Critics tend to treat epilogues as places at the end of novels where authors answer outstanding questions about their characters, put an end to trains of action, and distance the chief events of a novel enough to moderate the reader’s emergence from the intensities of novelistic life. In his preface to Roderick Hudson (1875), Henry James calls this part of a novel “a distribution at the last of prizes, pensions, husbands, wives, babies, millions, appended paragraphs, and cheerful remarks” (quoted in “The Art of Fiction,” 8). Frank Kermode cites the “conclusion” (zakliucheniie) of Dostoevsky’s Idiot as a good example of the type of epilogue that James referred to. He certainly is right about The Idiot, with its use of a visit by the Epanchins to Myshkin as a chance to review the continuing careers of the other major characters. But Dostoevsky used many other kinds of epilogue, ranging through the conclusions of The Friend of the Family and The Gambler to the long narrative at the end of The Insulted and Injured, the only ending he calls an epilogue, except for the elaborate ones of Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. The Possessed has three epilogues, none so labeled: the ambitious and circumstantial Stepan Trofimovich epilogue; the short account of the fates of the conspirators, which fits James’s characterization; and the Stavrogin epilogue, which certainly does nothing to relax the intensity of the reader’s experience. At the other end of the spectrum, Dostoevsky could write a novel like Poor Folk without an epilogue, and—I would argue—at least two epilogues without novels, the retrospective stories “The Gentle Creature,” and “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man.”
For more than a century, readers have objected to the epilogue of Crime and Punishment on the grounds of inconsistency with the rest of the novel. Simmons reflected a broad body of opinion in 1947 when he wrote: “The epilogue is manifestly the weakest section of the novel, and the regeneration of Raskolnikov under the influence of the Christian humility and the love of Sonya is neither artistically palatable nor psychologically sound. It would be interesting to know why Dostoevsky set aside the logic of events in rejecting the ending of suicide for his hero” (Dostoevsky, 153). Such attacks on the epilogue plainly reflect its departure from the character of the main text. For several hundred pages, Raskolnikov has wavered, first between murder and a rich subconscious array of generous and noble impulses, and then between confession and a strong scientistic array of social and psychological calculations. Suddenly in the epilogue, as the critical community has long observed, the novel loses this dialogic quality, which Bakhtin considers the center of the truly novelistic, and reads more like a devotional or inspirational tract, an account of conversion, repentance, and resurrection. The Raskolnikov who confesses to Sonya in a horrifying, allusive, almost wordless encounter, crudely asserts later, “I really only killed a louse, Sonya, a useless, nasty, harmful one” (pt. 5, chap. 5). But such torturous alternations end, and right before the end of the epilogue, “he remembered how constantly he had tortured and injured her heart, remembered her poor, thin little face, but now these recollections hardly tortured him; he knew with what endless love he would now redeem all her sufferings.” This disappearance of the polyphonic may shock a good Bakhtinian in terms of the philosophy of the novel, but it fits Bakhtin’s ideas about the history of the Dostoevskian plot. In the tradition that begins with Greek romances and evolves through medieval and Baroque accounts of adventures and ordeals into the Gothic novels and the traditions of Hoffman, Eugène Sue, and Balzac, Bakhtin expects the good-looking boy and girl of marriageable age to meet unexpectedly, suddenly become passionately involved, and encounter a series of obstacles that retard their union. After all these “attempts on chastity and fidelity, false accusations of crimes,…meetings with unexpected friends or enemies,…prophetic dreams…[etc.], the novel ends happily with the lovers united in marriage” (The Dialogic Imagination, 88).
Crime and Punishment is hardly a Greek romance, but Raskolnikov is the very image of his remarkably beautiful sister (pt. 3, chap. 1) and Sonya “was a small, eighteen-year-old, thin, but rather pretty blonde, with remarkable blue eyes” (pt. 2, chap. 6). Even where this prettiness is explicitly contradicted, it retains a shadowy presence: “She could not have been called pretty, but still her blue eyes were so clear, and when they lit up, the expression of her face became so kind and simple that you could not help being attracted to her” (pt. 3, chap. 4). In the fabula, Raskolnikov had suddenly become fixated on Sonya during Marmeladov’s monologue in the second chapter of the novel, as we learn much later, at nearly the end of chapter 4 in part 4: “I had picked you out long since [to confess to] that time when your father was talking about you, and when Lizaveta was alive.” She had become fixated upon him when he gave all he had to bury her father (pt. 3, chap. 4). Like the heroine of a Greek romance, Sonya is forced into prostitution, falsely accused of a crime, and separated from Raskolnikov by a prison sentence and a series of sicknesses, until in the second chapter of the epilogue, when they finally come together, and “in her eyes there shone infinite happiness: she understood, and for her there was no doubt that he loved her, infinitely, and that at last the moment had come.” A Bakhtinian could argue, therefore, that in the history of literary genres, the epilogue of Crime and Punishment adheres consistently to a formula that shaped the plot of the novel as a whole, thus bringing it to the conclusion implicit in the genre. This account of Crime and Punishment as an ordeal novel makes historical sense, since Dostoevsky relished the nineteenth-century descendants of that tradition. Artistically, however, it does not explain why a novelist with subtle and intricate moral, psychological, religious, and political positions would select from all the novelistic traditions he knew one whose glory resided in its obsessive unsubtlety.
