


IMPORTANT CONCEPTS IN CRIME AND
PUNISHMENT
1. cite incidents from the
novel to illustrate Raskolnikov’s dual nature.
2. identify doubles or pairs
of characters who share similar or contradictory traits and discuss how these
doubles add believability and suspense to the novel.
3. discuss the extent to
which Raskolnikov believes that his decision to commit the crime, and the
resulting consequences of that crime, are the result of predetermination or
fate.
4. cite incidents from the
novel illustrating the following theme: A man can be rehabilitated through the
power of reconciliation, repentance, and love.
represent in
Crime
and Punishment.
5. point out and explain
religious symbols in the novel including:
• the number 3
• the story of Lazarus
• Sonia’s cross
6. point out the
significance of the color yellow discuss what it may represent in
Crime
and Punishment.
7. recognize and point out
instances of irony in
Crime
and Punishment.
8. discuss the importance of
dreams in the novel to foreshadow future actions and to give insight into the
minds of the characters.
9. relate incidents from the
lives of the female characters in the novel that illustrate the Following. Be
sure to address the SIGNIFICANCE of this element
• hardships the women
must face in this era and the strength required to endure them.
• the willingness of the
female characters to sacrifi ce themselves for others and to forgive the
sins of others.
10. discuss the extent to
which Raskolnikov’s relationship with the female characters aids his
rehabilitation. Discuss what symbolism/ allusion is apparent in these
relationships.
11. Discuss the theme of
rebirth/ regeneration in the novel. Consider how each of the following
contributes to the development of this theme:
• love
• prayer
• repentance
• punishment
• forgiveness
12. The apparent connection
between imprisonment and a kind of spiritual freedom.
13.
The symbolic significance of the characters of Sonya, Dunya, Luzhin and
Svidrigailov.
14. point out the ways
Dostoevsky uses Svidrigailov’s nihilistic lifestyle and Lebeziatnikov’s
nihilistic views to express his dislike of nihilism.
15. discuss the ways in
which Raskolnikov and Dounia are alike and why only one of them is able to kill.
16.
The symbolic role of nature/ trees and plants/ water in the novel. The
role of the city.
17.
The symbolic significance of heat in the novel
KOHLBERG'S STAGES OF MORAL DEVELOPMENT
BIOGRAPHICAL
INTRODUCTION
An outstanding example of research in the Piagetian
tradition is the work of Lawrence Kohlberg. Kohlberg has focused on moral
development and has proposed a stage theory of moral thinking which goes well
beyond Piaget's initial formulations.
Kohlberg, who was born in 1927, grew up in Bronxville, New
York, and attended the Andover Academy in Massachusetts, a private high school
for bright and usually wealthy students. He did not go immediately to college,
but instead went to help the Israeli cause, in which he was made the Second
Engineer on an old freighter carrying refugees from parts of Europe to Israel.
After this, in 1948, he enrolled at the University of Chicago, where he scored
so high on admission tests that he had to take only a few courses to earn his
bachelor's degree. This he did in one year. He stayed on at Chicago for graduate
work in psychology, at first thinking he would become a clinical psychologist.
However, he soon became interested in Piaget and began interviewing children and
adolescents on moral issues. The result was his doctoral dissertation (1958a),
the first rendition of his new stage theory.
Kohlberg is an informal, unassuming man who also is a true
scholar; he has thought long and deeply about a wide range of issues in both
psychology and philosophy and has done much to help others appreciate the wisdom
of many of the "old psychologists," such as Rousseau, John Dewey, and James Mark
Baldwin. Kohlberg has taught at the University of Chicago (1962-1968) and, since
1968, has been at Harvard University.
PIAGET'S STAGES OF MORAL JUDGMENT
Piaget studied many aspects of moral judgment, but most of
his findings fit into a two-stage theory. Children younger than 10 or 11 years
think about moral dilemmas one way; older children consider them differently. As
we have seen, younger children regard rules as fixed and absolute. They believe
that rules are handed down by adults or by God and that one cannot change them.
The older child's view is more relativistic. He or she understands that it is
permissible to change rules if everyone agrees. Rules are not sacred and
absolute but are devices which humans use to get along cooperatively.
At approximately the same time--10 or 11 years--children's
moral thinking undergoes other shifts. In particular, younger children base
their moral judgments more on consequences, whereas older children base their
judgments on intentions. When, for example, the young child hears about one boy
who broke 15 cups trying to help his mother and another boy who broke only one
cup trying to steal cookies, the young child thinks that the first boy did
worse. The child primarily considers the amount of damage--the
consequences--whereas the older child is more likely to judge wrongness in terms
of the motives underlying the act (Piaget, 1932, p. 137).
There are many more details to Piaget's work on moral
judgment, but he essentially found a series of changes that occur between the
ages of 10 and 12, just when the child begins to enter the general stage of
formal operations.
Intellectual development, however, does not stop at this
point. This is just the beginning of formal operations, which continue to
develop at least until age 16. Accordingly, one might expect thinking about
moral issues to continue to develop throughout adolescence. Kohlberg therefore
interviewed both children and adolescents about moral dilemmas, and he did find
stages that go well beyond Piaget's. He uncovered six stages, only the first
three of which share many features with Piaget's stages.
KOHLBERG'S METHOD
Kohlberg's (1958a) core sample was comprised of 72 boys,
from both middle- and lower-class families in Chicago. They were ages 10, 13,
and 16. He later added to his sample younger children, delinquents, and boys and
girls from other American cities and from other countries (1963, 1970).
The basic interview consists of a series of dilemmas such
as the following:
Heinz Steals the Drug
In Europe, a woman was near death from a special kind of
cancer. There was one drug that the doctors thought might save her. It was a
form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered. The
drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was charging ten times what the
drug cost him to make. He paid $200 for the radium and charged $2,000 for a
small dose of the drug. The sick woman's husband, Heinz, went to everyone he
knew to borrow the money, but he could only get together about $ 1,000 which
is half of what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying and
asked him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said: "No,
I discovered the drug and I'm going to make money from it." So Heinz got
desperate and broke into the man's store to steal the drug-for his wife.
Should the husband have done that? (Kohlberg, 1963, p. 19)
Kohlberg is not really interested in whether the subject
says "yes" or "no" to this dilemma but in the reasoning behind the answer. The
interviewer wants to know why the subject thinks Heinz should or should not have
stolen the drug. The interview schedule then asks new questions which help one
understand the child's reasoning. For example, children are asked if Heinz had a
right to steal the drug, if he was violating the druggist's rights, and what
sentence the judge should give him once he was caught. Once again, the main
concern is with the reasoning behind the answers. The interview then goes on to
give more dilemmas in order to get a good sampling of a subject's moral
thinking.
Once Kohlberg had classified the various responses into
stages, he wanted to know whether his classification was reliable. In
particular, he. wanted to know if others would score the protocols in the same
way. Other judges independently scored a sample of responses, and he calculated
the degree to which all raters agreed. This procedure is called interrater
reliability. Kohlberg found these agreements to be high, as he has in his
subsequent work, but whenever investigators use Kohlberg's interview, they also
should check for interrater reliability before scoring the entire sample.
KOHLBERG'S SIX STAGES
Level 1. Preconventional Morality
Stage 1. Obedience and Punishment Orientation.
Kohlberg's stage 1 is similar to Piaget's first stage of moral thought. The
child assumes that powerful authorities hand down a fixed set of rules which he
or she must unquestioningly obey. To the Heinz dilemma, the child typically says
that Heinz was wrong to steal the drug because "It's against the law," or "It's
bad to steal," as if this were all there were to it. When asked to elaborate,
the child usually responds in terms of the consequences involved, explaining
that stealing is bad "because you'll get punished" (Kohlberg, 1958b).
Although the vast majority of children at stage 1 oppose
Heinz’s theft, it is still possible for a child to support the action and still
employ stage 1 reasoning. For example, a child might say, "Heinz can steal it
because he asked first and it's not like he stole something big; he won't get
punished" (see Rest, 1973). Even though the child agrees with Heinz’s action,
the reasoning is still stage 1; the concern is with what authorities permit and
punish.
Kohlberg calls stage 1 thinking "preconventional" because
children do not yet speak as members of society. Instead, they see morality as
something external to themselves, as that which the big people say they must do.
Stage 2. Individualism and Exchange. At this
stage children recognize that there is not just one right view that is handed
down by the authorities. Different individuals have different viewpoints.
"Heinz," they might point out, "might think it's right to take the drug, the
druggist would not." Since everything is relative, each person is free to
pursue his or her individual interests. One boy said that Heinz might
steal the drug if he wanted his wife to live, but that he doesn't have to if he
wants to marry someone younger and better-looking (Kohlberg, 1963, p. 24).
Another boy said Heinz might steal it because
maybe they had children and he might need someone at
home to look after them. But maybe he shouldn't steal it because they might
put him in prison for more years than he could stand. (Colby and Kauffman.
1983, p. 300)
What is right for Heinz, then, is what meets his own
self-interests.
You might have noticed that children at both stages 1 and
2 talk about punishment. However, they perceive it differently. At stage 1
punishment is tied up in the child's mind with wrongness; punishment "proves"
that disobedience is wrong. At stage 2, in contrast, punishment is simply a risk
that one naturally wants to avoid.
Although stage 2 respondents sometimes sound amoral, they
do have some sense of right action. This is a notion of fair exchange or
fair deals. The philosophy is one of returning favors--"If you scratch my back,
I'll scratch yours." To the Heinz story, subjects often say that Heinz was right
to steal the drug because the druggist was unwilling to make a fair deal; he was
"trying to rip Heinz off," Or they might say that he should steal for his wife
"because she might return the favor some day" (Gibbs et al., 1983, p. 19).
Respondents at stage 2 are still said to reason at the
preconventional level because they speak as isolated individuals rather than as
members of society. They see individuals exchanging favors, but there is still
no identification with the values of the family or community.
Level II. Conventional Morality
Stage 3. Good Interpersonal Relationships. At this
stage children--who are by now usually entering their teens--see morality as
more than simple deals. They believe that people should live up to the
expectations of the family and community and behave in "good" ways. Good
behavior means having good motives and interpersonal feelings such as love,
empathy, trust, and concern for others. Heinz, they typically argue, was right
to steal the drug because "He was a good man for wanting to save her," and "His
intentions were good, that of saving the life of someone he loves." Even if
Heinz doesn't love his wife, these subjects often say, he should steal the drug
because "I don't think any husband should sit back and watch his wife die"
(Gibbs et al., 1983, pp. 36-42; Kohlberg, 1958b).
If Heinz’s motives were good, the druggist's were bad. The
druggist, stage 3 subjects emphasize, was "selfish," "greedy," and "only
interested in himself, not another life." Sometimes the respondents become so
angry with the druggist that they say that he ought to be put in jail (Gibbs et
al., 1983, pp. 26-29, 40-42). A typical stage 3 response is that of Don, age 13:
It was really the druggist's fault, he was unfair,
trying to overcharge and letting someone die. Heinz loved his wife and wanted
to save her. I think anyone would. I don't think they would put him in jail.
The judge would look at all sides, and see that the druggist was charging too
much. (Kohlberg, 1963, p. 25)
We see that Don defines the issue in terms of the actors'
character traits and motives. He talks about the loving husband, the unfair
druggist, and the understanding judge. His answer deserves the label
"conventional "morality" because it assumes that the attitude expressed would be
shared by the entire community—"anyone" would be right to do what Heinz did
(Kohlberg, 1963, p. 25).
As mentioned earlier, there are similarities between
Kohlberg's first three stages and Piaget's two stages. In both sequences there
is a shift from unquestioning obedience to a relativistic outlook and to a
concern for good motives. For Kohlberg, however, these shifts occur in three
stages rather than two.
Stage 4. Maintaining the Social Order. Stage 3
reasoning works best in two-person relationships with family members or close
friends, where one can make a real effort to get to know the other's feelings
and needs and try to help. At stage 4, in contrast, the respondent becomes more
broadly concerned with society as a whole. Now the emphasis is on
obeying laws, respecting authority, and performing one's duties so that the
social order is maintained. In response to the Heinz story, many subjects say
they understand that Heinz's motives were good, but they cannot condone the
theft. What would happen if we all started breaking the laws whenever we felt we
had a good reason? The result would be chaos; society couldn't function. As one
subject explained,
I don't want to sound like Spiro Agnew, law and order
and wave the flag, but if everybody did as he wanted to do, set up his own
beliefs as to right and wrong, then I think you would have chaos. The only
thing I think we have in civilization nowadays is some sort of legal structure
which people are sort of bound to follow. [Society needs] a centralizing
framework. (Gibbs et al., 1983, pp. 140-41)
Because stage 4, subjects make moral decisions from the
perspective of society as a whole, they think from a full-fledged
member-of-society perspective (Colby and Kohlberg, 1983, p. 27).
You will recall that stage 1 children also generally
oppose stealing because it breaks the law. Superficially, stage 1 and stage 4
subjects are giving the same response, so we see here why Kohlberg insists that
we must probe into the reasoning behind the overt response. Stage 1 children
say, "It's wrong to steal" and "It's against the law," but they cannot elaborate
any further, except to say that stealing can get a person jailed. Stage 4
respondents, in contrast, have a conception of the function of laws for society
as a whole--a conception which far exceeds the grasp of the younger child.
Level III. Postconventional Morality
Stage 5. Social Contract and Individual Rights. At
stage 4, people want to keep society functioning. However, a smoothly
functioning society is not necessarily a good one. A totalitarian society might
be well-organized, but it is hardly the moral ideal. At stage 5, people begin to
ask, "What makes for a good society?" They begin to think about society in a
very theoretical way, stepping back from their own society and considering the
rights and values that a society ought to uphold. They then evaluate existing
societies in terms of these prior considerations. They are said to take a
"prior-to-society" perspective (Colby and Kohlberg, 1983, p. 22).
Stage 5 respondents basically believe that a good society
is best conceived as a social contract into which people freely enter to work
toward the benefit of all They recognize that different social groups within a
society will have different values, but they believe that all rational people
would agree on two points. First they would all want certain basic rights,
such as liberty and life, to be protected Second, they would want some
democratic procedures for changing unfair law and for improving society.
In response to the Heinz dilemma, stage 5 respondents make
it clear that they do not generally favor breaking laws; laws are social
contracts that we agree to uphold until we can change them by democratic means.
Nevertheless, the wife’s right to live is a moral right that must be protected.
Thus, stage 5 respondent sometimes defend Heinz’s theft in strong language:
It is the husband's duty to save his wife. The fact that
her life is in danger transcends every other standard you might use to judge
his action. Life is more important than property.
This young man went on to say that "from a moral
standpoint" Heinz should save the life of even a stranger, since to be
consistent, the value of a life means any life. When asked if the judge should
punish Heinz, he replied:
Usually the moral and legal standpoints coincide. Here
they conflict. The judge should weight the moral standpoint more heavily but
preserve the legal law in punishing Heinz lightly. (Kohlberg, 1976, p. 38)
Stage 5 subjects,- then, talk about "morality" and
"rights" that take some priority over particular laws. Kohlberg insists,
however, that we do not judge people to be at stage 5 merely from their verbal
labels. We need to look at their social perspective and mode of reasoning. At
stage 4, too, subjects frequently talk about the "right to life," but for them
this right is legitimized by the authority of their social or religious group
(e.g., by the Bible). Presumably, if their group valued property over life, they
would too. At stage 5, in contrast, people are making more of an independent
effort to think out what any society ought to value. They often reason, for
example, that property has little meaning without life. They are trying to
determine logically what a society ought to be like (Kohlberg, 1981, pp. 21-22;
Gibbs et al., 1983, p. 83).
Stage 6: Universal Principles. Stage 5 respondents
are working toward a conception of the good society. They suggest that we need
to (a) protect certain individual rights and (b) settle disputes through
democratic processes. However, democratic processes alone do not always result
in outcomes that we intuitively sense are just. A majority, for example, may
vote for a law that hinders a minority. Thus, Kohlberg believes that there must
be a higher stage--stage 6--which defines the principles by which we achieve
justice.
Kohlberg's conception of justice follows that of the
philosophers Kant and Rawls, as well as great moral leaders such as Gandhi and
Martin Luther King. According to these people, the principles of justice require
us to treat the claims of all parties in an impartial manner, respecting the
basic dignity, of all people as individuals. The principles of justice are
therefore universal; they apply to all. Thus, for example, we would not vote for
a law that aids some people but hurts others. The principles of justice guide us
toward decisions based on an equal respect for all.
In actual practice, Kohlberg says, we can reach just
decisions by looking at a situation through one another's eyes. In the Heinz
dilemma, this would mean that all parties--the druggist, Heinz, and his
wife--take the roles of the others. To do this in an impartial manner, people
can assume a "veil of ignorance" (Rawls, 1971), acting as if they do not know
which role they will eventually occupy. If the druggist did this, even he would
recognize that life must take priority over property; for he wouldn't want to
risk finding himself in the wife's shoes with property valued over life. Thus,
they would all agree that the wife must be saved--this would be the fair
solution. Such a solution, we must note, requires not only impartiality, but the
principle that everyone is given full and equal respect. If the wife were
considered of less value than the others, a just solution could not be reached.
Until recently, Kohlberg had been scoring some of his
subjects at stage 6, but he has temporarily stopped doing so, For one thing, he
and other researchers had not been finding subjects who consistently reasoned at
this stage. Also, Kohlberg has concluded that his interview dilemmas are not
useful for distinguishing between stage 5 and stage 6 thinking. He believes that
stage 6 has a clearer and broader conception of universal principles (which
include justice as well as individual rights), but feels that his interview
fails to draw out this broader understanding. Consequently, he has temporarily
dropped stage 6 from his scoring manual, calling it a "theoretical stage" and
scoring all postconventional responses as stage 5 (Colby and Kohlberg, 1983, p.
28).
Theoretically, one issue that distinguishes stage 5 from
stage 6 is civil disobedience. Stage 5 would be more hesitant to endorse civil
disobedience because of its commitment to the social contract and to changing
laws through democratic agreements. Only when an individual right is clearly at
stake does violating the law seem justified. At stage 6, in contrast, a
commitment to justice makes the rationale for civil disobedience stronger and
broader. Martin Luther King, for example, argued that laws are only valid
insofar as they are grounded in justice, and that a commitment to justice
carries with it an obligation to disobey unjust laws. King also recognized, of
course, the general need for laws and democratic processes (stages 4 and 5), and
he was therefore willing to accept the penalities for his actions. Nevertheless,
he believed that the higher principle of justice required civil disobedience
(Kohlberg, 198 1, p. 43).
Summary
At stage 1 children think of what is right as that which
authority says is right. Doing the right thing is obeying authority and avoiding
punishment. At stage 2, children are no longer so impressed by any single
authority; they see that there are different sides to any issue. Since
everything is relative, one is free to pursue one's own interests, although it
is often useful to make deals and exchange favors with others.
At stages 3 and 4, young people think as members of the
conventional society with its values, norms, and expectations. At stage 3, they
emphasize being a good person, which basically means having helpful motives
toward people close to one At stage 4, the concern shifts toward obeying laws to
maintain society as a whole.
At stages 5 and 6 people are less concerned with
maintaining society for it own sake, and more concerned with the principles and
values that make for a good society. At stage 5 they emphasize basic rights and
the democratic processes that give everyone a say, and at stage 6 they define
the principles by which agreement will be most just.
THEORETICAL ISSUES
How Development Occurs
Kohlberg, it is important to remember, is a close follower
of Piaget. Accordingly, Kohlberg's theoretical positions, including that on
developmental change, reflect those of his mentor.
Kohlberg (e.g., 1968; 198 1, Ch. 3) says that his stages
are not the product of maturation. That is, the stage structures and sequences
do not simply unfold according to a genetic blueprint.
Neither, Kohlberg maintains, are his stages the product of
socialization. That is, socializing agents (e.g., parents and teachers) do not
directly teach new forms of thinking. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine them
systematically teaching each new stage structure in its particular place in the
sequence.
The stages emerge, instead, from our own thinking about
moral problems. Social experiences do promote development, but they do so by
stimulating our mental processes. As we get into discussions and debates with
others, we find our views questioned and challenged and are therefore motivated
to come up with new, more comprehensive positions. New stages reflect these
broader viewpoints (Kohlberg et al., 1975).
We might imagine, for example, a young man and woman
discussing a new law. The man says that everyone should obey it, like it or not,
because laws are vital to social organization (stage 4). The woman notes,
however, that some well-organized societies, such as Nazi Germany, were not
particularly moral. The man therefore sees that some evidence contradicts his
view. He experiences some cognitive conflict and is motivated to think about the
matter more fully, perhaps moving a bit toward stage 5.
Kohlberg also sometimes speaks of change occurring through
role-taking opportunities, opportunities to consider others' viewpoints (e.g.,
1976). As children interact with others, they learn how viewpoints differ and
how to coordinate them in cooperative activities. As they discuss their problems
and work out their differences, they develop their conceptions of what is fair
and just.
Whatever the interactions are specifically like, they work
best, Kohlberg says, when they are open and democratic. The less children feel
pressured simply to conform to authority, the freer they are to settle their own
differences and formulate their own ideas. We will discuss Kohlberg's efforts to
induce developmental change in the section on implications for education.
Moral Thought and Moral Behavior
Kohlberg's scale has to do with moral thinking, not moral
action. As everyone knows, people who can talk at a high moral level may not
behave accordingly. Consequently, we would not expect perfect correlations
between moral judgment and moral action. Still, Kohlberg thinks that there
should be some relationship.
As a general hypothesis, he proposes that moral behavior
is more consistent, predictable. and responsible at the higher stages (Kohlberg
et al., 1975), because the stages themselves increasingly employ more stable and
general standards. For example, whereas stage 3 bases decisions on others'
feelings, which can vary, stage 4 refers to set rules and laws. Thus, we can
expect that moral behavior, too, will become more consistent as people move up
the sequence. Generally speaking, there is some research support for this
hypothesis (e.g., with respect to cheating), but the evidence is not clear-cut (Blasi,
1980; Brown and Herrnstein, 1975).
Some research has focused on the relationships between
particular stages and specific kinds of behavior. For example, one might expect
that juvenile delinquents or criminals would typically reason at stages 1 or 2,
viewing morality as something imposed from without (stage 1) or as a matter of
self-interest (stage 2), rather than identifying with society's conventional
expectations (stages 3 and 4). Again, some research supports this hypothesis,
but there also are some ambiguous results (Blasi, 1980).
Several studies have examined the relationship between
postconventional thinking and student protest. In a landmark study, Haan et al.
(1968) examined the moral reasoning of those who participated in the Berkeley
Free Speech Movement in 1964. Haan found that their thinking was more strongly
postconventional than that of a matched sample of nonparticipants, but this f
inding was not replicated for some other protests, apparently because moral
principles were not at stake (Keniston, 1971, pp. 260-6 1).
Blasi (1980), after reviewing 75 studies, concludes that
overall there is a relationship between moral thought and action, but he
suggests that we need to introduce other variables to clarify this relationship.
One variable may simply be the extent to which individuals themselves feel the
need to maintain consistency between their moral thoughts and actions (Blasi,
1980, Kohlberg and Candee, 1981).
IMPLICATIONS FOR EDUCATION
Kohlberg would like to see people advance to the highest
possible stage of moral thought. The best possible society would contain
individuals who not only understand the need for social order (stage 4) but can
entertain visions of universal principles, such as justice and liberty (stage 6)
(Kohlberg, 1970).
