The causal relationships in the fabula of Crime and Punishment have had a bad press. One of the most common observations about the novel challenges the number of coincidences, chance meetings, and episodes of eavesdropping it contains. Ernest Simmons summed up a large body of opinion in 1947 when he wrote,
Coincidence is an ever-present trap for weary novelists, and in this respect Dostoevsky nodded rather frequently in Crime and Punishment. It is perhaps the principal artistic blemish in the work. Coincidence, of course, may be justifiable in a novel, for it is a legitimate part of the pattern of reality. In real life, however, coincidental happenings do not violate the laws of probability, and in fiction our credibility is forfeited if coincidence is overworked. Dostoevsky certainly carries the matter too far in Crime and Punishment. Svidrigailov hears the reply which significantly affects the action. Lebeziatnikov bumps into Raskolnikov on the crowded city streets just when he is looking for him…. Luzhin lives in the same house as the Marmeladovs, and Svidrigailov hires quarters in Sonya’s house. The restricted stage, which recalls the misdirected application of the unities in some bad imitations of classical drama, results in forced situations and unbelievable coincidences.
(Dostoevsky, 87–88)
Authorial fatigue as the explanation for literary fact has great commonsense appeal. When Homer is weary, he nods. Like coincidence for fiction writers, however, fatigue offers critics a dangerously easy way to solve problems, and it may empathetically occur most often to a weary critic. Like Homer, Dostoevsky made many mistakes, but I owe it to my craft in each specific case to explore every possibility of purposefulness in the text. I have already argued that consistently following an algorithm without prescience can produce the same effect as advance structural planning. There is no question that Dostoevsky explicitly abandoned causation startlingly often in Crime and Punishment, and that these coincidences deserve attention.
Some incidents in the novel seem more strikingly coincidental today than they did in Dostoevsky’s time. I used to be troubled by the provenance of the murder weapon in Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov has carefully planned to use his landlady’s ax, finds it unavailable, and then happens upon an ax in the porter’s lodge. Plainly this is not a coincidence used by a weary author to solve a problem; if anything, Dostoevsky introduces a slightly clumsy problem in order to need the coincidence. It would have been easier to let Raskolnikov simply find the ax as planned and to do without the angry outburst of discouragement at the disruption of his plan and the strong reaction of encouragement at its reinstatement:
He leaped headlong for the ax (it was an ax) and drew it from under the bench where it was lying between two logs; right there, without going out, he fastened it to the loop, put both hands in his pockets, and went out of the porter’s lodge. No one had noticed. “If reason won’t, the Devil will!” [Ne rassudok, tak bes!] he thought, laughing strangely. This occurrence encouraged him extraordinarily.
(pt. 1, chap. 6)
When I first went to Leningrad in 1956, I wandered through the apartment courtyards in the area Dostoevsky knew. All the yards were stacked with firewood. Suddenly I realized that no coincidence was needed to provide an ax. Axes were part of the landscape in those days.
Some of the other coincidences also relate to the real world Dostoevsky was describing. Raskolnikov’s St. Petersburg is huge and oppressive, a city that goes on and on whenever Svidrigailov or Raskolnikov wander, and yet, as Simmons notes, the two chief villains each happen to rent rooms adjacent to Sonya, although their desires focus on Dunya, the other chief heroine. Raskolnikov happens upon the dying Marmeladov; Svidrigailov happens upon Raskolnikov. Raskolnikov even happens upon his best friend Razumikhin and crosses the street to avoid him, which Razumikhin observes and ignores, out of respect for Raskolnikov’s privacy. This last coincidence is hardly a part of the fabula at all, since it has no cause or effect, happens in no time or place, and operates primarily to characterize Razumikhin and Raskolnikov.
Artistically, these and many other encounters enhance the oppressiveness of the setting. St. Petersburg becomes a city whose inhabitants cannot escape one another. In fact, the hugeness of St. Petersburg derives more from Dostoevsky’s literary sources than from any reality he was depicting. In 1860, Dickens’s London and Hugo’s or Balzac’s Paris had populations in the millions, but St. Petersburg had barely half a million; there was real country within a half hour’s walk from any point in town. The poor were distributed more by the number of floors above the street than by neighborhoods, but the cluster of poor students, broken bureaucrats, and petty businesses in the nasty area where city met country at the hay barges made chance encounters appropriate parts of the everyday scene.
Yet even though some coincidences were less marked for Dostoevsky’s earlier readers and others strengthened the oppressive urban atmosphere, many coincidences demand more serious literary attention. After his dream of the beaten horse, as we have already seen, Raskolnikov has definitively abandoned the idea of murdering the old pawnbroker and “suddenly began to breathe easier. He felt that he had already cast off this fearsome burden that had been crushing him so long,” that he was liberated from some enchantment (pt. 1, chap. 5). On his way home, he makes an unnecessary detour through the Haymarket and happens to overhear a conversation indicating that the old pawnbroker will be alone at seven o’clock the next evening. In the world of ordinary causation, this information would have meant no more to Raskolnikov than to any other passerby. For a man who is no longer considering a murder, this coincidence would mean no more than it would to a man who has never considered a murder—that is to say, nothing at all. In the novel, however, Raskolnikov returns home “like a man condemned to death,” unable to resist the drive to murder. Something has deprived him of the freedom which is associated with air and life.
