Crime and Punishment

by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

  19. Ryazan: See above, Part One, note 31.

  20. The Sands: An area stretching between Nevsky Prospect and the Smolny Institute, so called because of the character of its soil (BT).

  21. Jouvin gloves: Xavier Jouvin (1801-44) of Grenoble, France, invented and patented the cutting die that enabled the mass production of close-fitting gloves.

  22. Go after several hares . . . a single one: Compare with the Russian (and English) folk saying, 'If you run after two hares, you will catch neither,' which Luzhin characteristically mangles. His speech also makes ironic allusion to famous passages in the Gospels: Jesus' commandment to 'love thy neighbour as thyself' (Matthew 22:39) and an exchange between John the Baptist and the crowds that come to be baptized by him: 'And the people asked him, saying, What shall we do then? He answereth and saith unto them, He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath none; and he that hath meat, let him do likewise' (Luke 3:10-11). Luzhin's argument resembles the teachings and style of the 'rational egoists' and radical 'social democrats' of the time, notably Chernyshevsky and Dmitry Pisarev (1840-68), as well as the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), whose ideas proved influential in 1860s Russia, along with those of J. S. Mill (1806-73) (BT, PSS).

  23. robbed . . . counterfeiting . . . murdered: All these episodes relate to stories reported in the press in 1865 or to Dostoyevsky directly by word of mouth. The first episode refers to a student expelled from university, who, as Dostoyevsky wrote to his publisher Katkov, 'decided to rob the mail and kill the postman'; such accounts helped convince him that the plot of his novel was 'far from eccentric' (BT).

  24. economic changes . . . when the great hour struck: Apparent references to the social and economic consequences of the abolition of serfdom in 1861, and in particular to the rapid impoverishment of educated but minor representatives of the nobility. The words of the 'lecturer' echo the actual testimony, as reported by the Moscow Gazette, of his real-life prototype A. T. Neofitov, who claimed to have committed his crime 'in order to provide for himself and his mother's family' - words echoed in turn by some of Dostoyevsky's comments on Raskolnikov in his notebooks and letters (PSS, SB).

  25. a tavern . . . and princesses: The notorious building in question, on the corner of Haymarket Square and Konnyi Lane, was known as the Malinnik ('raspberry bushes'). The first two floors were for eating and drinking, while the third was given over to 'thirteen haunts of the darkest, most appalling debauchery', as described by Vsevolod Krestovsky (1840-95), whose novel of St Petersburg low life, Petersburg Slums (1864-6), makes for an illuminating comparison with the depictions of prostitution and poverty in Crime and Punishment: 'Each of these [thirteen] burrows contained within itself several more nooks, separated one from the other by thin wooden partitions [ . . . ] And in these burrows and little wooden cells there huddle between eighty and a hundred of the most pitiful, outcast creatures, who have surrendered themselves to the most ruinous depravity.' According to the historians N. B. Lebina and M. V. Shkarovsky, 'These women never charged more than fifty copecks for their services. On holidays, a prostitute at the Malinnik might see up to fifty men. The clothing worn by girls in these establishments was not just poor, it was indecently primitive. Sometimes it consisted merely of a dirty towel wrapped around the hips' (BT).

  26. V----y: Voznesensky Prospect.

  27. short little lane: Tairov Lane, since renamed Brinko Lane.

  28. one square yard . . . just live!: A 'contamination', Tikhomirov convincingly argues, of passages from Victor Hugo's novels Notre-Dame de Paris (1831, published in Time in 1862) and Le Dernier Jour d'un condamne (see above, Part One, note 51).

  29. 'Crystal Palace': Referred to earlier by Razumikhin in French. In reality, there was no such tavern in St Petersburg at the time, in any language, though there was a hotel by that name, in the same part of town. More importantly, the name alludes to the Crystal Palace erected in Hyde Park at the Great Exhibition of 1851. This had struck Dostoyevsky, during his visit to London in 1862, as some kind of 'biblical scene, like something about Babylon, some prophecy from Revelations taking shape before your eyes'. The Crystal Palace became a motif in Dostoyevsky's polemics with Chernyshevsky and the other socialist radicals of the time; the narrator of Notes from Underground (1864) saw in it the model of the rationalist utopia against which he felt compelled to rebel. In Tikhomirov's view: 'The "Crystal Palace" of the Utopianist dreamers turns out, in Crime and Punishment, to be a third-rate tavern [ . . . ] which casts a dark shadow on the radiant image of the New Jerusalem, the route to which, according to Raskolnikov's theory, lies through blood and violence. It is relevant, in this connection, that in one of the drafts Raskolnikov was meant to set out his "idea" precisely there, in the "Crystal Palace"' (BT).