How, then, can one promote moral development? Turiel
(1966) found that when children listened to adults' moral judgments, the
resulting change was slight. This is what Kohlberg might have expected, for he
believes that if children are to reorganize their thinking, they must be more
active.
Accordingly, Kohlberg encouraged another student, Moshe
Blatt, to lead discussion groups in which children had a chance to grapple
actively with moral issues (Blatt and Kohlberg, 1975). Blatt presented moral
dilemmas which engaged the classes in a good deal of heated debate. He tried to
leave much of the discussion to the children themselves, stepping in only to
summarize, clarify, and sometimes present a view himself (p. 133). He encouraged
arguments that were one stage above those of most of the class. In essence, he
tried to implement one of Kohlberg's main ideas on how children move through the
stages. They do so by encountering views which challenge their thinking and
stimulate them to formulate better arguments (Kohlberg et al., 1975).
Blatt began a typical discussion by telling a story about
a man named Mr. Jones who had a seriously injured son and wanted to rush him to
the hospital. Mr. Jones had no car, so he approached a stranger, told him about
the situation, and asked to borrow his car. The stranger, however, refused,
saying he had an important appointment to keep. So Mr. Jones took the car by
force. Blatt then asked whether Mr. Jones should have done that.
In the discussion that followed, one child, Student B,
felt that Mr. Jones had a good cause for taking the car and also believed that
the stranger could be charged with murder if the son died. Student C pointed out
that the stranger violated no law. Student B still felt that the stranger's
behavior was somehow wrong, even though he now realized that it was not legally
wrong. Thus, Student B was in a kind of conflict. He had a sense of the
wrongness of the stranger's behavior, but he could not articulate this sense in
terms that would meet the objection. He was challenged to think about the
problem more deeply.
In the end, Blatt gave him the answer. The stranger's
behavior, Blatt said, was not legally wrong, but morally wrong--wrong according
to God's laws (this was a Sunday School Class). At this point, Blatt was an
authority teaching the "correct" view. In so doing, he might have robbed Student
B of the chance to formulate spontaneously his own position. He might have done
better to ask a question or to simply clarify the student's conflict (e.g,, "So
it's not legally wrong, but you still have a sense that, it's somehow wrong. .
."). In any case, it seems clear that part of this discussion was valuable for
this student. Since he himself struggled to formulate a distinction that could
handle the objection, he could fully appreciate and assimilate a new view that
he was looking for.
The Kohlberg-Blatt method of inducing cognitive conflict
exemplifies Piaget's equilibration model. The child takes one view, becomes
confused by discrepant information, and then resolves the confusion by forming a
more advanced and comprehensive position. The method is also the dialectic
process of Socratic teaching. The students give a view, the teacher asks
questions which get them to see the inadequacies of their views, and they are
then motivated to formulate better positions.
In Blatt's first experiment, the students (sixth graders)
participated in 12 weekly discussion groups. Blatt found that over half the
students moved up one full stage after the 12 weeks. Blatt and others have tried
to replicate these findings, sometimes using other age groups and lengthier
series of classes. As often happens with replications, the results have not been
quite so successful; upward changes have been smaller--usually a third of a
stage or less, Still, it generally seems that Socratic classroom discussions
held over several months can produce changes that, while small, are
significantly greater than those found in control groups who do not receive
these experiences (Rest, 1983).
One of Blatt's supplementary findings was that those
students who reported that they were most "interested" in the discussions made
the greatest amount of change. This finding is in keeping with Piagetian theory.
Children develop not because they are shaped through external reinforcements but
because their curiosity is aroused. They become interested in information that
does not quite fit into their existing cognitive structures and are thereby
motivated to revise their thinking Another Kohlberg student--M. Berkowitz
(1980)--is examining actual dialogues to see if those who become most challenged
and involved in the tensions of moral debate are also those who move forward.
Although Kohlberg remains committed to the
cognitive-conflict model of change, he has also become interested in other
strategies. One is the "just Community" approach. Here the focus is not the
individuals but groups. For example, Kohlberg and some of his colleagues (Power
and Reimer, 1979) set up a special democratic high school group and actively
encouraged the students to think of themselves as a community. Initially, little
community feeling was present. The group's dominant orientation was stage 2; it
treated problems such as stealing as purely individual matters. If a boy had
something stolen, it was too bad for him. After a year, however, the group norms
advanced to stage 3; the students now considered stealing to be a community
issue that reflected on the degree of trust and care in the group.
It will be interesting to see if the just community
approach can promote further advances in moral thinking. In the meantime, this
approach has aroused some uneasiness among some of Kohlberg's associates. In
particular, Reimer et al. (1983) have wondered whether Kohlberg, by explicitly
encouraging the students to think of themselves as a community, is not
practicing a form of indoctrination. Reimer says that he has talked to Kohlberg
about this, and he has come away convinced that Kohlberg is committed to
democratic groups in which students are encouraged "to think critically, to
discuss assumptions, and. when they feel it is necessary, to challenge the
teacher's suggestions" (p. 252). Thus, moral development remains a product of
the students' own thinking.
KOHLBERG'S THEORY APPLIED TO A MORAL DILEMMA SCENARIO:
AN EXAMPLE OF THE THEORY
Consider the following scenarios. What are the
possible solutions for each scenario at each of Kohlberg's stages of moral
development?
Scenario 1
A woman was near death from a unique kind of cancer. There is a drug that might
save her. The drug costs $4,000 per dosage. The sick woman's husband, Heinz,
went to everyone he knew to borrow the money and tried every legal means, but he
could only get together about $2,000. He asked the doctor scientist who
discovered the drug for a discount or let him pay later. But the doctor
scientist refused.
Should Heinz break into the laboratory to steal the drug for his wife? Why or
why not?
Scenario 2
Heinz broke into the laboratory and stole the drug. The next day, the newspapers
reported the break-in and theft. Brown, a police officer and a friend of Heinz
remembered seeing Heinz last evening, behaving suspiciously near the laboratory.
Later that night, he saw Heinz running away from the laboratory.
Should Brown report what he saw? Why or why not?
Scenario 3
Officer Brown reported what he saw. Heinz was arrested and brought to court. If
convicted, he faces up to two years' jail. Heinz was found guilty.
Should the judge sentence Heinz to prison? Why or why not?
ASSIGNMENT
Considering what we now about about Kohlberg's theory of
moral development, answer each of the questions on the following moral dilemmas.
Then, not which of Kohlberg's stages applies to the question:
Dilemma I
Joe is a fourteen-year-old boy who wanted to
go to camp very much. His father promised him he could go if he saved up the
money for it himself. So Joe worked hard at his paper route and saved up the
forty dollars it cost to go to camp, and a little more besides. But just before
camp was going to start, his father changed his mind. Some of his friends
decided to go on a special fishing trip, and Joe's father was short of the money
it would cost. So he told Joe to give him the money he had saved from the paper
route. Joe didn't want to give up going to camp, so he thinks of refusing to
give his father the money.
1. Should Joe refuse to give his father the
money? Why or why not?
2. Does the father have the right to tell
Joe to give him the money? Why or why not?
3. Does giving the money have anything to
do with being a good son? Why or why not?
4. Is the fact that Joe earned the money
himself important in this situation? Why or why not?
5. The father promised Joe he could go to
camp if he earned the money. Is the fact that the father promised the most
important thing in the situation? Why or why not?
6. In general, why should a promise kept?
7. Is it important to keep a promise to
someone you don't know well and probably won't see again? Why or why not?
8. What do you think is the most important
thing a father should be concerned about in his relationship to his son? Why
is that the most important thing?
9. In general, what should be the authority
of a father over his son? Why?
10. What do you think is the most important
thing a son should be concerned about in his relationship to his father? Why
is that the most important thing?
11. In thinking back over the dilemma, what
would you say is the most responsible thing for Joe to do in this situation?
Why?
Dilemma II
Judy was a twelve-year-old girl. Her mother
promised her that she could go to a special rock concert coming to their town if
she saved up from baby-sitting and lunch money to buy a ticket to the concert.
She managed to save up the fifteen dollars the ticket cost plus another five
dollars. But then her mother changed her mind and told Judy that she had to
spend the money on new clothes for school. Judy was disappointed and decided to
go to the concert anyway. She bought a ticket and told her mother that she had
only been able to save five dollars. That Saturday she went to the performance
and told her mother that she was spending the day with a friend. A week passed
without her mother finding out. Judy then told her older sister, Louise, that
she had gone to the performance and had lied to her mother about it. Louise
wonders whether to tell their mother what Judy did.
1. Should Louise, the older sister, tell
their mother that Judy lied about the money or should she keep quiet? Why?
2. In wondering whether to tell, Louise
thinks of the fact that Judy is her sister. Should that make a difference in
Louise's decision? Why or why not?
3. Does telling have anything to do with
being a good daughter? Why or why not?
4. Is the fact that Judy earned the money
herself important in this situation? Why or why not?
5. The mother promised Judy she could go to
the concert if she earned the money. Is the fact that the mother promised the
most important thing in the situation? Why or why not?
6. Why in general should a promise be kept?
7. Is it important to keep a promise to
someone you don't know well and probably won't see again? Why or why not?
8. What do you think is the most important
thing a mother should be concerned about in her relationship to her daughter?
Why is that the most important thing?
9. In general, what should be the authority
of a mother over her daughter? Why?
10. What do you think is the most important
thing a daughter should be concerned about in her relationship to her mother?
Why is that the most important thing?
11. In thinking back over the dilemma, what
would you say is the most responsible thing for Louise to do in this
situation? Why?
Dilemma III
In Europe, a woman was near death from a
special kind of cancer. There was one drug that the doctors thought might save
her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently
discovered. the drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was charging ten
times what the drug cost him to make. He paid $400 for the radium and charged
$4,000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick woman's husband, Heinz, went to
everyone he knew to borrow the money and tried every legal means, but he could
only get together about $2,000, which is half of what it cost. He told the
druggist that his wife was dying, and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him
pay later. But the druggist said, "No, I discovered the drug and I'm going to
make money from if." So, having tried every legal means, Heinz gets desperate
and considers breaking into the man's store to steal the drug for his wife.
1. Should Heinz steal the drug? Why
or why not?
2. Is it actually right or wrong for him to
steal the drug? Why is it right or wrong?
3. Does Heinz have a duty or obligation to
steal the drug? Why or why not?
4. If Heinz doesn't love his wife, should
he steal the drug for her? Does it make a difference in what Heinz should do
whether or not he loves his wife? Why or why not?
5. Suppose the person dying is not his wife
but a stranger. Should Heinz steal the drug for the stranger? Why or why not?
6. Suppose it's a pet animal he loves.
should Heinz steal to save the pet animal? Why or why not?
7. Is it important for people to do
everything they can to save another's life? Why or why not?
8. It is against the law for Heinz to
steal. Does that make it morally wrong? Why or why not?
9. In general, should people try to do
everything they can to obey the law? Why or why not? How does this apply to
what Heinz should do?
10. In thinking back over the dilemma, what
would you say is the most responsible thing for Heinz to do? Why?
Dilemma VII
Two young men, brothers, had got into serious
trouble. They were secretly leaving town in a hurry and needed money. Karl, the
older one, broke into a store and stole a thousand dollars. Bob, the younger
one, went to a retired old man who was known to help people in town. He told the
man that he was very sick and that he needed a thousand dollars to pay for an
operation. Bob asked the old man to lend him the money and promised that he
would pay him back when he recovered. Really Bob wasn't sick at all, and he had
no intention of paying the man back. Although the old man didn't know Bob very
well, he lent him the money. So Bob and Karl skipped town, each with a thousand
dollars.
1. Which is worse, stealing like Karl
or cheating like Bob? Why is that worse?
2. What do you think is the worst thing
about cheating the old man? Why is that the worst thing?
3. In general, why should a promise be
kept?
4. Is it important to keep a promise to
someone you don't know well or will never see again? Why or why not?
5. Why shouldn't someone steal from a
store?
6. What is the value or importance of
property rights?
7. Should people do everything they can to
obey the law? Why or why not?
8. Was the old man being irresponsible by
lending Bob the money? Why or why not?
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY:
DOSTOEVSKY
When Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky wrote
Crime and Punishment in the mid-1860s, he was already a well-known
author. Nonetheless, he lived in near-poverty and was plagued by gambling debts.
Born in Moscow in 1821, he was the second child in a family that eventually
consisted of seven children. The family's life was unhappy: Dostoyevsky's
father, a doctor, ruled the family with an iron hand; his mother, a meek woman,
died when the boy was sixteen. Young Dostoyevsky developed a love of books and
enthusiastically read Russian, French, and German novels. However, his father
insisted that Dostoyevsky study engineering, and from 1838 to 1843 Dostoyevsky
trained in this subject at the military engineering academy in St. Petersburg.
During this time the elder Dostoyevsky was murdered by one of his serfs, an
incident that had a profound impact on Fyodor.
In the mid-1840s Dostoyevsky embarked on a
literary career, writing several short stories and novellas, including "The
Double" (1846). The concept of the "double" — the notion that a person may have
a divided personality, symbolized by a good or evil "twin" — surfaced in several
of his later works, including Crime and Punishment. His early published
works brought Dostoyevsky some recognition. In 1848 Dostoyevsky joined a group
of radical intellectuals (known as the "Petrashevsky Circle" after their leader
Mikhail Petrashevsky). The group discussed literary and political ideas and
advocated reforming the autocratic tsarist government. Dostoyevsky and several
of his friends were arrested for treason, tried, and sentenced to death. Just as
they were lined up in front of the firing squad, a messenger arrived with news
that the tsar had commuted the death sentence to a term of hard labor in
Siberia. Dostoyevsky later alluded to this event in Crime and Punishment
and in other books. (It is believed that the authorities intended a mock
execution all along.) During his five years in prison, Dostoyevsky came to know
many of the prisoners, the great majority of whom were ordinary criminals rather
than political prisoners. Through his dealings with them, the writer developed
an understanding of the criminal mentality and the Russian soul. His political
views also changed. He rejected his earlier pro-Western liberal-socialist ideas
and instead embraced a specifically Russian brand of Christianity. His prison
experiences provided the material for his later book The House of the Dead
(1861).
After his release from prison camp in 1854,
Dostoyevsky had to spend several more years in Siberia as an army private. He
returned to St. Petersburg in 1859 and resumed his literary career. In the early
1860s he traveled extensively in Western Europe. However, he was troubled by
personal misfortune, including the death of his wife and his brother, with whom
he edited a literary journal. He also was afflicted by epilepsy, a condition
little understood at the lime. Moreover, he was unable to control his compulsive
gambling habit, and he found himself on the brink of poverty. His writing during
this period was stimulated not only by an intense desire to express important
ideas but also by a need to earn money. In 1864 he wrote Notes from
Underground, whose narrator is a self-confessed "sick ... spiteful ...
unattractive man," an embittered character who resents society. Immediately
after this book, Dostoyevsky started work on Crime and Punishment
(1865-66), regarded as his first true masterpiece. Important Russian critics
hailed the work, and Dostoyevsky was acclaimed as one of Russia's most
significant writers and thinkers. However, he still faced financial ruin, and
the next year he wrote, in just one month, a novella called The Gambler
in order to pay his debts. He subsequently married the stenographer to whom he
had dictated the work, Anna Snitkina. She helped reform his life, and they lived
abroad for several years. Foremost among his later novels are The Idiot
(1869), The Possessed (also translated as The Devils, 1871), and
The Brothers Karamazov (1880). With Crime and Punishment, these
books express the essence of Dostoyevsky's social and moral philosophy and his
insight into human character. In the last decade of his life, Dostoyevsky
finally gained critical acclaim, social prestige, and financial security. He
died in St. Petersburg in 1881.
Dostoyevsky's reputation and his influence
remain strong to the present day. Virtually all his books have been translated
into English and are in print. His insights into the complexities of human
psychology anticipated the theories of Sigmund Freud and other early
psychologists. (Indeed, Freud acknowledged Dostoyevsky's importance in this
field.) Later novelists as diverse as Robert Louis Stevenson, Franz Kafka,
Albert Camus, and Iris Murdoch all drew inspiration from Dostoyevsky's themes
and characters, while Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn carries on with Dostoyevsky's
unique brand of Russian nationalism and Christianity. Filmmakers Ingmar Bergman
and Woody Allen have also acknowledged a debt to Dostoyevsky in their views of
human nature. Some scholars have gone so far as to claim that Dostoyevsky's view
of the Russian character and politics prophesied the Russian Revolution and the
terrible deprivations that Russia suffered under Soviet Communist rule in the
twentieth century. With his contemporary Leo Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky is today
regarded as one of the two greatest nineteenth-century Russian novelists and
indeed as one of the most important novelists of any nation or period.
MOST OBVIOUS THEMES
IN CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
On the surface,
Crime and Punishment belongs to the popular genre known as the crime novel.
A young man (Raskolnikov) commits a murder and then tries to conceal his guilt
and evade arrest. In the end he confesses, is arrested, and is sent to prison,
where he begins a process of spiritual regeneration. The novel's suspense arises
not only from the question "what will happen next?", but from Dostoyevsky's
close and relentless examination of the murderer's psyche. Dostoyevsky is more
interested in important philosophical questions than in the technical police
procedures of bringing a criminal to justice. He is also interested in the
criminal's motives, which are ambiguous. The title indicates Dostoyevsky's
interest in opposites and in the duality of human nature. The nature of guilt
and innocence, the role of atonement and forgiveness, and the opposition of good
and evil (and God and the Devil) all play an important thematic role in the
book. While Dostoyevsky also examines social and political problems in the
Russia of his day, his concerns are universal.
Guilt and
Innocence
In large part, Crime and Punishment is an examination of the guilty
conscience. For Dostoyevsky, punishment is not a physical action or condition.
Rather (much as in Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost), punishment
inherently results from an awareness of guilt. Guilt is the knowledge that one
has done wrong and has become estranged from society and from God. From the very
beginning of the novel, Raskolnikov (whose name derives from the Russian word
for "schism") suffers from this estrangement. In murdering the pawnbroker, he
seeks to prove that he is above the law. But his crime only reinforces his sense
that he is not a part of society.
Although she is a
prostitute, Sonya is the embodiment of innocence. Her motive in becoming a
prostitute was not one of lust. Indeed, in all of the novel, there is no
indication that Sonya has any lustful or sexual inclination. On the contrary,
she is embarrassed by, and ashamed of, her profession. In Dostoyevsky's eyes,
she is not guilty of any transgression. She does what she does out of sheer
necessity, not out of any base instincts or any hope for personal gain.
In contrast with
Sonya's sense of shame over the life she leads, Pyotr Luzhin is shameless in the
way he manipulates Raskolnikov's sister and mother (Dunya and Pulkheria
Aleksandrovna). He is guilty of emotional blackmail as well as of fraud. Arkady
Svidrigailov is an even more "guilty" character. Luzhin's crimes are calculated,
whereas Svidrigailov's crimes result from his complete surrender to his evil
nature. Rather than facing up to his guilt and its consequences, as Raskolnikov
does, Svidrigailov partially acknowledges his guilt but evades the consequences
by committing suicide. Although Raskolnikov is the central figure of Crime
and Punishment, Dostoyevsky suggests that Raskolnikov may not quite be the
book's most guilty criminal. Svidrigailov and Luzhin are also guilty of criminal
misdeeds, and they are less open than Raskolnikov to the possibility of
redemption.
Atonement and
Forgiveness
The theme of atonement and forgiveness is closely related to that of guilt and
innocence. As Dostoyevsky's title suggests, punishment is the only logical and
necessary outcome of crime. Punishment, however, does not mean merely a legal
finding and a sentence of imprisonment. In Dostoyevsky's view, the criminal's
true punishment is not a sentence of imprisonment. Nor is legal punishment the
definitive answer to crime. The criminal's punishment results from his own
conscience, his awareness of his guilt. However, he must not only acknowledge
his guilt. The criminal must atone for it and must seek forgiveness.
Raskolnikov at
first tries to rationalize his crime by offering various explanations to
himself. Foremost among these is his "superman" theory. By definition, the
superman theory denies any possibility of atonement. The superman does not need
to atone, because he is permitted to commit any crime in order to further his
own ends. Raskolnikov also rationalizes his crime by arguing that the old
pawnbroker is of no use to anyone; in killing her, he is ridding the world of an
unpleasant person. Driven by poverty, he also claims that he wants to use her
money to better his position in life. In the course of the book, he comes to
realize that none of these excuses justifies his crime.
Raskolnikov's
reasons for fearing arrest are equally complex. It is clear, however, that
without the example and the urging of Sonya, he would not be able to seek
forgiveness. He finds it remarkable that when he confesses his crime to her,
Sonya immediately forgives him. She urges him to bow down before God and make a
public confession. This act of contrition, she believes, will enable him to
begin to cleanse his soul.
Svidrigailov is
aware of his own guilt, but he does not seek forgiveness. Unlike Raskolnikov, he
does not believe in the possibility of forgiveness. In giving money to Sonya and
others, he attempts a partial atonement for his sins. However, even these
gestures are motivated partly by base self-interest. Because he is spiritually
dead, he feels that the only atonement he can make is to commit suicide.
Ubermensch
("Superman")
Part of the motive for Raskolnikov's crime comes from a theory that he has
developed. In an essay that he publishes, Raskolnikov argues that humankind is
divided into two categories: ordinary people, and geniuses or supermen. Ordinary
people must obey the law, but "supermen" — of whom there are very few in any
generation — are entitled to break existing laws and make their own laws.
Raskolnikov cites the French emperor Napoleon as the epitome of the superman
type. He argues that Napoleon rose to power by overstepping the laws that govern
ordinary people. Napoleon made his own laws and achieved his goals by killing
tens of thousands of people in wars. Because Napoleon was a genius, Raskolnikov
reasons, he was not regarded as a criminal. On the contrary, he was hailed as a
hero. Early in Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov has become obsessed with
the notion that he himself is a "superman." Therefore, he thinks, he is not
subject to the laws that govern ordinary people. (In the original Russian text,
Dostoyevsky frequently uses a word that means "overstepping" or "stepping
over"—that is, transgressing. This word is closely related to the Russian word
for "crime" (prestuplenie). Raskolnikov decides to murder the pawnbroker
Alyona Ivanovna partly to prove that he is a superman. However, his indecision
and confusion throughout the novel indicate that he is not a superman. Moreover,
in the course of the novel, Dostoyevsky seeks to prove that there is no such
thing as a superman. Dostoyevsky believes that every human life is precious, and
no one is entitled to kill.
Dostoyevsky's
formulation of the superman theory (through Raskolnikov) clearly anticipates the
ideas developed by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in the 1880s. For
Nietzsche, the superman and his "will to power" were supreme ideals.
Christianity stood in the way of the superman, and Nietzsche scorned
Christianity as a "slave morality." Dostoyevsky's view of the superman is
absolutely opposed to Nietzsche's. For Dostoyevsky, following the "superman"
theory to its natural conclusion inevitably leads to death, destruction, chaos,
and misery. Rather than seeing Christianity as a "slave mentality," Dostoyevsky
views it as the true vision of the human place in the world and of the human
relationship with God. In Dostoyevsky's view, all people are valued in the eyes
of God.
