In Dostoevsky we have the great philosopher of abjection. No writer of his stature ever scraped as deep and dirty as Dostoevsky, either socially or psychologically. In work after work, his characters confront the worst of torments that plague both the inner and outer man. Dostoevsky’s great novella Notes from Underground (an excellent intro to his oeuvre if you’re not yet ready for a big book) begins “I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I think my liver is diseased,” and this is how his protagonists tend to be: depressed, debilitated, dispossessed, and depraved. They are at life’s bottom and have often driven themselves there, miserable and dissolute but unable not to heap further degradation and agony on themselves. Nowhere in literature will you find a deeper probing of the psychology of self-punishment and self-flagellation, or the grim ineluctable slipping away into true nihilism.
But nihilistic as his characters often are, Dostoevsky himself was of quite another type. Though he suffered terribly in life (in addition to being an epileptic and compulsive gambler, he was arrested for his early political beliefs, put through a fake execution—psych!—and sentenced to hard labor in Siberia for four years), he should not be confused with being a nihilist or proto-existentialist himself—quite the opposite. His relentless unflinching investigation of misery is actually part of a larger, redemptive project, not dissimilar to Augustine’s in the Confessions or Milton’s in Paradise Lost. For Dostoevsky will lead you down the path to faithlessness and desperation, trying to sucker you into believing what his characters believe, but only to show you that there is an alternative, even to the most seemingly lost. In the least preachy, least intrusive way possible (so subtle, readers often miss it), Dostoevsky makes it clear that the alternative to suffering is God, and redemption is always available—even when you don’t know it.
As a whole, Crime and Punishment enacts this trap perfectly, but also sets it up in miniature early on in one of the most emotionally riveting scenes you’ll ever read. Only nine pages into the novel, the protagonist, Raskolnikov, meets Marmaladov, a drunk in a bar who has just guzzled away the money that would have fed his starving children. Marmaladov buttonholes Raskolnikov and asks him if he has known what it is “to plead without hope … utterly without hope, sir, knowing beforehand that nothing will come of it?” Marmaladov’s point is that you know you have no chance, yet you do it anyway. Some part of you wants the rejection, both to punish yourself and to confirm that you’ve hit rock bottom, that it can’t get worse, that life can’t give you yet another dose. That’s the subtlety both of his question’s psychology and Dostoevsky’s insight: that the desperate man wants to be broken, not to be able to endure, just as the compulsive gambler subconsciously wants to run out of money. For at the end of hope, at least there’s cease.
Marmaladov then poses what will eventually become the central question of the book: “Do you understand what it means to have nowhere left to turn?” The distraught man is poised on the very brink Dostoevsky wants to place the reader, the same brink where Raskolnikov will soon find himself, though he doesn’t realize it yet. But in Marmaladov’s heart there is a flicker of understanding, a flicker of hope, lost on Raskolnikov. He wants forgiveness; he doesn’t feel he deserves it but hopes that God might grant it anyway, precisely because he doesn’t feel worthy (see “Best Line”). From this point on, the story will become Raskolnikov’s descent into abjection and groping for redemption (never quite able to look heavenward) as a counterexample to Marmaladov, the man who understands that he’s not as alone as modern life would have him believe.
As a novel, Crime and Punishment is a piano wire pulled tighter and tighter, then strummed. At first glance, the plot seems almost a mockery of the title; the murder takes place only a seventh of the way in, and the “punishment” (if considered conventionally—whether Raskolnikov will be arrested and imprisoned) isn’t revealed till the very end. But of course the punishment is also his guilt and the exquisite cat-and-mousing of Raskolnikov both by the detective Ilya Petrovich and by his own psyche. This is what most people remember of the novel, the slow teasing out of the evidence—real and imagined—against him, the uncertainty in our minds and his whether the police really have something on him, the psychological thumbscrews that tighten and tighten and tighten. In terms of pacing, it’s utterly masterful; in the psychology of guilt, unrivaled; and in the sheer execution of the story, a fully sustained joy to the reader. Crime and Punishment is a book to treasure, the perfect combination of the page-turner and the philosophical novel.
