2.
A new type of crime is on the American mind—foreign, remote, metaphysical, even literary; and radically different from what we are used to. Street crime, drunken crime, drug-inspired crime, crimes of passion, greed, revenge, crimes against children, gangster crime, white-collar crime, break-ins, car thefts, holdups, shootings—these are familiar, and to a degree nearly expected. They shake us up without disorienting us. They belong to our civilization; they are the darker signals of home. “Our” crime has usually been local—the stalker, the burglar, the mugger lurking in a doorway. Even Jeffrey Dahmer, the cannibal sadist who kept boys’ body parts in his kitchen refrigerator, is not so very anomalous in the context of what can happen in ordinary neighborhoods—a little girl imprisoned in an underground cage; children tormented, starved, beaten to death; newborns bludgeoned; battered women, slain wives, mutilated husbands. Domesticity gone awry.
All that is recognizable and homespun. What feels alien to America is the philosophical criminal of exceptional intelligence and humanitarian purpose who is driven to commit murder out of an uncompromising idealism. Such a type has always seemed a literary construct of a particular European political coloration (The Secret Agent, The Princess Casamassima), or else has hinted at ideologies so removed from tame Republicans and Democrats as to be literally outlandish. Then came the mysterious depredations of the Unabomber. Until the melodramatic publication of his manifesto in major newspapers, the Unabomber remained an unpredictable riddle, unfathomable, sans name or habitation. In garrulous print his credo revealed him to be a visionary. His dream was of a green and pleasant land liberated from the curse of technological proliferation. The technical élites were his targets: computer wizards like Professor David Gelernter of Yale, a thinker in pursuit of artificial intelligence. Maimed by a package bomb, Gelernter escaped death; others did not.
In the storm of interpretation that followed the Unabomber’s public declaration of principles, he was often mistaken for a kind of contemporary Luddite. This was a serious misnomer. The nineteenth-century Luddites were hand weavers who rioted against the introduction of mechanical looms in England’s textile industry; they smashed the machines to protect their livelihoods. They were not out to kill, nor did they promulgate romantic theories about the wholesome superiority of hand looms. They were selfish, ruthlessly pragmatic, and societally unreasonable. By contrast, Theodore Kaczynski—the Unabomber—is above all a calculating social reasoner and messianic utopian. His crimes, for which he was found guilty as charged, were intended to restore us to cities and landscapes clear of digital complexities; he meant to clean the American slate of its accumulated technostructural smudges. At the same time, we can acknowledge him to have been selfless and pure, loyal and empathic, the sort of man who befriends, without condescension, an uneducated and impoverished Mexican laborer. It is easy to think of the Unabomber, living out his principles in his pollution-free mountain cabin, as a Thoreauvian philosopher of advanced environmentalism. The philosopher is one with the murderer. The Napoleonic world-improver is one with the humble hermit of the wilderness.
In the Unabomber, America has at last brought forth its own Raskolnikov—the appealing, appalling, and disturbingly visionary murderer of Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky’s masterwork of 1866. But the Unabomber is not the only ideological criminal (though he may be the most intellectual) to burst out of remoteness and fantasy onto unsuspecting native grounds. It was a political conviction rooted in anti-government ideas of liberty suppressed that fueled the deadly bombing of a Federal building in Oklahoma City. God’s will directed the bombing of the World Trade Center, and the Muslim zealots who devised the means are world-improvers obedient to the highest good; so are the bombers of abortion clinics. The Weathermen of the sixties, who bombed banks and shot police in order to release “Amerika” from the tyranny of a democratic polity, are close ideological cousins of the Russian nihilists who agitated against Alexander II, the liberalizing Czar of a century before. That celebrated nineteen-sixties mantra—to make an omelet you need to break eggs—had its origin not in an affinity for violence, but in the mouth-watering lure of the humanitarian omelet. It was only the gastronomic image that was novel. In the Russian sixties, one hundred years earlier—in 1861, the very year Alexander II freed the serfs—a radical young critic named Dimitry Pisarev called for striking “right and left” and announced, “What resists the blow is worth keeping; what flies to pieces is rubbish.” Here was the altruistic bomber’s dogma, proclaimed in the pages of a literary journal—and long before The New York Review of Books published on its front cover a diagram of how to construct a Molotov cocktail.