OTHER ELEMENTS
Narrative
Crime and Punishment is written in the third person. However,
Dostoyevsky's narrative focus shifts throughout the novel. Crime and
Punishment is widely credited as the first psychological novel, and in many
passages, Dostoyevsky is concerned with the state of mind of the central
character, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov. In these passages—including those that
relate Raskolnikov's brooding, the murder itself, and his encounters with the
inspector Porfiry Petrovich—Dostoyevsky puts us inside Raskolnikov's head. We
view the action from Raskolnikov's viewpoint and share his often-disordered and
contradictory thoughts. These passages read more like a first-person confession
than a detached third-person fictional narrative. At the same time, he describes
exterior events with clear realism. Critics have pointed out that Dostoyevsky is
essentially a dramatic novelist. He does not so much tell a story as enact it.
Crime and Punishment is full of dramatic scenes, of which Raskolnikov's
murder of the pawnbroker is only one. There are also a number of dramatic
confrontations between characters. Dostoyevsky's characters rarely have calm
discussions; rather, they have fierce arguments and verbal duels. Generally (but
not always) Raskolnikov is at one end of these confrontations. At the other, in
various scenes, are his friend Razumikhin, his sister and mother, his sister's
corrupt suitor Luzhin, the police investigator Porfiry Petrovich, the innocent
prostitute Sonya, and the cynical landowner Svidrigailov. These duels and
pairings help to illustrate the idea of the double, discussed further below.
Setting
The action of the book takes place in St. Petersburg, the capital city of
Russia, in the summer of 1865. (The brief epilogue is set in Siberia.) Crime
and Punishment is a distinctly urban novel. In choosing a definite urban
setting, Dostoyevsky was paving new ground for Russian fiction. His Russian
predecessors and contemporaries such as Gogol, Turgenev, and Tolstoy generally
set their stories on country estates. In confining the action of his novel
entirely to St. Petersburg, Dostoyevsky was emulating the English author Charles
Dickens, who set his well-known stories in the British capital, London.
Moreover, St. Petersburg is not just a backdrop, but it is an inherent part of
the novel. Dostoyevsky recreates St. Petersburg's neighborhoods and its streets,
bridges, and canals with great realism. In his narrative, Dostoyevsky does not
give the full street names, but uses only abbreviations. (In the very first
paragraph, for example, he refers to "S—Lane" and "K—n Bridge.") Readers who
were familiar with St. Petersburg would probably have been able to identify most
of these specific locations, as modern scholars have done.
Much of the action
takes place indoors, generally in cramped tenement apartments. With these
settings, Dostoyevsky creates a tense, claustrophobic atmosphere. For example,
in the weeks before he commits the murders, Raskolnikov has been lying in his
tiny room and brooding. He retreats to this room after the murders, occasionally
leaving his lair to wander the city's streets.
Most of the book's
main characters are not natives of St. Petersburg, but have come to the city
from Russia's far-flung rural provinces. Thus, they are not at ease in this
urban setting. Provincial Russians might normally regard the capital city,
created by Peter the Great as Russia's "window on the West," as a place of
opportunity. However, for Raskolnikov, Katerina Ivanovna, Svidrigailov, and
other characters, the city turns out to be a destination of last resort, a place
where their diminished expectations are finally played out. (Svidrigailov
remarks that "there aren't many places where there are as many gloomy, harsh and
strange influences on the soul of man as there are in St. Petersburg.") This
sense of the city as a dead-end is emphasized by the settings. The apartments
where Raskolnikov and the Marmeladovs live are so small that there is scarcely
enough space for a small group of visitors. Moreover, at several points in the
novel, characters are threatened with eviction and fear that they will wind up
on the streets. Near the end of the book, Katerina Ivanovna and her children beg
on the streets by singing and dancing.
Most readers tend
to think of Russia as a "winter" country, with lots of snow and cold weather.
Dostoyevsky contradicts these expectations by setting his story during an
unusual summer heat wave. The heat and humidity add to the general sense of
discomfort that pervades the narrative. They also reflect and reinforce the
feverish state that afflicts Raskolnikov throughout the book.
Structure
Crime and Punishment is divided into six parts plus an epilogue. Each
part is broken further into several chapters. For the most part, each chapter
centers around a self-contained dramatic episode. Much of this episodic
structure is attributable to the fact that Crime and Punishment was
written for serialization in a magazine. Magazine readers wanted each
installment to be complete in itself and to contain colorful incidents. Many
chapters end with the sudden, unexpected arrival of a new character. By
introducing such developments at the end of many of the chapters, Dostoyevsky
maintained a high level of suspense. He knew that his readers would be curious
to know what would happen in the next chapter and that they would look forward
to the next installment. Moreover, an unresolved complication at the end of a
particular chapter would also stimulate Dostoyevsky to write the next chapter.
This method of writing helps account for the numerous abrupt shifts in the plot
focus.
Coincidence
Like many other important nineteenth-century novelists, Dostoyevsky does not
hesitate to use coincidence to advance the plot. Indeed, many of the crucial
developments in Crime and Punishment depend on sheer coincidences that
seem highly unlikely to the modern reader. However, coincidence was an accepted
literary convention of the period. Dostoyevsky does not attempt to explain away
his coincidences, but on the contrary he simply states them as matters of fact.
He uses this technique as a shortcut to bring together certain characters and
set up dramatic situations.
While he is
walking down the street, Raskolnikov comes upon the scene of an accident. The
accident victim turns out to be Marmeladov, a drunken civil servant whom he had
met earlier in the novel. Marmeladov has been run over by a horse-drawn
carriage. Raskolnikov takes charge of the situation and has Marmeladov carried
home, where the injured man dies. This coincidence leads to Raskolnikov's first
meeting with Marmeladov's daughter Sonya, who has turned to prostitution to
support the poverty-stricken family. Drawn to Sonya by her meek nature and pure
heart, Raskolnikov will later confess to her. In another coincidence, Sonya
turns out to have been a friend of Lizaveta. This disclosure serves to increase
Raskolnikov's sense of guilt and further points up Sonya's selflessness.
It is also purely
coincidence that the scheming Luzhin happens to be living temporarily in the
same building as Katerina Ivanovna. This makes plausible his appearance at
Katerina's funeral party and his attempt to frame Sonya for robbery. Later,
Svidrigailov just happens by coincidence to be renting the apartment next door
to Sonya's apartment. Thus, he is able to overhear Raskolnikov's murder
confession. Svidngailov's awareness of Raskolnikov's guilty secret helps set
into motion another chain of events. There are many more such coincidences in
the course of the story. That such coincidences involving a relatively small
number of characters would occur in a large city like St. Petersburg is almost
unbelievable. However, Dostoyevsky's narrative has such dramatic force that the
reader is able to overlook the implausibility of these coincidences.
Symbolism and
Imagery
As already discussed, Dostoyevsky's literary technique mixes narrative realism,
dramatic scenes, and psychological analysis. He also uses symbolism and imagery,
not so much for aesthetic effect as to emphasize certain points about his
characters' psychology. One of his main symbolic devices is the pairing of
certain characters. Early in his writing career, Dostoyevsky formulated the idea
of the "double." That is, he believed that there may be two sides to a human
personality. In giving a character like Raskolnikov several "doubles,"
Dostoyevsky emphasizes certain aspects of Raskolnikov's personality by
contrasting him with these "doubles."
Among
Raskolnikov's symbolic "doubles" are Marmeladov, Razumikhin, Dunya, Sonya, and
Svidrigailov. Where Raskolnikov is obsessed with a theory, Marmeladov lives
entirely by impulse. Where Raskolnikov is extreme, Razumikhin is reasonable.
(The Russian word razum means "reason.") Raskolnikov cuts himself off
from his family, while his sister Dunya is completely dedicated to the family.
Sonya too sacrifices herself for her family. Furthermore, her meekness and faith
contrast with Raskolnikov's pride and his rejection of God. Raskolnikov is
literally sickened by his crime and does not give any indication that he will
commit more murders, whereas Svidrigailov takes pleasure in his criminal lust
and persists in it.
Appropriately
enough, blood and blood imagery pervade the book. Before he commits the murder,
Raskolnikov has a horrific nightmare in which a group of drunken men flog "a
little grey mare" to death. The notion of "shedding blood" becomes quite
literal. Raskolnikov's murder of the pawnbroker and her sister with an axe is
naturally a bloody act. As he attempts to escape notice, Raskolnikov becomes
obsessed with the idea that he is covered in blood and that this will give him
away. Toward the end of the novel, his sister Dunya tells him that "you have
blood on your hands"; Raskolnikov defiantly replies that the world is covered in
blood. It can be noted, as well, that the novel's blood imagery is paralleled by
frequent references to tears.
Dostoyevsky uses
dreams to give insight into his characters' psychology, as well as for symbolic
purposes. Critics have debated the meaning of Raskolnikov's nightmare about the
horse, mentioned above. As well as indicating his tormented state of mind, this
nightmare may also symbolize the brutality of murder and the helplessness of the
innocent. In the book's epilogue, in Siberia, Raskolnikov dreams that the world
is swept by a terrible plague that turns people mad. This dream is generally
believed to symbolize what would happen if all people rejected traditional
morality and acted out Raskolnikov's "superman" theory. Svidrigailov, too, has
terrible dreams and claims that he has seen the ghosts of his deceased wife and
of a servant. The night before he kills himself, he dreams about a little girl
whom he has victimized. In this dream, he sees the moral consequences of his
crimes.
It may seem
paradoxical to claim that critics have not sufficiently concerned themselves
with Dostoevsky's attack against rationalism in Crime and Punishment; yet
this aspect of the novel has frequently failed to receive adequate attention,
not because it has been overlooked, but because often it has been immediately
noticed, perfunctorily mentioned, and then put out of mind as something obvious.
Few writers have examined the consequence of the anti-rationalistic tenor of the
novel: the extent to which it is paralleled by the structural devices
incorporated in the work.
Dostoevsky held
that dialectics, self-seeking, and exclusive reliance on reason ("reason and
will" in Raskolnikov's theories and again in his dream of the plague) lead to
death-in-life. In Crime and Punishment he set himself the task of
exposing the evils of rationalism by presenting a laboratory case of an
individual who followed its precepts and pushed them to their logical
conclusion. By working out what would happen to that man, Dostoevsky intended to
show how destructive the idea was for individuals, nations, and mankind; for to
him the fates of the individual and the nation were inseparably interlocked....
The underlying
antithesis of Crime and Punishment, the conflict between the side of
reason, selfishness, and pride, and that of acceptance of suffering, closeness
to life-sustaining Earth, and love, sounds insipid and platitudinous when stated
in such general fashion as we have done here. Dostoevsky, however, does not
present it in the form of abstract statement alone. He conveys it with superb
dialectical skill, and when we do find direct statements in the novel, they are
intentionally made so inadequate as to make us realize all the more clearly
their disappointing irrelevancy and to lead us to seek a richer representation
in other modes of discourse....
Symbolism is the
method of expression with which we are primarily concerned here, but it is far
from being the only indirect, non-intellectual manner of expression on which
Dostoevsky depends. Oblique presentation is another means which he uses; one
example is the introduction of the subject of need for suffering. The idea is
first presented in a debased and grotesque form by Marmeladov. His confession of
how he had mistreated his family, of his drinking, and of the theft of money—to
Raskolnikov, a stranger whom he has met in the tavern—is almost a burlesque
foreshadowing of Raskolnikov's later penance, the kissing of the earth and his
confession at the police station. Marmeladov is drunk, irresponsible, and still
submerged in his selfish course of action; he welcomes suffering but continues
to spurn his responsibilities; he is making a fool of himself in the tavern. His
discourse throughout calls for an ambiguous response. Raskolnikov's reaction may
be pity, agreement, laughter, or disgust; the reader's is a mixture and
succession of all those emotions.
Thus the important
ideas summed up in Marmeladov's "it's not joy I thirst for, but sorrow and
tears" are introduced in a derogatory context and in an ambivalent manner, on
the lowest, least impressive level. Yet the concept is now present with us, the
readers, as it is with Raskolnikov—even though it first appears in the guise of
something questionable, disreputable, and laughable—and we are forced to ponder
it and to measure against it Sonya's, Raskolnikov's, Porfiry's and others'
approaches to the same subject of "taking one's suffering."
A simple,
unequivocal statement, a respectable entrance of the theme on the stage of the
book, would amount to a reduction of life to "a matter of arithmetic" and would
release the reader from the salutary, in fact indispensable task of smelting
down the ore for himself....
In Crime and
Punishment the reader, as well as Raskolnikov, must struggle to draw his own
conclusions from a work which mirrors the refractory and contradictory materials
of life itself, with their admixture of the absurd, repulsive, and grotesque....
Traditional
symbolism, that is, symbolism which draws on images established by the Christian
tradition and on those common in Russian non-Christian, possibly pre-Christian
and pagan, folk thought and expression, is an important element in the structure
of Crime and Punishment. The outstanding strands of symbolic imagery in
the novel are those of water, vegetation, sun and air, the resurrection of
Lazarus and Christ, and the earth.
Water is to
Dostoevsky a symbol of rebirth and regeneration. It is regarded as such by the
positive characters, for whom it is an accompaniment and an indication of the
life-giving forces in the world. By the same token, the significance of water
may be the opposite to negative characters. Water holds the terror of death for
the corrupt Svidrigaylov, who confirms his depravity by thinking: "Never in my
life could I stand water, not even on a landscape painting." Water, instead of
being an instrument of life, becomes for him a hateful, avenging menace during
the last hours of his life....
Indeed it will be
in the cold and in the rain that he will put a bullet in his head. Instead of
being a positive force, water is for him the appropriate setting for the taking
of his own life.
When Raskolnikov
is under the sway of rationalism and corrupting ways of thinking, this also is
indicated by Dostoevsky by attributing to him negative reactions to water
similar to those of Svidrigaylov. In Raskolnikov, however, the battle is not
definitely lost. A conflict still rages between his former self—which did have
contact with other people and understood the beauty of the river, the cathedral
(representing the traditional, religious, and emotional forces), and water—and
the new, rationalistic self, which is responsible for the murder and for his
inner desiccation.... There is still left in Raskolnikov an instinctive reaction
to water (and to beauty) as an instrument of life, although this receptivity,
which had been full-blown and characteristic of him in his childhood, is now in
his student days overlaid by the utilitarian and rationalistic theories....
But Raskolnikov
also realizes that his trends of thought have banished him, like Cain, from the
brotherhood of men and clouded his right and ability to enjoy beauty and the
beneficent influences of life symbolized by water; hence his perplexity and
conflict....
Related to the
many references to the river and rain, and often closely associated with them,
are two other groups of symbolic imagery: that of vegetation (shrubbery, leaves,
bushes, flowers, and greenness in general) and that of the sun (and the related
images of light and air).
In contrast to the
dusty, hot, stifling, and crowded city, a fitting setting for Raskolnikov's
oppressive and murderous thoughts, we find, for example, "the greenness and the
freshness" of the Petersburg islands.... The natural surroundings reawakened in
him the feelings of his youth, through which he came close to avoiding his crime
and to finding regeneration without having to pass through the cycle of Crime
and Punishment.....
By the same token,
vegetation exercised the opposite effect on Svidrigaylov: it repelled him. In
the inn on the night of his suicide, when he heard the leaves in the garden
under his window, he thought, "How I hate the noise of trees at night in a storm
and in darkness." Whereas Raskolnikov received a healthy warning during his
short sleep "under a bush," Svidrigaylov uses the sordid setting of an amusement
park which "had one spindly three-year-old Christmas tree and three small
bushes" merely for vain distraction on the eve of his suicide, and contemplates
killing himself under "a large bush drenched with rain." In him all positive
elements had been rubbed out or transformed into evil.
Similar to water
and vegetation, sunshine, light in general, and air are positive values, whereas
darkness and lack of air are dangerous and deadening. The beauty of the
cathedral flooded by sunlight ought to be felt and admired.... Before the
murder, he looks up from the bridge at the "bright, red sunset" and is able to
face the sun as well as the river with calm, but after the murder, "in the
street it was again unbearably hot—not a drop of rain all during those days ....
The sun flashed brightly in his eyes, so that it hurt him to look and his head
was spinning round in good earnest—the usual sensation of a man in a fever who
comes out into the street on a bright, sunny day." The sun is pleasant for a man
in good spiritual health, but unbearable for a feverish creature of the dark,
such as Raskolnikov had become....
Absence of air
reinforces the lack of light suggestive of inner heaviness. Raskolnikov, whom
Svidrigaylov tells that people need air, feels physically and mentally
suffocated when he is summoned to the police-station: "There's so little fresh
air here. Stifling. Makes my head reel more and more every minute, and my brain
too." Later he tells his friend Razumikhin: "Things have become too airless, too
stifling." Airiness, on the contrary, is an indication of an advantageous
relation between outward circumstances and Raskolnikov's inner state. The
warning dream of the mare comes to Raskolnikov in a setting not only of
greenness but also of abundance of fresh air: "The green vegetation and the
fresh air at first pleased his tired eyes, used to the dust of the city, to the
lime and mortar and the huge houses that enclosed and confined him on all sides.
The air was fresh and sweet here: no evil smells."
When we turn to
specifically Christian symbolism in Crime and Punishment, we find the
outstanding images to be those of New Jerusalem, Christ's passion, and Lazarus.
New Jerusalem is an important concept throughout Dostoevsky's work.... Porfiry
asks Raskolmkov, "Do you believe in New Jerusalem?" The significance of
Raskolnikov' s positive answer lies in the fact that the New Jerusalem which he
means is the Utopian perversion of it, to be built upon foundations of crime and
individual self-assertion and transgression (prestuplenie). It is the
"Golden Age," as Raskolnikov called it in the draft version in Dostoevsky's
notebook: "Oh why are not all people happy? The picture of the Age of Gold—it is
already present in minds and hearts. Why should it not come about? ... But what
right have I, a mean murderer, to wish happiness to people and to dream of the
Age of Gold?"
The confession of
Raskolnikov is described in terms reminiscent of Christ's passion on the road to
Golgotha: he goes on "his sorrowful way." When Raskolnikov reads in his mother's
letter of Dunya' s having walked up and down in her room and prayed before the
Kazan Virgin, he associates her planned self-sacrifice in marrying Luzhin with
the biblical prototype of self-assumed suffering for the sake of others: "Ascent
to Golgotha is certainly pretty difficult," he says to himself. When Raskolnikov
accepts Lizaveta's cypress cross from Sonya, he shows his recognition of the
significance of his taking it—the implied resolve to seek a new life though
accepting suffering and punishment—by saying to Sonya, "This is the symbol of my
taking up the cross."
One of the central
Christian myths alluded to in the novel is the story of Lazarus. It is the
biblical passage dealing with Lazarus that Raskolnikov asks Sonya to read to
him. The raising of Lazarus from the dead is to Dostoevsky the best exemplum of
a human being resurrected to a new life, the road to Golgotha the best
expression of the dark road of sorrow, and Christ himself the grand type of
voluntary suffering....
The traditional
emphasis of the Eastern Church is on Resurrection—of the Western, on the
Passion. In Crime and Punishment both sides are represented: the Eastern
in its promise of Raskolnikov's rebirth, the Western in the stress on his
suffering. Perhaps at least part of the universality of the appeal of the novel
and of its success in the West may be due to the fact that it combines the two
religious tendencies....
The Christian
symbolism is underlined by the pagan and universal symbolism of the earth. Sonya
persuades Raskolnikov not only to confess and wear the cross, but also to kiss
the earth at the crossroads—a distinctly Russian and pre-Christian
acknowledgment of the earth as the common mother of all men.... In bowing to the
earth and kissing it, Raskolnikov is performing a symbolic and non-rational act;
the rationalist is marking the beginning of his change into a complete, organic,
living human being, rejoining all other men in the community. By his crime and
ideas, he had separated himself from his friends, family, and nation; in one
word, he had cut himself off from Mother Earth. By the gesture of kissing the
earth, he is reestablishing all his ties....
Now that we have
examined selected examples of symbolism in the novel, let us take a look at the
epilogue as a test of insights we may have gained into the structure and unity
of the novel, for the epilogue is the culmination and juncture of the various
strands of images which we have encountered earlier....
If we approach the
epilogue with the various preparatory strands of images clearly in our minds,
what do we find?... [We] see the state of the soul of the unregenerate
Raskolnikov, the Lazarus before the rebirth, expressed by Dostoevsky through the
symbolic imagery to which the novel has made us accustomed—water and vegetation.
The love for life (which Raskolnikov does not yet comprehend) is represented by
a spring with green grass and bushes around it.
When the
regeneration of Raskolnikov begins, it is expressed in a manner still more
closely linked to previously introduced imagery. His dream of the plague
condemns Raskolnikov's own rationalism. It shows people obsessed by reason and
will losing contact with the soil.... This dream of the plague, coming
immediately before the start of the hero's regeneration, may also be another
reminiscence of the Book of Revelation with its last seven plagues coming just
before the millennium and the establishment of the New Jerusalem.
The epilogue then
goes on to emphasize that it is the second week after Easter—the feast of
Christ's passion, death, and resurrection; and that it is warm, bright
spring—the season of the revival of dead nature, again a coupling of Christian
and non-Christian symbolism of rebirth such as we have encountered earlier in
the novel.
The crucial final
scene which follows takes place on "a bright and warm day," and "on the bank of
the river." The river which Raskolnikov sees now is no longer a possible means
for committing suicide nor a sight inducing melancholy; it is the river of life.
Then appears
Sonya, and with her arrival comes the moment when Raskolnikov is suffused with
love for his guide and savior.... Vivid response to all that lives is a joining
with the creator in creating and preserving the world; Sophia is a blissful
meeting of god and nature, the creator and creature. In Orthodox thought Sophia
has come close to being regarded as something similar to the fourth divine
person. Love for Sophia is a generalized ecstatic love for all creation, so that
the images of flowers, greenness, landscape, the river, air, the sun, and water
throughout Crime and Punishment can be regarded as being subsumed in the
concept of Sophia and figuratively in the person of Sonya, the embodiment of the
concept. Sonya sees that all exists in God; she knows, and helps Raskolnikov to
recognize, what it means to anticipate the millennium by living in rapt love for
all creation here, in this world.
It was Sonya who
had brought Raskolnikov the message of Lazarus and his resurrection; she had
given him the cypress cross and urged him to kiss the earth at the crossroads.
On the evening of the day when, by the bank of the river and in the presence of
Sonya, Raskolnikov's regeneration had begun, the New Testament lies under his
pillow as a reminder of the Christian prototype of resurrection which had been
stressed earlier in the novel. Against the background of all the important
symbols of the book, Easter, spring, Abraham's flocks, the earth of Siberia, the
river, the dream, and Sonya, the drama within Raskolnikov's mind assumes its
expressive outward form.
There follow
several explicit statements of what happened. We read that "the dawn of a full
resurrection to a new life" was already shining "in their faces, that love
brought them back to life, that the heart of one held inexhaustible sources of
life for the heart of the other," and that "the gradual rebirth" of Raskolnikov
would follow. But the power of the general, overt statements depends on the
indirect, oblique, dramatic, and symbolic statements which preceded them and
prepared the ground for our acceptance of them. If we sense the full
significance of the statement that now "Raskolnikov could solve nothing
consciously. He only felt. Life had taken the place of dialectics," for example,
it is because we have seen dialectics and apathy dramatized in Luzhin,
Lebezyatnikov, Raskolnikov, and Svidrigaylov, and resurrection in Sonya and
various symbols throughout the novel of which the epilogue is a climax and a
recapitulation.