Having been utterly rapt—entertained, surprised, impressed, and kept up well past your bedtime, waiting for the next twist—you’ll get to the end of Crime and Punishment and realize that you just read a supremely religious work. And the basis of this religion, for Dostoevsky as for Marmaladov, is forgiveness. Like a former addict who’s become a counselor—but somehow manages to keep from proselytizing—Dostoevsky sees your dark side from within and absolves everything, because he was there. Dostoevsky: a man like any other—maculate, flawed, and all too aware of the fallibility and frailty of us all. But tucked beneath his threadbare coat were the wings of an angel—an angel of understanding, an angel of mercy, an angel who never forgot his humanity.
The Buzz: The desire to confess, how it burns. Ask anybody what Crime and Punishment is about and they’re likely to remember Raskolnikov’s deliberation and tentativity before killing the old woman and the ceaseless guilt that hounds him thereafter. From the moment he commits the crime, Raskolnikov feels the flames licking: “A terrible word trembled on his lips as the bolt had trembled then on the door: now, now, the bolt will give way; now, now, the word will slip out; oh, only to say it!”
Crime and Punishment is literature’s greatest inquiry into criminal psychology, both from the perspective of the prosecuted (Raskolnikov) and the prosecutor (Petrovich). The latter offers this gem: “If I don’t arrest him or worry him in any way, but if he knows, or at least suspects, every minute of every hour, that I know everything down to the last detail, and am watching him day and night with ceaseless vigilance, if he is always conscious of the weight of suspicion and fear, he is absolutely certain to lose his head.” This is effectively the psychology of the panopticon: a prison guard tower invented in the 18th century by Jeremy Bentham that suggests to the inmates that everything they do can be seen. Bentham’s breakthrough—understood by Dostoevsky as well—is that once the prisoners believe that the panopticon is staffed at all times, it doesn’t have to be staffed at all. The very idea of being perpetually watched does the job of watching. Through Dostoevsky’s deft narration, Ilya Petrovich allows Raskolnikov to create a panopticon in his own mind.
What People Don’t Know (But Should): Late in the novel, we find that Raskolnikov has published an article prepounding a proto-Nietzschean superman theory. (Dostoevsky’s source for the idea was possibly Napoleon III’s Life of Julius Caesar, translated into Russian in 1865. And though Nietzsche called Dostoevsky “the only psychologist who has anything to teach me,” it’s doubtful that Dostoevsky taught him this. Nietzsche probably first saw a similar theory in Goethe or the Young Hegelians.) It’s an awkward addition to the plot, as if Dostoevsky, already halfway through his novel, caught wind of the theory and felt the need to attribute it to his character so he could put it under critique. Crime and Punishment does have one other rather bizarre tie to Nietzsche, however: thirty-three years after the novel’s publication, Nietzsche went insane upon seeing a horse beaten in a scene similar to the one Dostoevsky describes in Raskolnikov’s dream.
Best Line: You’ll be hard-pressed to find a level of heartache comparable to this, Marmaladov’s prayer, at least since Ugolino’s confession in Inferno: “This very bottle, sir, bought with her money. … She said nothing, she only looked at me in silence. … It hurts more when there are no reproaches! … Now, who could be sorry for a wretch like me, eh? Are you sorry for me now, sir, or not? Tell me, sir, are you sorry or aren’t you? He-he-he-he! …
“No, there is no need to be sorry for me! I ought to be crucified, crucified, not pitied! Crucify, oh judge, crucify me, but pity your victim! … He will pity us, He who pitied all men and understood all men and all things, He alone is the judge. In that day … He will say: ‘Come unto Me! I have already forgiven thee’ … And the wise and learned shall say: Lord, why dost Thou receive these?’ And He shall say: ‘I receive them, oh ye wise men, I receive them, oh ye learned ones, inasmuch as not one of these has deemed himself worthy.”
Marmaladov will be forgiven. That is the religion Dostoevsky champions.
What’s Sexy: Zip. Raskolnikov falls for Marmaladov’s daughter, the prostitute, but he sees her as an icon of self-sacrifice (which she is) and looks to her for deliverance, not for a roll in the hay.
Quirky Fact: The April 1866 edition of a journal called The Russian Messenger contained installments of both Crime and Punishment and Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Two of the greatest novels of all time, both serialized in the same magazine—try topping that, The New Yorker!
What to Skip: A number of sections of Book V are quite skimmable; I wouldn’t spend too much time on V, i (a scene with Peter Petrovich, the wealthy suitor of Raskolnikov’s sister); V, ii (Marmaladov’s funeral); and V, v (Raskolnikov with Marmaladov’s daughter). Apart from that, you’ll be dazzled.