At this point in the siuzhet, the narrator introduces an incident which occurred before the novel began, Raskolnikov’s overhearing a conversation about murdering the pawnbroker:
“One life and a thousand lives in return, that’s sheer arithmetic! And on the universal balance, what does the life of this stupid, vicious, consumptive old crone mean? No more than the life of a louse, a cockroach, or not even that because the old crone is harmful….”
“Of course, she doesn’t deserve to live…but that’s how nature is.”
“Aw, old man, you know they fix nature up and guide it, and otherwise we’d have to drown in prejudices. Otherwise, there’d never have been a single great man. People talk about ‘duty, conscience,’…But look at how we understand them.”
Raskolnikov was extraordinarily distraught. Of course, all this was the most commonplace and ordinary youthful conversation and thought; he’d heard it more than once before, in other forms, on other themes. But why exactly he had happened to hear exactly this conversation and such thoughts as had just been emerging in his own head…. Just exactly these same thoughts.
(pt. 1, chap. 6)
Let us look at this passage under the categories we established in part 1 of this study. Chronologically, this incident is placed about six weeks before Raskolnikov overhears Lizaveta’s conversation in the square. Geographically, it is placed in the kind of tavern that Raskolnikov rarely visits, but that Marmeladov and later Svidrigailov inhabit. In terms of parallelism, it is one of those rare cases where two incidents are identical, at least in Raskolnikov’s mind as he compares his version of the murder with the student’s. Identical events, or justifications for events, lie at the opposite end of a spectrum from those with nothing in common. In the realm of causation, this overheard conversation is already at the zero end of the spectrum in one sense, since Raskolnikov “happens” to hear it. On the other hand, this conversation is important among the causes of the murder. Dostoevsky’s narrator carefully removes the possibility that the conversation gave Raskolnikov any information or conception. The conversation was commonplace and coincided exactly with an idea Raskolnikov was already hatching. The importance resided in one thing: the coincidence of encountering this idea at this moment. We have discussed the way the allegorical use of parallel plots lead readers to feel they are living in a universe God designed to work consistently. Coincidence here leads us to a sense of living in a universe the Devil designed capriciously. But caprice has its order, too.
The overhearing both of the student and of Lizaveta matters only because they are coincidences. In the second paragraph of chapter 6, we are told, “Always after that in this whole business, he tended to see some sort of a strangeness, as if in the presence of some special influences and coincidences.” Coincidence here takes on a very special function. It solves absolutely no problem for a weary author. It introduces into the hero’s set of motives a new causal mechanism, superstition. In the world of science, throwing salt over one’s shoulder or sticking pins in an effigy causes very little to happen. In the world of superstition, both actions are purposeful because they are expected to be effective. In the first paragraph of chapter 6, Dostoevsky takes the trouble to give a circumstantial everyday explanation for Lizaveta’s presence in the Haymarket, relating it to her work, though not to Raskolnikov’s random, explicitly unmotivated decision to walk there. The next paragraph begins with the word “but,” and introduces a word that was an important part of the intellectual world of the 1860s: “But Raskolnikov had grown superstitious of late. Traces of superstition remained in him long afterwards, almost ineradicably” (pt. 1, chap. 6). In Auguste Comte’s vision of universal history, mankind moves through three stages: a stage of superstition, when men believe they can influence nature through secret procedures; a stage of religion, when men believe they can influence nature through the intervention of divinities; and a stage of science, when they actually can influence nature by understanding the laws by which it operates. The Russian Nihilists and all the Positivists prided themselves on residing in the final stage of intellectual history, and looked down on religious people as throwbacks to an earlier age. Dostoevsky delighted in mocking great and little scientific minds for operating not on reason but on faith. He felt considerable distaste for spiritualism, but attacked Dmitry Mendeleev in the January, March, and April 1876 issues of Diary of a Writer for claiming that spiritualism could not possibly be true and didn’t need to be proven fraudulent. This was a statement of faith, not science.
Yet in the first paragraph of Notes from Underground, when the Underground Man can make no sense of his sickness, he goes on, “I’m taking no treatment, and never did, although I respect medicine and doctors. Moreover, I’m superstitious in the extreme; well, at least enough to respect medicine. I’m sufficiently educated not to be superstitious, but I’m superstitious” (1). The Underground Man is suggesting here that respect for medicine emerges from superstition, but Dostoevsky is hinting that many of his ideological foes—the positivists, scientists, materialists, and nihilists—have not superseded the religious stage in the history of humanity, but have in fact retreated to the superstitious stage. Dostoevsky is using coincidences to undercut the confidence of his adversaries in their control of the world to suggest that discovering a force at work in the world or a law of nature is little different from discovering that a hex produces a desired result. This is an attack not so much on science as on scientism, the belief that science can solve all problems, whether social, historical, or intellectual.
When he uses the word “but” to introduce the word “superstition” after giving a very everyday explanation for Lizaveta’s presence, he is setting two parallel causal systems into operation, much as had been done by Lermontov, whom Dostoevsky called one of the two “demons” in Russian literature. The first system is the narrator’s commonplace, everyday causal system, where people earn livings, go broke, put kinks into chronology when they make plans and appointments, but are living in the world that Dostoevsky’s enemies called “real.” The second system is Raskolnikov’s sick, superstitious, strange way of relating incidents, which reads the finding of an everyday ax as extraordinarily encouraging, operating in a world of omens and proverbs like, “If reason won’t, the devil will!” Dostoevsky uses many of the coincidences in the novel to slam his narrator’s commonsense reading against Raskolnikov’s sick, superstitious, but pseudo-rational reading of the same event. What works fictionally as melodramatic plotting works ideologically as argumentative plotting.