Source: George
Gibian, "Traditional Symbolism in Crime and Punishment," in PMLA,
Vol. LXX, No. 5, December, 1955, pp. 970-96.
CONTEXT
Dostoyevsky's
Russia: Social and Political Background
For most modern Americans, the Russia of Dostoyevsky's time is almost
incomprehensible. Sir Winston Churchill's comment in 1939 that Russia "is a
riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma" can apply equally to the Russia of
the 1860s when Dostoyevsky wrote Crime and Punishment. In the most simple
terms, much of Russia's historical difference from the West has to do with the
fact that for centuries it was cut off from Western Europe. The Reformation, the
Renaissance, and the Enlightenment that helped transform the countries of
Western Europe from feudalism to modern nations with well-educated citizens and
important cultural institutions barely touched Russia. Moreover, large-scale
foreign invasions (from the Mongols in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries
to the Nazi armies in the early 1940s) periodically devastated the country. As a
result, Russia has historically been suspicious of other nations. Also, early in
its national history, Russia developed a tradition of government that
centralized immense power in the hands of an emperor—the tsar—and a handful of
his advisors. (The Russian title "tsar" derives from the Latin word "Caesar.")
In the mid-1500s, Tsar Ivan IV (known as Ivan the Terrible) established what for
more than the next four hundred years became the model for Russian government,
alternating short-lived periods of ineffectual reform with periods of severe
repression.
Relatively
"liberal" rulers such as Tsar Peter the Great (reigned 1682-1725) and Tsarina
Catherine the Great (who was actually German; reigned 1762-96) pursued a policy
of "westernization." They attempted to import modern technology and manners from
Western Europe. At the same time, however, they held tightly onto absolute power
and ruthlessly suppressed any challenge to the established political order.
During the period
when Dostoyevsky was receiving his education and then establishing his literary
career—the 1830s into the 1860s—Russia was stirred by intense intellectual
debate. The small class of the educated people recognized that major changes
were needed if the huge but backward country was to address its social problems
and find its way successfully in the world. One general approach to change was
proposed by certain intellectuals collectively known as Westernizers. The
Westernizers were influenced by German philosophy and by social ideas that
developed in Western Europe during the Industrial Revolution. They were also
influenced by contemporary European revolutionary movements. The Westernizers
were not united in their goals or methods. There were various factions. Some
favored gradual democratic reforms, while others called for revolution to
replace the tsarist government with a socialist regime. Among the leading
Westernizers was Vissarion Belinsky (1811-48), the most famous Russian literary
critic of his day. Belinsky praised Dostoyevsky's first book, Poor Folk
(1846), and declared that Dostoyevsky was the literary successor of Gogol.
Another group of
thinkers, known as the Slavophiles, proposed an entirely different approach to
Russia's problems. Broadly speaking, the Slavophiles felt that Western ideals of
rationalism and modernization were dangerous and alien to Russia. Rather than
relying on a program of legislation and material improvement, the Slavophiles
argued that Russia could only fulfill its destiny when Russians returned to
their native spiritual values. Although they disagreed with the Westernizers,
the Slavophiles were also opposed to the existing Russian government. By Western
standards, the Slavophiles could be considered romantic and reactionary, but
they made an important contribution to the debate over the future of Russia.
As a young man,
Dostoyevsky was influenced by the Westernizers. In the mid-1840s he joined the
so-called Petrashevsky Circle, a small group that met weekly to discuss
socialist ideas. The group demanded political reforms and generally opposed the
government of Tsar Nicholas I. In the spring of 1849 the members were arrested.
Twenty-one of them, including Dostoyevsky, were sentenced to death but were
pardoned at the last minute. During his subsequent imprisonment in Siberia,
Dostoyevsky underwent a profound spiritual and political change. He renounced
political radicalism and came to believe that Russia's hope lay in Slavic
idealism. His travels in Western Europe in the 1860s and 1870s reinforced his
distaste for modern industrial society. In the great novels of his mature
period, including Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky expresses his
sympathy with the Slavophiles and attacks the Westernizers and radicals.
Raskolnikov reflects the viewpoint of the radical Nihilists (from the Latin word
for "nothing"), who rejected all the traditional conventions of society.
By the time
Dostoyevsky wrote Crime and Punishment Tsar Alexander II (reigned
1855-81) was in the midst of a significant reform policy. In 1861 the Tsar
signed a proclamation that freed millions of Russian serfs (peasants who lived
and worked in conditions similar to slavery). This was followed by reforms of
local government, the courts, and the military. (The police inspector Porfiry
Petrovich refers to these reforms.) However, these reforms failed to resolve the
major problems in Russia and helped to create new problems. Again, the immense
social problems facing Russia at the time—widespread poverty, ignorance, and
social agitation—form the background to Crime and Punishment.
Christianity in Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote, " If someone succeded in proving to me that
Christ was outside the truth, and if, indeed, the truth was outside Christ, then
I would sooner remain with Christ than with the truth" (Frank 68). It was by no
means easy for Dostoyevsky to reach this conclusion. In Dostoyevsky's life, one
sees that of an intellectual Prodigal Son, returning to the Father In Heaven
only after all other available systems of belief have been exhausted. Reared in
a devout Russian Orthodox home, Dostoyevsky as a young man rebelled against his
upbringing and embraced the anarchist (and atheistic) philosophies of the
intelligentsia, radical students and middle class intellectuals violently
opposed to the status quo in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Morsm 50). Dostoyevsky
revolutionary stirrings were not unnoticed by the Tsar's secret police, and, in
1849, Dostoyevsky was sentenced to a mock execution followed by ten years' hard
labor in a Siberian prison (Morsm 50).
One critic said "It has been customary to say that Dostoyevsky re-learnt
Christianity in prison.(A Boyce Gibson 19.) There, out of his element and
surrounded by hardened criminals, he had plenty of time to contemplate life and
read The New Testament (the only book he was allowed). However, it was not until
his compulsory army service that Dostoyevsky's faith began to blossom. In the
army, Dostoyevsky met a fellow officer and devout Christian named Baron von
Vrangel, who befriended the still young Dostoevesky and helped him re-discover
the Christian faith (Frank 4).
Although a professing Christian for the rest of his life, Dostoyevsky
was not a "plaster saint." (Until he died, he was plagued by doubts and a
passion for gambling.) Instead, Dostoyevsky understood, perhaps better than any
other great Christian author, that his faith was created and sustained by one
thing only: the grace of God.
It is of such grace that Dostoyevsky writes in Crime and Punishment.
Although most critics agree that Crime and Punishment's theme is not as
deliberately Christian as Dostoyevsky's latter works, the novel's voice is still
authentically Christian. Written in 1864, shortly after Dostoyevsky lost his
first wife, his brother, and a close friend (Gibson 32); Crime and Punishment
reveals a time in Dostoyevsky's life when he felt disconnected from the world
and God. Through Crime and Punishment's protagonist, Raskalnikov, (Whose name,
according to Vyacheslav Ivanov, is derived from the Russian root meaning
"schism" or "apostate.") (Ivanov 72) one glimpses into the condition of
Dostoyevsky's soul.
Although Crime and Punishment has a primarily social message, it
provides the reader with "a sidelong approach to a Christian interpretation of
man." (Gibson, 102) Through its pages Dostoyevsky illustrates the inherent
fallacy in humanism: that individualism carried to the extreme is self
destructive. In addition, Dostoyevsky's work cogently illustrates St. Paul's
words in his first Epistle to the Corinthians that "To shame the wise, God has
chosen what the world counts folly, and to shame what is strong, God has chosen
what the world counts weakness" (I Corr. 1:27). In Crime and Punishment,
Dostoyevsky also offers a hopeful message: through humility and love, even the
vilest man can be reformed. Finally, it is through learning to love that man
begins to change.
Raskalnikov is the embodiment of the old German proverb, Ein guter
Mensch, in seinem dunklen Drangen, ist sich den rechten weges wohl
bewusst.Translated loosely, the statement means that "A good man, in his dark
impulses, is still conscious of the right way." Although he tries to convince
himself that he is not subject to moral law, Raskalnikov cannot avoid the fact
that he is subject to natural law. He believes that he is a superman, one who do
anything to assure his success, and he murders an old .pawnbroker to prove this
theory. As such, Raskalnikov's greatest sin is not his murder of Aliona Ivanovna
or of Litzeveta, but rather that, in his arrogance, he severs himself from
humanity. Although Raskalnikov sucessfully commits the crime, he is unable to
live with himself. In an 1879 letter to A.N. Lyubimov, Dostoyevsky said that the
end of the humanist was "the complete enslavement of conscience . . . their
ideal is an ideal of the coersion of the human conscience and the reduction of
mankind to th e level of cattle" (Frank 469). To apply Dostoyevsky's comparrison,
Raskalnikov ---in murdering what he calls "a louse" in the name of freedom---
becomes a slave to guilt and lousier than his victim. Thus, Rakalnikov's "
Napoleon" theory is negated, and his question becomes "How can I stop the
guilt?"
illustrated best in this inner dialogue: "This much he (Raskalnikov) knew: he
had to put an end to all that, today, right away, once and for all because he
did not want to live like that. Put an end to it---but how? By what means put an
end to it? About this he had no conception. He did not even want to think of it
. He drove away thougth. Painfully, thought tracked him down. He only felt, he
only knew, one way or another, everything had to be changed." (Dostoyevsky 159)
How can Raskalnikiov change? The rest of Crime and Punishment is devoted
to the question. Raskalnikov's theories and idealism failed him, and he is left
with nothing but guilt, fear, and a knawing desire for freedom from his
concience. But where is such freedom to be found? How can Raskalnikov bridge the
schism he created between himself and mankind? These questions eventually lead
Raskalnikov to prison and to the grace of God, but first he must learn one thing
---humility.
To understand fully the importance of the Christian (and Dostoyevsky's)
concept of humility in Crime and Punishment, one need look no further than to
the novel's second chapter in which Raskalnikov meets a drunk named Marmeladov.
Marmeladov, although nearly in a stupor, manages to grasp the essence of divine
grace and forshadows Raskalnikov's eventual atonement. For full effect,
Marmeladov's statement must be quoted in entirety. He shouts to the crowd in the
bar: "And when He has finished judging all, He will summon us, too: 'You, too
come forth,' he will say, 'Come forth you drunkards, come forth you weaklings;
come forth you shameless ones!' And we will all come forth unashamed. And we
will stand before him, and He will say: 'You are swine, made in the image of the
Beast, with his seal upon you, but you, too come unto me!' And the wise and the
clever will cry out: 'Lord! why dost thou receive these men ?' And he will say:
' I receive them, O wise and clever ones, because not one among them considers
himself worthy of this." (Dostoyevsky 33)
Through Marmeladov's drunken rambling, Dostoyevsky echoes Pauline
sentiment in the first chapter of Corinthians, where it is stated that God will
shame the wise with folly and the strong with weakness (I Cor. 1:27). In Crime
and Punishment, this is the essence of the Gospel. God's acceptance of drunks
and weaklings in Marmeladov's allegory promts incredulity from the "wise and
clever." But to Dostoyevsky, humility is the greatest strength.
Clearly, Raskalnikov's salvation lies in the recognition of his own
weakness, but, after the murder he is far too obsessed with his own strength to
remember Marmeladov's words. Raskalnikov realizes that he is miserable, he is
unrepentant: he does not believe he has done wrong and he still believes that,
through strength of will, he can absolve his guilt. "'Enough,'" Raskalnikov
says. "'Now for the kingdom of light and reason . . . and power . . . Now we
shall match wits!' he added . . . as though he were adressing some dark force .
. ." (Dostoyevsky, 191). However, it is not a dark force with which Raskalnikov
wrestles, but with God. Raskalnikov is still in rebellion and the schism
remains.
Enter Sonya, the embodiment of divine weakness and catalyst of
Raskalnikov's eventual redemption. She is the daughter of Marmeladov. She is
forced into prostitution to provide for her family, but she does so willingly
out of love. She is submissive, uneducated, poor, and a woman. In short, Sonya
is everything her contemporary world counted as folly, but to Dostoyevsky she
too is a testament to God's grace. Sonya "feels that she has sunk to the depths,
and it is only God who keeps her going" (Gibson 94). In Sonya, one sees as great
a sinner as Raskalnikov at peace with herself and with God. Her secrets:
humility and love. Like her father, Sonya recognizes her unworthiness before
God. Her knowlege that God alone gives her worth allows her to love others
unconditionally, including Raskalnikov. To paraphrase I John 4:19, Sonya loves
because God first loved Sonya.
Against Sonya's meekness and love, Raskalnikov begins to break. At
first, he is argumentative, mocking Sonya's childlike faith. "'She's a holy
fool!" (Dostoyevsky 317) Raskalnikov thinks to himself, but he is still drawn to
Sonya's strength. At last, Raskalnikov begins to realize that he is not alone ,
and it is because of this realization that he confesses to Sonya. It can be said
that, in this confession, Raskalnikov's strength begins to submit to divine
weakness. It is through love and humility that the schism will be bridged.
However, Raskalnikov's confession to Sonya is not enough, and Sonya
knows it. Vyacheslav Ivanov said Sonya "asks only one thing of her beloved: that
he should aknowledge the reality of . . . mankind outside himself, and should
solemnly declare his cceptence of this new . . . faith by an act of confession
to all the people" (Ivanov 80). Sonya tells Raskalnikov to bow down at a
crossroads, kiss the earth he offended and say aloud "'I have killed!" After
repenting, Sonya says that Raskalnikov must face the consequences of his action
(Dostoyevsky 407). Only through accepting his guilt will Raskalnikov be healed,
but he is unwilling to do so. He is unrepentant and is thus not absolved of his
guilt, but he eventually makes up his mind to confess, and, in a nervous fit, he
falls to the ground at the Haymarket crossroads and kisses it. But the words "'I
killed,' which had perhaps been ready on his tounge died inside him."
(Dostoyevsky 506). Raskalnikov is unrepentant still. His ego prohibits him from
tota l submission.
Yet, Raskalnikov submits to the authorities and is sentanced to prison
in Siberia. Ever devoted, Sonya follows him, but Raskalnikov is "ashamed before
her" (Dostoyevsky 521), and treats her badly. Raskalnikov is still unrepentant,
for he regards his crime as "simply a blunder, the sort of thing that might
happen to anyone" (Dostoyevsky 521), but he is ashamed because he allowed
himself to feel guilty. Although he is phisically in prison, Raskalnikov's real
prison is spiritual. Raskalnikov remains a slave to guilt, and it is only
through repentance that the chains will be loosed.
It can be said that, in Crime and Punishment, Raskalnikov never repents
in the theological sense of a concrete turning away from his sinful nature.
Indeed, to the last he merely entertains the idea of conversion to Christianity
(Dostoyevsky 528). But if indeed Crime and Punishment is a story about the grace
of God, shouldn't there be a conversion experience? Shouldn't Raskalnikov do
something equivalent to walking down the aisle weeping and utttering "I saw the
light?"
Dostoyevsky's answer would be an emphatic "No." In his life, faith came
gradually after years of struggle. Similarly, Dostoyevsky's hero Raskalnikov
must undergo "a gradual transition from one world to another" (Dostoyevsky 528).
Dostoyevsky understood that to define divine grace as a moment's conversion
experience was to cheapen it. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that "Cheap grace is the
justification of sin without the justification of the sinner" (Bonhoeffer 46).
Dostoyevsky would have agreed, if Crime and Punishment is any indicator. As
such, there is no cheapening of grace in the novel. Rather, Dostoyevsky leaves
the reader at the begining of faith: love. For it is by Raskalnikov's love for
Sonya that the schism between Raskalnikov and mankind is finally bridged.
Fittingly, Raskanilov's redemption begins in the spring, a time of new
beginings. Raskalnikov "wept and embraced [Sonya's] knees . . . there was no
longer any doubt he loved her. He loved her infinitely. At long last, the moment
had come . . ." (Dostoyevsky 527). At last Raskalnikov looks beyond himself and
begins to see that he is in error and that there is something more than his
guilt. He is freed from the slavery of guilt. In short, in this brief encounter
with Sonya, the seed of faith is planted. Whether or not the seed will be
brought to fruition remains to be seen. However, given Sonya's love and
Raskalnikov's desire for freedom, salvation seems likely.
What, then, is the reader to learn about Christianity in Crime and
Punishment? Certainly one is presented with enough Christian symbolism, obscure
biblical allusion, and allegory to merit volumes of literary analysis and keep
thousands of otherwise aimless Russian literature experts employed. However, at
its fundamental level, Crime and Punishment presents itself as a novel about
contrasts: love and hate, right and wrong, young and old. Most importantly, the
novel contrasts the oppression of sin with boundless freedom that lies within
the grace of God. In Raskalnikov, Dostoyevsky has a testament that, in spite of
one's past, one can, in God's love, be renewed. Crime and Punishment tells us
that, no matter how great the schism between God and man may be, God's grace is
greater still.
SOME ADDITIONAL
INFO....
Some facts that the English reader
should know:
1) Raskolnikov, Luzhin, Svidrigaïlov,
Zametov, Marmeladov and Razhumikin have some symbolic meanings in their last
names. For every Russian reader it is the obvious fact; however, in translation
the meaning of names becomes lost.
Raskol’nik – schismatic
Luzha – puddle
Razum – reason, intelligence
Zametit’ – to notice
Marmelad – sort of sweet candy
Svidrigaïlov – name from the medieval Russian history, Lithuanian prince
2) The story of Marmeladov’s family came
from the other Dostoevsky’s novel The Drunkards, which the writer had
never finished. Instead of turning the story into the complete literary work,
Dostoevsky put it in the plot of Crime and Punishment.
3) The character of Raskolnikov could be
compared to other characters in Russian literature of that time. These heroes of
Romantic era often possessed the qualities of revolt, cynicism and moral flaw in
intelligent and attractive light. The critics created a name for such type of
literary character, superfluous person. The examples of these heroes are
Pushkin’s Yevgeniy Onegin and Lermontov’s Pechorin (Hero of Our Time).
4) Russian word for “crime” is “prestuplenie”
which in direct translation means “stepping over”. “Stepping over the line” is
also one of the phrases used by Raskolnikov in his “Louse or Napoleon” theory.
5) The murder weapon in the novel is an
axe, a tool so often associated with Russian peasantry. It also carries the
connotations of peasant unrest. However, Porfiry, is not deluded by the
traditional weapon of a peasant and dismisses two painters from the list of
suspects. Instead the ‘axe’ is used in his conversation with Raskolnikov as a
double edged metaphor.
ABOUT NIHILISM AND THE
UBERMENSCH
Übermensch
the
German
philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche
explains the steps through which man can become an
Übermensch
(homo superior; the equivalent English translation would be
'super-human')
by
his will to power, manifested destructively in the rejection of, and
rebellion against, modern ideals and moral codes;
The will to
destruction
Nietzsche's motivation for the claim 'God
is dead' is
the destruction of the
Christian
conscience,
i.e., a God-centered way of thinking, and the fateful will to break out. His
symbols for this are
flame
and
thunder.
Only by breaking out of the idealistic norms one can become Übermensch, which
literally means "beyond human." The initial point of destruction is the
church,
which is, according to Nietzsche, the exact opposite of what
Jesus
preached. The reason for this is a process initiated by the apostle Paul, which
caused a transfiguration of Jesus' teachings to a remedy-punishment doctrine.
Zarathustra was the prototype for Nietzsche's Übermensch.
Furthermore,
asceticism,
religions that hold a "next life" to be more important than this one, and
especially the teachings of
Plato
point towards a nihilistic beyond, which places the belief in God in opposition
to reality. While this does not disprove God's existence, it does mark the
belief in God as running counter to Nietzsche's ethical valuing of the immediate
world.
Re-evaluating or
destroying old ideals
Once man has
undergone the process of denying God ('Omnis determinatio est negatio'), he
begins a journey towards becoming Übermensch. The humans are alone and, contrary
to absolving themselves of responsibility through the postulation of a deity,
they must create their own, new, moral ideals.
In establishing new
ideals, man now does not rank them according to transcendental aspects ("Where
from" and "What for") because this would again aim towards beyond.
Instead, there are
no absolute ideals any more but only an interpretation of them in which moral
ideals are the most important ones.
Overcoming nihilism
The most difficult
step according to Nietzsche is basing one's entire life into this world. Placing
belief or faith in anything transcendental is nihilistic and would lead to the
failure of man's attempt to become Übermensch. The idea of God is a quiet
temptation. In overcoming nihilism, man undergoes three phases:
-
The immoralist phase: he dares the jump away from the
Christian dogmas to a space without God but wonders how life without Him can
be possible. He 'balances over an empty space'.
-
The free thinker phase: man is already fully aware of his
freedoms and knows how to use them. He knows 'I am free when I am with
myself'.
-
The Übermensch: lives according to the principles of his
Will to Power
which ends in complete independence.
In short, Nietzsche
stated that everyone should take absolute responsibility for their own actions
in the world, and this can only be achieved by an overthrow of Christian ideals,
according to Nietzsche.
However, another
problem is that when the Ubermensch lives according to his Will to Power. If he
desires to control others, they will also desire to break free. If he
successfully controls others, their children will desire to break free. A person
who attempts to gain absolute, complete will to power, will bring only
destruction. It will merely create an endless cycle.
Common
misconceptions
Misidentification with Nazis
The most common misconception about the
Übermensch is that it is equivalent to the ideals of
Nazism,
and that it is related or equal to the concept of
Herrenvolk
("master race"). The concept of racial supremacy or antisemitism is absent in
Nietzsche. It is widely believed that Nietzsche's sister,
Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche,
who married an anti-Semite, contributed greatly to this misconception by
deliberately misrepresenting his work, and the Nazis themselves reinterpreted
and incorporated hodgepodge elements of many philosophical and religious texts,
including Nietzsche's.
Nietzsche had an admiration of
Napoleon
Bonaparte and
Julius
Caesar,
and advocated an authoritarian united Europe.
Misleading loan-translation
The translation of Übermensch as
"superman" may compound the misconception.
Über
can have a variety of meanings, as in Überwindung ("overcoming"),
überstehen/durchstehen ("come through"/"get over"), übersetzen
("translate"/"take across"). Some scholars therefore prefer the translation as
Overman, since the point of the Übermensch is that man needs to overcome
himself.
The German adverb "übermenschlich"
is common and used in contexts such as "mit übermenschlichen Kräften gelang
es ihm…": "with a force no human being is capable of he managed to…" or
"with superhuman force…", the connotation is that of leaving the human
sphere. Parallel constructions can be found in übernatürlich ("no longer
natural", "transcendental"), überirdisch ("heavenly", literally
"unearthly"). "Superman" lacks the German connotation of a sphere beyond human
knowledge and power. In addition, Mensch is less specifically male than
the English man, closer at times to the English human. Mensch is
to be understood as a neuter form of a noun.
Popular
elaboration of the concept
The term has loosed its bounds and left
the philosophic roundtable to go out into the general public. The inescapable
reference is the American comic book character
Superman.
Care must be taken when one comes across the word in literary usage. The British
novelist
Bulwer-Lytton
is said to have created the first superman who is not evil; by this it was meant
that his character was surpassing the ordinary man like the Übermensch, not with
impossible physical powers.
Confusion with scientific ideologies
Nietzsche's writings are spiritual and
philosophical in character, and do not state that the central ideas are
biological,
psychological,
sociological,
or
sociobiological.