Like the Unabomber, Raskolnikov is an intellectual who publishes a notorious essay expounding his ideas about men and society. Both are obscure loners. Both are alienated from a concerned and affectionate family. Both are tender toward outcasts and the needy. Both are élitists. Both are idealists. Both are murderers. Contemporary America, it seems, has finally caught up with czarist Russia’s most argumentative novelist.
And in Crime and Punishment Dostoyevsky was feverishly pursuing an argument. It was an argument against the radicals who were dominant among Russian intellectuals in the eighteen-sixties, many of them espousing nihilist views. In the universities especially, revolutionary commotion was on the rise. Yet there was an incongruity in the timing of all these calls for violent subversion. St. Petersburg was no longer the seat of the old Czar of the repressive eighteen-forties, the tyrannical Nicholas I, against whose cruelties convulsive outrage might be justly presumed. Paradoxically, under that grim reign even the most fiery radicals were at heart gradualists who modeled their hopes on Western reformist ideas. By the incendiary sixties, the throne was held by Nicholas’s moderate son and successor, whose numerous democratic initiatives looked to be nudging Russia toward something that might eventually resemble a constitutional monarchy. The younger revolutionary theorists would have none of it. It was incomplete; it was too slow. Liberalism, they roared, was the enemy of revolution, and would impede a more definitive razing of evil.
The first installments of Crime and Punishment had just begun to appear in The Russian Messenger, a Slavophile periodical, when a student revolutionary made an attempt on the life of the Czar as he was leaving the gardens of the Winter Palace to enter his carriage. The government responded with a draconian crackdown on the radicals. “You know,” Dostoyevsky wrote cuttingly to his publisher in the wake of these events, “they are completely convinced that on a tabula rasa they will immediately construct a paradise.” But he went on to sympathize with “our poor little defenseless boys and girls” and “their enthusiasm for the good and their purity of heart.” So many “have become nihilists so purely, so unselfishly, in the name of honor, truth, and genuine usefulness! You know they are helpless against these stupidities, and take them for perfection.” And though in the same letter he spoke of “the powerful, extraordinary, sacred union of the Czar with the people,” he objected to the increase in repression. “But how can nihilism be fought without freedom of speech?” he asked.
This mixture of contempt for the radicals and solicitude for their misguided, perplexed, and perplexing humanity led to the fashioning of Raskolnikov. Pisarev striking right and left was one ingredient. Another was the appeal of self-sacrificial idealism. And a third was the literary mode through which Dostoyevsky combined and refined the tangled elements of passion, brutishness, monomaniacal principle, mental chaos, candor, mockery, fury, compassion, generosity—and two brutal ax-murders. All these contradictory elements course through Raskolnikov with nearly a Joycean effect; but if stream of consciousness flows mutely and uninterruptedly, assimilating the outer world into the inner, Raskolnikov’s mind—and Dostoyevsky’s method—is zigzag and bumpy, given to rebellious and unaccountable alterations of purpose. Raskolnikov is without restraint—not only as an angry character in a novel, but as a reflection of Dostoyevsky himself, who was out to expose the entire spectrum of
radical thought engulfing the writers and thinkers of St. Petersburg.
This may be why Raskolnikov is made to rush dizzyingly from impulse to impulse, from kindliness to withdrawal to lashing out, and from one underlying motive to another—a disorderliness at war with his half-buried and equivocal conscience. Only at the start is he seen, briefly, to be deliberate and in control. Detached, reasoning it out, Raskolnikov robs and murders a pawnbroker whom he has come to loathe, an unpleasant and predatory old woman alone and helpless in her flat. He hammers her repeatedly with the heavy handle of an ax:
Her thin hair, pale and streaked with gray, was thickly greased as usual, plaited into a ratty braid and tucked under a piece of horn comb that stuck up at the back of her head … he struck her again and yet again with all his strength, both times with the butt-end, both times on the crown of the head. Blood poured out as from an overturned glass.
Unexpectedly, the old woman’s simple-minded sister just then enters the flat; she is disposed of even more horribly: “The blow landed directly on the skull, with the sharp edge, and immediately split the whole upper part of the forehead, almost to the crown.”