  30. Aztecs - Izler: The merchant Ivan Izler owned the suburban 'Artificial Mineral Water Gardens' (or simply 'Izler's Gardens'), which opened in the 1840s. By the time Dostoyevsky visited in the 1860s the Gardens had become very popular for their firework displays, theatre shows, giants, gypsies and other attractions. Izler tried to bring Massimo and Bartola, of Liliputian height and putatively Aztec origin, to the gardens, but failed; they were exhibited elsewhere (BT).

  31. that chap went to the bank: This account of a nervous criminal, which continues the story of the forged lottery tickets first mentioned in the previous chapter, cleaves closely to a contemporaneous account published in the Moscow Gazette of 10 September 1865 about a young man who, like Raskolnikov - and the mail-robber mentioned earlier - was a 'former student' who hadn't completed his course (BT).

  32. Assez cause!: 'Enough talk!' (French). A phrase much used by Balzac and, following his example, Dostoyevsky.

  33. Spermaceti: 'A wax-like substance that results from processing the liquid animal wax obtained from the skull of the sperm whale. In the nineteenth century spermaceti was taken to be a sperm whale's semen (hence its name). It would seem that Razumikhin's surprising image is linked to the notions of medieval alchemists, who used sperm in their experiments to create an artificial man or homunculus' (BT).

  34. Since that evening: As Tikhomirov points out, this is 'a memory slip either by Raskolnikov or Dostoyevsky: the hero walks past that house on the way to the police bureau on the morning after the murder' (BT).

  35. meloning and lemoning: An example (freely translated) of the many phrases transposed to Crime and Punishment from Dostoyevsky's 'Siberian Notebook' in which he collected colourful examples of the language of his fellow convicts.

  36. A drunk can't hold a candle: Another unusual idiom recorded by Dostoyevsky while in exile in Siberia.

  37. kammerjunker: An honorary rank at court typically granted to young noblemen, most famously to Alexander Pushkin. 'Groom of the Chamber' is the approximate English equivalent.

  38. The prince: Between 1861 and 1866 the Military Governor General of St Petersburg (the administrative head of the city) was Prince A. A. Suvorov, grandson of Generalissimo Alexander Suvorov (1730?-1800), famed for never losing a battle during his illustrious career (BT).

  39. a feather the colour of fire: Viktor Shklovsky compared this to the 'feather of an angel', a point developed by Tikhomirov, who invokes the Orthodox iconography of Sophia (Sofya/Sonya) as angel-like, with face and hands 'the colour of fire'. The iconic significance of this detail contrasts strikingly with Sonya's dress with its 'ridiculously long train', which would have been suitable only for high-society occasions (BT).

  PART THREE

  1. A complete lack of personality: In this chapter Razumikhin's defence of personality and cultural difference has much in common with aspects of the 'native soil' philosophy (pochvennichestvo) that Dostoyevsky, his brother and fellow contributors had been elaborating in the pages of Time and Epoch between 1861 and 1865. 'The term derives from pochva (soil, native soil, "roots") and in its most basic sense as a doctrine it called for a return to their native soil by Russia's educated classes, who, since the reforms of Peter I in the early eighteenth ce
ntury, had evolved as a Westernized elite split away from their Russian heritage and from the majority of their fellow Russians' (KL). Optimistically conceived by Dostoyevsky as a philosophy that might reconcile the Slavophiles and the Westernizers, pochvennichestvo was opposed directly to the position of the socialists and of the radical journal The Contemporary. The latter's ideal, Dostoyevsky claimed in 1862, was complete impersonality and a kind of identikit man 'who would be exactly the same wherever he was - in Germany, England or France - and who would embody the general human type that had been manufactured in the West' (BT).

  2. monomania: See Part One, note 30.

  3. a Rubinstein: Anton Rubinstein (1829-94), the celebrated virtuoso pianist and founder of the St Petersburg Conservatory; he taught Dostoyevsky's niece and met Dostoyevsky himself at least once (BT).

  4. Prussian House of Lords: The Upper House of the Prussian parliament, which between 1862 and 1866 was at loggerheads with Bismarck's government (BT).

  5. hypochondriac: See Part One, note 2.