At one level, the argument that Raskolnikov repents only in the epilogue makes good religious sense. The contrast between his monologic repentance in the epilogue and the complex ambiguity of his confessions in the main text of the novel rises from the nature of confession in much Christian thinking. Confession is not the result of repentance. Rather, it is the means to it. Crime and Punishment has been described as a novel of multiple rehearsals followed by single performances and their aftermaths. In the opening scene, Raskolnikov rehearses the murder, bringing a real pledge in place of the dummy he will offer later on. He rehearses the murder again in his dream of the beating of the horse and a number of times in his conscious mind as he reflects about his plans. After the horrible, clumsy, botched performance, he begins rehearsing his confession, trying it out with great effect on Zametov at the Crystal Palace; in a fearsome, wordless scene with Razumikhin; in a dramatically unsuccessful kissing of the earth; and in the famous confession to Sonya. After all these rehearsals, he finally brings himself to confess to the explosive lieutenant at the police office. The aftermath of this successful confession is repentance and resurrection, which brings the novel to a close. When Raskolnikov confesses to Sonya, he cannot be expected to repent as of yet. This argument that the epilogue differs from the rest of the text because it describes a period after the achievement of confession offers a stronger explanation for the artistic nature of the epilogue than the historical tradition of Greek romance. But this doctrinal closure of the novel, destroying its dialogic power, seems to have troubled Dostoevsky himself. To reduce this closed feeling, he ends the novel narratively, offering the whole of it as the introduction to another story: “But this is where a new story begins, the story of the gradual renewal of a human being, the story of his gradual rebirth, gradual shift from one world to another, acquaintance with a new, hitherto altogether unknown reality. This could be the subject of a new account, but the present account is finished.” This open end gives readers the sense of participation in an unfinished story.
Simmons’s idea that suicide would have been the most logical outcome also occurs to Raskolnikov: “He suffered also from the thought of why he had not killed himself at that time. Why had he stood above the river then and given his preference to admitting the crime?” Dostoevsky offers two explanations for this decision, Raskolnikov’s and the narrator’s. Raskolnikov links it to the sheer love of life, and the narrator to the possibility that “even then, when he was standing above the river…he felt in his future and in that of his convictions a profound falsehood. He did not understand that this foreboding could be forewarning of a future transformation in his life, his future resurrection.” If the dialogue between these two answers to Simmons’s question remains somewhat open, the dialogue in the novel as a whole throws important light on it. Basically two theories of crime collide in this novel. One is the theory Dostoevsky derived from Napoleon III’s History of Julius Caesar, the belief that certain great figures are entitled to commit crimes without guilt or punishment because they will benefit humanity so greatly in their other activities. The other is Porfiry Petrovich’s belief that crime is one of two symptoms of a disease whose other symptom is the need to get caught. Murderers therefore leave clues, visit the scene of the crime, spend the fruits of their crime conspicuously, tease the police, and—if all else fails—confess. If they do not, they commit suicide. When Raskolnikov tells Porfiry at the end of his last interrogation, “I have admitted nothing to you, remember that,” Porfiry’s answer is one of the great moments in the history of detective fiction:
“Well, it goes without saying, I’ll remember—why look, he’s even trembling. Don’t you worry, my sweetheart, thy will be done. Wander around a bit; only you mustn’t wander too far. In any event, I do have one more big favor to ask of you,” he added, lowering his voice. “A ticklish matter, but an important one: if in any event (which I don’t believe will happen and consider quite against your nature)—in the event—well, in any event—if you should feel the inclination in these forty or fifty hours to finish the matter in some other way, in some fantastic manner—to inflict a bit of violence on yourself (an absurd proposition, but, well, you must forgive me), then—leave a brief, but circumstantial note. That’s it, two lines, just two bits of writing, and tell about the stone.”
