Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky Page 0,1

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’.

Raskolnikov’s mind also stands in metaphorical relation to the broader topography in which his fate is to be played out: the overcrowded, shabby area of St Petersburg’s Haymarket district, with its narrow, twisting streets, its fetid canal (or ‘Ditch’) and its filthy stairwells, drinking dens and connecting courtyards, through which tradesmen, girl-prostitutes and criminals ‘hurry and scurry’. Only a stone’s throw from the imperial majesty of the Neva River and Nevsky Prospect (associated with Pushkin and Gogol respectively), this is the shadow St Petersburg, airless and coffin-like in the height of summer, that Dostoyevsky made his own in both literature and life. In place of the sober ‘military capital’ evoked by Pushkin in The Bronze Horseman (1833) – with its ‘severe, elegant appearance’, its perfection of form – Dostoyevsky’s Haymarket is drunken and unkempt. Here, Baltic Germans shout atrocious Russian, villagers pour in to sub-rent ‘corners’, and students and officers spout caricatured versions of Bentham and Mill. This, too, is a prison of sorts: not the prison of Pushkin’s military autocracy, nor the