His ideas have no firm connection to the claim of superiority of any particular
race
or
ethnicity,
and thus they are not
racist
in themselves.
What is Nihilism?
Nihilism, Nihilists, and
Nihilistic Philosophy
The term nihilism comes
from the Latin word 'nihil' which literally means "nothing." Many believe that
it was originally coined by Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev in his novel
Fathers and Sons (1862) when in fact it probably first appeared several
decades earlier. Nevertheless, Turgenev's use of the word to describe the views
he attributed to young intellectual critics of feudal society generally and the
Tsarist regime in particular is what gave the word widespread popularity.
This usage came at a
fortuitous time because there was a burgeoning radical movement that seem to fit
that term quite well — at least as far as conservatives were concerned. They
were perhaps the first to latch onto the word, using it as a slur to describe a
generation that was in revolt against established social norms. These youth
themselves were not eager to adopt the term, but it eventually came into general
usage.
This Russian Nihilism would
have seemed very familiar to anyone who lived through the 1960s in America. It
was largely a youth movement comprised of a new intellectual class that was
growing rapidly due to increased attendance at schools by commoners, increased
wealth in the middle class, and the development of independent presses.
The result was a "culture
war" with an older generation that felt a stronger allegiance to traditional
norms, traditional religion, and traditional morality. Against these "Fathers"
were arrayed the "Sons," children who no longer believed in the ideals of their
elders, were disillusioned at the hypocrisy around them, and feared that any
attempt to improve things would only be in vain.
As one might expect, the
more the young Russian Nihilists were pushed into conforming to tradition, the
more they pushed back — acting out in crude or vulgar ways, expressing contempt
for traditional values, opposing religious authority, etc. Some attempted to
change society through political action, but most were disillusioned with
politics and "dropped out," preferring instead to seek greater personal
development through a complete break with the past. It was these latter
individuals who perhaps most merit the label Nihilists — apolitical youth who
shared much in common with Turgenev's character Bazarov.
Ultimately, Russian
Nihilism didn't accomplish much itself — it certainly didn't produce general
cultural and political changes anywhere close to what was created by the 1960s
youth movements in America and Europe. The problem, it seems, is that the
radical cultural and political critiques were not well-balanced by an equally
strong program of alternatives. Basically, the Nihilists had little or nothing
to offer in exchange for what they hoped to tear down. Some certainly tried, but
there just weren't enough to effectively strengthen the movement.
This is not to say,
however, that Russian Nihilism left no mark whatsoever. Its emphasis on
materialism as opposed to idealism probably helped pave the way for the later
ascendancy of communism. It is also reasonable to conclude that the critiques of
traditional culture helped Russians to shed past prejudices and assumptions,
even if they didn't embrace the Nihilist philosophy entirely.
Nihilism
The term was first used by
Turgeniev in his novel, "Fathers and Sons" (in "Russkij Vestnik", Feb., 1862): a
Nihilist is one who bows to no authority and accepts no doctrine, however
widespread, that is not supported by proof.
The nihilist theory was
formulated by Cernysevskij in his novel "Cto delat" (What shall be done,
1862-64), which forecasts a new social order constructed on the ruins of the
old. But essentially, Nihilism was a reaction against the abuses of Russian
absolutism; it originated with the first secret political society in Russia
founded by Pestel (1817), and its first effort was the military revolt of the
Decembrists (14 Dec., 1825). Nicholas I crushed the uprising, sent its leaders
to the scaffold and one hundred and sixteen participants to Siberia. The spread
(1830) of certain philosophical doctrines (Hegel, Saint Simon, Fourier) brought
numerous recruits to Nihilism, especially in the universities; and, in many of
the cities, societies were organized to combat absolutism and introduce
constitutional government.
Theoretical Nihilism
Its apostles were Alexander
Herzen (1812-70) and Michael Bakunin (1814-76), both of noble birth. The former,
arrested (1832) as a partisan of liberal ideas, was imprisoned for eight months,
deported, pardoned (1840), resided in Moscow till 1847 when he migrated to
London and there founded (1857) the weekly periodical, "Kolokol" (Bell), and
later "The Polar Star". The "Kolokol" published Russian political secrets and
denunciations of the Government; and, in spite of the police, made its way into
Russia to spread revolutionary ideas. Herzen, inspired by Hegel and Feurbach,
proclaimed the destruction of the existing order; but he did not advocate
violent measures. Hence his younger followers wearied of him; and on the other
hand his defense of the Poles during the insurrection of 1863 alienated many of
his Russian sympathizers. The "Kolokol" went out of existence in 1868 and Herzen
died two years later. Bakunin was extreme in his revolutionary theories. In the
first number of "L'Alliance Internationale de la Démocratie Socialiste" founded
by him in 1869, he openly professed
Atheism
and called for the abolition of marriage, property, and of all social and
religious institutions. His advice, given in his "Revolutionary Catechism", was:
"Be severe to yourself and severe to others. Suppress the sentiments of
relationship, friendship, love, and gratitude. Have only one pleasure, one joy,
one reward -- the triumph of the revolution. Night and day, have only one
thought, the destruction of everything without pity. Be ready to die and ready
to kill any one who opposes the triumph of your revolt." Bakunin thus opened the
way to nihilistic terrorism.
Dostoevsky's nihilism
RAVI VYAS
WHAT lessons, if any, do we get when we look back on the
20th Century? Two world wars, the Stalinist purges and the labour camps, the
holocaust, all those revolutions that devoured their own children, leaving
behind ideas and dreams hovering deliriously over a wasteland of fact - over 100
million dead or missing. Put another way, the whole project of modernity, based
on the new-found faith in the power of reason, science, industry, revolution and
the perfectibility of man, of an Utopia in-the- making beyond good and evil,
gone up in a wisp of smoke. It was Dostoevsky's discovery, first put succinctly
in Notes from Underground and elaborated in Crime and Punishment, that showed
how monstrously stupid and twisted human beings, governed by vile and senseless
passions, could be. So, among the 19th Century novelists, all more or less
tainted by false hopes, only Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov could stand up today and
say to us: "I told you so!"
First, the plot summary of Crime and Punishment.
Raskolnikov, an impoverished student, conceives of himself as being an
extraordinary young man and then formulates a theory whereby extraordinary men
of the world have the right to commit any crime. To prove his theory, he murders
an old pawnbroker and her step-sister. Immediately after the crime he becomes
ill and lies in his room in a semi-conscious state. As soon as he is well and
can walk again, Raskolnikov goes out and reads about the crime in all the
newspapers of the last few days.
Raskolnikov meets an official from the police station and
almost confesses the crime. He does go far enough in his ravings to make the
official suspicious. Later, he witnesses the death of Marmaledov, a minor
government official who is struck by a carriage as he staggers across the street
in a drunken stupor. When he returns home he finds his mother and her sister
Dounia who have just arrived to prepare for her wedding to Luzhin. Raskolnikov
denounces Luzhin and refuses to allow his sister to marry him. About the same
time, Svidrigalov, Dounia's former employer, arrives in town, looks up
Raskolnikov and asks for a meeting with Dounia. Previously, Svidrigalov had
attempted to seduce Dounia and when Raskolnikov had heard of it had taken a
violent dislike to him.
Meanwhile, Raskolnikov learns that the police inspector
Porfiry, is interviewing all the people who had ever any business with the old
pawnbroker. Therefore he goes for the interview and leaves thinking that the
police are suspicious of him. Since he had met Sonia Marmaledov, the daughter of
the dead man whom Raskolnikov had helped, he goes to her and asks her to read
from the Bible about the rising of Lazarus from the dead. He feels great
sympathy with Sonia because she had been forced into prostitution in order to
support the family while her father drank. After another interview with Porfiry,
Raskolnikov confesses to Sonia. During the confession, Svidrigalov listens
through the door and uses this information to force Sonia to sleep with him. She
refuses and he kills himself later in the night. After talking to Sonia,
Raskolnikov confesses to the murder and is sentenced to eight years in a
Siberian prison. Sonia follows him and with her help begins his regeneration.
The structure of Crime and Punishment is clear. The book
consists of six parts and an epilogue, and at the end of the first part, within
the first 100 pages, the crime is done. The following five parts, the bulk of
the book, deal with punishment which is essentially a process of psychological
crisis and complex self- examination, ending at last with confession and
punishment. The meaning of the book has been explained by Dostoevsky in his
Notebooks: "Man is not born for happiness. Man earns his happiness, and always
by suffering. There is no injustice here, for knowledge and consciousness of
life... is acquired by experience pro and contra, which one must get through
one's own".
Though Crime and Punishment is a psychological study of
crime, the dominant recurring theme or the leitmotiv is the split of of human
consciousness between the rational and irrational truths. Raskolnikov, the hero
of the novel, is rationally "beyond good and evil". As he does not believe in
God, he cannot accept any transcendental or eternal moral law. He commits murder
simply in order to prove to himself that he dares overstep the line of our
conventional good and evil, and conquer the final freedom of the man-God who
does not recognise any law above and beyond himself. He obtains a complete
rational sanction for his crime: yet the subconscious "irrational" reaction
after it is so terrible that it drives him to a voluntary confession of his
deed, despite the fact that logically he still does not consider himself a
criminal at all.
It is easy to regard agnosticism and atheism as naturally
coexisting with progress but, as G.K. Chesterton once put it, when people cease
to believe in God, they do not believe in nothing - but rather they believe in
anything. When you really believe that the heavens are empty and that God is
dead, or that He was never alive in the first place, what happens is not an
overwhelming sense of insignificance but rather a sense of total helplessness
with absolutely nowhere to turn: you go from here to there, around the room,
around the "world" you live in - without ever being able to rest but also
without being able to do anything. Raskolnikov is condemned to go around and
round talking to his phantoms. His sickness is a continual dissatisfaction, an
inability to love anyone or anything, a restlessness without object, a disgust
of the self - and in a love of the self. This is the modern man, the nihilist
who sees in the water's depth his reflection shattered to pieces. The vision of
his fall fascinates him; faced with himself, nausea grips him but he cannot look
away. There is something strangely fascinating about morbidity and guilt. Or, as
the poet put it, "the waters of the abyss where I was falling in love with
myself". This is precisely what happens to Raskolnikov in punishment.
One of Dostoevsky's best critics, Mikhail Bakhtin,
observed that Dostoevsky created a new form, the "polyphonic" novel, in that,
the narrative is told not as a monologue but as a great polyphony of many
voices, endlessly competing for dominance. The many voices speak of many things,
and Crime and Punishment is therefore seen as many things. First, as the most
profound of detective stories in which detection of the crime involves the
remorseless pursuit of its motives, and where the essential detective is the
criminal himself. Second, it is read as a metaphysical thriller, in which the
very nature of sin is analysed. Third, it is regarded as a story of tragic
pride, in which the hero is haunted to the depths of his soul by the deed of
blood he has done - one critic has said that it reads like the fifth acts of all
tragedies. Fourth, it is seen as a profound work of modern nihilism and egotism
in which the superman attempts to step beyond the role of good and evil. Very
simply, the story is not told as if it is the only one; there are stories within
stories which are all ways of saying just one thing in some compelling fashion.
It is indeed the first of the modern novels. Besides all this, Crime and
Punishment "enlarges our consciousness" and so complex is our imaginative
identification with Raskolnikov that we begin to feel that we too might commit
murders.
Dostoevsky's Spirituality
A. His View of God
In general, Dostoevsky’s doctrine of God
appears to be orthodox. He exhibits no maverick views, as did his contemporary
Leo Tolstoy, who was anti-Trinitarian. Intriguingly, the principal atheists in
Dostoevsky’s novels (Stavrogin and Kirillov in The Idiot, Ivan and
Smerdyakov in The Brothers Karamazov, and Svidrigaylov in Crime and
Punishment) all commit suicide. It is as if Dostoevsky is saying that
because these characters have forsaken Life—the One who is life—they see no
meaning in this life and so end their earthly lives.
In Demons the author says that "faith
in [God] is the refuge for mankind…as well as in the hope of eternal bliss
promised to the righteous…"5
God was the fundamental datum beneath all of
Dostoevsky’s writing. That is not to say that Dostoevsky did not wrestle with
that reality over and over. As a matter of fact, he admitted that he would deal
with doubts to his dying day. In his five-volume masterpiece on the famed
novelist Joseph Frank commented: "Dostoevsky was to say…that the problem of the
existence of God had tormented him all his life; but this only confirms that it
was always emotionally impossible for him ever to accept a world that had no
relation to a God of any kind."6 As hinted earlier, the type of
unkind father Dostoevsky had experienced in early life probably contributed
significantly to the breeding of his later doubts.
In filtering out the novelist’s theology from
his writings, one must take into account the fact that not all Dostoevsky’s
characters enunciate the author’s personal beliefs. In fact, Dostoevsky,
"as an artist, accord[ed] equal rights to his atheists," and "it is the atheists
in his novels who do most of the theological talking!"7
One character in The Brothers Karamazov
who reflects an aberrant view of God is a semi-crazy monk named Father
Ferapont who makes an unbiblical distinction between the Holy Spirit and the
Holy Ghost. Nevertheless, the overall eccentricity that Dostoevsky accords this
character makes it abundantly plain that the writer himself does not hold this
bizarre view.
No major analyst has really raised any
serious questions about the orthodox view of God that Dostoevsky apparently
held.
B. Christ
While Dostoevsky does not express himself on
every occasion explicitly in the terminology of a modern evangelical theologian,
there seems to be no significant data for not accepting the novelist as orthodox
in his views on the person of Christ. Dostoevsky did not hesitate to speak of
Christ as the "God-man." Even the anti-theist character Ivan Karamazov refers to
the orthodox position on Christ as being "the One without sin" and indicates
that "Christ…was God" (Part III, Book V, chap 4). Also his brother Dmitri owns
that "Christ is God" (Part I, Book III, chap 5). Joseph Frank asserted
concerning our author’s novels and letters: "Unless we entirely reject their
veracity, they reveal Dostoevsky to be a believing Christian in his own way,
inwardly striving to accept the essential dogmas of the divinity of Christ,
personal immortality, the Second Coming, and the Resurrection."8
On more than one occasion Dostoevsky
expressed a view which would strike an evangelical ear strangely. He says that
if it came to a showdown between rejecting Christ and the truth, he would side
with Christ over against the truth! For those who take John 14:6 at face value,
the statement strikes a strange note. Probably his declaration is simply
literary hyperbole in adoration of Christ.
Transcribed in his notebook among
Dostoevsky’s notes in his final years was the plan to write a book on the life
of Christ. Obviously, if he had lived to fulfill his enterprise, a more accurate
determination could be made concerning the orthodoxy of his position. However,
throughout the gamut of his published writing no seriously disturbing notes
appear on this subject, so it seems best to assume, as even secular analysts do,
that the great Russian was broadly orthodox on the deity and humanity of Christ.
C. Sin
One final book Dostoevsky had hoped to write
was to have been entitled The Life of a Great Sinner. After
Dostoevsky became famous, people wrote to him in the way they do today to Ann
Landers, asking for advice. Consequently, Dostoevsky replied to one unknown
mother in 1878 (concerning a problem child): "if the child is bad, the blame
lies…both with his natural inclinations (because a person is certainly born with
them) and with those who brought him up…"9 This comment certainly
reveals that Dostoevsky assuredly treated sin as inborn and instinctive.
On one occasion Dostoevsky offered something
of his own definition: "When a man has not fulfilled the law of striving toward
an ideal, that is, has not through love sacrificed his ego to people…he suffers
and calls this condition sin."10 This is hardly a formal definition
to be found in a theological textbook, nor does it have a vertical (or Godward)
orientation. Rather, it is an experiential crystallization he worked out amid
life’s nitty-gritty and is congruent with his understanding of suffering (which
will be treated in the next section).
William Leatherbarrow spoke of how in the
Siberian prison-camp close contact with criminals "disabused Dostoevsky of his
earlier utopianism and faith in the essential goodness of man…"11
Dostoevsky referred to one prisoner in the camp as a "moral Quasimodo." The
stubborn reality of sin runs like a subterranean stream beneath all of the
novel-writing of Dostoevsky.
Homiletically, sin reveals itself pictorially
in Dostoevsky’s corpus in at least four features (all beginning with the letter
"s"). First, sin is seen as spite or spitefulness. Dostoevsky
himself was a very irritable and spiteful person. His second wife, Anna,
mentions (after her husband had insulted a waiter) that "he could not restrain
his spite."12
Dostoevsky’s novels are pimientoed with the
term "spite" and its cognates. In Crime and Punishment Raskolnikov the
murderer has a "spiteful…smile…on his lips" (Part I, chap 3). In "A Gentle
Spirit," a short story, the narrator-pawnbroker remarks to a fifteen-year-old
girl, "I was spiteful." In Demons one can find the "spite" terminology on
pp. 252, 255, 340–41, 378 (twice), 441, 461, 521, 524, 533, 558, 591, 610, 612,
617, 675 (twice), 676, 693, and 701.13
A second figurative form that sin assumes in
Dostoevsky’s canon is that of "stepping over." This pictorial language
immediately reminds the student of the Bible of the concept of transgression
(stepping over a boundary). For instance, when Raskolnikov commits his
ax-murder, the symbolical note of his "stepping over" the threshold is
explicitly mentioned (as it is on other significant occasions).
A third depiction of sin takes the form of
smog. Dostoevsky once wrote figuratively: "Sin is…smog, and the smog
will disappear when the sun rises in its power."14
The fourth simile for sin in Dostoevsky is
that of schism or splitness. The liberal theologian Paul Tillich once
depicted sin in terms of "gaps and splits." The lead sinner (Raskolnikov) in
Crime and Punishment bears in his Russian name the root raskol, which
means "schism." Berdyaev claimed, "That cleavage (dedoublement) in the
spirit…is the essential theme of all Dostoevsky’s novels."15 As
William Leatherbarrow analyzed the human condition in our subject, he stated,
"Man in Dostoevsky’s works, as in Genesis, is a tragic, split creature, excluded
from paradise but longing for reconciliation."16
Dostoevsky’s gallery of characters consists
of a parade of clinical cases in abnormal psychology. (Alyosha in The
Brothers Karamazov is one of the very few near normal, healthy characters in
his canon of works.) This phenomenon of splitness reveals itself repeatedly
throughout his stories and novels. Splitness takes the form of spite and
irrationality, a desire-to-please, yet a desire-not-to-please in the so-called
Underground Man (or narrator) in Notes from the Underground.
One of the most intriguing cases of all for
Bible students is the story of "The Double." It is virtually a takeoff on the
classic chapter of Romans 7. "The Double" narrates the case of an ill-at-ease
civil servant whose social problems cause him to hallucinate, thereby creating
his own "double personality split off from his real self." (Dostoevsky often
possesses the knack of writing so that a reader can’t always tell what is
intended as fact and what is intended as fantasy.) Theologian Bernard Ramm
analyzed this fascinating fissure-in-the-soul, drawing out the parallels between
Romans 7 and Dostoevsky’s "Double."17
Like the major existentialists, Dostoevsky
has done Christian theology a service by painting the portraits of people in a
form that is consonant with that of Christian orthodoxy. Berdyaev asserted that
Dostoevsky "uncovered a volcanic crater in every being."18 And these
volcanoes are always rumbling!
D. Salvation
In The Idiot, on his birthday,
Prince Myshkin challenges the atheists present to tell him "with what they will
save the world?"19 In a general way Dostoevsky answered his
character’s question in a letter: "in Christianity alone…the salvation of the
Russian land from all her afflictions lies."20 Leatherbarrow called
Dostoevsky "a novelist with a mission. There is to be no harmony without
redemption, no salvation without God, and no paradise on earth."21
Joseph Frank evaluated: "The values of expiation, forgiveness, and love were
destined to take precedence over all others in Dostoevsky’s artistic universe…"22
Initially, it seems necessary to say
something about the genre of literature under our scrutiny here. A novel is not
designed as a super-long evangelistic tract. One of the sad dilemmas is that a
Christian reader often seems to have to choose between a profound Dostoevsky
(whose works may appear defective, evangelically speaking) and some modern trite
"Christian" fiction all gauged about the lead character’s getting saved (and
usually an overdose of romance tossed in for good measure).
From the preceding paragraph the reader may
already sense that (while his doctrines of God, Christ, and sin appear
reasonably orthodox), Dostoevsky’s doctrine of salvation leaves something to be
desired—from a biblical standpoint. If Dostoevsky had "mission" (Leatherbarrow’s
term), what was his mission? In light of a full-orbed biblical mission,
Dostoevsky’s solutions come up short of the mark.
At best, Dostoevsky’s major novels might be
described as pre-evangelistic. If a novelist were planning to offer a
distinctively Christian answer, Dmitri Karamazov (in The Brothers Karamazov),
Raskolnikov (in Crime and Punishment), and Stepan Verkhovensky
(in Demons) are off-target. At the end of these three major novels all
three characters are primed for conversion, but the best we are given falls
under the category of hopeful hints. Boyce Gibson remarks, "In the Epilogue of
Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov avoids the Christian formula [of
conversion]…"23 Similarly, Richard Peace commented concerning Stepan
Verkhovensky (in Demons) that his "final words…seem more in
keeping with some vague theism of the [18]40s than with true Christianity."24
And what shall we say of Alyosha’s
"conversion"? Alyosha (having gone through some serious doubts) threw himself
onto the earth to kiss it. "Something…unshakable, like that heavenly dome above
him, was entering into his soul for all eternity" (The Brothers Karamazov,
Part II, Book VII, chap 4). Alyosha articulates his experience by asserting,
"Someone visited my soul at that moment." An ecstatic experience, yes. A
Christian conversion? At best, an analyst must preserve an agnostic stance on
the subject. It is certainly a vast cry from the "Jesus is Lord" experience of
Saul of Tarsus in Acts 9. There is no real propositional content or identifiable
theological referent to Alyosha’s mystical encounter. Who is the "Someone"
Alyosha encounters?
Father Zosima is the lovable elder over the
monastery (in The Brothers Karamazov) to which Alyosha is temporarily
attached. Father Zosima says to his inquirer: "There is only one means of
salvation…take yourself and make yourself responsible for all men’s lives."25
For a Christian what is the "only…means of salvation"? Father Zosima’s response
is hardly deemed the orthodox answer to the question. It seems light years away
from Acts 16:31.
Ivan the intellectual cannonades Alyosha with
atheistic arguments. One of Alyosha’s responses is to tell Ivan to "love life
above everything. To this statement Ivan rejoins, "More than life’s meaning?"
Alyosha responds, "Half your work is done, Ivan, you love life; now you’ve only
got to do the second half [presumably to find life’s meaning] and you’re saved."
Those are strange statements to any evangelical Christian.
From his other writings we know that in
Notes from the Underground Dostoevsky had planned "to advocate Christian
faith as a means of attaining moral freedom," yet "that swine of a [Russian]
censor" (as Dostoevsky called him) wouldn’t allow him to publish a Christian
message through the voice of such an unChristian character. Dostoevsky
complained that the government censor suppressed the place where from all this I
deduced the need for faith and Christ."26 If we had this uncensored
version, we might be able to better assess Dostoevsky’s soteriology.
There is one theme under this rubric,
however, which is so pervasive in Dostoevsky’s writings that it cannot be
ignored. That is the topic of salvation through suffering. In 1960 Martin Luther
King, Jr., spoke of "the conviction that unearned suffering is redemptive." One
suspects that King was speaking of social liberation. However, exactly what
Dostoevsky meant by using similar language remains ambiguous.
