Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  Since the original manuscript of Crime and Punishment has been lost, it is difficult to determine just what the editors had objected to in the text. The only other information available is a remark made in 1889 by the editors of The Russian Messenger, who, in publishing Dostoevsky’s letter, commented that “it was not easy for him to give up his intentionally exaggerated idealization of Sonya as a woman who carried self-sacrifice to the point of sacrificing her body. Feodor Mikhailovich substantially shortened the conversation during the reading of the Gospel, which in the original version was much longer than what remains in the printed text.”43 It seems clear, then, that Dostoevsky had initially given Sonya a more affirmative role in this scene, and this led to what Katkov considered her unacceptably “exaggerated idealization.”

  What Katkov found inadmissible may perhaps be clarified by a passage in Dostoevsky’s notebooks, where Sonya is presented occasionally as the spokeswoman for the morality that Dostoevsky wished to advocate. In one scene, she explains to Raskolnikov that “in comfort, in wealth, you would perhaps have seen nothing of human happiness. The person God loves, the person on whom He really counts, is the one to whom He sends much suffering, so that he sees better and recognizes through himself why in unhappiness the suffering of people is more visible than in happiness.” Immediately following this speech, Raskolnikov retorts bitterly: “And perhaps God does not exist” (7: 150). This reply is included in the Gospel-reading chapter, and we may assume that Sonya’s words were meant for the same context. It is possible that similar speeches in the notes were also included in the rejected version.

  If so, it is not difficult to understand why the worthy editors of The Russian Messenger might have been upset. For Dostoevsky is depicting a fallen woman as the inspired interpreter of the Gospels, the expositor of the inscrutable purposes of divine will. Moreover, if the logic of Sonya’s words is taken literally, it would mean that God had ultimately brought about, for his own ends, her degradation and Raskolnikov’s crime. Such a bold reversal of the ordinary tenets of social morality could well have been seen by the editors as being tainted with “Nihilism,” since it could provide an opening for an implicit accusation against God himself. Exactly such an accusation will soon be made by the death-stricken Ippolit Terentyev in The Idiot and later by Ivan Karamazov.

  If these speculations have any validity, they may help to clarify why Dostoevsky was accused by the editors of blurring the boundaries between good and evil. “Evil and good are sharply separated,” he assures Lyubimov, “and it will be impossible to confuse or misinterpret them. . . . Everything you spoke about has been done, everything is separated, demarcated and clear. The reading of the Gospel is given a different coloring.”44 Katkov probably improved Dostoevsky’s text by insisting that he shorten Sonya’s preachings, and the novelist may well in the end have recognized this himself. As he returned the proofs in mid-July, he remarked: “For 20 years I have painfully felt, and seen more clearly than anyone, that my literary vice is: prolixity, but I can’t seem to shake it off.”45 There is, however, nothing prolix about Crime and Punishment, whose every word, as we shall soon see, stems from acute artistic self-awareness.

  On October 1, shortly after Dostoevsky’s return to Petersburg, Milyukov called and found his friend walking up and down his study in terrible agitation. It was then that Dostoevsky revealed to him the terms of the Stellovsky agreement and confessed that he was hopelessly entrapped. Just a month was left to satisfy his part of the bargain and nothing had yet been written. Even if he managed to write a first draft, it would be almost physically impossible to transcribe and correct it in time to meet the deadline. Milyukov, horrified at what might occur, advised him to find a stenographer and dictate the novel (The Gambler). Luckily, Milyukov had contact with a professor of stenography who had recently established the first such course for women in Russia. A day or two later, one of his star pupils, Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina, turned up in Dostoevsky’s flat with newly sharpened pencils and a portfolio especially purchased for this epochal occasion, ready to assume her duties. This businesslike visit of the outwardly cool young lady proved to have a decisive effect on Dostoevsky’s entire life.

