The plot that emerges in Crime and Punishment reflects much of Dostoevsky’s background in the history of literature as well as his own evolution as a novelist. Part 1 of the novel can be isolated for a moment and studied as a novella called Crime whose much longer sequel would be called Punishment. This book begins with a rich depiction of the hero’s alienation from the educational, economic, social, and moral worlds; it ends with him committing a murder. The second and third chapters contain two long embedded narratives: Marmeladov’s monologue in the tavern and the letter from Raskolnikov’s mother describing Dunya’s trials as a governess for the Svidrigailovs and her engagement to Luzhin. These accounts contain much of the background of the novel, but in the construction of the causal system, Dostoevsky has given Raskolnikov no part in the events Marmeladov relates and little influence on the events in his mother’s letter except for his absence and his need for money, about which his mother’s account is silent. Except when Raskolnikov is involved, these two sets of events and characters continue to have little effect on one another, although Dostoevsky foregrounds Dunya’s courtesy to Sonya Marmeladova and uses Svidrigailov’s fortune to provide for the Marmeladov children. Luzhin persecutes Sonya partly for political, partly for prurient, purposes, but primarily to offend and discredit Raskolnikov. But this lack of causal interconnection forces Dostoevsky to emphasize two other kinds of relationship between the Marmeladov fabula and the Svidrigailov-Dunya fabula. One is spatial: Svidrigailov lives adjacent to Sonya, and Luzhin lives among the other Marmeladovs.
Far more important are the parallels between the Marmeladov and the Dunya plots. Dunya’s plan to sacrifice her happiness to support her brother’s career is one of his strongest motives for the murder, and in one of the most puzzling passages in the novel, Raskolnikov tells Sonya that he had planned to confess the crime to her even before he had met her. To remind his readership of this organizing principle, parallelism, Dostoevsky begins the next chapter, the fourth in the novel, with a five-page interior monologue that is primarily Raskolnikov’s literary criticism of his mother’s letter, partly of its diction, use of the word “apparently,” etc., but also of its plot, particularly the motivations of Luzhin, Dunya, and his mother. This third monologue in the novel ends with a comparison of the other two, an eloquently bitter linking of Sonya and Dunya: “Oh, dear and unjust hearts!…Sonechka, Sonechka Marmeladova, the eternal Sonechka, as long as the World lasts!…Do you know, Dunechka, that Sonechka’s destiny is in no way more vile than a destiny with Mr. Luzhin?” (pt. 1, chap. 4). Dostoevsky is using Raskolnikov to instruct his readers in how to read the relationship among the incidents in Crime and Punishment. Causation is important, and certainly time and space are, but as Raskolnikov forces us to see at this point, the Dunya plot is related to the Sonya plot centrally by analogy. Calculated marriages have been compared to prostitution by characters in Dickens, Hugo, George Sand, and other favorites of Dostoevsky’s, but the nagging attention to the parallel constitutes one of the central elements of the Sonya plot. Of the five ways incidents can be related in a novel like Crime and Punishment, parallelism has probably received the most admiring attention. For Shakespeare, we have studied how parallelism leads to abstraction, or rather how it makes abstraction concrete by enabling readers to see and feel the common features for themselves. In Crime and Punishment, the multitude of parallelisms carries much of the ideological argument that drove Dostoevsky to write this particular novel at this time.