  6. The queen . . . who darned her own stockings: A reference to Marie Antoinette (1755-93), imprisoned in 1792 and guillotined the following year. Various historians of the French Revolution (1789) mention this scene, in which she typically uses toothpicks instead of knitting needles (BT, SB).

  7. Crevez, chiens, si vous n'etes pas contents!: 'Drop dead, dogs, if you aren't satisfied!' (French): an almost exact quotation from Victor Hugo's novel Les Miserables, which Dostoyevsky read on its appearance in 1862. See Book Eight, Chapter Four ('A Rose in Misery'), in which the young student, Marius, receives a visit from the young and appallingly emaciated daughter of his neighbour Jondrette. In the course of their conversation, she tells him: 'Do you know what it will mean if we get a breakfast today? It will mean that we shall have had our breakfast of the day before yesterday, our breakfast of yesterday, our dinner of today, and all that at once, and this morning. Come! Parbleu! if you are not satisfied, dogs, burst!' (trans. Isabel Hapgood).

  8. such a melancholic: See Part One, note 2.

  9. Mitrofanievsky Cemetery: A large cemetery in the south of St Petersburg, dismantled in the early Soviet decades. Favoured at the time by poor and middling families, it contained two functioning churches and a chapel by the entrance (BT).

  10. funeral banquet: In Russia, a memorial meal for the dead usually takes place immediately after the funeral, but also forty-nine days after death. A solemn occasion, marked by various rituals, the funeral banquet (pominki) can also be a marker of social status and wealth; see, for example, Firs Zhuravlyov's painting A Merchant's Funeral Banquet (1876).

  11. play Lazarus: A reference to the Lazarus laid at the gates of a wealthy man's house, hungry and 'full of sores' (Luke 16:20). His legend inspired a spiritual folk song in Russia, often sung by beggars. In turn, the song gave rise to the Russian idiom used here - 'pet' Lazarya' (literally, 'to sing Lazarus') - with the meaning of exhibiting and even exaggerating one's poverty or misfortune and playing for sympathy. Raskolnikov's allusion to the beggar Lazarus closely precedes mention in the next chapter of the more famous biblical Lazarus, who was raised from the dead by Christ and becomes a motif of the novel. As Boris Tikhomirov notes, the two biblical Lazaruses have often been fused, whether in the popular imagination or in Ernest Renan's Vie de Jesus (1863), a book well known to Dostoyevsky. On the importance of the spiritual songs for Dostoyevsky, and of the Russian folk heritage in general, see Faith Wigzell's fine contribution to The Cambridge Companion to Dostoevskii (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 21-46.

  12. No need to break the chairs . . . to think about!: An almost verbatim quotation from Nikolai Gogol's great comedy The Government Inspector (1836) and the first of many references to Gogol by Porfiry Petrovich.

  13. Ordinary paper: All official documents had to be written on special stamped paper issued by the Ministry of Finances; such paper came in three varieties, 'ordinary' being the cheapest. This category was itself divided into four further types, 'the most ordinary' costing only twenty copecks a sheet (BT).

  14. 'the environment': The cliche at issue here is the phrase sreda zayela ('the environment [that] eats away' at the individual). For Russian radicals of the 1860s the 'environment' was so decisive a factor that it lessened or entirely eradicated the moral responsibility of the individual. Crime and Punishment is, among other things, a trenchant response to such theories, particularly as articulated by Nikolai Chernyshevsky. As such, it continues the critique of Chernyshevskian rationalism and determinism begun in Dostoyevsky's novella Notes from Underground (1864).

  15. mathematical head . . . phalanstery: The utopian socialist Francois Marie Charles Fourier (1772-1837) conceived of 'phalansteries' as enormous, palace-like buildings congenial to new forms of cooperative life. Eventually, the world would be divided into precisely 2,985,984 such communities. In a letter to his publisher Katkov, written while he was working on this part of the novel, Dostoyevsky noted: 'Fourier was convinced that it needed only one phalanstery to be built and the entire world would immediately be covered with them'. As a young man Dostoyevsky had himself been close to the Fourierists of the 'Petrashevsky circle' in St Petersburg, involvement with which led directly to his imprisonment and exile in Siberia. In a written deposition before his sentencing, Dostoyevsky expressed sympathy with Fourier's 'love of humanity', but called his system the most unrealistic of utopias (BT, KL).