  1 PSS, 28/Bk. 2: 121–122; April 19, 1865.

  2 What information there is of Suslova (1839–1918) comes from her husband, V. V. Rozanov, a morally dubious figure who sometimes advocated a vicious anti-Semitism and wrote simultaneously for both progressive and reactionary newspapers under different pseudonyms. Rozanov and Suslova were married when he was twenty and she forty. After six years, she ran away with a Jewish lover of good family and education working in the book trade. Rozanov refused to give her a legal separation in the hope that she would return; she then refused to grant him a divorce even when he later fathered several children by a woman he wished to marry. When Rozanov appealed to her father, with whom she was then living, the old man replied that “the enemy of the human race has moved in with me now, and it [has become] impossible for me to live here.” One of Rozanov’s friends, who went to plead with Suslova when she was past sixty, mentioned the fierce implacability of her hatred.

  In a letter written in 1902, Rozanov describes their first meeting when he was seventeen and she thirty-seven. She was, he writes, “sublime . . . I have never yet seen such a Russian woman, and if Russian, then . . . a Mother of God of the flagellants.” (A Mother of God of the flagellant sect exercised absolute autocratic power over those belonging to her group.) See Leonid Grossman, Put’ Dostoevskogo (Moscow, 1928), 134–137, and Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, L’Empire des tsars et les Russes (Paris, 1990), 1197.

  3 PSS, 28/Bk. 2: 127; June 8, 1865.

  4 Ibid., 128; August 3/15, 1865.

  5 Ibid., 129; August 20 1865.

  6 Ibid., 129–130; August 10/22, 1865.

  7 Ibid.

  8 Ibid., 130–132; August 12/24, 1865.

  9 Ibid.

  10 Father Georgy Florovsky, Puti Russkogo bogosloviya (Paris, 1983), 390.

  11 N. N. Glubokovsky, Russkaya bogoslovskiya nauka v eya istoricheskom razvitii i noveishem sostoyanii (Warsaw, 1928), 17.

  12 PSS, 28/Bk. 2: 259; February 18/March 1, 1868.

  13 Ibid., 136–138; September 15/27, 1865.

  14 Ibid., 150; February 18, 1866.

  15 Ibid.

  16 Ibid., 151.

  17 Dostoevsky, The Gambler, with Polina Suslova’s Diary, trans. Victor Terras, ed. Edward Wasiolek (Chicago, 1972), 301–302.

  18 Cited in PSS, 7: 346.

  19 Ibid., 349.

  20 PSS, 28/Bk. 2: 150; February 18, 1866.

  21 Ibid., 151.

  22 Ibid., 152.

  23 The incident is recounted in the memoirs of Dostoevsky’s niece Marya Ivanova. See DVS, 2: 48.

  24 See the reminiscences of Z. K. Ralli, who knew the Ishutin group and Karakozov himself, and cites this passage of Weinberg in his own recollections. “Iz vospominaniya Z. K. Ralli,” in Revolyutsionnoe dvizhenie 1860–godov, ed. B. I. Gorev and B. P. Kozmin (Moscow, 1932), 143.

  25 Cited in A. A. Kornilov, Obshchestvennoe dvizhenie pri Alexander II, 1835–1881 (Moscow, 1909), 175.

  26 Cited in Henri Granjard, Ivan Tourguénev et les courants politiques et sociaux de son temps (Paris, 1954), 336.

  27 Cited in Kornei Chukovsky, The Poet and the Hangman, trans. R. W. Rotsel (Ann Arbor, MI, 1977), 40.

  28 Ibid., 40–41.

  29 Ibid., 18–19.

  30 PSS, 28/Bk. 2: 154; April 25, 1866.

  31 Franco Venturi, The Roots of Revolution, trans. Francis Haskell (New York, 1966), 332–334.

  32 Ishutin’s group prepared the way for Sergey Nechaev a few years later, and many of the people Nechaev recruited had been initiated into revolutionary activity by Ishutin. This earlier group was organized in two sections: one, called the “Organization,” was devoted to agitation and propaganda; the second, called “Hell,” was dedicated to terrorism against the landowning classes and government, and the final aim was the assassination of the tsar. �
�A member of ‘Hell,’ ” according to Ishutin, “must live under a false name and break all family ties; he must not marry; he must give up his friends; and in general he must live with one single exclusive aim: an infinite love and devotion for his country and its good.”