(pt. 6, chap. 2)
Porfiry’s hypnotically purposeful dithering emerges from his central doctrine. Bakhtin would argue that Dostoevsky’s position emerges from the dialogue between these two theories of crime. I would argue that Dostoevsky appoints a judge to decide between the two doctrines: the plot. In the plot, he places Raskolnikov and a control, Svidrigailov. Each has killed two or maybe three people, since Lizaveta is often pregnant and does not raise her hand from a low protective position to defend her head. This is the kind of literary experiment Zola would propose a few years later. Raskolnikov confesses and is resurrected. Svidrigailov does not confess and commits suicide. Porfiry is fighting for law and order, but his affectionate comments should be taken literally, because he believes he is also fighting for Raskolnikov’s life. In this way, while the discourse in Crime and Punishment leaps from the dialogic to the inspirational in the epilogue, the plot remains consistent with the whole, moving logically, though hesitantly, towards confession and then redemption.
The epilogue of Crime and Punishment can be treated as a work of art in its own right, achieving its extraordinary density of impact by relying on a massive prologue: the rest of the novel. This prologue loads the names, the events, and even certain words with meaning that enables Dostoevsky to address his readers with great economy of exposition after hundreds of pages spent training them. Let us examine the first paragraph of this work of art: “Siberia. On the shore of a broad wilderness river stands a city, one of the administrative centers of Russia; in the city is a fortress, in the fortress a prison camp. In the camp the transported second-class convict Rodion Raskolnikov has been imprisoned for nine months already. Almost a year and a half has passed since the day of his crime.”
Dostoevsky can talk to us in shorthand because neither the crime nor the hero of this ten-page work of art needs any introduction, though Raskolnikov has acquired a new title to replace that of “student” with which he introduced himself to the pawnbroker and to his readership after several pages of anonymity in the first chapter of the novel, or the title “former student,” which he uses more often. The one-word sentence “Siberia” eliminates curiosité from the siuzhet of this work of art, since a long tradition of transportation and exile has loaded that word with beauty, brutality, and a standardized repertory of landscapes and incidents. Dostoevsky’s own House of the Dead had described the Omsk prison camp in rich detail. As Bakhtin would have expected, time is juxtaposed to place in this paragraph. Raskolnikov has been in Siberia nine months and had committed his crime a year and a half earlier. This is about average for a Dostoevsky epilogue, though The Brothers Karamazov, the novel most like Crime and Punishment in its epilogue, has only a five-day lapse. A year and eight months have elapsed before the last chapter of The Gambler, two years before that of The Eternal Husband, and six months before the conclusion of The Raw Youth.
After establishing a new time and place for this new work of art, one paragraph uses Raskolnikov’s trial to review the story of his crime and a second paragraph describes the trial and sentencing, followed by the curious introduction of new material redounding to Raskolnikov’s credit, adding materials to the fabula that reinforce the positive associations of impulsive as opposed to calculated actions. After this slightly abnormal epilogic material, the first chapter reverts to the format James formulated, recounting the destinies of Dunya, Sonya, Razumikhin, and Raskolnikov’s mother. But critics of the novel object not so much to the rather conventional chapter 1 as to the far more powerful chapter 2 of the epilogue. The center of this chapter is Raskolnikov’s final dream. Unlike the other dreams in Crime and Punishment, which are psychological and polysemous, the dream in the epilogue is as ideological as Chernyshevsky’s dreams in What Is to Be Done? In this dream, the trichinae that infect the world are spirits (dukhi) endowed with mind and will: “People who have ingested them immediately become mad and insane. But never, never had human beings considered themselves so shrewd and unshakeable in the truth as did those infected. Never had they considered their pronouncements, their scientific conclusions, their moral convictions and beliefs more unshakeable…. People killed one another in some sort of mindless viciousness.”
At this point in the epilogue, Dostoevsky brings the entire novel together. The social, historical, and scientific certainties that had led Raskolnikov to the murder are linked with the sicknesses from which he suffered through most of the novel. Porfiry’s doctrine of crime as a sickness becomes linked with the idea of science as superstition, and these murderous microscopic spirits give a new meaning to Raskolnikov’s bravado when he found the ax: “If reason won’t, the Devil will” (pt. 1, chap. 6). The image of these diabolic microbes would evolve into the devils in the epigraph of The Possessed and into the polemic with Mendeleev and others over spiritualism in The Diary of a Writer a decade later, but at this point in Dostoevsky’s career, it emerged as an unbelievably concise summation of the doctrine, imagery, and plotting of Crime and Punishment.