by Colin Wilson
What I must stand for is my personal free-will, and what it can do for me when I am in the right mood to use it.17
After these gigantic analyses, this beetle-man cannot resist Evan Strowde’s conclusion: ‘So we have reached the belief that the best thing we can do is to do nothing at all—is to sink into a contemplative inertia.’
But he knows, as well as Strowde, that this is not really what he wants; it is a second-best for something else, ‘Something for which I am hungry, but which I shall never find’. So ends the beetle-man’s preamble to the reader.
The second part of his ‘confession’is a tale of his own past, and of a glimpse of that ‘something he can never find’. It is not a particularly good story. He tells how he forced his company on a party of old schoolfellows, who openly disliked him, and how, after some humiliations, he followed them to a brothel. In bed with a prostitute named Lisa he begins a conversation— about death. And as he talks his own imagination fires. He begins by speaking of love and religion and God. When sh mockingly accuses him of talking like a book, he grows more eloquent; and suddenly it is Dostoevsky, the great artist-psychologist of Poor Folk) who is creating a picture of human misery and redeeming love, who is speaking into the darkness to the young prostitute who lies by his side. This is the Outsider’s moment, his feeling of harmony, his glimpse of a ‘power within him’. The girl suddenly begins to cry, and quietly, the Outsider slips out of bed and takes leave of her, after giving her his address.
But when the girl calls on him a few days later, a complete change of attitude has occurred in him; the ‘glimpse5 has been completely lost; he is his old irritable, violent self again. He curses her, insults her. When, with the insight of a woman in love, she divines that he is desperately unhappy, and suddenly offers herself to him, his self-contempt turns to hatred for her. He takes her body, and then offers her payment for her ‘services’. She leaves, and he is alone again, suddenly feeling lost and miserable, hating himself, and his inability to resolve the everlasting conflicts within him.
Notes from Underground’is an unpleasant story, so unnecessarily unpleasant as to be barely readable. What it does convey, more than any other work we have quoted, is the tortured, self-divided nature of the Outsider. The nasty taste it leaves in the mouth is due to its failure as a work of art, its obsessive caterwauling about the weakness of human nature, etc. A lot of Dostoevsky’s work leaves the same taste, his ‘Eternal Husband’ and many of the short-stories arouse a mixed feeling of boredom and disgust, the sort of irritation one feels in watching Mr. Aldous Huxley’s systematic butchery of all his characters. If we were to judge Dostoevsky by such work, the final verdict on him would be the same as Shaw’s on Shakespeare—that he understands human weakness without understanding human strength.
In point of fact, this is not true; Dostoevsky’s evolution as a novelist is a slow development of understanding of human strength. The heroes of the early books are in every sense ‘Godless’; then little by little, they cease to be vain and trivial. Raskolnikov is followed by Prince Myshkin, then by Kirilov and Shatov, finally by the Karamazov Brothers, who are giants compared to the beetle-man.
Crime and Punishment has suffered greatly at the hands of critics who insist on treating it as a moral tract upon the wickedness of taking human life, in spite of Dostoevsky’s plain statements about its real purpose, which is far less obvious. Even Nicholas Berdyaev, whose book on Dostoevsky is the most stimulating ever written, adopts the Christian standpoint and condemns Raskolnikov as a ‘cold monster’.
Having already seen what happens when the Outsider makes the ‘attempt to gain control5, we can dismiss this interpretation without fear of finding ourselves in the position of condoning murder. In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov is in the same position as the beetle-man, living alone in his room, morose, too self-conscious, hating human wretchedness, and disliking the human weakness which he holds to be its cause. With his whole being, he wants to establish contact with the ‘power within him’, and he knows that, to do this, he must arouse his will to some important purpose, to find a definitive act. In a later chapter of the book (after the murder) Dostoevsky describes Raskol-nikov’s awakening: ‘His movements were precise and definite; a firm purpose was evident in him. “Today,” he muttered to himself. He understood that he was still weak, but his intense spiritual concentration gave him strength and self-confidence’.18 [Italics mine.]
