Quarrel & Quandary Read Free Page B

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 tothe 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 undera 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