Diktat of thirty or so years earlier
which relegated all but Hard Times to
the Second Division in FR’s League of English Novels, compounded with the rise
of an international Marxian and
Structuralist criticism which contrived to ignore him almost entirely while
drawing English attention to other, continental European writers. Set against the lowlife and intrigue of
pre-Revolutionary Russia, with its violence, class-politics, alcoholism and
philosophy, the caricature Dickens of Pickwick, Tiny Tim and the Artful Dodger exercised
little superficial attraction. To learn, therefore, even at a remove which had enabled me to take
a somewhat more rounded view of Dickens, that the Russian had regarded the
English author as a master, was grounds in itself for revisiting Dostoyevsky,
if nothing else to see what correspondences could possibly exist.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Well, there are plenty. Between
the murder (or rather, murders, since Raskolnikov also kills the pawnbroker’s
entirely inoffensive sister – something else I’d forgotten) and the confession,
the novel sets out a drama of contrasting and complementary ‘crimes’
perpetrated by a cast of vividly-drawn characters, all linked in some way to
Raskolnikov, and whose ultimate fate or ‘punishment’ might be interpreted as
unintended consequences of his action.
Certainly, they enable him to be seen, and to see himself – albeit unwillingly
– in a context broader than simply that of the lone existential individual he
evidently believes himself initially to be. I use the term ‘drama’ advisedly,
since there is a certain staginess about
the way these characters suddenly come into Raskolnikov’s orbit and accompany
him through a series of perambulations between rooms in the city, and there is
almost certainly something of a ‘state of Russia’ purpose in Dostoyevsky’s
crowding of them all together into such a narrow circle and compressed
timescale – not unlike, for instance, the Dickens of Little Dorrit. The dramatis personae are perhaps not so overdrawn as some of
Dickens’s memorable figures, and with the exception of Porfiry Petrovitch do not repeat themselves quite so often in
order to make sure the reader is absolutely clear where they stand, but there’s
a flamboyance of utterance if not of physical description that renders them so
brightly that I’m astonished I retained so little of them, even over three
decades. One sees and recalls what one wants to see and recall, I suppose – or
what one can, given one’s own resources.
For the most part, these are remarkably sophisticated psychological
portraits, but perhaps it isn’t really surprising that a twentysomething middle-class boy with pretensions to
intellect couldn’t immediately appreciate that. Raskolnikov doesn’t.
Thus Marmeladov, the civil
servant who has drunk away his prospects, effectively abandoned his family, and
is encountered railing against himself in a grog-shop, swearing abstinence and
reform should he be given a chance, then slipping right back into drunkenness
as soon as that happens, might well appear a grotesque, an unbelievably stupid
and unprincipled man, if he were not the exact type of every alcoholic I’ve
ever encountered since I learned anything about alcoholism. He’s an addict, a
sick man who knows he is sick but has no conception of a cure, and who sees all
too clearly the end that awaits him – a senseless, booze-related death that
will leave those who love him hopeless as well as destitute. There is nothing
he nor anybody else can do to help him. Raskolnikov tries – this before the
murders, even while he is still toying with his Napoleonic fantasies – but his
act of kindness in giving Marmeladov what little money he has only leads to a
further binge, leading ultimately to his squalid demise. Raskolnikov’s subsequent
additional generosity to his widow, Katerina Ivanovna, has still further,
unforeseeably disastrous consequences.
The vain Luzhin, a wealthy
middle-aged man who is introduced as the fiancé-of-convenience of Raskolnikov’s
sister, Dunya, believes he can buy gratitude and affection from those less
well-off than himself. But we are allowed to see the insecurity that motivates
his attempts to manipulate others into compliance with his wishes, so again a
figure who might well have been presented as a caricature of wickedness is
permitted a psychological depth beyond his actions. He has already betrayed
himself with his statement that he would prefer to have a socially ‘inferior’ wife
who is totally dependent on him, and the repulsion this engenders in
Raskolnikov, and the righteous indignation this latter evinces, even while he
is increasingly aware of his own criminality, forces Luzhin into a corner from
which he unsuccessfully contrives to escape by cynically attempting to frame
the hapless Sonya for theft. Exposed, Luzhin flees, but the only consequence of
his trying to inflict lifelong torment on his victims to satisfy his own vanity
is a brief humiliation before a group of people with whom he need have no
further dealings. There is certainly a moral crime, but no real punishment.