  Ishutin and those like him were implacably opposed to the liberation of the serfs and to any attempt to promote or implement democratic reforms because they would prevent a more thoroughgoing revolution. Venturi remarks, “this violent opposition to reforms inevitably coincided with the opinion of the most reactionary nobles who always opposed the emancipation of the serfs and who now continued to criticize it.” (Ibid., 334–338) We shall see Dostoevsky making the same equation between left and right extremes in his letters and in Demons.

  33 PSS, 28/Bk. 2: 154–155; April 25, 1866.

  34 Ibid., 155.

  35 Ibid., 156; April 29, 1866.

  36 Ibid., 157; May 9, 1866.

  37 M. A. Ivanova, “Vospominaniya,” DVS, 2: 41.

  38 PSS, 28/Bk. 2: 160; June 17, 1866.

  39 Ivanova, DVS, 2: 41.

  40 N. Fon-Fokht, “K biografiya F. M. Dostoevskogo,” DVS, 2: 56.

  41 PSS, 28/Bk. 2: 166; July 10–15, 1866.

  42 Ibid.

  43 Cited in PSS, 7: 326.

  44 PSS, 28/Bk. 2: 164; July 8, 1866.

  45 Ibid., 167; July 19, 1866.

  CHAPTER 33

  From Novella to Novel

  The main outlines of Dostoevsky’s conception of Crime and Punishment were set early, but it was only as the work developed and expanded under his hands that it took on its multifaceted richness. In the splendid complete edition of Dostoevsky’s writings published by the Academy of Sciences of the former Soviet Union, the editors have reassembled the disorderly confusion of the notebooks that Dostoevsky kept while working on Crime and Punishment and printed them in a sequence roughly corresponding to the various stages of composition. Dostoevsky, as we know, was in the habit of casually flipping open his notebooks and writing on the first blank space that presented itself to his pen, and since he also used the same pages to record all sorts of memorabilia, the extraction of this material was by no means a simple task. Thanks to these meritorious labors, however, we now possess a working draft of the story or novella as originally conceived, as well as two other versions of the text. These have been distinguished as the Wiesbaden version, the Petersburg version, and the final plan embodying the change from a first-person narrator to the indigenous variety of third-person form invented by Dostoevsky for his purposes.

  The Wiesbaden version coincides roughly with the story that Dostoevsky described in his letter to Katkov, and a draft of six short chapters has been reconstructed from his notes. Written in the form of a diary or journal, the events it records correspond to what eventually became the conclusion of Part I and Chapters 1–6 of Part II in the definitive redaction. (The action of this part of the novel begins with Raskolnikov’s return to his room after the murder, and it ends as he reads a newspaper account of the crime and encounters the police clerk Zametov.) What strikes one about the six Wiesbaden chapters is how much of the later text they already contain. Here are almost all of the secondary characters in their final form; details suggesting a bloody criminal deed are given and the terror of the narrator vividly conveyed; but it is not indisputable that the missing first chapter contained a depiction of the murder itself. It is possible that the story began after the crime, whose events would be gradually disclosed retrospectively through the narrator’s account of its unbearable effects on his emotions.1

  This first draft concentrates entirely on the moral-psychic reactions of the narrator after the murder—his panic, his terror, his desperate attempts to control his nerves and pretend to behave rationally while consumed by a raging fever and constantly at the mercy of his wildly agitated emotions. What continually haunts him, in moments of lucidity, is his total estrangement from his former self and from the entire universe of his accustomed thoughts and feelings. And it gradually dawns on him that he has been severed from all this by one stroke—the stroke that killed the repulsive pawnbroker and, by a horrible mischance, her long-suffering and entirely blameless sister Lizaveta, who, to make matters worse, is said to have been pregnant. This emphasis, of course, corresponds to the original motivation that Dostoevsky gave Katkov for the criminal’s surrender: “The feelings of isolation and separation from humanity, which he felt right after completing the crime, has tortured him.”

