Dostoevsky (105 page)

Five months later, Raskolnikov makes his first visit to the pawnbroker, and then overhears the conversation in the tavern between the student and the young officer. This marks the moment of the appearance of his “strange idea” that murder can be sanctioned by conscience in the name of a higher social good. And looming behind the sudden birth of Raskolnikov’s intention (“pecking at his brain like a chicken in the egg”) are thus the long months of gestation during
which he had dreamed of becoming such a Napoleonic personality and acquiring homicidal privileges (6: 53). His encounter with the pawnbroker simply concretized the possibility of applying this ambition, which had been germinating in his subconscious, to the local Petersburg conditions of his own life.

Dostoevsky’s handling of his narrative, his mystery story technique of gradual disclosure, orchestrates the process of Raskolnikov’s piecemeal self-discovery. Raskolnikov comes to understand how the temptation of incarnating a Napoleonic personality has run athwart of his supposedly unselfish purposes. The first allusion to Raskolnikov’s article occurs during the tavern conversation. The narrator indicates the need for a Napoleonic personality to put into practice the ideas being discussed. For when the young officer objects that the injustice of the pawnbroker’s existence is simply “nature,” the student retorts vehemently, “we have to correct and direct nature, and but for that we should drown in a sea of prejudice. But for that there would never have been a single great man” (6: 54).

The notion of a “great man,” who possesses the moral right to give a new meaning to “duty” and “conscience,” is thus involved from the very first in Raskolnikov’s “strange idea,” and there is even an allusion to this grandiose ambition on the opening page, as Raskolnikov slips past his landlady’s door, afraid of being confronted with his failure to pay the rent. “I want to attempt such a thing, and at the same time am frightened by such trifles. . . . Taking a new step, uttering their own word is what [men] fear most” (6: 6). Raskolnikov will later define his “extraordinary” people precisely by their ability to utter a “new word”; he is already placing the drably scruffy crime he intends to commit in such an exalted perspective.

Another more extended reference to the article is inserted as Raskolnikov frantically makes his final preparations for the killing. Long ago, we are told, he had been concerned about the “psychology of the criminal” (which is how the subject of his article is later described) and why run-of-the-mill lawbreakers were invariably overcome by “a failure of reason and willpower” just before committing their offense. Raskolnikov was convinced that “his reason and will would remain unimpaired at the time of carrying out his design, for the simple reason that his design was ‘not a crime’ ” (6: 58–59). This reasoning is manifestly contained in Raskolnikov’s article, whose “extraordinary” people did not commit “crimes” precisely because they had a
moral right
to disregard existing laws; “ordinary” criminals were perturbed by conscience and thus gave themselves away. Raskolnikov’s belief that he would be immune to such agitations indicates his long-held self-classification as one of the “extraordinary” elite.

Raskolnikov is thus shown falling more and more into the grip of his monomania, and this means into the grip of his desire to prove to
himself
that he truly belongs to the “extraordinary” category. At the same time, he remains unaware of the deadly dialectic taking place in his personality, which requires him to muster a pitiless egoism in order to bring about a humanitarian and morally
beneficent end. This lack of awareness is of course essential for Dostoevsky’s artistic strategy, and it is emphasized by the manner in which Raskolnikov’s inner struggle is finally resolved. Just at the moment when, after the mare-killing dream, Raskolnikov believes that his conscience has won and that he has at last shaken off “that spell, that sorcery, that fascination, that obsession” (6: 50) (the choice of words indicates to what extent he felt in the power of a subliminal psychic compulsion), he accidentally overhears a conversation revealing that his intended victim, Alyona Ivanovna, who lives with her younger sister Lizaveta, will be alone at a certain hour the next day. On learning of this miraculous opportunity, Raskolnikov “felt suddenly in his whole being that he had no more freedom of thought, no will. . . . It was as if a part of his clothing had been caught in the cogs of a machine and he was being dragged into it” (6: 52, 58). Fate thus takes a hand, but it is fate acting on a pathological psychic predisposition to kill conditioned by ideological self-intoxication.

