Crime and Punishment

A serious student whose enthusiasm for classic literature decidedly tends toward Jane Austen and Plato — toward a reality in which life’s dark shadows eventually give way to the bright sunlight of understanding, or at least to the enlightening glow of irony — wrote to me to express her frustration at being unable to find the greatness in Dostoevsky, in spite of having read Crime and Punishment for a second time in the hopes of discovering what she had somehow failed to discover in her first attempt. Furthermore, she asked for some guidance to help her find a foothold into Dostoevsky’s world, which seemed so foreign to her temperament and experience. The following, with minor modifications, was my reply.

I can see why it is a strange and difficult book for you to understand, especially regarding motives and psychology. However, I am proud of you for taking another shot at it, since it is important to challenge oneself with ideas that are unfamiliar or unlike one’s ordinary way of thinking. Dostoevsky’s way of thinking is definitely different from yours, in all the ways that Jane Austen’s feels familiar and comfortable to you. On the other hand, although the style of thinking and writing is quite different, I don’t believe that the themes are as foreign to your mind as they might seem on the surface.

So let’s begin our discussion of C&P by looking at Raskolnikov’s psychology and how it leads to his crime. He is a young man, poor but intelligent, feeling that he is superior to the people around him, but that the world is ignoring his superiority and treating him as nothing. He has been studying a lot of “modern ideas” which teach that material science is the only truth, the so-called spiritual world is an illusion, there is no “good and evil,” no ultimate meaning of life. At the same time, he sees so much poverty and injustice around him, including related to himself and his family. Gradually, he reaches the conclusion that since there is no objective meaning of “good and evil,” there is no objective reason why a person might not use “immoral” behavior to correct society’s injustices and evils. However, he also believes, as a young progressive intellectual, that if you told everyone that morality is an illusion, society would collapse, because most ordinary humans cannot live their lives intelligently without some sort of rules from outside. Therefore, correcting society by throwing off the old rules of “good and evil” is not something that ordinary people could or should do. Only a great man, someone who sees that morality is just conventional, and who can overcome the limits of “conscience” and “good behavior,” is capable of taking the kind of action needed to produce the radical changes that society needs. 

Realizing this, Raskolnikov now has a dilemma: If it is true that the measure of a great man is his ability to accept the full meaning of modern ideas and reject traditional morality, then if he himself cannot do this, he will have to face the shameful fact that he himself is not the kind of great man he is talking about. He does not kill the pawnbroker because she is particularly evil, but only because she is essentially a worthless person, and therefore a good way to “test” his courage and his ability to think and act like a great man — namely, to overcome the ordinary human limits of traditional morality and conscience in order to destroy something that deserves to be destroyed.

However, after he kills the pawnbroker (and accidentally Lizaveta), he is immediately shaken, and scared of what he has done. It is important to remember what this means in his mind. His shame and guilt are proof that he is not a great man — he is too small and weak to have the feelings of a truly great man like Napoleon, who can kill to change the world without guilt. Throughout the book, his sickness and mental deterioration are the result of his inner struggle. He is continually trying to persuade himself that he is the superior type of human that he has read and written about, but he is continually suffering from guilt and shame, which prove that he is just another member of the inferior and insignificant majority (as he sees it). 

Of course, the events of the story are exaggerated to make a theoretical point, but if you allow your reason to step back from your immediate repulsion, confusion, and disgust at Raskolnikov’s actions, I think you will begin to see what Raskolnikov’s psyche represents, at its most basic level. For do not you yourself sometimes feel that your soul is searching for things that most of the people around you cannot know or care about? Do you not also believe that the society in which you live is a kind of trap of irrationality, smallminded conformity, and slavish stupidity? Do you not, when thinking such things, sometimes have moments of feeling superior to much of the society around you, because you are thinking about truth and beauty, while they are thinking about following the rules and accumulating a lot of money and amusement? And do you not, furthermore, have more than a few moments of genuine pride at the fact that you are not following all those social conventions, that you are not doing “what everyone else does,” and that your goals are not tied to mere material comfort and ordinary social success?

But then, don’t you, if you reflect upon yourself, also have many moments of self-doubt, wondering whether you have been fooling yourself all this time? Don’t you ask yourself, perhaps quite often, “Am I just pretending to be a serious person, while in fact I am an ordinary person with childish fantasies of being something better, something special, something more intelligent and talented?” And during those moments of doubt, don’t you sometimes feel suddenly ashamed, foolish, and small? In fact, don’t you occasionally, in these moments of feeling “exposed” before yourself as a vain girl full of delusions, even experience a certain amount of self-hatred?

If your answer to most of these questions is yes, then here we have a perfect example why we need classic literature, read in the open-minded, non-progressive manner, as its authors intended it to be read: it reveals us to ourselves, in ways that nothing else can. For by answering yes to those questions I just raised, you discover that even you — reserved, moral, and unpretentious you — share some of the essential and motivating psychology of the lunatic Raskolnikov. Both of you are thoughtful, private, full of great curiosity and a longing for meaning; and both of you sense — deep down, whether you always admit it to yourselves or not — that you are in some ways too good for most of the people around you.