The second slaying is an unforeseen by-product of the first. The first is the rational consequence of forethought. What is the nature—the thesis—of this forethought? Shortly before the murder, Raskolnikov overhears a student in a tavern speculating about the pawnbroker: she is “rich as a Jew,” and has willed all her money to the Church. “A hundred, a thousand good deeds and undertakings … could be arranged and set going by the money that old woman has doomed to the monastery!” exclaims the student.
Hundreds, maybe thousands of lives put right; dozens of families saved from destitution, from decay, from ruin, from depravity, from the venereal hospitals—all on her money. Kill her and take her money, so that afterwards with its help you can devote yourself to the service of all mankind and the common cause.… One death for hundreds of lives—it’s simple arithmetic! And what does the life of this stupid, consumptive, and wicked old crone mean in the general balance? No more than the life of a louse, a cockroach.
Startled by this polemic, Raskolnikov admits to himself that “exactly the same thoughts had just been conceived in his own head”—though not as harmless theoretical bombast.
The theory in Raskolnikov’s head—Benthamite utilitarianism, the greatest good for the greatest number, with its calibrated notions of what is useful and what is expendable—had been current for at least a decade among the Westernizing majority of the Russian intelligentsia, especially the literati of the capital. In supplying Bentham with an ax, Dostoyevsky thought to carry out the intoxications of the utilitarian doctrine as far as its principles would go: brutality and bloodletting would reveal the poisonous fruit of a political philosophy based on reason alone.
A fiercely sardonic repudiation of that philosophy—some of it in the vocabulary of contemporary American controversy—is entrusted to Raskolnikov’s affectionate and loyal comrade, Razumikhin:
It started with the views of the socialists.… Crime is a protest against the abnormality of the social set-up—that alone and nothing more, no other causes are admitted—but nothing!… With them one is always a “victim of the environment”—and nothing else!… If society itself is normally set up, all crimes will at once disappear, because there will be no reason for protesting.… Nature isn’t taken into account, nature is driven out, nature is not supposed to be!… On the contrary, a social system, coming out of some mathematical head, will at once organize the whole of mankind and instantly make it righteous and sinless.… And it turns out in the end that they’ve reduced everything to mere brickwork and the layout of corridors and rooms in a phalanstery!
The phalanstery, a cooperative commune, was the brainchild of Charles Fourier, who, along with the political theorist Saint-Simon (and well before Marx), was an enduring influence on the Francophile Russian radical intelligentsia. But Razumikhin’s outcry against the utopian socialists who idealize the life of the commune and fantasize universal harmony is no more than a satiric rap on the knuckles. Dostoyevsky is after a bloodier and more threatening vision—nihilism in its hideously perfected form. This is the ideological cloak he next throws over Raskolnikov; it is Raskolnikov’s manifesto as it appears in his article. The “extraordinary man,” Raskolnikov declaims, has the right to “step over certain obstacles” in order to fulfill a mission that is “salutary for the whole of mankind.”
In my opinion, if, as the result of certain combinations, Kepler’s or Newton’s discoveries could become known to people in no other way than by sacrificing the lives of one, or ten, or a hundred or more people who were hindering the discovery, or standing as an obstacle in its path, then Newton would have the right, and it would even be his duty … to remove those ten or a hundred people, in order to make his discoveries known to all mankind.
Every lawgiver or founder of a new idea, he goes on, has always been a criminal—“all of them to a man … from the fact alone that in giving a new law they thereby violated the old one … and they certainly did not stop at shedding blood either, if it happened that blood … could help them.” Such extraordinary men—Lycurgus, Solon, Napoleon—call for “the destruction of the present in the name of the better,” and will lead the world toward a new Jerusalem.
To which Razumikhin, recoiling, responds: “You do finally permit bloodshed in all conscience.” And just here, in the turbulence of Razumikhin’s revelation—and prefiguring Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn, and Sharansky—Dostoyevsky makes his case for the dismantling of the Soviet state half a century before the revolutionary convulsion that brought it into being.
3.
Yet the mammoth irony of Dostoyevsky’s life remains: the writer who excoriated the radical theorists, who despised the nihilist revolutionaries, who wrote novel after novel to defy them, once belonged to their company.