And a little later:
…a sort of savage energy gleamed suddenly in his feverish eyes and his wasted, yellow face. He did not know or think where he was going, but had one thought only: ‘that all this must be ended today... that he would not return home without it, because he would not go on living like that.’
Now we can see that Crime and Punishment is actually simply a study in what we have spoken of in Chapter IV—the definitive act. Raskolnikov’s position has much in common with Nietzsche’s: he hates his own weakness, he hates human weakness and misery. His deepest instinct is towards strength and health, ‘pure will’ without the troubles and perplexities of intellect’. He does not believe that he is rotten to the core; he does not believe ‘there is no health in us’. There is strength— he is certain of that—but a long way down, and it would take a great deal of will to blast one’s way down to it. Very well, show him a way, any way. Show him an enemy worth his strength.
And here is the difficulty. For Raskolnikov, like Barbusse’s hero, has ‘no genius, no special talent’.
A writer, a thinker, a preacher, a soldier, all might find worth-while work to do in that environment of social misery and decay. But Raskolnikov has no faith in his mission. He sees Petrograd as Blake saw London, the Industrial Revolution:
I wander through each dirty street
Near where the dirty Thames does flow
And on each human face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
The misery that provoked young Russian students to become followers of Herzen and Bakunin aroused in Dostoevsky a deeper feeling than a desire for social revolution. And in Crime and Punishment, the suffering, fevered Raskolnikov is Dostoevsky’s spokesman. His reaction to it all is a fictionalized version of Dostoevsky’s feeing about it.
Now here the problem of interpretation becomes difficult. For Raskolnikov’s reaction to his perception of universal misery is to commit a crime, to kill an old pawnbroker, whose death will serve the double purpose of providing him with money to escape his binding poverty, and of being a gesture of defiance, a definitive act. The murder achieves neither of these purposes; he finds no money and solves no problems. The Reader asks, Why does he solve no problem? and it is only too easy to ‘identify’ his horror of the bloodshed with a moral intention on the part of the author. Berdyaev writes:
The spiritual nature of man forbids the killing of the least and most harmful of men: it means the loss of one’s essential humanity ... it is a crime no higher end can justify. Our neighbour is more precious than any abstract notion.... That is the Christian conception and it is Dostoevsky’s.19
Now, this is a convenient simplification that completely obscures the real meaning of the novel. Raskolnikov rejects this point of view and there is no evidence that Dostoevsky accepts it. Dostoevsky does not state: ‘Murder is wrong because the Christian conception of the sacredness of human life is right.’ His theme is far more subtle; and although it is true that his final conclusions are Christian, it would be downright dishonesty to accept Berdyaev’s short-cut to them. It would involve the assumption that Dostoevsky created Raskolnikov as Shakespeare created Iago, to be a pure villain: we should then agree with Berdyaev: ‘There is no humanitarianism in Raskolnikov, who is cruel and without pity’; whereas, in point of fact, a glance at almost any page of Crime and Punishment will show us that this is nonsense. The central theme of Crime and Punishment is pity; pity is Raskolnikov’s undoing. The idea that obsesses him is Van Gogh’s ‘Misery will never end’. From the beginning of the book, all the situa
tions are devised to drive this home: the drunken Marmeladov (who enjoys suffering, like the beetle-man) and his starving family; the dream of the horse being beaten to death; the long recital of woes in the letter from Raskolnikov’s mother; there are even little episodes that have no relation to the plot, but were interposed simply to intensify the picture of human suffering: the young girl who has been drugged and seduced, the woman who tries to drown herself as Raskolnikov leans on the bridge. To add to all this, there are Raskolnikov’s humiliations: his poverty, his landlady dunning for rent, etc. And underneath all this, even more fundamental, there is the beetle-man’s problem: What is worth doing?
