Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  Once Dostoevsky had begun to see his character in this light, alternating between despair and “cold fury,” it became increasingly difficult to imagine a purely internal motivation for his self-surrender, and this may have led Dostoevsky to fuse the story with his previous idea for the novel called The Drunkards. References to “Marmeladov’s daughter” now appear in all the outlines of the action. “Like a prostitute. . . . The daughter helps the mother. Takes the money. Pity for the children” (7: 80). After the narrator has committed the crime, it is he who feels a need for pity, which he cannot imagine being offered except by a Sonya capable of loving and forgiving even her ignominious father. What is explicitly articulated in these notes will remain implicit, though perfectly discernible, in the final text and underlies Raskolnikov’s irresistible impulse to turn to her with his confession.

  As Sonya Marmeladova now becomes linked with the narrator’s decision to give himself up, though, Dostoevsky has great difficulty imagining how this action will be motivated. One alternative envisages the narrator invoking a “picture of the golden age” and then asking: “But what right have I, a vile killer, to desire happiness for people and to dream of a golden age. I want to have that right. And following this (this chapter) he goes and gives himself up. He stops by only to say good-bye to her, then he bows down to the people and—confession” (7: 91). Such edifying resolutions, however, clashed with the manner in which the narrator had begun to evolve. His denigration of mankind as a whole, not only its more “useless” specimens, now begins to appear frequently. For example: “(The misfortunes of his father, mother). How nasty people are! Are they worth having me repent before them? No, no. I’m going to remain silent” (7: 82). Most important of all, Dostoevsky now links such misanthropy with the motif of power.

  All these notes portray the character’s own thoughts and feelings. In others, Dostoevsky sets down instructions for himself, and these suggest that he has begun to see how these two divergent aspects of his protagonist might be portrayed as more than a simple alteration. “N.B. Important. After the sickness, a kind of cruelty and complete justification of himself” (7: 78). There is a significant character shift after the murder and the resulting illness. Now an aspect of personality, previously hidden, unexpectedly emerges. Another note reveals all the weight that Dostoevsky attributed to this discovery. “So that there is then a coup de maître,” he writes with pardonable pride. “At first there was danger, then fear and illness, and his whole character did not show itself, and then suddenly his (whole) character showed itself in its full demonic strength and all the reasons and motives for the crime become clear” (7: 90). The handling of the character is thus conceived not so much in terms of any deep-seated modification but rather as the bringing to light of potentialities always present but hitherto only lying dormant in the background.

  The notebooks reveal how carefully Dostoevsky worked over every detail of his text, and how he always refused to sacrifice artistic integrity to editorial pressure; indeed, nowhere is this care more evident than in how Dostoevsky manipulates the coming to consciousness—in both Raskolnikov and the reader—of the true motive for Raskolnikov’s crime. At first his crime appears to be the result of his Utilitarian logic, set in motion by his own economic straits, the desperate plight of his family, and a desire to aid others with the spoils of the murder. A good bit later, we learn about the article in which he has justified the right of “extraordinary people” to step over the moral law in order to bring benefits to humanity as a whole. In the confession scene with Sonya, however, Raskolnikov gives as his motive simply the desire to obtain power for himself alone, solely to test whether he is entitled to take his place among those superior individuals who possess the innate right to overstep the moral law. The notes we have been citing, as we shall show in the next chapter, suggest that the differing explanations offered by Raskolnikov represent different phases of the inner metamorphosis that results from his gradually dawning grasp of the full implications of what he has done. Not only does his horrified conscience continue to operate on the moral-psychological level, but he also comes to understand the inner contradictions in the ideas in which he has believed. As Dostoevsky writes in another note: “N.B. His moral development begins from the crime itself; the possibility of such questions arise which would not then have existed previously” (7: 140).