It is easy to dislike him, and not because the spectacle of a self-accusing apostate shocks. He ended as a Slavophile religious believer; but in his twenties he was what he bitterly came to scorn—a Westernizing Russian liberal. Nevertheless a certain nasty consistency ruled. At all times he was bigoted and xenophobic: he had an irrational hatred of Germans and Poles, and his novels are speckled with anti-Semitism. He attacked Roman Catholicism as the temporal legacy of a pagan empire, while extolling Russian Orthodoxy. He was an obsessive and deluded gambler scheming to strike it rich at the snap of a finger: he played madly at the roulette tables of Europe, and repeatedly reduced himself and his pregnant young second wife to actual privation. Escaping debtors’ prison in Russia, he was compelled for years to wander homelessly and wretchedly through Germany and Switzerland. In Wiesbaden he borrowed fifty thalers from Turgenev and took ten years to repay him. He held the rigidly exclusionary blood-and-soil tenet that the future of civilization lay with Russia alone. He was seriously superstitious and had a silly trust in omens and dreams. He was irritable, sometimes volcanically so, and inordinately vain. And if all these self-inflicted debilities of character were not ugly enough, he suffered from a catastrophic innate debility: he was subject, without warning, to horrifying epileptic seizures in a period when there were no medical controls.
Though not quite without warning. Dostoyevsky’s fits were heralded by a curious surge of ecstasy—an “aura” indistinguishable from religious exaltation. He underwent his first seizure, he reported, on Easter morning in 1865, when he was forty-four years old: “Heaven had come down to earth and swallowed me. I really grasped God and was penetrated by Him.” But there may have been unidentified earlier attacks, different in kind. At the age of ten he experienced an auditory hallucination; he thought he heard a voice cry “A wolf is on the loose!” and was comforted by a kindly serf who belonged to his father.
Later fits uniformly triggered the divine penumbra. He was well prepared for it. From childhood he had been saturated in a narrow household piety not unlike the unquestioning devoutness of the illiterate Russian peasant. Prayer
s were recited before icons; a clergyman came to give lessons. The Gospels were read, and the Acta Martyrum—the lives of the saints—with their peculiarly Russian emphasis on passive suffering. No Sunday or religious holiday went unobserved, on the day itself and at vespers the evening before. Rituals were punctiliously kept up. Dostoyevsky’s father, a former army doctor on the staff of a hospital for the poor outside Moscow, frequently led his family on excursions to the great onion-domed Kremlin cathedrals, where religion and nationalism were inseparable. Every spring, Dostoyevsky’s mother took the children on a pilgrimage to the Monastery of St. Sergey, sixty miles from Moscow, where they kneeled among mobs of the faithful before an imposing silver reliquary said to contain the saint’s miraculous remains. None of this was typical of the Russian gentry of the time. Neither Tolstoy nor Turgenev had such an upbringing. Joseph Frank, Dostoyevsky’s superb and exhaustive biographer, explains why. “Most upper-class Russians,” he recounts, “would have shared the attitude exemplified in Herzen’s anecdote about his host at a dinner party who, when asked whether he was serving Lenten dishes out of personal conviction, replied that it was ‘simply and solely for the sake of the servants.’ ”
There is speculation that Dostoyevsky’s father may himself have had a mild form of epilepsy: he was gloomy, moody, and unpredictably explosive, a martinet who drank too much and imposed his will on everyone around him. In his youth he had completed his studies at a seminary for non-monastic clergy, a low caste, but went on instead to pursue medicine, and eventually elevated himself to the status of the minor nobility. His salary was insufficient and the family was not well off, despite the doctor’s inheritance of a small and scrubby estate, along with its “baptized property”—the serfs attached to the land. When Dostoyevsky was sixteen, his father dispatched him and his older brother Mikhail, both of whom had literary ambitions, to the Academy of Military Engineers in St. Petersburg, in preparation for government careers. But the doctor’s plan for his sons came to nothing. Less than two years later, in a season of drought, bad crops, and peasant resentment, Dostoyevsky was informed that his father had been found dead on the estate, presumably strangled by his serfs. Killings of this kind were not uncommon. In a famous letter to Gogol (the very letter that would ultimately send Dostoyevsky before the firing squad), the radical critic Vissarion Belinsky wrote that the Czar was “well aware of what landowners do with their peasants and how many throats of the former are cut every year by the latter.”
Quarrel & Quandary Page 2