So what is it, then, that makes the difference between you? What makes Raskolnikov a murderer and a crazed criminal, and you a mentally disciplined and fundamentally reasonable human being?

Perhaps the essential answers are two: nihilism and radical progressivism. Nihilism is the belief that there is no reality beyond the facts of material science, no real standard of goodness or beauty, and therefore that nothing we do or believe can be right or wrong, true or false, so that life is meaningless, unless we give it meaning by our own acts of will. Radical progressivism is the belief that society is not flawed or unjust because humans are naturally imperfect, but rather because humans lack the collective will to throw off the old unjust social institutions and create a new, free society by destroying all the beliefs and structures that made the old world unjust and oppressive. 

Put nihilism and radicalism together, and you get a recipe for revolutionary political movements, violent activism, and the rejection of all traditions in favor of a new idealistic picture of a “scientific” society, a utilitarian utopia, which will be created, led, and ruled by superior beings who can see through the old errors and know how to correct them to produce a new, happy world: “community, identity, stability,” or “true equality,” or “social justice.” This theme — the deterioration of Russia under the influence of new ideas of nihilism and radical politics — was the dominant concern in most of Dostoevsky’s writing. But since Crime and Punishment is probably his best and most influential novel, his most famous characterization of this dangerous modern trend is Raskolnikov. 

Since Dostoevsky was talking about a new attitude taking over Russian society, it was reasonable to cast his protagonist as a very young man. Raskolnikov: an idealist, an intelligent but emotionally unstable boy swept up in modern ideas that would reject the whole past in favor of a new world in which he himself would be a great champion and mastermind. Thinking he knows everything when his knowledge is very limited. Thinking he alone understands the meaning of justice, while in fact he lacks basic humanity and empathy with his fellow human beings. Seeing other people around him as symbols and projects, rather than as individual humans whose wishes and thoughts matter. Imagining that the only world worth living in is one that is designed by him alone, according to his own ideas and plans.

The novel is Dostoevsky’s psychological investigation of what this radical progressivism means in practice, and of what following this way of thinking would really lead to: irrational violence, the murder of innocent people, suffering, shame, moral sickness, and ultimately self-destruction. Or redemption, if the belief in truth and goodness (represented by Sonya’s faith in God through all her suffering) could somehow prevail and defeat the radical progressive impulse.

In light of all of this, let us now look at a couple of your specific questions.

Besides, I wonder why he stole valuable articles when his purpose wasn’t about money? And why did he kill Lizaveta as well? I think his ambition was at least bigger than that of a thief, but why did he just act like a thief as soon as he killed the pawnbroker?

First of all, although he took a few things, he did not take much, or the most valuable things. Part of his reason for taking anything at all was to create the illusion that the crime was committed by a thief. But he didn’t take much, partly because after the murder(s), he was too panicked and anxious to think clearly about what to do. This becomes a damaging clue, because it suggests to the investigator that the killer must have been an amateur who got scared.

He killed Lizaveta because she could identify him, and also because, in the heat of the moment, after committing a murder, there was a kind of mania in his mind that would have told him to kill anyone who walked in. He had much bigger ambitions, related to his desire to prove to himself that he had the right to murder, because he was a man of the great type. That’s why, as I said, his illness through the rest of the book is so important. The illness is a physical effect of his psyche’s torture upon realizing his inability to be as great as he had wished to prove, since he can never overcome his guilt, which he believes a great man should be able to do.

What did you think when reading this book, and why do you think it is great?

First, as for why it is great, I would say that it is one of the first, and also one of the most important, literary attempts to address this theme of modern nihilism and its effects on society. Dostoevsky saw the monster coming long before almost anyone else. Nietzsche, who dealt with this theme deeply throughout his mature philosophy, said that Dostoevsky was the only writer who ever taught him anything about psychology. He was fighting to save his country, Russia, from the revolutionary disaster that finally destroyed her many decades later. He saw it coming from very far away, saw what it would mean, and had the courage to stand up against all the intellectual trends around him and declare what he saw truthfully, with the deepest psychological insight. That’s greatness.

As for what I thought when reading it the first time…I thought…I thought that I understand Raskolnikov’s theory and his feelings: frustrated by the people around him who could not think as well as he could, believing that he knew what they did not know, and sensing that conventional ideas can be a false and harmful limit on a person who thinks seriously and has an expansive view of life.

But I never thought about killing anyone to prove the point! I had enough innate humanity, along with my anti-nihilistic belief that there is a higher truth, to prevent me from seeing any merit in his specific choices and rationalizations. (As you may guess from your knowledge of me, I have never had any sympathy with radical politics or progressivism.) But I had just enough pride and hubris to empathize with his psychological position, along with enough self-doubt to understand his agony at feeling like a failed great man.

In those early novels, Dostoevsky was excellent at presenting educated young men who had genuine intelligence and seriousness, even a kind of superiority, but who were bleeding to death spiritually due to insecurity and social isolation. That psychological condition was the familiar rope that allowed me to climb into his world, even though I’ve never been a nihilist or a revolutionary, and usually tend, like you, to prefer my psychological insights in the tenor of Plato or Jane Austen.