Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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