Berdyaev declared, "Dostoevsky believed
firmly in the redemptive and regenerative power of suffering: life is the
expiation of sin by suffering."27 When Dostoevsky put down on paper
his plan for Crime and Punishment, he transcribed, "The criminal himself
resolves to accept suffering and thereby atone for his deed."28 Dunya
admonishes Raskolnikov: "Suffer and expiate your sin by it" (Crime and
Punishment, Part V, chap 4). Later the detective Porphyry remarks to the
murderer, "This may be God’s means for bringing you to him" (Part VI, chap 2).
Raskolnikov’s sister Dunya asks her brother, who is on the verge of confessing:
"Aren’t you half expiating the crime by facing the suffering?" (Book VI, chap
7).
In Demons the nearly sociopathic
Stavrogin confesses, "I want to forgive myself and that is my…whole goal" (for
his responsibility in a young girl’s suicide). He continues: "That is why I seek
boundless suffering." To Stavrogin, Bishop Tikhon offers strange advice (from a
biblical viewpoint): "Christ…will forgive you, if only you attain to forgiving
yourself."29 Would any NT apostle have said that to an earnest
inquirer?
William Leatherbarrow announced: "In The
Insulted and Injured, for the first time in Dostoevsky’s novels, the
idea of the spiritually healing power of suffering is opposed to the dream of
heaven on earth."30 As he analyzes Dmitri’s physical suffering and
Ivan’s mental suffering (in The Brothers Karamazov), Leatherbarrow
concludes: "All must be redeemed through suffering."31 In the same
novel a man who engineered a successful murder without getting caught says, "I
want to suffer for my sins" (Part II, Book VI, chap 2). Finally, Alyosha owns to
Dmitri (after he’s convicted—wrongly—of murder): "you wanted to make yourself [a
new man] by suffering" (Epilogue, chap 2). In another place Dmitri stated, "I
want to suffer and by suffering I shall cleanse myself" (Part III, Book IX, chap
5).32
On one occasion Dostoevsky wrote to his wife:
"God gave you to me so that…I might expiate my own great sins…"33 The
repetitiveness of this salvation-through-suffering theme is far too relentless
in Dostoevsky to be downplayed. Joseph Frank concluded that "the highest aim of
Dostoevsky’s Christianity…is not personal salvation but the fusion of the
individual ego with the community in a symbiosis of love; the only sin that
Dostoevsky appears to recognize is the failure to fulfill this law of love."34
The book of Hebrews appears to grant some
pedagogically perfecting power to suffering when rightly responded to (see Heb
2:10; 5:9; 12:2-11). God uses suffering as a teaching tool to conform us to
Christ. Yet Dostoevsky (through the mouth of his characters) seemed to invest
suffering with some spiritually regenerative power—and this we must repudiate.
While Dostoevsky offered spiritual solutions for regeneration through his
characters to other needy characters in his novels, I do not find forthcoming
any clear-cut biblical prescription for salvation by grace through faith in
Jesus Christ.
In relation to Roman Catholicism, Dostoevsky
set forth numerous virulent tirades in his books. However, it is never apparent
that he is taking Romanism to task on the grounds of their unbiblical
soteriology. He saw Roman Catholicism’s temporal power as the principal threat
to truth and viewed it as acceding to atheistic socialism.
E. Eschatology
"The end of the world is coming," wrote
Dostoevsky in his notebook.35 During Dostoevsky’s days there was an
excess of irreligion (in the form of atheism) and an excess of religion
(in the form of apocalypticism). There is a considerable amount of apocalyptic
talk occurring in both The Idiot and Demons.
One of the less serious characters in
The Idiot, Lebedyev, is a "self-styled interpreter of the Apocalypse" [that
is, the book of Revelation].37 In line with Matt 24:6, Dostoevsky
remarked that "Christ himself…predicted…that strife and development will
continue to the end of the world…"37 In The House of the Dead
there is one discussion about the possibility of the return of the Jews
to Jerusalem.
Revelation 6 crops up in one conversation
between Lebedyev and Prince Myshkin (in The
Idiot). Obviously the interpreter in this case
adopts a historicist position by quoting events in Revelation 6 with the
contemporary world of the 1800s. Lebedyev says "She agreed with me that we are
living in the age of the third horse, the black one [Rev 6:5, 6], and the rider
who has the balance in his hand, seeing that everything in the present age is
weighed in the scales and by agreement, and people are seeking for nothing but
their rights—‘a measure of wheat for a penny and three measures of barley for a
penny’…and afterwards will follow the pale horse and he whose name was Death and
with whom hell followed…[Rev 6:8]" (Part II, chap 2). Lebedyev’s apocalyptic
interpretation is later called "mere charlatanism" by General Ivolgin (in Part
II, chap 6). In the same book Princess Belokonskaya’s name reflects the symbolic
fourth horse of Revelation 6, for belo in Russian means "white" and
kon means "horse."38
In The Brothers Karamazov Ivan
interprets Rev 8:11 as the heresy of antisupernaturalism manifest in the German
Enlightenment—once more an example of a historicist hermeneutic. Lebedyev (in
The Idiot) connects Rev 8:11’s Wormwood—amazingly—with the network of
European railroads (Part II, chap 11)!
Revelation 10:6 also appears in Dostoevsky’s
two chief apocalyptic novels. Demons informs us, "in the Apocalypse the
angel swears that time will be no more" (Part II, chap 5). A dying consumptive
named Ippolit wryly plays upon Rev 10:6 (in light of his secretly projected
suicide) when he informs Prince Myshkin: "tomorrow there will be ‘no more time’"
(Part III, chap 5). Then he asks, "And do you remember, prince, who proclaimed
that there will be ‘no more time’? It was proclaimed by the great and might
angel in the Apocalypse" (Ibid). Of course, most modern Bible versions render
"time…no more" in the way the New King James Version does: "there should be
delay no longer." While this retranslation undercuts the two preceding
interpreter’s ideas, it nevertheless reveals Dostoevsky’s familiarity with the
text of Revelation.
The system of interpretation revolving around
Revelation 13 and Antichrist also makes its presence felt in Dostoevsky’s
novels. "Is it true that you expound Antichrist?" the amateur analyst Lebedyev
is asked (The Idiot, Part II, chap 2). Lebedyev responded that he
"unfolded the allegory and fitted dates to it."
Most literary analysts concur in seeing
Stavrogin in Demons as an antichrist figure. Stavrogin is not blatantly
villainous, but he is the cold-and-bold, unpredictable polar personality around
whom many of the other characters in the novel revolve. The name Stavrogin is
related to the Byzantine word stavros (and Greek stauros),
meaning "cross." Yet the rog part of his Russian name means "horn,"
making the student of eschatology think of Rev 13:1 and Dan 7:20-25.39
Furthermore, Stavrogin’s first name is Nikolai (meaning "conqueror of people")
as in the name of the Nicolaitans in Rev 2:6 and 15.
Stavrogin’s chief henchman is Peter
Verkhovensky. In Russian verkhovenstvo means "supremacy."40
Verkhovensky is the mean-spirited, nihilist revolutionary agitator in Demons.
He says to Stavrogin, "You are my idol" and "I’ve been inventing you" (Part
2, chap 8). With these notions should be compared Rev 13:11-15. In the narrative
Verkhovensky is an incendiary, so he—in effect—brings fire to the earth,
paralleling Rev 13:13. In Demons the convict Fedka speaks to Verkhovensky
of "every beast from the book of the Apocalypse" (Part III, chap 3).
Also in Demons the intellectual
Kirillov talks to Stavrogin about "the man-god." To this notion Stavrogin
queries, "[You mean] the God-man [by which he refers to Christ]?" Kirillov
rather rejoins, "The man-god—that’s the whole difference" (Part II, chap 5).
Again, the Bible student cannot help but reflect upon the parody of Christ found
in antichrist (as in 2 Thess 2:3-4).
In Crime and Punishment Marmeladov,
the alcoholic father, refers to drunkards "made in the image of the beast and
his mark" (Part I, chap 2). Compare Rev 13:15-17. Consequently, the thought and
terminology of Revelation 13 played a significant role in the thinking of
Dostoevsky.
A parallel with Revelation 17 and 18 comes
through when the Europe of the 1860s is likened to Babylon: "their Babylon is
indeed going to collapse; great will be its fall…" (Demons, Part
II, chap 5).
Joseph Frank wrote that Dostoevsky "sought to
accept the essential dogmas of the divinity of Christ, personal immortality, the
Second Coming and the Resurrection."41 When Raskolnikov (in Crime
and Punishment) decides not to end his life in a canal, "he could not
understand that his decision against suicide arose from a presentiment of a
future resurrection and a new life."42
In Demons, Shatov, a
nationalist who supports Christianity but isn’t a Christian himself, "believes
that Christ’s second coming will be among the Russian people, who will then
bring about the spiritual rebirth of the rest of the world."43 Thus,
one of Dostoevsky’s characters provides a most interesting locus for Christ’s
return.
In The Brothers Karamazov Ivan refers
to Christ’s return in heavenly glory—like lightning (Part II, Book V, chap 5).
Later Father Zosima’s friend says, "The sign of the Son of Man will be seen in
the heavens" (Part II, Book VI, chap 2) as in Matt 24:30.
The Brothers Karamazov ends on a high
note. After they return from the boy Ilyusha’s funeral, the youth Kolya asks
Alyosha: "Can it be true what’s taught us in religion that we shall all rise
again from the dead and shall live and see each other again, Ilyusha too?" To
the youth’s question Alyosha replies: "Certainly" (Epilogue, chap 3).
Judgment is not missing in Dostoevsky’s
novels. Frank notes that in the corpus of novels there is a "lurking imminence
of the Day of Judgment and the Final Reckoning."44 Demons
refers to the Last Judgment (Part I, chap 4).
Hell would seem to be a reality in
Dostoevsky. Dmitri Karamazov asks whether he will go "to Heaven or to Hell…?" (The
Brothers Karamazov, Part III, Book IV, chap 8). Berdyaev reported
that "evil for [Dostoevsky] was evil, to be burned in the fires of hell."45
Peace claimed, "A striking feature of The Brothers Karamazov…is the
extent to which the characters are obsessed by hell…"46
The debauched father (in The Brothers Karamazov) declared, "I
believe in hell" (Part I, Book I, chap 4). Nevertheless, Father Zosima "did not
literally believe in hellfire."47
In summary, then, Dostoevsky shows an overall
respect for the Bible’s eschatology, although some of his characters promote
bizarre interpretations. In A Raw Youth "Versilov speaks of the Second
Coming which will end with the rapturous hymn that greets ‘the last
resurrection.’"48
Thus, Dostoevsky seems to concur with
historic orthodoxy that the Second Coming of Christ is that one far-off divine
event toward which all creation moves (to borrow Tennyson’s language).
IV. Was
Dostoevsky a Christian?
The conclusion of philosopher Nicholas
Berdyaev is: "I personally know no more profoundly Christian writer than
Dostoevsky…" and asserts that Dostoevsky "loved Christ consumingly…"49
Given such complimentary conclusions, some readers might consider it almost
sacrilegious to raise the question that entitles this section of the article.
However, since Christians are commanded to be claim-testers (in 1 Thess: 5:21
and 1 John 4:1), the question must be deemed a legitimate issue to
raise—especially in light of the previously discussed defective soteriology. We
shall survey Dostoevsky’s religious heritage and then wrestle with the question
of possible conversion points in his experience.
A. His Religious Heritage
Dostoevsky was raised within the womb of the
Russian Orthodox Church. His grandfather was an archpriest, his uncle was a
village priest, three aunts married village priests, and his father had even
attended seminary for a while.50 Also his maternal grandfather
corrected proofs of theological law in Moscow.51 Dostoevsky recorded.
"I came from a pious Russian family…In our family, we knew the Gospel almost
from the cradle."52 His childhood reading primer was 104 Sacred
Stories from the Old and New Testaments. Job was one of the Bible
stories that most fascinated him as a youngster. Furthermore, a deacon visited
the Dostoevsky home and taught Scripture lessons "from one and a half to two
hours" each week.53
A later strategic item in Dostoevsky’s story
is his receiving a copy of The Gospels from three women en route to
Siberian prison. One of the three, Natalya Fonvizina "knew [the Bible] almost by
heart; she read the works of the Fathers of the Orthodox Church and the writers
of the Catholic and Protestant churches…"54 Dostoevsky treasured and
preserved this gift of The Gospels to his dying day, as we have noted.
B. The Conversion Question
This is a complicated question, because
Dostoevsky was a complex person with complicated writings. The question is
compounded by his involvement in one of those sacerdotal types of Eastern
churches. Little Fyodor said his prayers daily before the family icon of the
Virgin Mary: "Mother of God, keep me and preserve me under Thy wing!"55
His second wife reported that he said this favorite prayer with his children
every evening at 9 p.m.56 Often such churches do not stress the
importance of a clear-cut conversion decision. (Of course, we might also have a
tough time determining from the Gospels exactly when Peter or any of the
apostles were converted.)
It is possible that Dostoevsky began to
believe in Christ during his early childhood experience. Like many children
growing up in a Christian family, it may be hard to trace any neat
before-and-after date. That is one possibility for attempting to pinpoint a
starting point for Dostoevsky’s Christianity.
His life-sparing traumatic experience before
the firing squad in 1849 left him feeling that he had been given new life—a sort
of resurrection, but other documented factors would seem to militate against
this event being assessed as a Christian conversion. His reported words to his
brother Mikhail on that occasion were. "Now, in changing my life, I am reborn in
a new form. Brother! I swear that I…will keep my soul and heart pure. I will be
reborn for the better. That’s all my hope, all my consolation!"57
Note that the writer said both "I am reborn" and "I will be
reborn." Because of what Dostoevsky said earlier to another prisoner, it is best
to assume that here he was simply using flowery, figurative language. He was
undoubtedly rejuvenated, but unlikely regenerated at this juncture in his life.
He used similar words when his ten-pound leg chains were removed upon his
release from the Siberian prison ("Freedom, new life, resurrection from the
dead…!).58
If Dostoevsky was already a Christian before
he left Siberia in 1859, he "never seemed to grow as a Christian," reported an
anonymous Christianity Today reporter. "He had an affair. He became a
compulsive gambler and lost so much money [that] he was all but bankrupt."59
This addiction to gambling; which placed his family in poverty, is
chronicled in Dostoevsky’s novel The Gambler.
Another experience while he was in the
Siberian prison is often cited by biographers. During one Easter week in prison
Dostoevsky recounted a mystical experience. Before that, he had despised the
other convicts. After it his attitude was completely altered. He related:
"…suddenly felt I could look on these unfortunates with quite different eyes,
and suddenly as if by miracle, all hatred and rancor had vanished from my
heart."60 However, as Joseph Frank evaluates this so-called
"conversion," it was "not faith in God or Christ…rather, it is a faith in the
Russian common people. Dostoevsky’s regeneration [here]…centered primarily on
his relations with the people…"61 This was a social rather
than strictly spiritual conversion.
The principal problem with Dostoevsky’s
salvation is his doctrine of salvation as expressed (or unexpressed) in his
novels. There is such a stress upon a salvation by suffering that this theme
raises real questions about an authentic Christianity in the famous author
himself. Dostoevsky unquestionably believed he had a religious mission in his
writing, but any message of clear-cut conversion—and how to become a
Christian—fails to come through in the great novels. At best, they serve a
pre-evangelistic purpose, which is indeed a valuable function. At the climax of
his novels Christianity comes through more as a flickering light at the end of a
dark tunnel. Even the Dostoevsky-praising philosopher Berdyaev observed that the
famed Russian "did not tell us how to acquire [freedom of spirit], how we may
attain spiritual and moral autonomy…"62
In an 1875 letter Dostoevsky advised N. L.
Ozmidov: "Wouldn’t it be more to the point…if you read somewhat more attentively
the epistles of St. Paul?"63 Ah, we could only wish that Dostoevsky
had heeded his own admonition when it came to the subject of soteriology!
Thankfully, there is some evidence to be
adduced on the positive side of the fence. We have Dostoevsky’s own utterance:
"If you believe in Christ, then you believe you will live eternally."64
His wife Anna also narrated a visit to a monastery where her husband was
asked point-blank by a Father Ambrosius whether he was a believer. To him
Dostoevsky responded that he was.65 When Dostoevsky was about to be
shot in 1849, a fellow prisoner named F. N. Lvov documented that Dostoevsky
exclaimed to Speshnev: "We shall be with Christ."66 (The problem here
is that Speshnev was a known atheist!) William Lyon Phelps, a Christian
professor at Yale University, acknowledged that Dostoevsky "found in the
Christian religion the only solution of the riddle of existence…"67
V. Conclusion
There is much valuable grist for a
Christian’s mental mill to be found within the sterling novels of Fyodor
Dostoevsky. His presentation of God, Christ, and sin are generally aligned with
the theological thought of Christian orthodoxy. Sadly, however, his
crystallizations that relate to the subject of salvation in his novels often
appear defective. Do we suffer for our sins, or (as the NT declares) has Christ
sufficiently suffered for our sins (Heb 9:26-28; 1 Pet 2:21-24; 3:18)?
Dostoevsky almost seemed to embrace an in-this-life purgatory. Suffering here on
earth is purgative, regenerative for him, which does not square with NT
teaching. Suffering did prove personally beneficial in Dostoevsky’s own
life, so he probably read his NT through this experiential grid. But experience
will not necessarily be prescriptive for exegesis.
On this salient subject Dostoevsky is
considerably less than a student of the NT could wish. However, just as we can
profitably read the monumental works of the Arian John Milton or sing the hymns
of another Arian—Isaac Watts, so a Christian does well to wrestle with the
world-class novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky.
LIMINAL SPACE
Psychological term: a place where boundaries dissolve a little
and we stand on the threshold, getting ourselves ready to move across the limits
of what we were into what we are to be.
A space of transformation between phases of separation and
reincorporation. It represents a period of ambiguity, of marginal and
transitional state. The liminal or threshold world is a space between the world
of status that the person is leaving and the world of status into which the
person is being inducted.
The concept of liminality as a quality of "in-between" space
and/or state is of the outmost importance in describing some of the most
interesting and highly specific social and cultural phenomena: the transcultural
space, the transgeographical space, the transgender space etc.
Liminal spaces are ambiguous and ambivalent.
RUSSIAN NAMES
Male characters: their middle names all end in "ovitch,"
which simply means "son of." Their middle name is just their father's name with
this ending tacked on (called a patronymic). For example, Rodya's father's name
was Roman Raskolnikov. Thus, Rodya's middle name is Romanovitch.
Female characters: similarly, their middle names all end in
"ovna," which means "daughter of," and which is again tacked on to their
father's name. E.g., Dounia's middle name is Romanovna.
A few keys to Russian pronunciation: "kh" is like the
Scottish "ch" in "loch." "zh" is like the "s" in "measure." "v" at the end of a
word is like an 'T."
Some fun with onomastics:
"raskol"= schism or split
"razum"= reason or common sense "marmelad"= jam or jelly
"luzha"= puddle
"zametit"= to notice
PART I- POINTS of INTEREST
Raskolnikov’s personality.
Indecision
Arrogance
Isolation/ perception of fellow man
Internal vs. external
Ubermensch/ amorality
Symbolism
The city
The apartment
The tavern
The pawnbroker
Representative
Sonya
Sonya=Sophia
The "moral center"/ moral ambiguity (liminal space, or "transpiritual
identity")
Raskolnikov
Marmeladov
Suffering
Katerina (the victim)
Marmeladov (self-imposed)
The setting
Sacrifice
Christ references
Sonia
Dunya
The moral continuum
Svidrigailov/ Luzhin vs. Sonia/ Dunya. Where is Raskolnikov?
Raskolnikiv’s vascillation: to kill or not to kill?
The dream
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
UNIT STUDY GUIDE
Themes/ Motifs/ Symbols/ Concepts
- The “double” (the personality’s
“other side”)
- The perversion of justice
- Blood imagery
- The flogged horse
- Bloody hands
- Katerina Ivanovna’s bloody
handkerchief
- The dream
- the flogged horse
- the plague
- Rationalism
- Suffering
- Earth (as “common mother of all men”)
- Communion (body and blood of Christ)
- Water
- The city
- Vegetation (fertility)
- Light vs. darkness
- Air vs. suffocation
- “The New Jerusalem”… and its
perversion in distopia
- faith
- Christ’s Passion/ crucifixion/
sacrifice
- Sonya
- Dunya
- Razumihkin’s love for Dunya
- Lazarus/ resurrection/ regeneration
- The Virgin Mary (mercy)
- Mary Magdalene (God’s grace in the
lowest)
- Sonya = Sophia (Gnostic goddess of
wisdom)
- The 30 roubles = 30 pieces of silver
(Judas Iscariot)
- The color yellow
- The yellow card
- Raskolnikov’s room
- Isolation
- Socioeconomic oppression
- Dunya and Luzhin
- Raskolnikov
- Marmeladov and family
- Guilt and innocence
- Sonya
- Dunya
- Lizaveta
- Luzhin
- Svidrigailov
- Ubermensch
- Liminal Space
- Nihilism
ASSIGNMENTS
Discussion Questions Parts I and II
1. According to Kohlberg, where would Raskolnikov
fall in the stages of moral development?
2. If I were to say that Raskolnikov stands as an
example of a Christian ideal, what might I mean? Why is it significant that Raskolnikov
periodically displays flashes of conscience?
3. If I were to say that Sonia stands as an example
of a Christian ideal, what might I mean?
4. What is the imagery associated with Raskolnikov's
room (Chapter 3 in Part I)? What is significant about it?
5. How would you characterize the character type of Dounia in the novel? (this is a stretch, I know, but do your best.)
6. Where would Razumikhin fall in Kohlberg's stages
of moral development? Why?
Discussion Questions For Crime
and Punishment
1. One of the central themes of Crime and Punishment is
that of redemption/salvation via suffering, especially in relation to Christian
teachings. In what way is the biblical story of Lazarus relevant to the personal
journeys of Raskolnikov and Marmeladov?
2. Do you think that Porfiry is aware of Raskolnikov’s guilt
from the start of the play? If so, in what ways is Porfiry playing a game of
psychological “cat and mouse” in order to trap Raskolnikov? And, why do you
think that Raskolnikov cannot seem to resist discussing the crime with Porfiry,
the very person he should avoid?
3. In Raskolnikov’s article, he argues that “extraordinary” men,
who are often the world’s leaders, have a right to commit crimes when they must
do so for the benefit of humanity. Are you for or against this argument? Provide
examples from history or current world politics, if possible, to support your
argument.
Discussion Questions #3
1. Relate the
details of Raskolnikov’s crime. What evidence is there that Raskolnikov is
mentally unbalanced at the time he commits the murders?
2.
Some critics believe that the character Razumihin serves to increase
a reader’s sympathy for Raskolnikov by helping to present him as a
worthwhile man, even though he is a murderer. Cite incidents from the story
to support this idea.
3.
In what ways are Marmeladov and Raskolnikov alike? One of the themes
of this novel is that through love and forgiveness, a man can be
rehabilitated or reborn. In what way(s) does the character of Marmeladov
help to illustrate this theme?
4.
In what way(s) are Sonia and Dounia similar characters? Why do you
think Raskolnikov confesses his crime to Sonia rather than to his sister
Dounia?
5. Both
Svidrigailov and Luzhin are described by some critics as representing the
evil side of man. Cite incidents from the story to discuss the extent to
which you agree with this idea. In your opinion, which man represents the
greater evil?