The thematic function of this surrender of Raskolnikov to the grip of fatality is to obviate any possibility that Raskolnikov will be understood to have acted on the basis of a conscious, willed, rational decision. Rather, he is controlled by the psychic forces released through the struggle to overcome the moral resistance of his conscience. Raskolnikov is thus portrayed as being governed by compulsions he does not understand (though the reader has been afforded a glimpse of what they amount to in
practice
), and whose true meaning it will take him the remainder of the book to unravel. Moreover, the gap between Raskolnikov’s self-deception and the perspective of the reader is further widened by Dostoevsky’s masterly manipulation of time sequence in the chapter just preceding the murder.

The all-important tavern scene is placed at
Chapter 6
of the narrative even though this event occurred six weeks earlier in the objective chronology. The reader thus receives the strongest impression of the enormous gap between Raskolnikov’s nominally humanitarian-altruistic aim, which has just been enunciated for the first time, and the blood-soaked horror that will be depicted a few pages later. The discrepancy between abstract idea and concrete human reality is then reinforced by another time shift that soon follows, which refers to matters antedating the murder even farther back in the chronology—six months instead of six weeks. For an intercalation contains the references already mentioned in Raskolnikov’s article, on the basis of which he believes in his own invulnerability to “irrational” agitations because, as the narrator rather mockingly notes, “as regards the moral question . . . his analysis was now complete; his casuistry had become as sharp as a razor, and he could not find any conscious objections in himself” (6: 58). Both his original theory and its Petersburg embodiment are thus brought into close “thematic apposition” to the crime itself.

These time shifts create a profound effect of dramatic irony that works both backward and forward in the text. All through the past six weeks, it becomes
clear, Raskolnikov himself had been prey to the symptoms of the “ordinary” criminal, assailed by the same “eclipse of reason and failure of willpower . . . that reached [its] highest point just before the perpetration of the crime” (6: 58). His high fever augments the “failure of willpower” to which he had believed himself immune. The extent to which he had been self-deluded in the past thus becomes manifest, and since he has by no means succeeded in vanquishing his “ordinary” moral conscience, he will obviously not succeed either in attaining the nerveless self-mastery that theoretically flows from his doctrine.

The dramatic irony employed in this chapter receives sensational confirmation in the murder scene, which shocked Dostoevsky’s contemporaries by the crudity and unsparing realism of its depiction. Nothing goes according to the few plans made in advance, and the unexpected necessity of also killing the meek and good-hearted Lizaveta glaringly illustrates the contingency of human reality that Raskolnikov had imagined he could so easily dominate. He acts in a state of terrorized panic, though behaving with the cunning and seeming consequentiality of a monomaniac. But there is no doubt that Raskolnikov’s reasoning faculties were in complete abeyance. Only at the last moment, after killing Lizaveta, does he realize that he had failed to latch the door!

In most of this brutal murder scene, the narrator remains close to Raskolnikov’s point of view and conveys the almost hypnotic nature of his behavior. But he notes at one point that “fear gained more and more mastery over him,” and adds that Raskolnikov would have given himself up if he could have realized all the “hopelessness” and “hideousness” of his position. Not from fear, however, “but from the simple horror and loathing of what he had done. This feeling of loathing especially surged up in him and grew stronger every minute” (6: 65). Once more Raskolnikov’s moral conscience rises up in revolt, but he is no longer able to suppress it, as he had in the past, by the casuistry of his Utilitarian logic; the crime itself is what this logic has brought him to in reality. What emerges instead is the rampant egoism justified by such logic, and now fully released in his monomania. As the two men who had come to visit Alyona Ivanovna rattle at the locked door behind which Raskolnikov stands, axe in hand, he was “tempted to swear at them, to jeer at them, while they could not open the door!” (6: 68).