  Whether the novel actually answers the questions that arise for Raskolnikov has often been doubted. Another note, entitled “the chief anatomy of the novel,” is frequently cited to prove Dostoevsky’s indecisiveness on this crucial question, but in my view it proves just the opposite: “After the illness, etc. It is absolutely necessary to establish the course of things firmly and clearly and to eliminate what is vague, that is, explain the whole murder one way or another, and make its character and relations clear.” A marginal jotting, keyed to the word “murder,” reads: “pride, personality, and insolence” (7: 141–142). Here we have the forces unleashed in Raskolnikov by the unholy amalgam then typical of Russian radical ideology—an altruistic desire to alleviate social injustice and suffering, thrown together with a supremely Bazarovian contempt for the masses. It is the danger of self-delusion and moral-psychic tragedy lurking in this perversely contradictory mixture that Dostoevsky was trying to reveal through Raskolnikov’s fate.

  Dostoevsky, as we have seen, speaks of Raskolnikov’s character as suddenly exhibiting “its full demonic strength”; other references change this significantly to “satanical pride” (7: 149). Pisarev used exactly the same expression for Bazarov three years earlier in his article in The Russian Word, and though the notes are regrettably sparse with information about the ideological context within which Dostoevsky was working, his use of this phrase is far from accidental. It reveals that Dostoevsky’s character was being created in relation to Pisarev’s deification of the new raznochinets “hero of our time,” and that the ideas attributed to Raskolnikov can be traced primarily to the famous article of the radical critic. Moreover, the course of radical ideology itself, evolving from the relative humanitarianism of The Contemporary (represented in Dostoevsky’s novel by the ridiculous, obtuse, but good-hearted Lebezyatnikov) to the contemptuous elitism and worship of the superior individual exhibited by Pisarev and Zaitsev, duplicates precisely the mutation in Raskolnikov on which Dostoevsky was now basing the portrayal of his character. Psychology and ideology thus fuse together once again into the seamless unity that Dostoevsky called “idea-feelings,” and his ability to intuit these syntheses of emotion and ideology constitutes much of his particular genius as a novelist.

  There is a specific allusion to Pisarev’s ideas in the early version of a speech by Luzhin, the unscrupulous businessman who wishes to marry Raskolnikov’s sister, Dunya. In this note he is still called Chebalov, but his words are identical with those of the preening suitor in Part II, Chapter 5; and this homily, it should be noted, is recognized by Raskolnikov as expressing the identical pattern of ideas that had led him to the murder. “Chebalov says to Raskolnikov. Tant que I’ve put my affairs in good order, I am useful to others, and therefore, the more I am an egoist, the better it is for others. As for the old beliefs: you loved, you thought of others, and you let your own affairs go down the drain, and you ended up being a weight around the neck of your neighbors. It’s simply a matter of arithmetic. No, you know, I like the realists of the new generation, the shoemaker and Pushkin; and although I do not agree with them in part, still the general tendency” (7: 151). This last, unfinished sentence unmistakably refers to Pisarev, who had launched the slogan of “Realism” as a social doctrine in 1864 and, following Bazarov, had resoundingly declared a shoemaker to be more useful than Pushkin. It was manifestly within this specific ideological framework that Dostoevsky was now conceiving the tormented course of Raskolnikov’s career and interweaving these ideas with his psychology.

  Crime and Punishment came to birth only when, in November 1865, Dostoevsky shifted from a first-person to a third-perso
n narrator. This was the culmination of a long struggle whose vestiges can be traced all through the early stages of composition. Some of the problems of using the first person are already apparent from the earliest version, whose first chapter is supposedly written five days after the murder (committed on June 9). The narrator dates the beginning of his diary as June 14 because, as he explains, to have written anything earlier would have been impossible in view of his mental and emotional confusion. Indeed, Dostoevsky reminds himself that “in all these six chapters (the narrator) must write, speak, and appear to the reader in part as if not in possession of his senses” (7: 83).