6.
Why does Katerina dress the children up as street singers?
7.
What does Raskolnikov consider to be Sonia’s greatest sin? In what way does
Luzhin help her to understand Raskolnikov’s point of view on this subject?
8.
For what reasons does Dounia agree to marry Luzhin? How does Raskolnikov feel
about her impending marriage? Why does she eventually break her engagement?
9.
What do Svidrigailov’s dreams about the young girl reveal about his character?
Svidrigailov admits to Raskolnikov that he is afraid to die, why then does he
decide to
kill
himself?
10.
Cite two instances from the story supporting Raskolnikov’s belief that fate or
providence are helping him to carry out his plan to murder the pawnbroker.
11.
Describ in a few sentences the character traits of one of the following
characters from the story: Raskolnikov, Dounia, Luzhin, Sonia, Porfi ry.
12.
Porfi ry admits that he has no “mathematical” proof that Raskolnikov is the
murderer. Why then is Porfi ry convinced that Raskolnikov is guilty?
13.
Why does the painter confess to the crime?
14.
What do the number 3 and the color yellow represent in the story?
15.
How does Dounia respond to Svidrigailov’s offer to give her 10,000 roubles?
16.
Defi ne nihilism. In what way(s) does Svidrigailov live a nihilistic life style?
Why do you think Dostoevsky presents the nihilistic views through Svidrigailov,
a pervert, and Lebeziatnikov, a fool?
17. At what point
in the story does Raskolnikov realize that he is in love with Sonia?
Discussion
Questions #4- The Epilogue
Chapter I
1. Why does the court conclude that Raskolnikov must have been
mentally deranged when he committed the murders?
2. During his confession to the court, Raskolnikov claims that
he committed the murders because he was miserably poor and wanted the money to
provide for himself. What would be his motive for omitting his theory that
extraordinary men have the right to
overstep the boundaries of the law? Is he fully repentant?
3. What evidence exists that Raskolnikov’s personality, mood,
and character have not changed since he confessed his crimes and went to prison?
4. Describe Pulcheria’s state of mind throughout Raskolnikov’s
trial and after he is sentenced to prison. What happens to Razumihin and Dounia?
Chapter II
1. When he first goes to prison, why is Raskolnikov ashamed? How
does he feel about his prison life?
2. In the following passage, Raskolnikov discusses repentance:
And if only fate would
have sent him repentance—burning repentance that would have torn
his heart and robbed him
of sleep, that repentance, the awful agony of which brings visions of
hanging or drowning! Oh,
he would have been glad of it! Tears and agonies would at least have
been life. But he did
not repent of his crime. (Pg. 462)
Knowing that Raskolnikov does not repent his crime, how likely
is it that he will continue to be a danger to society? What factor can help him
want to find sincere repentance?
3. How does Raskolnikov come to realize that he loves Sonia?
4. State a theme for Crime and Punishment based on the
following excerpt:
They [Sonia and
Raskolnikov] wanted to speak, but could not; tears stood in their eyes. They
were both pale and thin;
but those sick pale faces were bright with the dawn of a new future,
of a full resurrection
into a new life. They were renewed by love; the heart of each held infi nite
sources of life for the heart of the
other. (Pg. 466)
CRITICAL RESPONSE ASSIGNMENT 1
Choose one of the following
passages on which to conduct a close reading. Be sure that you do not
choose a passage on which you have written a dialectical journal.
Then, in a carefully written, 2-page formal response, address the significance
of the passage. Discuss symbolism, theme (how the passage fits into the
novel as a whole; you're looking for an analytical statement that is consistent
with what we already know about the work), characterization, imagery, etc.
Be as complete as possible, but, at the same time, consider carefully your
analysis. Can your conclusions be supported by the work?
Your paper should be typed and
MLA-formatted. PLEASE REVIEW THE GUIDELINES SET FORTH IN THE MLA
HANDBOOK IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS. Be sure to proofread for
mechanical errors (punctuation, spelling, sentence structure, verb tense, etc.)
While this assignment is a formal one, this is NOT an essay assignment.
Your task is not to write a five-paragraph essay or to establish a thesis
and analyze the work as a whole. You need only analyze the passage
given, though, again, be sure to address the significance of the passage within
the context of the broader work.
Note:
-
Do not copy the quote in its
entirety into your assignment. Reference instead the quote you have
chosen in the title of your paper.
-
You MUST incorporate direct
quotes within the text of your paper. If you do not, you have not
provided adequate support for your paper.
-
In accordance with MLA formatting
guidelines, please type your paper in 12pt Times New Roman font. All
margins should be set at 1".
-
Papers that are selected for
close grading will be evaluated for mechanics and content, so give special
thought to proofreading and the building of your argument(s).
-
Assignment value: 30 pts.
Option 1:
For that initial second he thought
he was going insane. A terrible coldness had seized him; but the coldness
was also due to the fever which had begin in him a long time ago, while he had
been asleep. Now he was suddenly attacked by an ague so violent that his
teeth nearly leapt from his mouth, so violently did they chatter, and his entire
body started to shake. He opened the door and began to listen: everyone in
the building was fast asleep.
Part Two, Chapter I, pg. 109 (Penguin
Classics edition) Note for those using the Garnett translation: this is
the second paragraph in the novel.
Option 2:
Outside the heat was
once again unbearable; not a single drop of rain all these days. Again the
dust, brick and lime, again the stench from the little shops and drinking dens,
again at every moment the drinks, the Finnish pedlars and the cabs that were
practically falling to bits. The sun was glaring brightly into his eyes,
making them hurt, and his head had begin to go round with a will--the usual
sensation of a person in a fever who suddenly comes out to the street on a
bright, sunny day.
When he reached the
turning into yesterday's street, he glanced along it in an agony of
anxiety, to that house... and immediately looked away.
'If they ask me about
it I may tell them,' he thought, as he approached the building that housed the
bureau.
Part II, chapter I, pg.
115 (Penguin Classics edition) Note for those using the Garnett
translation: this is the 34th paragraph indentation in the chapter
CRITICAL RESPONSE ASSIGNMENT 2
Choose one of the following
passages on which to conduct a close reading. Be sure that you do not
choose a passage on which you have written a dialectical journal.
Then, in a carefully written, 2-page formal response, address the significance
of the passage. Discuss symbolism, theme (how the passage fits into the
novel as a whole; you're looking for an analytical statement that is consistent
with what we already know about the work), characterization, imagery, etc.
Be as complete as possible, but, at the same time, consider carefully your
analysis. Can your conclusions be supported by the work?
Your paper should be typed and
MLA-formatted. PLEASE REVIEW THE GUIDELINES SET FORTH IN THE MLA
HANDBOOK IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS. Be sure to proofread for
mechanical errors (punctuation, spelling, sentence structure, verb tense, etc.)
While this assignment is a formal one, this is NOT an essay assignment.
Your task is not to write a five-paragraph essay or to establish a thesis
and analyze the work as a whole. You need only analyze the passage
given, though, again, be sure to address the significance of the passage within
the context of the broader work.
Note:
-
Do not copy the quote in its
entirety into your assignment. Reference instead the quote you have
chosen in the title of your paper.
-
You MUST incorporate direct
quotes within the text of your paper. If you do not, you have not
provided adequate support for your paper.
-
In accordance with MLA formatting
guidelines, please type your paper in 12pt Times New Roman font. All
margins should be set at 1".
-
Papers that are selected for
close grading will be evaluated for mechanics and content, so give special
thought to proofreading and the building of your argument(s).
-
Assignment value: 30 pts.
Option 1
During the course of their conversation, Raskolnikov studied
(Sonia) fixedly. This was a thin, very thin and pale little face, rather
irregular and sharp, with a sharp, small nose and chin. One could
certainly not have called her pretty, but on the other hand her blue eyes were
so clear, and when they grew animated the expression of her face became so kind
and open-hearted that one felt oneself involuntarily drawn to her. There
was about her face, moreover, as about all the rest of her, one peculiar
distinguishing feature: in spite of her eighteen years, she still looked
more or less like a little girl, far younger than she was, almost a complete
child, and occasionally, in some of her movements, this made itself almost
absurdly evident.
Part Three, chapter IV, pg.
283 (Penguin Classics edition) Note for those using the Garnett
translation: this is the 23rd paragraph indentation in the chapter
Option 2
'The old woman is rubbish!' he thought, heatedly and with
violence. 'It's possible that the old woman was a mistake, but she's not
what it's all about, in any case! The old woman was just an illness... I
wanted to get my stepping-over done as quickly as possible... It wasn't a person
but a principle that I killed! I killed the principle, but I didn't step
over it, I remained on this side of it... All I was able to do was to kill....'
Part Three, chapter VI, pg.
326 (Penguin Classics edition)
CRITICAL RESPONSE ASSIGNMENT 3
In a carefully written, 2-page formal response, address the significance
of the following passage. Discuss symbolism (if applicable) , theme (how the passage fits into the
novel as a whole; you're looking for an analytical statement that is consistent
with what we already know about the work), characterization, imagery, etc.
Be as complete as possible, but, at the same time, consider carefully your
analysis. Can your conclusions be supported by the work?
Your paper should be typed and
MLA-formatted. PLEASE REVIEW THE GUIDELINES SET FORTH IN THE MLA
HANDBOOK IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS. Be sure to proofread for
mechanical errors (punctuation, spelling, sentence structure, verb tense, etc.)
While this assignment is a formal one, this is NOT an essay assignment.
Your task is not to write a five-paragraph essay or to establish a thesis
and analyze the work as a whole. You need only analyze the passage
given, though, again, be sure to address the significance of the passage within
the context of the broader work.
Note:
-
Do not copy the quote in its
entirety into your assignment.
-
You MUST incorporate direct
quotes within the text of your paper. If you do not, you have not
provided adequate support for your paper.
-
In accordance with MLA formatting
guidelines, please type your paper in 12pt Times New Roman font. All
margins should be set at 1".
-
Papers that are selected for
close grading will be evaluated for mechanics and content, so give special
thought to proofreading and the building of your argument(s).
-
Assignment value: 30 pts.
Option 1
In any case, what were they, all those torments of the past,
all of them? The whole thing, even his crime, even his sentence and
exile, now seemed to him, on this first impulse, now seemed to him something
alien and external, as though none of it had ever happened to him. He was,
however, unable to give much prolonged or continuous thought to anything that
evening, or to concentrate on any one idea; and anyway, even if he had been able
to, he would not have found his way to a solution of these questions in a
conscious manner; now he could only feel. In place of dialectics life had
arrived, and in his consciousness something of a wholly different nature must
now work towards fruition.
Under his pillow there was a copy of the New Testament.
Mechanically, he took it out. This book was hers, was the same one from
which she had read to him of the raising of Lazarus. At the outset of his
penal servitude he had thought she would torment him with religion, talk about
the New Testament and press books on him. Much to his great surprise,
however, she never once even offered him a New Testament. He himself had
asked for it not long before he had fallen ill, and she had brought him her copy
in silence. Until now, he had never opened it.
Even now he did not open it, but a certain thought flickered
through his mind: "What if her convictions can now be mine, too? Her
feelings, her strivings, at least..."
Epilogue, Chapter II, pg.
656 (Penguin Classics edition)
ABSTRACT ASSIGNMENT
Choose one of the following articles on which to complete an
abstract (if you need a reminder in how to write an abstract, see the assignment
list from the fall semester on the home page). Don't forget to include MLA
citation information.
Article 1
Humanity in Crime and Punishment
In Crime and Punishment, Fyodor
Dostoyevsky created an unforgettable novel of haunting
intensity. With its sustained focus on the emotions and thoughts
of its young protagonist, Rodion Raskolnikov, Dostoyevsky's
novel provides a harrowing portrait of human error and
misfortune. Dostoyevsky had originally intended to write an
account of murder from the perspective of the murderer himself.
As he worked on the project in November 1865, however, he
concluded that such a perspective might be too limited, so he
chose an omniscient, third-person narrative mode instead. Yet
traces of the original design remain: much of the novel offers
direct insight into Raskolnikov's impressions and experiences.
One of the ways in which Dostoyevsky allows the reader intimate
access into his protagonist's mind is by describing
Raskolnikov's dreams. Early in the novel, for example,
Raskolnikov has a vivid dream in which he sees himself as a
young boy accompanying his father on a visit to the grave of a
younger brother who died in infancy. On the way to the grave,
Raskolnikov and his father witness an enraged peasant beating an
old, overburdened mare. The young boy is horrified to see how
the peasant whips the horse across the eyes. Finally, the
peasant kills the horse with an iron crowbar, and the shocked
child runs over to kiss the horse's bloody muzzle. It is after
he awakens from this dream that Raskolnikov utters aloud for the
first time his plan to take an axe and smash open the old
pawnbroker's skull. Clearly, Raskolnikov's vivid dream has
brought to the surface his unexpressed, murderous intentions.
Dostoyevsky's treatment of this dream has
additional significance, however. Some dream analysts might
argue that every character in one's dream represents some aspect
of the dreamer's personality or impulses. Therefore, not only
does the figure of the murderous peasant evoke Raskolnikov's own
murderous urges, but also, the figure of the murdered horse
might represent some part of the dreamer. Indeed, Raskolnikov's
crime not only has the effect of killing the pawnbroker and
Lizaveta in a physical sense, it also has the effect of killing
Raskolnikov himself in a spiritual sense. Long after the murder
he would tell Sonya: "I killed myself, not that old creature!"
Having "died" at the moment when he killed the pawnbroker and
Lizaveta, Raskolnikov is faced with the challenge of being
restored to "life," and much of the novel records his struggle
with this problem.
Raskolnikov's interactions with Sonya play
a significant role in this process. During the meeting in which
he confesses his crime to her, Raskolnikov's conduct and words
have the effect of creating a kind of psychological or emotional
reen-actment of the original murder. Just as Raskolnikov feels
that he killed himself when he murdered the pawnbroker, so too
must he now have a second victim: the innocent Sonya takes the
symbolic place of the innocent Lizaveta. The unconscious aim of
Raskolnikov's behavior during this scene is to see how Sonya
handles the dreadful experience. Will she be devastated by her
recognition of Raskolnikov's crime, or, on the contrary, will
she find a way to go on living and thus serve as a model for
Raskolnikov himself? Her religious faith and her love for
Raskolnikov serve as a potent force for the criminal's
regeneration.
Dostoyevsky's treatment of the theme of
death and regeneration makes distinctive use of religious
imagery, from the Gospel account of the raising of Lazarus
(first mentioned to Raskolnikov by Porfiry Petrovich and then
read aloud by Sonya to Raskolnikov) to the final scene of the
novel, which takes place soon after the Christian holiday of
Easter. During that final scene, Raskolnikov feels a surge of
overwhelming love for Sonya, as if his soul has undergone a
sudden cleansing or purification. Dostoyevsky's description of
this moment emphasizes its religious dimensions. He writes that
Raskolnikov and Sonya experience "a perfect resurrection into a
new life" and that "Love had raised them from the dead."
In addition to its religious imagery,
Crime and Punishment also incorporates other symbolic
systems. Landscapes and physical settings often suggest a
character's emotional or psychological conditions. Raskolnikov
lives in a tiny, cramped room, an evocative emblem of how
constricted his lifestyle and thinking have become. He buries
the items stolen from the pawnbroker under a huge rock. This
rock serves as a reminder of the crushing burden of guilt that
Raskolnikov carries with him. Recognizing the cramped nature of
Raskolnikov's lifestyle and thinking, Porfiry Petrovich tells
him that he needs "air" and that he should learn to be a "sun."
The only time that Raskolnikov feels some sense of ease is when
he leaves the stifling city streets behind and walks out into
the countryside. His spiritual conversion at the end of the
novel takes place on the bank of a river with a wide, pastoral
scene displayed in front of him.
Yet it is not only the physical landscape
that amplifies and reflects Raskolnikov's inner condition.
Dostoyevsky's handling of other characters also plays a key role
in the development and exposition of the central figure. As
Raskolnikov moves through the city, he seems to move through a
charged atmosphere in which every encounter triggers a resonant
response in his soul. Thus, his chance meeting with Marmeladov
introduces the concepts of suffering and self-sacrifice,
concepts that will become so important to Raskolnikov later in
the novel. More importantly, the characters who surround
Raskolnikov often seem to serve as potential doubles or alter
egos. That is, the traits that these characters embody represent
potential directions for Raskolnikov himself. On one side stands
the humble Sonya. She is willing to sacrifice herself for her
family, and she puts the ideals of love and service to one's
fellow humans above any notion of self-glorification. On the
other side stands the corrupt Svidrigailov. He indulges in
extreme forms of debauchery simply to relieve his boredom.
Svidngailov tells Raskolnikov that he considers the young man to
be something of a kindred spirit. Although Raskolnikov does not
wish to admit it, he senses that there may be some validity to
Svidrigailov's assertions. When Svidrigailov informs Sonya that
Raskolnikov only has two paths to choose from, either "a bullet
in the brain" or "Siberia," he has effectively identified the
choices that lie in front of the wretched young man. Only
Sonya's appearance outside the police station at the end of the
main section of the novel prevents Raskolnikov from emulating
Svidrigailov's example and committing suicide. Instead, he
follows her advice, confesses his crime, and with her love and
support he ultimately finds redemption in Siberia.
In addition to the main characters who
reflect and amplify Raskolnikov's conflicting impulses, several
secondary characters appear in the novel to convey Dostoyevsky's
scorn for certain ideological trends in contemporary Russian
society. The pompous Luzhin, for example, has come to St.
Petersburg to curry favor with the new "progressive" elements
among the intelligentsia. Dostoyevsky uses Luzhin's simplistic
praise for scientific thought and the virtues of self-interest
to mock the popular ideas of the progressive writer N. G.
Chernyshevsky. Even more satirical in this regard is the
character of Lebezyatnikov, who has been so impressed with
scenes from Chernyshevsky's novel, What Is to Be Done,
that he tries to outdo the behavior of characters from that
novel. He tells Luzhin that if he had a wife, he would encourage
her to take a lover simply so he could show his magnanimity and
understanding in refusing to condemn her.
Dostoyevsky's disdain for the radical
movement was perhaps fueled by his own early exposure to
progressive social movements. As a young man in the 1840s he had
belonged to a small circle devoted to the discussion and
dissemination of Utopian socialist thought. His participation in
this group had led to his arrest and imprisonment in 1849. He
was subsequently sentenced to prison camp and exile in Siberia,
and a decade would pass before he could return to St.
Petersburg. Through his portrait of the young Raskolnikov,
Dostoyevsky wished to show the dangers of errant thought in
contemporary Russia. Those who believed that society's ills
could be cured through rationalistic schemes, without regard for
the inner spiritual and emotional complexity of the human
subject, were not only doomed to fail, but from Dostoyevsky's
perspective, they represented a serious threat to society
itself. Raskolnikov's crime, then, serves to illustrate the
pernicious nature of the radicals' self-centered and
self-elevating intellectual schemes. Yet Dostoyevsky's novel
offers much more than a partisan ideological tract. His haunting
description of Raskolnikov's desperate struggles and aspirations
has resulted in one of the most memorable and thought-provoking
works in all of world literature.
Source: Julian Connolly, in an essay for
Novels for Students, Gale, 1998.
Connolly is a professor of Slavic
Languages and Literatures at the University of Virginia.
Article 2
The Principals of Uncertainty in
Crime and Punishment
As the novel [Crime and
Punishment] grew under Dostoevski's pen, his
notebooks and drafts show that he went from
uncertainty to uncertainty in depicting
Raskolnikov and his crime, even jotting down
reminders to himself to elucidate the murderer's
motives more clearly. It would be easy enough to
conclude from this that Dostoevsky ... had
simply not suspected the full richness and
potential of his character and his theme, but
this would be too simple a conclusion.
Uncertainty is an important artistic principle
in much of Dostoevsky's work, and it is at the
very heart of Crime and Punishment....
In Crime and Punishment
Dostoevsky sacrifices to the principle of
uncertainty many of the conventional
prerogatives of the novelist: his most
far-reaching sacrifice was that of omniscience
.... In Crime and Punishment the narrator
enjoys no consistent perceptual advantage over
the participants: he sees the world through the
same haze of subjective uncertainty as
Raskolnikov does. It is this above all else that
gives the novel its permanently nightmarish
quality.
The most obvious
manifestation of this kind of uncertainty is in
the presentation of motive. Raskolnikov becomes
a "criminal in search of his own motive"; he
does not in the end know why he committed his
crime, and neither does the reader. The narrator
offers us no definite explanation, only a share
in Raskolnikov's confusion.... Dostoevsky
originally conceived Raskolnikov's crime as a
means of exposing the absurdity of the moral
utilitarianism characteristic of many leading
intellectuals in the 1860s....
The utilitarian principle
undoubtedly remains a major aspect of
Raskolnikov's crime in the finished novel.
Indeed, he does not finally renounce it until
his conversion in the Epilogue. In a
conversation with Dunya late in the novel he
vigorously defends the morality of his crime in
utilitarian terms: " 'Crime? What crime!' he
cried in a sort of sudden frenzy. 'That I killed
a vile, harmful louse, an old hag of a
moneylender of no use to anybody, for whose
murder one should be forgiven forty sins, and
who bled poor people dry. Can that be called a
crime? I don't think about it, and I have no
desire to wipe it out.'" But the utilitarian
ethic alone can satisfy the demands of neither
the reader nor Raskolnikov himself for a
comprehensive explanation of his act. In a
sense, this affirms Dostoevsky's point that the
complex and often contradictory impulses behind
human action cannot in the end be reduced to
simple causal chains or primary motives. But
Raskolnikov, as a "man of the sixties," cannot
countenance the possibility that he has
committed an irrational or irreducible act. He
craves a comprehensive motive to restore his
belief in the lucidity of human values and
behavior. Yet rational utilitarianism is not
adequate to the task, and he loses himself in
the maze of his own personality. He embarks upon
his crime ostensibly with the aim of robbery to
further the fortunes of himself and other
socially worthy people at the expense of a
worthless parasite—a simple and logical
adjustment of society's faulty arithmetic. Yet
he fails to ascertain in advance the extent and
whereabouts of his victim's wealth; he leaves
with only a few cheap trinkets which he soon
abandons under a stone and never reclaims. At no
stage does he consider the possibility of
appropriating the old woman's wealth without
resorting to murder. It quickly becomes obvious
that Raskolnikov has not murdered in order to
steal; he has fabricated a shabby robbery in
order to murder. He has only murder on his mind,
not the appropriation and redistribution of
wealth.
After the murder the
utilitarian motive slips farther and farther
into the background as Raskolnikov's probing
intellect discerns the shapes of other and more
disturbing implications of his act. It is worth
remembering that he is rarely troubled by the
murder of Lizaveta, the innocent victim of an
unanticipated turn of events. This second
killing does not engage his concern, for it was
an unpremeditated, simple, even "innocent"
slaying with a clear motive: Raskolnikov killed
Lizaveta in order to escape. It is the
"rationally justified" murder of the old hag
that gnaws at his soul and that in the end he
cannot account for.
