Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky Page 0,2

bureaucratic nightmare of Gogol, but the false freedom of those torn from their roots, left with nothing but words and borrowed ideas.

The opening pages acquaint us with these borrowed ideas in the recurring themes of Raskolnikov’s wretched soliloquies: how to overcome his cowardice and indecisiveness, how to utter ‘a new word’, to take a ‘new step’; above all, how to stop talking and start doing. Before us is a Hamlet without a clearly identifiable cause, a man-child who fears the frivolity of his own thoughts (mere ‘toys’), which he is unable to arrange in satisfactory order. A penchant for self-contradiction lends a rebarbative texture to his ruminations, marked by the frequency of ‘but’ and ‘still’ and tapering off in rows of dots. It is the self-lacerating language familiar from the narrator of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864), but spoken now from beneath the eaves, rather than from beneath the floorboards. The masochism of the mouse-man of the Underground is replaced by Raskolnikov’s ‘Satanic pride’.6

This pride, however, is knowingly misplaced. Raskolnikov’s thoughts are evidently as stale to him as they would have been to contemporary readers, for whom the anxieties of the ineffectual intellectual had long been familiar from novels set on country estates among gifted young men too weak or too comfortable to address the malign status quo. By 1865 the idle moral torments of the ‘superfluous men’ of Ivan Goncharov (1812–91) and Ivan Turgenev (1818–83) had filtered down to the new breed of déclassé, de-Christianized intellectuals, the most influential of whom, such as the socialist Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828–89) and the nihilist Dmitry Pisarev (1840–68), were inspiring a generation of revolutionaries with their heavily ideological fiction and criticism. For both of these men, prison was more than a metaphor.

In this context, Raskolnikov’s vacillations and ruminations are decidedly old-school, and not infrequently derivative. Thus, Pisarev, in response to Bazarov, the anti-hero of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862), had already set out a division between the conformist masses and the select few to whom all is permitted and who may be prevented only by ‘personal taste’ from murder and robbery.7 Now, three years later, this idea is plagiarized by Raskolnikov. Nor does Dostoyevsky want us to ignore, from the opening page, the belated echoes of the title of Chernyshevsky’s hymn to the emancipatory power of ‘rational egoism’, the novel What Is to Be Done? (1863). Later, Raskolnikov will address the same question verbatim to his good angel, Sonya, and she, in turn, will pose it to him. Raskolnikov’s answer will again be an act of plagiarism: we must break what must be broken – an almost direct quote from Pisarev, recycled many years later by Lenin. But Raskolnikov is an unlikely revolutionary. He is too much a loner to be the ‘political conspirator’ his friend Razumikhin mistakes him for, and he is certainly no leader of men; perhaps he is just a belated Romantic, framing his outdated, somewhat comical delusions in the language of his day?

Dostoyevsky also introduces in the early chapters a further element latent in his pitch to Katkov: the impatience of his protagonist, who ‘makes up his mind to get out of his foul situation in a single bound’. This is brought to the surface by the maid and country girl Nastasya, who, endowed with the intuition that Dostoyevsky often reserves for his less educated characters, divines that Raskolnikov is too lazy to work and wants his fortune ‘right now’. Unimpressed by ‘eggheads’ who never do a stroke of work, she nevertheless feels a rough tenderness towards him as a human being, foreshadowing the much deeper feelings and intuition that will be shown by Sonya, who similarly opposes her own unconscious wisdom (Sonya: Sophia) to the sophistry of Raskolnikov.

In the folkloric context that would have constituted Nastasya’s own education, Raskolnikov might be cast as Ivan the Fool, who sits on the stove all day and waits for a pretty maiden and a crock of gold to fall into his lap. Raskolnikov, who also hails from the provinces, has himself kept one foot in the cuckoo land of magic tales, as an early, jarring reference to King Pea (Tsar Gorokh, associated with bygone happiness) makes plain. But St Petersburg, he will find, is no place for childish dreams.

Nor is it a place for a ‘player’ (igrok), to give the literal translation of the Russian word for ‘gambler’. For Raskolnikov – like Pushkin’s