This moment behind the door, when Raskolnikov’s egoism reaches a self-destructive pitch of hatred for and defiance of everyone, will be used again as a flashback, and becomes a leitmotif. It represents all those emotive forces that, stirred up by his theory and then unleashed in the crime, have now become detached from their previous moral mooring. The two antithetical parts of Raskolnikov’s personality, held together earlier by the razor-sharp dialectic of his casuistry, had persuaded him that it was possible to reconcile murder and morality. No longer is such a belief tenable, and he will continue to fluctuate between
these two poles for the remainder of the book, with only the faint glimpse of a possible resolution at the end.

Raskolnikov’s point of view and that of the reader do not coincide in
Part I
—or at least were not meant to coincide. And while readers may not be able to detach themselves sufficiently from Raskolnikov to pick up all the foreshadowings, they nonetheless cannot avoid receiving the stunning impact of the discrepancy between events and his declared aims and expectations. In
Part II
of the novel, which runs from the immediate aftermath of the crime to the arrival of Raskolnikov’s family in Petersburg, Dostoevsky will begin to close the gap between Raskolnikov’s awareness and that already imparted to the reader by the narrator.

Most important in the first two chapters of
Part II
is what occurs when, summoned to the police station, Raskolnikov suddenly realizes that his entire relation to the normal moral-social world has irremediably changed. “A gloomy sensation of agonizing everlasting solitude and estrangement took conscious form in his soul . . . he felt clearly that . . . he could never appeal to these people . . . even if they had been his own brothers and sisters” (6: 81–82). He feels an overwhelming impulse to confess to the humane police officer Nikodim Fomich, and this involuntary need to overcome his glacial sense of alienation, which will continue to war with his vanity and egoistic pride, is what will soon cause him to seek the solace of human companionship through Sonya. But when Nikodim Fomich plunges into a conversation with his subordinate, the explosive but easily pacified Lieutenant Gunpowder, about the murder of Alyona Ivanovna, Raskolnikov collapses into a dead faint.

Raskolnikov will gradually learn about his own behavior by overhearing Nikodim Fomich’s conversation with his subordinate concerning the two men who had come to visit the pawnbroker and who had been arrested as suspects. The events at the police station lead Raskolnikov to begin the process of exploring his own motivation, which the crime has shown him could hardly be the one he had previously imagined. “If really all this was done
consciously
[
soznatel’no
],” he thinks, “and not like a fool, if you really had a definite and unwavering goal, how is it that you never even looked at the purse, and have no idea of what you gained, or why you shouldered all this torment and consciously embarked on such a base, vile, and ignoble business?” (6: 86). And this query is the first step toward undermining the humanitarian-altruistic rationale given so much prominence in the tavern scene. What sweeps over Raskolnikov in response to this uncertainty is “a new and irresistible sensation of boundless, almost physical repulsion for everything around him. . . . He loathed everyone he met” (6: 87). This “irresistible sensation” contains much of the answer he was seeking, though he was not yet conscious of what it signified.

The entirely new moral-psychic situation in which Raskolnikov finds himself is then underlined by the visit to his only friend, the warmhearted, generous, ebullient Razumikhin. Their social-economic circumstances were exactly the same, but Razumikhin “was straining every nerve to improve his circumstances in order to continue his studies” (6: 44). Despite Razumikhin’s lively banter and offer of aid to a friend who, as he quickly realizes, is “delirious,” the visit only increases Raskolnikov’s tormenting sense of irremediable solitude. He now feels even more alienated from the “magnificent spectacle” of Petersburg than before (6: 90). He unthinkingly throws into a canal the twenty-kopek piece given him as charity by a little girl “in Christ’s name,” indicating how little he can identify himself any longer with the compassionate aims expressed in the tavern scene. What remains is the raw terror of the dream that follows, when he imagines hearing the volatile Lieutenant Gunpowder mercilessly beating the landlady on the staircase.