Porfiry Petrovich, the
examining magistrate, is the first to associate
the murder with the ideas expounded in an
article of Raskolnikov's on crime, and thus to
open the way to an explanation of the crime, not
in terms of Raskolnikov's professed utilitarian
altruism, but in the light of his insane pride,
egoism, and craving for power. Raskolnikov's
article, published without his knowledge, is a
product of the narrow, cloistered
intellectualism which characterizes the young
ex-student and makes it so difficult for him to
enter the mainstream of life. It is composed of
the cramped and arid thoughts engendered by the
coffinlike room in which he leads only the ghost
of a life. The article divides humanity into two
distinct categories: the Supermen, such as
Newton and Napoleon, who by virtue of their
originality, strength of will, or daring, write
their names boldly in the history of human
achievement; and the Lice, the ordinary men and
women who are the bricks and not the architects
of history and who contribute nothing new. The
former, according to Raskolnikov, have an
inherent right to moral and intellectual
freedom; they create their own laws and may
overstep the bounds of conventional law and
morality. The latter are condemned by their
ordinariness to a life of submission to common
law and common morality; their sole function is
to breed in the hope of one day giving birth to
a Superman.
Clearly belief in any such
division of humanity must tempt the man of pride
into a harrowing dilemma of self-definition; and
Raskolnikov is a man of immense pride. Does he
therefore murder in the conviction that, as a
superior man, he has the right to brush aside
conventional morality in order to expedite the
contribution he must make to history? This is
unlikely, for, although Raskolnikov is seduced
by his pride into longing for the status of
Superman, his persistent doubts as he plans and
rehearses the murder reveal all too clearly his
uncertainty and fear of the Superman's freedom.
Is the crime therefore conceived as a grotesque
act of self-definition, whereby by assessing his
reaction to moral transgression Raskolnikov
seeks to choose his true self from the differing
options offered by his pride and his
uncertainty? This affords a tantalizingly
plausible explanation of the murder; after all,
we would expect the abstract Raskolnikov to
respond most readily to abstract motives.
Somehow it is impossible to imagine this
unphysical intellectual murdering in response to
such physical needs as hunger or want; but we
can imagine him chasing the specter of
self-knowledge. Moreover, Raskolnikov's need of
self-definition is acute; in the novel's early
chapters he oscillates wildly between satanic
pride and abject humility, between unbounded
admiration for the strong and limitless pity for
the weak....
But the crime could be an
authentic attempt at the resolution of this
duality only if Raskolnikov were genuinely
uncertain to which category of humanity he
belonged, and this is not the case. In his pride
he might long to be a Napoleon, but he knows
that he is a louse, knows it even before he
commits the crime, as he later acknowledges:
"and the reason why I am finally a louse is
because I am perhaps even nastier and viler than
the louse I killed, and I felt beforehand
that I would say that to myself after I
had killed her." The implications of this
admission are startling: Raskolnikov embarked
upon the murder of the old woman knowing in
advance that he had no right to kill and no
clear motive, and, moreover, clearly
anticipating the destructive effect such an act
would have upon the rest of his life. Perhaps it
is this he has in mind when he later asserts:
"Did I really kill the old hag? I killed myself,
not the old hag! At that moment in one blow I
did away with myself for good!" This feature of
Raskolnikov's behavior illustrates the
incompatibility of knowledge and pride.
Raskolnikov's knowledge that he is ordinary and
has no special right to overstep conventional
moral limits cannot contain his proud and
essentially irrational need to assert himself.
In the end his crime is an act of terrifying
inconsequence: a proud, petulant, and
meaningless protest against the certain
knowledge that he is not superior; a moment when
the demands of frustrated pride are so insistent
that he is prepared to sacrifice the whole of
his future to them. "I simply killed; I killed
for myself, for myself alone, and at that moment
it was all the same to me whether I became some
sort of benefactor of humanity or spent the rest
of my life catching people in my web and sucking
the life forces out of them like a spider."
In Crime and Punishment
the principle of uncertainty encompasses more
than the question of motivation. Even the
spatial and temporal coordinates of the novel
are blurred and at times distorted by a narrator
whose precise nature and point of view are
neither clearly defined nor absolutely fixed.
The notebooks reveal that the adoption of a
narrative point of view presented Dostoevsky
with his greatest difficulty in writing the
novel. He onginally planned to use the
first-person confession form, which would have
allowed direct and easy access to the thought
processes of the hero, but which would have
created real difficulties when it came to
filling in the objective details of the world in
which the murderer moves. Dostoevsky wrestled
with this form until the third and final draft,
when a new approach occurred to him: "Narration
from point of view of author, a sort of
invisible but omniscient being who doesn't leave
his hero for a moment." The third-person
narrator anticipated in this comment is retained
for the novel itself, but his omniscience is
open to doubt. Complete omniscience would have
robbed the novel of its haunting uncertainty and
provided the reader too clear an insight into
Raskolnikov's behavior and motivation. The first
chapter illustrates this particularly well, as
the alleys of St. Petersburg, with their
stifling heat, dust, stuffiness, and smells, are
conveyed to the reader in terms of the
impression they make upon Raskolnikov. These
details of the physical world, in passing
through Raskolnikov' s awareness, lose their
tactile and sensual authenticity and are
transformed into psychological stimuli....
In much the same way our
sense of real space is distorted by this
subjective third-person narrative. Many years
after the appearance of Crime and Punishment
Einstein argued that we cannot experience space
in the abstract, independent of the matter that
fills it; and it is Raskolnikov's consciousness
that fills this novel. Like a gravitational
field, it warps the space around it. For
example, the description of Raskolnikov's room
as seen through Raskolnikov's eyes at the start
of the novel is uncomfortably inconsistent with
objectively narrated events which occur in this
same room later. The room appears to shift its
size with the narrative point of view. The early
description is clearly conditioned by
Raskolnikov's own sensations of claustrophobia;
he is oppressed and haunted by ideas, theories,
pride, poverty, and illness, and the room he
describes with hatred upon waking from a
restless sleep resembles a tomb. A mere six feet
long, not high enough for a man to stand,
littered with dusty books, its yellow wallpaper
peeling from the walls, it is dominated by a
huge, clumsy sofa. The description accords so
perfectly with what we know of Raskolnikov's
state of mind that we hardly distinguish where
his consciousness ends and the outside world
begins. Yet a few chapters later, as Raskolnikov
lies in bed semidelirious after the crime and
the narrative adopts a more objective course in
order to permit the introduction of several new
characters, our sense of the room's size is
quite different. As the sick Raskolnikov is
visited by his maid Nastasya, his friend
Razumikhin, the doctor Zosimov, and his sister's
suitor Luzhin, the "tomb" seems to open out in
order to accommodate each new arrival.
Distance is equally
intangible. When, in Chapter 1, Raskolnikov
visits his victim's flat, we have no real
sensation of his physically moving from one
environment to another. Dostoevsky tells us that
"exactly seven hundred and thirty" paces
separate the pawnbroker's flat from
Raskolnikov's hovel, but the precision of this
figure is entirely numerical. Locked inside
Raskolnikov's consciousness as he rehearses a
multitude of doubts and hesitations, we measure
the physical distance only in terms of the
number of thoughts which flash through his mind.
But the most uncertain
quantity of all is time. Nearly all readers of
Crime and Punishment experience the loss
of a sense of duration in the course of the
novel. It seems hardly possible, but the entire
action requires only two weeks, and Part I a
mere three days. Directed by the narrative mode
into the inner world of Raskolnikov's turbulent
imagination, we lose our temporal reference
points.
Absolute time ceases to
be; we know time only as Raskolnikov experiences
it. At moments it is severely retarded—indeed,
in Part I, as Raskolnikov prepares for the kill,
its flow is all but arrested; later the sense of
time is violently accelerated as Raskolnikov
undergoes the vertiginous fall from his crime to
his confession. In this way time becomes a
function of consciousness. We might go further
and suggest an analogy with Einsteinian time,
which, like Dostoevsky's, depends fundamentally
upon point of view. For Einstein there could be
no absolute time, the time experienced by
separate observers differed according to their
relative motion. Dostoevsky seems to be
suggesting something very similar in a cryptic
remark in the drafts for Crime and Punishment:
"What is time? Time does not exist; time is only
numbers. Time is the relation of what exists to
what does not exist." This remark might perhaps
be interpreted as meaning that there is no
abstract, absolute time. Time exists only when
actualized in an event or series of events. The
importance of this for Crime and Punishment
is that events and their duration are
experienced differently by different observers.
Through Raskolnikov's consciousness the reader
of the novel observes only the hero's
experiences of intervals between events. There
are no events narrated with consistent
objectivity which form reference points against
which to judge Raskolnikov's sense of time....
Despite all the
uncertainties upon which Crime and Punishment
rests, one overriding certainty is sustained
throughout the novel: the conviction, shared by
author, reader, and hero, that the crime is in
the final analysis wrong.
Source: William J.
Leatherbairow, "The Principles of Uncertainty:
Crime and Punishment," in his Fedor
Dostoevsky, Twayne, 1981, pp. 69-95.
Article 3
Traditional Symbolism in Crime and
Punishment
It may seem paradoxical to
claim that critics have not sufficiently
concerned themselves with Dostoevsky's attack
against rationalism in Crime and Punishment;
yet this aspect of the novel has frequently
failed to receive adequate attention, not
because it has been overlooked, but because
often it has been immediately noticed,
perfunctorily mentioned, and then put out of
mind as something obvious. Few writers have
examined the consequence of the
anti-rationalistic tenor of the novel: the
extent to which it is paralleled by the
structural devices incorporated in the work.
Dostoevsky held that
dialectics, self-seeking, and exclusive reliance
on reason ("reason and will" in Raskolnikov's
theories and again in his dream of the plague)
lead to death-in-life. In Crime and
Punishment he set himself the task of
exposing the evils of rationalism by presenting
a laboratory case of an individual who followed
its precepts and pushed them to their logical
conclusion. By working out what would happen to
that man, Dostoevsky intended to show how
destructive the idea was for individuals,
nations, and mankind; for to him the fates of
the individual and the nation were inseparably
interlocked....
The underlying antithesis
of Crime and Punishment, the conflict
between the side of reason, selfishness, and
pride, and that of acceptance of suffering,
closeness to life-sustaining Earth, and love,
sounds insipid and platitudinous when stated in
such general fashion as we have done here.
Dostoevsky, however, does not present it in the
form of abstract statement alone. He conveys it
with superb dialectical skill, and when we do
find direct statements in the novel, they are
intentionally made so inadequate as to make us
realize all the more clearly their disappointing
irrelevancy and to lead us to seek a richer
representation in other modes of discourse....
Symbolism is the method of
expression with which we are primarily concerned
here, but it is far from being the only
indirect, non-intellectual manner of expression
on which Dostoevsky depends. Oblique
presentation is another means which he uses; one
example is the introduction of the subject of
need for suffering. The idea is first presented
in a debased and grotesque form by Marmeladov.
His confession of how he had mistreated his
family, of his drinking, and of the theft of
money—to Raskolnikov, a stranger whom he has met
in the tavern—is almost a burlesque
foreshadowing of Raskolnikov's later penance,
the kissing of the earth and his confession at
the police station. Marmeladov is drunk,
irresponsible, and still submerged in his
selfish course of action; he welcomes suffering
but continues to spurn his responsibilities; he
is making a fool of himself in the tavern. His
discourse throughout calls for an ambiguous
response. Raskolnikov's reaction may be pity,
agreement, laughter, or disgust; the reader's is
a mixture and succession of all those emotions.
Thus the important ideas
summed up in Marmeladov's "it's not joy I thirst
for, but sorrow and tears" are introduced in a
derogatory context and in an ambivalent manner,
on the lowest, least impressive level. Yet the
concept is now present with us, the readers, as
it is with Raskolnikov—even though it first
appears in the guise of something questionable,
disreputable, and laughable—and we are forced to
ponder it and to measure against it Sonya's,
Raskolnikov's, Porfiry's and others' approaches
to the same subject of "taking one's suffering."
A simple, unequivocal
statement, a respectable entrance of the theme
on the stage of the book, would amount to a
reduction of life to "a matter of arithmetic"
and would release the reader from the salutary,
in fact indispensable task of smelting down the
ore for himself....
In Crime and Punishment
the reader, as well as Raskolnikov, must
struggle to draw his own conclusions from a work
which mirrors the refractory and contradictory
materials of life itself, with their admixture
of the absurd, repulsive, and grotesque....
Traditional symbolism,
that is, symbolism which draws on images
established by the Christian tradition and on
those common in Russian non-Christian, possibly
pre-Christian and pagan, folk thought and
expression, is an important element in the
structure of Crime and Punishment. The
outstanding strands of symbolic imagery in the
novel are those of water, vegetation, sun and
air, the resurrection of Lazarus and Christ, and
the earth.
Water is to Dostoevsky a
symbol of rebirth and regeneration. It is
regarded as such by the positive characters, for
whom it is an accompaniment and an indication of
the life-giving forces in the world. By the same
token, the significance of water may be the
opposite to negative characters. Water holds the
terror of death for the corrupt Svidrigaylov,
who confirms his depravity by thinking: "Never
in my life could I stand water, not even on a
landscape painting." Water, instead of being an
instrument of life, becomes for him a hateful,
avenging menace during the last hours of his
life....
Indeed it will be in the
cold and in the rain that he will put a bullet
in his head. Instead of being a positive force,
water is for him the appropriate setting for the
taking of his own life.
When Raskolnikov is under
the sway of rationalism and corrupting ways of
thinking, this also is indicated by Dostoevsky
by attributing to him negative reactions to
water similar to those of Svidrigaylov. In
Raskolnikov, however, the battle is not
definitely lost. A conflict still rages between
his former self—which did have contact with
other people and understood the beauty of the
river, the cathedral (representing the
traditional, religious, and emotional forces),
and water—and the new, rationalistic self, which
is responsible for the murder and for his inner
desiccation.... There is still left in
Raskolnikov an instinctive reaction to water
(and to beauty) as an instrument of life,
although this receptivity, which had been
full-blown and characteristic of him in his
childhood, is now in his student days overlaid
by the utilitarian and rationalistic
theories....
But Raskolnikov also
realizes that his trends of thought have
banished him, like Cain, from the brotherhood of
men and clouded his right and ability to enjoy
beauty and the beneficent influences of life
symbolized by water; hence his perplexity and
conflict....
Related to the many
references to the river and rain, and often
closely associated with them, are two other
groups of symbolic imagery: that of vegetation
(shrubbery, leaves, bushes, flowers, and
greenness in general) and that of the sun (and
the related images of light and air).
In contrast to the dusty,
hot, stifling, and crowded city, a fitting
setting for Raskolnikov's oppressive and
murderous thoughts, we find, for example, "the
greenness and the freshness" of the Petersburg
islands.... The natural surroundings reawakened
in him the feelings of his youth, through which
he came close to avoiding his crime and to
finding regeneration without having to pass
through the cycle of Crime and Punishment.....
By the same token,
vegetation exercised the opposite effect on
Svidrigaylov: it repelled him. In the inn on the
night of his suicide, when he heard the leaves
in the garden under his window, he thought, "How
I hate the noise of trees at night in a storm
and in darkness." Whereas Raskolnikov received a
healthy warning during his short sleep "under a
bush," Svidrigaylov uses the sordid setting of
an amusement park which "had one spindly
three-year-old Christmas tree and three small
bushes" merely for vain distraction on the eve
of his suicide, and contemplates killing himself
under "a large bush drenched with rain." In him
all positive elements had been rubbed out or
transformed into evil.
Similar to water and
vegetation, sunshine, light in general, and air
are positive values, whereas darkness and lack
of air are dangerous and deadening. The beauty
of the cathedral flooded by sunlight ought to be
felt and admired.... Before the murder, he looks
up from the bridge at the "bright, red sunset"
and is able to face the sun as well as the river
with calm, but after the murder, "in the street
it was again unbearably hot—not a drop of rain
all during those days .... The sun flashed
brightly in his eyes, so that it hurt him to
look and his head was spinning round in good
earnest—the usual sensation of a man in a fever
who comes out into the street on a bright, sunny
day." The sun is pleasant for a man in good
spiritual health, but unbearable for a feverish
creature of the dark, such as Raskolnikov had
become....
Absence of air reinforces
the lack of light suggestive of inner heaviness.
Raskolnikov, whom Svidrigaylov tells that people
need air, feels physically and mentally
suffocated when he is summoned to the
police-station: "There's so little fresh air
here. Stifling. Makes my head reel more and more
every minute, and my brain too." Later he tells
his friend Razumikhin: "Things have become too
airless, too stifling." Airiness, on the
contrary, is an indication of an advantageous
relation between outward circumstances and
Raskolnikov's inner state. The warning dream of
the mare comes to Raskolnikov in a setting not
only of greenness but also of abundance of fresh
air: "The green vegetation and the fresh air at
first pleased his tired eyes, used to the dust
of the city, to the lime and mortar and the huge
houses that enclosed and confined him on all
sides. The air was fresh and sweet here: no evil
smells."
When we turn to
specifically Christian symbolism in Crime and
Punishment, we find the outstanding images
to be those of New Jerusalem, Christ's passion,
and Lazarus. New Jerusalem is an important
concept throughout Dostoevsky's work.... Porfiry
asks Raskolmkov, "Do you believe in New
Jerusalem?" The significance of Raskolnikov' s
positive answer lies in the fact that the New
Jerusalem which he means is the Utopian
perversion of it, to be built upon foundations
of crime and individual self-assertion and
transgression (prestuplenie). It is the
"Golden Age," as Raskolnikov called it in the
draft version in Dostoevsky's notebook: "Oh why
are not all people happy? The picture of the Age
of Gold—it is already present in minds and
hearts. Why should it not come about? ... But
what right have I, a mean murderer, to wish
happiness to people and to dream of the Age of
Gold?"
The confession of
Raskolnikov is described in terms reminiscent of
Christ's passion on the road to Golgotha: he
goes on "his sorrowful way." When Raskolnikov
reads in his mother's letter of Dunya' s having
walked up and down in her room and prayed before
the Kazan Virgin, he associates her planned
self-sacrifice in marrying Luzhin with the
biblical prototype of self-assumed suffering for
the sake of others: "Ascent to Golgotha is
certainly pretty difficult," he says to himself.
When Raskolnikov accepts Lizaveta's cypress
cross from Sonya, he shows his recognition of
the significance of his taking it—the implied
resolve to seek a new life though accepting
suffering and punishment—by saying to Sonya,
"This is the symbol of my taking up the cross."
One of the central
Christian myths alluded to in the novel is the
story of Lazarus. It is the biblical passage
dealing with Lazarus that Raskolnikov asks Sonya
to read to him. The raising of Lazarus from the
dead is to Dostoevsky the best exemplum of a
human being resurrected to a new life, the road
to Golgotha the best expression of the dark road
of sorrow, and Christ himself the grand type of
voluntary suffering....
The traditional emphasis
of the Eastern Church is on Resurrection—of the
Western, on the Passion. In Crime and
Punishment both sides are represented: the
Eastern in its promise of Raskolnikov's rebirth,
the Western in the stress on his suffering.
Perhaps at least part of the universality of the
appeal of the novel and of its success in the
West may be due to the fact that it combines the
two religious tendencies....
The Christian symbolism is
underlined by the pagan and universal symbolism
of the earth. Sonya persuades Raskolnikov not
only to confess and wear the cross, but also to
kiss the earth at the crossroads—a distinctly
Russian and pre-Christian acknowledgment of the
earth as the common mother of all men.... In
bowing to the earth and kissing it, Raskolnikov
is performing a symbolic and non-rational act;
the rationalist is marking the beginning of his
change into a complete, organic, living human
being, rejoining all other men in the community.
By his crime and ideas, he had separated himself
from his friends, family, and nation; in one
word, he had cut himself off from Mother Earth.
By the gesture of kissing the earth, he is
reestablishing all his ties....
Now that we have examined
selected examples of symbolism in the novel, let
us take a look at the epilogue as a test of
insights we may have gained into the structure
and unity of the novel, for the epilogue is the
culmination and juncture of the various strands
of images which we have encountered earlier....
If we approach the
epilogue with the various preparatory strands of
images clearly in our minds, what do we find?...
[We] see the state of the soul of the
unregenerate Raskolnikov, the Lazarus before the
rebirth, expressed by Dostoevsky through the
symbolic imagery to which the novel has made us
accustomed—water and vegetation. The love for
life (which Raskolnikov does not yet comprehend)
is represented by a spring with green grass and
bushes around it.
When the regeneration of
Raskolnikov begins, it is expressed in a manner
still more closely linked to previously
introduced imagery. His dream of the plague
condemns Raskolnikov's own rationalism. It shows
people obsessed by reason and will losing
contact with the soil.... This dream of the
plague, coming immediately before the start of
the hero's regeneration, may also be another
reminiscence of the Book of Revelation with its
last seven plagues coming just before the
millennium and the establishment of the New
Jerusalem.
The epilogue then goes on
to emphasize that it is the second week after
Easter—the feast of Christ's passion, death, and
resurrection; and that it is warm, bright
spring—the season of the revival of dead nature,
again a coupling of Christian and non-Christian
symbolism of rebirth such as we have encountered
earlier in the novel.
The crucial final scene
which follows takes place on "a bright and warm
day," and "on the bank of the river." The river
which Raskolnikov sees now is no longer a
possible means for committing suicide nor a
sight inducing melancholy; it is the river of
life.
Then appears Sonya, and
with her arrival comes the moment when
Raskolnikov is suffused with love for his guide
and savior.... Vivid response to all that lives
is a joining with the creator in creating and
preserving the world; Sophia is a blissful
meeting of god and nature, the creator and
creature. In Orthodox thought Sophia has come
close to being regarded as something similar to
the fourth divine person. Love for Sophia is a
generalized ecstatic love for all creation, so
that the images of flowers, greenness,
landscape, the river, air, the sun, and water
throughout Crime and Punishment can be
regarded as being subsumed in the concept of
Sophia and figuratively in the person of Sonya,
the embodiment of the concept. Sonya sees that
all exists in God; she knows, and helps
Raskolnikov to recognize, what it means to
anticipate the millennium by living in rapt love
for all creation here, in this world.
It was Sonya who had
brought Raskolnikov the message of Lazarus and
his resurrection; she had given him the cypress
cross and urged him to kiss the earth at the
crossroads. On the evening of the day when, by
the bank of the river and in the presence of
Sonya, Raskolnikov's regeneration had begun, the
New Testament lies under his pillow as a
reminder of the Christian prototype of
resurrection which had been stressed earlier in
the novel. Against the background of all the
important symbols of the book, Easter, spring,
Abraham's flocks, the earth of Siberia, the
river, the dream, and Sonya, the drama within
Raskolnikov's mind assumes its expressive
outward form.
There follow several
explicit statements of what happened. We read
that "the dawn of a full resurrection to a new
life" was already shining "in their faces, that
love brought them back to life, that the heart
of one held inexhaustible sources of life for
the heart of the other," and that "the gradual
rebirth" of Raskolnikov would follow. But the
power of the general, overt statements depends
on the indirect, oblique, dramatic, and symbolic
statements which preceded them and prepared the
ground for our acceptance of them. If we sense
the full significance of the statement that now
"Raskolnikov could solve nothing consciously. He
only felt. Life had taken the place of
dialectics," for example, it is because we have
seen dialectics and apathy dramatized in Luzhin,
Lebezyatnikov, Raskolnikov, and Svidrigaylov,
and resurrection in Sonya and various symbols
throughout the novel of which the epilogue is a
climax and a recapitulation.
Source: George Gibian,
"Traditional Symbolism in Crime and
Punishment," in PMLA, Vol. LXX, No.
5, December, 1955, pp. 970-96.