  Dostoevsky thus wished to convey the narrator’s partial derangement while, at the same time, using him as a focus on the external world and portraying the reactions induced by his crime as the action proceeds. All this posed serious difficulties, and the manuscript version shows Dostoevsky’s constant uncertainty about how to hold the balance between the narrator’s psychic disarray and the needs of his story. This problem of time perspective bothered Dostoevsky from the very start, and he moves the second chapter back several more days, to June 16, in order to give his narrator more time to come to his senses; but the distance between past and present was still not great enough, and this led to an inevitable clash between the situation in which the narrator was immersed and his function as narrator. As Edward Wasiolek has pointed out, “Raskolnikov is supposed to be . . . fixed wholly on his determination to elude his imaginary pursuers. But the ‘I’ point of view forces him to provide his own interpretations, and, even worse, his own stylistic refinements. Every stylistic refinement wars against the realism of the dramatic action.”2 Moreover, there would be serious doubts about the verisimilitude of a narrator who presumably is in a state of semihysteria and yet is able to remember and analyze, to report long scenes as well as lengthy dialogues, and in general to function as a reliable observer. This problem was only made more acute when the Marmeladovs entered the picture and fragments of the drunkard’s extensive monologues began to appear among the notes.

  Dostoevsky was acutely aware of this issue, and the first expedient he thought of is indicated by a brief note: “The story ends and the diary begins” (7: 81). Since no trace of such a dual form can be found, this idea was probably abandoned very quickly; but one understands how Dostoevsky’s mind was working. He wished to separate a recital of events, set down by the narrator after they had been completed, from another account of the same events written by someone still caught in their flux. This would have eliminated the disturbing clash between one and the other so noticeable in the Wiesbaden version. The same purpose inspires the next alternative, the Petersburg version, which is entitled “On Trial” and whose author is now in the custody of the legal authorities.

  In this text, the narrator begins: “(I was on trial and) I will tell everything. . . . I am writing this for myself, but let others and all my judges read it” (7: 96). This draft continues with Marmeladov’s monologic recital of his woes (presented almost verbatim in the novel), and by this time the schema of events has been recast so that this scene clearly precedes the murder. Most important, though, the position of the narrator, sitting in jail and contemplating his errors, allows him both to respond and to reflect without unduly straining credibility. But even in this plan, the time gap between the termination of all the events and the composition of the narrative is very small (roughly a week), and Dostoevsky continued to remain uneasy. After all, the narrator can hardly be completely tranquil, for the trial has not yet taken place.

  The notebooks thus contain a third possibility, which is attached to a near-definitive outline of the action concerning Raskolnikov during the first two-thirds of the novel. “A New Plan,” Dostoevsky announces. “The Story of a Criminal. Eight years before (in order to keep it completely at a distance)!” (7: 144). The phrase in parentheses indicates just how preoccupied Dostoevsky was with this issue of narrative distance, and how clearly he saw all of the problems involved. In this new plan, the narrator would be writing after the conclusion of his prison term (eight years), and what was probably the subtitle would indicate the profound moral alteration induced by the passage of time: the narrator now calls himself a criminal, no longer maintaining that the murder could not be considered a “crime” at all. The narrator is now so far removed from his previous self that it would require only a short step to shift from an I-narrator to the third person.

  This narrative shift, however, did not occur all at once, and Dostoevsky debates the reasons for it in pages that, lying in close proximity to those just cited, were probably written at about the same time. “If it is to be a confession,” he muses, “then everything must be made overly clear to the utter extreme.” The recognition of this necessity leads Dostoevsky to some second thoughts: “If a confession, then in parts it will not be chaste (tselomudrenno) and it will be difficult to imagine why it was written.” The use of the term “chaste” (which can also be translated broadly as “proper”) in this context probably refers to the question of why the narrator should have wished to engage in so painful an act of self-exposure. At this point, Dostoevsky comes to the conclusion that his narrative technique must be altered.3

  “But the subject is like this. The story from oneself [the author], and not from him [the character]” (7: 148–149). By “subject” Dostoevsky may be thinking about his conception of a main character who, after the crime, reveals unexpected aspects of himself—aspects of which, previously, he had not been fully aware. If, in a first-person narration, “everything must be made clear to the utter extreme” at every instant, then it would be difficult to obtain such an effect of self-surprise; at best, the revelations could be referred to and explained, but they could hardly be presented with full dramatic force. Taken in conjunction with the problem of justifying his narrative, such considerations would explain why Dostoevsky, despite his desperate economic straits, could not resist making a fresh start and transferring to a third-person narrator.