Chapter 4 continues with Raskolnikov meeting a disheveled teenager staggering down the boulevard. Raskolnikov reflects that her destiny is also prostitution and death before she is twenty, and he calls the hovering lecher “Svidrigailov,” creating a cluster of three helpless women sacrificed to the lust of moneyed selfishness. By calling our attention to this “situation rhyme,” Dostoevsky makes us see the consistency in Raskolnikov’s responses to the three women. With Sonya’s family, his first impulse is generous; he places money on the windowsill as he leaves, then in a fit of esprit de l’escalier, repents cynically on the staircase: “They have Sonya” (pt. 1, chap. 2). With Dunya, his first reaction to the Luzhin engagement is spirited. He wants to prevent the marriage, but then angrily asks himself what right he has to forbid it, which leads him to thoughts about murdering the pawnbroker. With the drunken teenager, he gives a policeman money to help her home, then calls to the puzzled policeman to forget the whole idea, telling himself that statistics prove that a certain percentage of women have to be ruined every year. By the end of the fourth chapter, therefore, Dostoevsky has trained his readers to expect parallel events producing parallel responses, and specifically to expect Raskolnikov to alternate between impulsive generosity and cynical afterthought. By the fifth chapter, the character of this alternation becomes clearer because it is laid out in Raskolnikov’s interior monologue: “After that,” he cried, springing from the bench, “but is that really going to happen? Can it be that it will happen?” (Pt. 1, chap. 5).
Earlier, the italicized words had been part of an authorial strategy to inspire curiosité, the reader’s drive to figure out what is going on, but by now it is clear to the reader that “that” refers to the murder; the italicized words are a part of Raskolnikov’s system for tabooing explicit enunciation of the principal matter on his mind. By the end of the fifth chapter, Dostoevsky has laid out the chief algorithm for creating or interpreting Crime and Punishment—the alternation in Raskolnikov’s mind between two fully established bodies of imagery and ideology:
dream (son) vs. daydream (mechta)
unconsciousness vs. consciousness
impulse vs. afterthought
generosity vs. economics
nature vs. science
humanity vs. statistics
intuition vs. reason
freedom vs. burden (bremia)
air vs. enslavement
revulsion vs. murder
After the murder, more elements enter the picture, notably the opposition between confession and suicide and between resurrection and death, but by the end of the fifth chapter, the plan for the novel is in place, and it is daringly simple.
The plot of Crime and Punishment has its main action within the mind of Raskolnikov. He is on stage almost all the time, usually as a central actor, but sometimes, as in chapters 2 and 3, as the audience for the account of another character. When he is not on stage, one of his two surrogates, Razumikhin or Svidrigailov, usually occupies our attention. In this sense, Dostoevsky has abandoned the plot of the letter novel, in which two or more narrators can see the same event. We know that Dostoevsky first planned to narrate the novel in the first person, through Raskolnikov’s eyes and voice. But first-person narration never worked as well for Dostoevsky in full-length novels as it did in his greatest shorter works, probably for technical reasons: the need for eavesdropping, letters, or outside reports to inform a narrator cut off from authorial omniscience. But the obsessive, sometimes oppressive involvement in Raskolnikov’s life survived the shift to third-person narration.
Critics often call Raskolnikov unpredictable and the novel tormentingly disorienting, just as they call Moscow’s Cathedral of the Blessed Basil wild and violent. But the power of that cathedral rests in part on the rigid formality of its floor plan, and the power of Crime and Punishment rests in part on the clarity of the central split, or raskol, in Raskolnikov’s mind and its enactment in alternating states of mind, often separated by the word vdrug, “suddenly.”
Once he has trained us to expect this algorithm, Dostoevsky sets to work to implicate us in the crime. He ends chapter 4 by setting up a parallel for Raskolnikov, embedding a brief portrait of Razumikhin, another ex-student, but one who is companionable, practical, cheerful, and simple-hearted, as opposed to Raskolnikov, who is a loner, unable or unwilling to help himself, grim, haughty, and excessively intellectual. In exactly the same position, they are heading in opposite directions. Next, Dostoevsky introduces the first great scene in the novel, again an embedded one—a dream. In this dream, we see another moment in Raskolnikov’s background, his childhood when his father was alive, seeing it again with Raskolnikov as spectator at two levels, adult spectator to the dream and child spectator to the beating of the horse within the dream. This double layering involves us with Raskolnikov, whose impulses at both ages coincide with our own, and the vividness of the dream—its play on personal power, personal possession of a living female creature, savage glee in that possession and in the destructive use of it—all link this passage with the passages about Luzhin, Svidrigailov, and the lecher passing the ruined teenager on the boulevard. Our experience of Raskolnikov’s experience retains its obsessive integrity.