For the beetle-man, the problem was complicated by his emotional anaemia: he thinks much more than he enjoys or suffers. Raskolnikov is a little better off: the world’s misery unites his whole being with a mixed feeling of revolt and pity. Particularly, his feeling about ‘lower forms of life’ (Lawrence’s detestation) are unambiguous—about vile old pawnbrokresses, for instance. He is a dissatisfied man and therefore a dangerous man. There is human misery, and he asks himself the question: What can be done about it? His healthy-minded answer is: ‘You can do nothing as you are.’ And why? Because as he is he suffers from all the Outsider’s disabilities; he is aware of his strength, but has no idea of how to use it; he thinks instead of acting.
He is not quite such a fool and neurotic as the beetle-man. Nevertheless, he is over-sensitive, and he over-estimates his own callousness. Besides which, he has intended to kill only the old woman; when he is interrupted, he has to kill her sister too. Later two painters are accused of the crime and there is a possibility they may be executed; in which case he will have committed four murders. All this contributes to his breakdown. Finally, the last indignity, the murders do not alter his life; he derives no benefit from them. With two murders to his credit, possibly four, he is back where he started. No wonder he breaks down and confesses!
But before the end of the book, he has caught a glimpse of ‘a way out’. There is the scene with the prostitute Sonia, in which she reads aloud the story of raising Lazarus. And Raskolnikov recognizes his own problem. For he too needs to be raised from the dead. Like another Outsider we have considered, the idea both fascinates and revolts him. For the spiritually dead, the idea of rebirth is terrible. Sonia who is simple and docile and, like Susan Kitteredge in The Secret Life, has no spiritual problems, can somehow divine Raskolnikov’s misery; she too could tell him: ‘You’ll have to be, somehow.’ His attempt at solution of the Outsider’s problems is a failure; he has tried to gain self-control and has not succeeded. But it would be a mistake to suppose that this is because his method was wrong. He has already advanced to Nietzsche’s position of ‘beyond good and evil’. Although he tells Sonia, in confessing the murder, ‘I murdered myself, not her,’ this is not an indication that he accepts the murder to have been evil, for later he asked frenziedly: ‘Crime? What crime? That I killed a vile, noxious insect....’
And it is apparent, at the end, that he has no feeling of ‘Christian repentance’ for the murder. He is not giving himself up because he wants to ‘expiate’ it:
Only now I see clearly the imbecility of my cowardice.... It’s simply because I am contemptible and have nothing in me that I have decided to [give myself up]. ... I wanted to do good to men, thousands of good deeds to make up for that one piece of stupidity; not stupidity even, simply clumsiness, for the idea was by no means so stupid as it seems now it has failed....20
This is unambiguous, and unless we assume that Dostoevsky completely dissociates himself from Raskolnikov’s ideas, we can hardly persist in the belief that Raskolnikov fails because his solution is morally wrong. He fails for the very different reason that he is not strong enough to cease to be an Outsider. This, of course, does not mean that we must accept Raskolnikov’s belief that murder is not morally wrong. It is simply that the question is irrelevant to the Outsider’s problems; and Crime and Punishment is first and foremost a book about the Outsider’s problems.
The transition from Notes from Underground to Crime and Punishment is obviously very much like the transition from Barbusse’s hero to Van Gogh and T. E. Lawrence. The beetle-man is a passive (Barbusse) Outsider; Raskolnikov is an active (Van Gogh) Outsider. Dostoevsky’s treatment of the theme has taken an immense leap forward from one book to the next. When we note the fact that Poor Folk and The Double (both written before the years in Siberia) are also about the Outsider, and about Outsiders even weaker and stupider than the beetle-man; we might hazard a generalization, and say that the Outsider theme was one of Dostoevsky’s central preoccupations, and that, as he grew more mature as an artist, his Outsiders tended to grow in stature.