  16. Ivan the Great Bell Tower: The tallest of the towers in the Kremlin, it is, in fact, some twenty-five feet higher than is suggested here. Razumikhin appears to be parodying the determinist arguments of Chernyshevsky's characters in his novel What Is to Be Done? (1863) (BT).

  17. Weekly Review . . . Periodical Review: Journals appeared and disappeared with alarming speed in 1860s Russia; the Dostoyevsky brothers' Time was shut down by the censor in 1863, only to re-emerge as Epoch eight months later (SB, KL).

  18. all because they are extraordinary: The originality of Raskolnikov's argument about the moral rights of extraordinary men continues to exercise scholars; Tikhomirov calls it 'the Russian version of a certain pan-European archetype'. In his epic biography Joseph Frank mentions numerous literary precursors - including Schiller, Byron, Balzac and Pushkin - but gives pride of place to the radical critic Dmitry Pisarev's interpretation of Ivan Turgenev's nihilist hero Bazarov in Fathers and Sons (1862). Where others saw Bazarov in a satirical light, Pisarev exalted him as a solitary figure who rises above the mass of humanity and the fetters of his own conscience: 'Neither above him, nor outside him, nor inside him does he recognize any regulator, any moral law, any principle.' Dostoyevsky's colleague and friend Nikolai Strakhov (1828-96) observed (in Frank's words) 'that Pisarev had gone farther than other radicals along the path of total negation' and Dostoyevsky appeared to share this view. See Derek Offord, 'Crime and Punishment and Contemporary Radical Thought' in Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment : A Casebook; Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865-1871 (London: Robson Books, 1995), pp. 70-75; and Introduction. A more immediate source of Raskolnikov's emphasis on 'extraordinary' people appears to have been Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte's Histoire de Jules Cesar, translated into Russian in 1865 and interpreted as a defence of Napoleon more than of Caesar. Perhaps this is the 'book' to which Raskolnikov's 'article' putatively responded. Ideas about rare individuals were in any case already in the air: twenty-five years earlier Thomas Carlyle's On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1841) had greatly impressed Russian educated society (BT, SB).

  19. everyone oversteps the law . . . to commit crime: The Russian word for 'crime', prestuplenie, is literally a 'stepping over', comparable etymologically to the less commonly used English word 'transgression'. See also Introduction, V.

  20. Vive la guerre eternelle: 'Long live eternal war' (French). A possible allusion to a passage in La Guerre et la Paix (1861) by the socialist and self-professed 'anarchist' Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-65): 'la guerre . . . est eternelle. Sal
ut a la guerre' ('war . . . is eternal. Welcome, war'). In this treatise, published in Russian translation in 1864, Proudhon sought 'to understand war in its innermost idea, its reasoning, its conscience, and even, to put it more boldly, its high morality'. Tikhomirov comments on the 'fundamental proximity of Raskolnikov's theory and Proudhon's doctrine, which paradoxically couples blood and conscience, war and morality' (BT).

  21. the New Jerusalem: A reference to the image of the world without death or sorrow that would follow Christ's Second Coming and the Day of Judgement: 'And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea. And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband' (Revelation 21:1-2). In line with the characteristic ambivalence of Dostoyevsky's method, however, Raskolnikov may equally be referring to the kind of socialist utopia envisaged by the 'new Christianity' of Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) and his many followers, who reinterpreted such biblical imagery in a strictly secular key. For them, paradise would be achieved on earth by human efforts, without any need for God.

  22. the raising of Lazarus: The story of the dead man brought back to life by Christ, as told in John 11:1-45. See note 11 above.

  23. branded in some way: Here, as elsewhere, the allusive scope of Porfiry's comments is considerable, from stories of the signs that allegedly marked the birth of Muhammad and other historical figures to the 'Tsar signs' (marks on the body) mentioned in Russian folklore, by which a true ruler or heir to the throne might be identified (BT). Of striking relevance to Raskolnikov's drama throughout the novel is a review of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte's Histoire de Jules Cesar (see note 18 above) translated from the English press for a Russian newspaper in 1865. The English critic asks how the French emperor would identify 'who among us is Caesar, Charlemagne, Napoleon?', and concludes that if Napoleon III were to answer honestly, he would say 'that there is no sign to distinguish a prophet from a false prophet, other than the ungainsayable logic of success. Whoever wins, executing his ideas and achieving success through his genius, is right. From this it follows that humanity can do nothing but wait for events to unfold and obey' (cited in Russian translation in SB).