The aftermath of this dream near the end of chapter 5 repeats the paired bodies of imagery and ideology that we have already assimilated but may not have noticed as organized polar oppositions until now:
He wants to catch his breath, cry out, and wakes up…all in a sweat, his hair drenched with sweat, gasping, and sat up in horror.
“Thank God, it’s just a dream,” he said…taking a deep breath…. “Isn’t this a fever starting up in me, such a hideous dream”….
“Oh, God,…Can it be, can it really be that I will take an axe and start beating her head, and smash her skull—will slip on sticky, warm blood, smash a lock, steal and tremble, hide, all bloodied—with an axe—Lord, can it be?…
“No, I won’t endure it, I won’t. Suppose, suppose there’s not even any doubt at all in all these calculations, suppose that all that’s been decided this month were clear as day, fair as arithmetic. Lord! I still would not decide to do it.”…He suddenly breathed more easily. He felt that he already had cast off this fearsome burden that had been crushing him so long, and his heart suddenly grew light and was at peace. “Lord, show me my way, and I renounce this damned—daydream of mine.”
Crossing the bridge, he gazed quietly and peaceably at the
Neva, at the brilliant setting of a bright red sun…. It was as if a boil on his heart that had been swelling all month had suddenly burst. Freedom! Freedom! He was free now from these hexes, these enchantments, these obsessions.
(pt. 1, chap. 5)
This passage is so powerful that most readers probably form a new expectation at this point to replace the alternation they have been trained to expect. The fate of that new expectation is the subject of a later chapter, but here we will turn to the end of part 1, after Raskolnikov has done exactly what he envisioned with such revulsion in the passage just quoted.
Raskolnikov—whose actions, passions, and experiences we have shared without interruption (waking, sleeping, listening, and committing murder)—has unhooked the door and listened at the stairhead, waiting patiently to escape. He hears voices in the distance, then silence, then the noisy painters quitting work, and then someone’s footsteps approaching, heavily, evenly, unhurriedly. He freezes, as in a nightmare when one dreams pursuers are catching up, closing in, wanting to kill, and it’s as if one has taken root there and can’t move one’s hands. He finally slips back to the pawnbroker’s room, rehooks the door, and hides, not breathing. As Raskolnikov stands in the room with the two bleeding corpses, holding his breath as he listens at the door, inches from his potential discoverers, who may leave or summon the police, we readers hold our breath, exert our will upon him not to give up and confess, and then suddenly realize that we are accessories after the fact, trying to help this merciless, calculating hatchet-murderer to escape.
This complicity in the crime alternates with the reader’s horror and revulsion at it, just as Raskolnikov alternates between a drive towards murder and escape and a drive toward freedom from the murderous impulse and—after the murder—towards confession. Dostoevsky’s siuzhet manipulates his readers into the fabula of the novel by almost never letting them outside the mind of Raskolnikov. We have mentioned that this intensity of narrative concentration on a single figure implicates the readers in his predicament much as readers willed the escape of picaresque scamps in earlier novels. Crime and Punishment has a beginning, a middle, and an end, but it retains the algorithmic integrity of Gogol and his masters. In Crime and Punishment, the shaping rule is not accretive and perverse as in Dead Souls, but is rather the terrifying alternation between the crime and the punishment, the rational calculation that the destruction of a bloodsucking insect was an action worthy of a great man and the direct, emotional realization that this was the murder of a helpless fellow human being. Dostoevsky uses his narrative tools to draw the reader inside this vacillation.
By constructing a siuzhet that makes us live with his protagonist so intimately for ninety pages, Dostoevsky has implicated us in a crime that is vicious, greedy, cold, and despicable. This is the manipulative novel at its strongest. It tells us what is happening, shows us what is happening, but more than that, it makes us experience what is happening. From the end of part 1, the reader, like Raskolnikov, will alternate between a strong drive towards his escape and a drive toward his confession. The siuzhet programs the reader’s experience to track the hero’s experience in the fabula.