  But there still remained the question of exactly what kind of narrator this should be. Contemporary narratologists have long known that authorial narrators are not just loose, amorphous presences who know how to spin a yarn; they are, rather, “implied authors,” with distinct profiles and attitudes that decisively shape the novelistic perspective. Dostoevsky was fully conscious of this important truth and tried to define exactly the stance that his authorial narrator would adopt. No such problem had arisen earlier because the narrator was the central character. Everything had been presented from his own point of view, which meant that, though guilty of a terrible crime, he would inevitably arouse a certain sympathy because of his altruistic impulses, his inner sufferings, and his final repentance. What sort of third-person narrator could play the same role in relation to the reader? As Dostoevsky pondered the choice between the first and third person, he wrote, “But from the author. Too much naïveté and frankness are needed.” Why this should be so is hardly self-evident; but the context suggests that Dostoevsky may still have been thinking of some sort of confessional novel, which, even if cast in the third person, would involve the total identification of the narrator with the main protagonist. Such an assumption would help explain the emphasis of the next sentence, which insists on the separation of the author from the character: “It is necessary to assume as author someone omniscient and faultless, who holds up to the view of all one of the members of the new generation” (7: 149).

  The narrator will thus be undertaking a specific historical task: to exhibit for scrutiny an example of the very latest Russian type, the successor to Bazarov and the other “new men” of Russian literature. But Dostoevsky may have felt that such a narrator would be too coolly detached, too “omniscient and faultless” to serve his purposes (“faultless” translates the Russian ne pogreshayushim, which literally means “sinless” and can be taken to imply an accusatory or condemnatory posture). He therefore alters his narrator, in another notation, merely to a “sort of invisible and
omniscient being, who doesn’t leave his hero for a moment, even with the words: ‘all that was done completely by chance’ ” (7: 146). By attaching the narrator as closely as possible to the protagonist’s point of view, Dostoevsky retains the advantages of I-narration, which automatically generates the effect of sympathy created by all inside views of a character; and he reminds himself to maintain such inside views, as far as possible, even when moving from the direct portrayal of consciousness into summary and report. At the same time, he retains the freedom of omniscience necessary to dramatize the process of Raskolnikov’s self-discovery, to reveal the character gradually, to comment on him from the outside when this becomes necessary, and to leave him entirely when the plot-action widens out.

  This narrative technique fuses the narrator very closely with the consciousness and point of view of the central character as well as other important figures (though without, as Mikhail Bakhtin was inclined to maintain, eliminating him entirely as a controlling perspective).4 Dostoevsky had used a similar narrative approach earlier in The Double, and such a fusion was by no means unprecedented in the history of the novel (in Jane Austen, among others). But in Crime and Punishment this identification begins to approximate, through Dostoevsky’s own use of time shifts of memory and his remarkable manipulation of temporal sequence, the experiments of Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and later stream-of-consciousness writers such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. Brilliantly original for its period, this technique gives us the gripping masterpiece we know, whose intricate construction and artistic sophistication can only cause us to wonder at the persistence of the legend that Dostoevsky was an untidy and negligent craftsman. Some light on this legend may be cast by the remark of E. M. de Vogüé, a novelist himself, who wrote of Crime and Punishment with some surprise in 1886 that “a word . . . one does not even notice, a small fact that takes up only a line, have their reverberations fifty pages later . . . [so that] the continuity becomes unintelligible if one skips a couple of pages.”5 This acute observation, which expresses all the disarray of a late nineteenth-century reader accustomed to the more orderly and linear types of expository narration, helps to account for the tenacity of such a critical misjudgment, but we have now begun to attain a more accurate appreciation of Dostoevsky’s pathbreaking originality. Even so, Crime and Punishment still has not yet been read with sufficiently close attention to the interweaving of those “reverberations” on whose connections its meaning depends.