This is borne out by a glance at the later novels: even Mysh-kin in The Idiot is an Outsider, although in a different sense than anyone we have dealt with so far. He is an imaginative picture of the Chinese ‘man of Tao’:
He is modest, like one who is a guest,
He is yielding, like ice that is going to melt,
He is simple, like wood that is unplaned,
He is vacant, like valleys that are hollow,
He is dim, like water that is turbid.... [Tao Te Ching, XV]
This is Myshkin, described by Lao Tze 500 years before Christianity. His secret is simple: he is still a child. Men do evil because they attach importance to the wrong things, because they are ‘grown-up’. Myshkin has perfect instinctive simplicity. But the criticism we can aim at him has already been developed in this study: you cannot solve the problem of evil by remaining a child. Chaos must be faced; there must be a descent into the dark world. In The Idiot, there are, as for Emil Sinclair, two worlds—the light world of the General’s family (especially Aglaya), and the world of nervous tension, guilt, chaos (Nastasia and Rogojin). Myshkin cracks up under the strain between the two; like Vaslav Nijinsky, he goes insane. Clearly, the lesson here is the same as in Demian: childlike innocence is no solution of the Outsider’s problems.
There are two more major novels of Dostoevsky which we must analyse in detail (if we except A Raw Youth, which is technically so botched as to be almost unreadable). Both of these make a completely new attack on the Outsider’s problems. From the nature of Dostoevsky’s achievement so far, from the fertility of his intellect and his tremendous creative impulse, we can expect some important new treatment of the theme; and in fact we shall find that in Devils and The Brothers Karamazov Dostoevsky succeeds in analysing the problems as no one else has.
Of these two novels Devils develops the idea of Crime and Punishment, and must be examined in the remainder of this chapter. The greatest attack on the Outsider problems—the last great novel—will carry us forward into an entirely new field, and must be reserved for the next chapter. For in Devils, as in Crime and Punuiment and Notes from Underground, the ethical ideas are still in solution as it were. In The Brothers Karamazov they have crystallized in concrete concepts of good and evil.
Devils is a logical development from the earlier novels: this is to be expected. Dostoevsky simplifies his treatment of the Outsider by dividing it in two, and distributing the parts between the two chief characters, Stavrogin and Kirilov. Before we speak of these, it may be advisable to say something about the genesis of the book.
Its original idea sprang from the ‘Netchaev affair’. Netchaev was an anarchist-nihilist who undoubtedly deserves to be the subject of a detailed biography. Where anarchism was concerned he was a fanatical idealist; apart from this, his personal character was as base and immoral as anything in criminal history. His intrigues show him to have been as degraded as Lacenaire, and he was as ruthless and brutal as any Nazi thug. Yet his life shows an extraordinary, perverted heroism. There is even a story that he helped to plan the assassination of Alexander II while he was imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress (Russia’s ‘Devil’s Island’), and that when his associates asked whether they should concentrate on rescuing him or on killing the Tsar, he answered without hesit
ation, ‘Remove the oppressor’. The ‘oppressor’ was removed, and Netchaev died of scurvy in prison.
Netchaev, ‘the tiger cub5, was one of the world’s most remarkable deceivers; he tried to build up a vast revolutionary movement solely on lies, bluff and play-acting. He deceived everybody (including the arch-revolutionaries Bakunin and Herzen) and might easily, with a little more luck, have intrigued his way to absolute dictatorship of Russia (which was obviously his ideal).
The affair that provided the plot of Devils led to Netchaev’s downfall. In Moscow, posing as the representative of a certain ‘European Revolutionary Alliance’, Netchaev organized small groups of students and disillusioned ex-Army officers into ‘revolutionary committees’. A student named Ivanov was suspected of planning to betray them, and was murdered by Netchaev, with the complicity of the ‘group’. The murder was soon discovered; arrests followed. Netchaev escaped to Switzerland, then to England, while the affair occupied the front pages of Russia’s newspapers. Later, Netchaev, with misplaced confidence in the authorities’ short memory, walked back into the lion’s mouth, and ended in the Peter and Paul Fortress.