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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 ideologicalcriminal (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 radicalswho 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