  This theme dominates in the early draft and is expressed in three scenes of a growing order of magnitude. The first takes place at the police station, when the narrator responds to official insolence with anger, oblivious of the total change in his relations to others, and then, weighed down as he was by the terrible burden of the crime he had committed, gradually realizes that no longer could he morally assert a right to be treated with respect. This realization comes to the narrator only in hindsight, but a more instant recognition occurs when, after concealing the spoils of the crime, he decides to pay a visit to his friend, Razumikhin. As the narrator climbs the stairs, he feels a sensation that “if there is (now) for me on earth something (especially) hard (and impossible) then it is to talk and have relations . . . with other (people . . .). And (the consciousness of all that) was my instant of the most oppressive anguish for perhaps all that month, in which I went through so much endless torture” (7: 35–36). The words printed in parentheses are corrections and additions that Dostoevsky made in the various drafts of his text. These words indicate the moment at which the narrator realizes that even the simplest and most ordinary human relations have now become impossible for him, and Dostoevsky drew a circle around the paragraph to indicate its importance. The final epiphany of this experience occurs in a sequence that begins when the narrator, quitting Razumikhin and walking through the busy streets on the way home, is lashed by the whip of a passing coachman whose path he is blocking. Just as in the police station, his first reaction is one of outraged pride, but he realizes almost at once how inappropriate such a response was in his present predicament. “The thought came to me immediately that it would have been a lot better (perhaps even good) if the carriage had crushed me (completely)” (7: 38).

  Among the onlookers were a merchant’s wife and her little daughter, who slip a twenty-kopek piece into the narrator’s hand because “the blow had awakened their pity for me.” Clutching the coin, the narrator walks toward the Neva in the direction of the Winter Palace while gazing at the cupola of St. Isaacs’s Cathedral and “all that splendid panorama.” As a student, he had walked by the same vista many times. Now, as he stands in the same place that he knew so well, “suddenly the same (painful) sensation which oppressed my chest at Razumikhin’s half an hour ago, the same sensation oppressed my heart here.” He realizes that “there was no reason for me (any longer) to stop here (or anywhere). . . . [A]ll those former sensations and interests and people were far away from me as if from another planet” (7: 39–40). As he leans over the railing of a canal, the narrator lets the twenty-kopek piece slip into the water, thus symbolizing his break with all these emotions and values of the past.

  Although the effects of estrangement are clearly intended to dominate in the resolution of the action, they are reinforced by other episodes. One such is the narrator’s half-dream, half-hallucination, kept almost unchanged in the novel, which reveals both his self-revulsion at the crime and his fear of pursuit. Lying in bed, he suddenly hears “a terrible cry” and opens his eyes; slowly he realizes that it is one of the police officials he has just met who is beating the landlady on the staircase. “I had never heard such unnatural sounds, such yelling, grinding of teeth, curses, and blows. . . . What is it all about, I thought, why (is he beating her), why? Fear like ice penetrated me to the core . . . (soon they will come for me (also) I thought). . . .” Imagining all this to be real, the narrator asks Nastasya about the frightening occurrence; but he is told that nothing of the sort had happened—it had all
been a delusion, despite the narrator’s conviction that he had been fully awake. “A yet greater tremor seized me,” he writes, presumably at this evidence of his derangement. When Nastasya tells him “(that) is the blood in you crying out” (7: 41–43), she takes this bit of folk wisdom literally, while to the narrator the word “blood” immediately evokes the crime. Such an experience, added to his estrangement, was surely meant to provide further incentive for the narrator’s eventual confession.

  Why Dostoevsky abandoned this story can only remain a matter for speculation, but one possibility is that his protagonist began to develop beyond the boundaries in which he had first been conceived. All through the extant text, the narrator is crushed and overcome by the moral-psychic consequences of his murderous deed, but just as the manuscript breaks off, he begins to display other traits of character. Instead of fear and anguish, he now exhibits rage and hatred against all those who have been looking after him in his illness and decides to slip away from their oppressive care. The conversation about the murder at his bedside, he explains, “made me feel unbearable malice . . . and what is more remarkable still is that during these agonies, this terror, I never thought a single time with the slightest compassion about the murder I had committed” (7: 73). Here is a character entirely different from the one previously portrayed, and Dostoevsky may have stopped writing at this point because this figure had begun to evolve beyond his initial conception. In some notes for the immediate continuation of this version, he jots down: “Recovered. Cold fury, calculation. Why so much nerves?” (7: 76). This last phrase is obviously a scornful question of the narrator addressed to himself.