Svidrigailov, Dunya’s would-be
seducer, is a monster. I don’t think I really appreciated this when I first read the novel, but he is
clearly, in contemporary terms, a rapist
and paedophile. How much such terms would have been distinguished from the
stock categories of ‘libertine’ or ‘rake’ at the time of Dostoyevsky’s writing
is perhaps a moot point, and working originally with a somewhat stylised
template for the conventions of the 19th century novel I cannot
honestly say I noticed, but he shares what is now a well-established pathology
among such people in confidently blaming his victims for ‘inciting’ his crimes
against them. The nightmares which attend his last night before he shoots
himself make explicit a kind of
self-awareness. The twin catalysts
for his suicidal despair are Raskolnikov’s refusal to be blackmailed by him (Svidrigailov
has overheard his confession to Sonya), and Dunya’s resistance to attempted
rape, their combined effect being to expose to him his own moral
bankruptcy. News of his suicide is then
the final ‘push’ which impels Raskolnikov to admit his own crimes to the
police. Thus once more there is a complex play of cause and effect, and the
generation of one kind of good from what might equally be seen either as a good
or an evil event. We are certainly given no authorial help as to how these
incidents are intended to be interpreted, and there is no sudden epiphany either for Raskolnikov or for
the reader.
As with Dickens, the women
characters are less well-realised than the men: they are either mad, or quite
exaggeratedly virtuous. Katerina Ivanovna is already unhinged by her husband’s
fecklessness, and becomes completely deranged following his death and her
family’s eviction from their lodgings;
Raskolnikov’s mother, Pulcheria Alexandrovna, begins as an innocent abroad
and sinks into a vague insanity following his conviction; even the
jointly-murdered pawnbroker’s sister, Lizaveta, is described as having been
‘simple-minded.’ It is true that Dunya
has enough about her to train a gun on her assailant Svidrigailov, but she
cannot bring herself to shoot him, while Sonya, driven to prostitution in order
to support her abandoned family, takes refuge in a passive religious faith.
There is, therefore, a lot going
on in my ‘forgotten’ main bulk of the novel. And yet, if one concentrates on
Raskolnikov’s internal dilemma, as I did all those years ago, it is just about
explicable that this whole block of narrative might be set aside as secondary
to his existential plight. For all the
examples of human turpitude, self-deception, sin, guilt and exposure with which
he comes into contact, none of these directly affects his attitude to his own
crime nor, apparently, his decision to turn himself in. Porfiry Petrovitch has
rumbled him, and quietly pointed out that his only options appear to be suicide
or submission to the law. He has also raised some interesting points, arising
out of the housepainter Nikolay’s false confession to the murders, about a
fanatical streak in the Russian character which makes individuals want to
suffer, perhaps in imitation of Christ. This is, of course, another
self-deception, but it is both counterpointed and emphasised by the way in
which the arch-sufferer and potential religious fanatic, Sonya, pursues
Raskolnikov to the police station, like some kind of Hound of Heaven, to ensure that he comes clean. Raskolnikov himself
does not really know why he has confessed. He has called the dead pawnbroker, Alyona
Ivanovna, a ‘louse’ until the very end; he has contemplated escaping to
America; he himself has no religious scruples, and his (pseudo-)philosophy of
‘permissible’ crime does not appear to have been confounded in his own
estimation. Perhaps he simply should have considered the fate of his hero,
Napoleon, and contemplated what happened to him when he took on Russia…
But this is not quite the final
word. Various mitigating factors are discovered at Raskolnikov’s trial
(introduced rather too conveniently, in my view) which leads to a relatively
short sentence of penal servitude in Siberia (à
propos, was there not a death penalty for murder in Russia in those
days ?) Sonya, of course, follows him
there. Raskolnikov does undergo some kind of change while in prison, but
I was wrong in assuming that this is necessarily a religious conversion. He
appears finally to have fallen in love with Sonya, and this may involve also a
spiritual dimension, or lay the ground for such, but Dostoyevsky is
emphatically unforthcoming about this. Raskolnikov’s story remains ambiguous to
the very last.
So what do I learn from all this
? FR Leavis, whom I cited above, was a prominent scholar and critic who
believed that great novels have ‘moral seriousness’ and should be capable of
changing their readers. Crime and Punishment is undoubtedly a
morally serious work, and I hope I’ve demonstrated that it had a significant
effect on me as a youth; but the effect it has had on a second reading in
middle-age has been quite different. Then, it was the relationship of the
solipsistic individual to the world and its moral codes and conventions which
struck me as important; this time it has been an exploration of the ways
different people fill their lives with self-deceptions, contradictory codes of
conduct, opportunism and manufactured meanings as bulwarks against the
unknowability of our ends. If I’m spared to read it again in old age, I will
probably derive something still more
from it, appropriate to the state of knowledge and - I hope - wisdom I will have reached. Leavis was partially right: great books change us, but we also change
them as we bring our own experience and ability to make distinctions to bear on them.
Which brings me to a concluding conundrum.
Unless a book is worth rereading, it probably isn’t worth reading once.
Discuss.
In 1979 I read the Penguin Classics edition of "Crime and Punishment" (1979; translator: David Magarshack.) In 2011 it was the Golgotha Press "Works of Fyodor Dostoevsky" for Amazon Kindle (2010; translator not listed.)
