Notes on Dostoevsky's CRIME AND PUNISHMENT Преступление и наказание The Marmeladov Subplot

[Note: I rely in my blog posts here largely on the Jessie Coulson translation of C and P, in the Norton Critical Edition of the novel. At times I translate short passages myself from the Russian original.]

The Marmeladov Subplot

Note: marmelad (мармелад) in Russian is a sweet jellied candy, and has nothing to do with orange marmalade.


Dostoevsky published Crime and Punishment in 1866; the action takes place in St. Petersburg in the summer of the previous year. A characteristic feature of the great 19^th century Russian realists is their social obligation, the imperative to treat broad social and political issues. 

The original title of C and P was The Drunkards, and apparently the main focus was to be the Marmeladov family. Later on the Marmeladov subplot became one of many melodramatic plotlines that fuse together the main ideas and themes, and that revolve around the central dilemma of the novel’s main character, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, the twenty-two-year-old student—whose crime (the murders of an old woman and her sister) and punishment (his suffering, largely moral and spiritual for the crime) provide the title of the novel.

In the novel’s first important scene (Part I, Ch. 2), Raskolnikov meets Semyon Zakharovich Marmeladov by chance in a squalid tavern. The word ‘squalid’ is of special importance here, inasmuch as the whole atmosphere of C and P teems with squalor. Everything about St. Petersburg stinks, the air is foul, the water is practically undrinkable, and the underclass people who provide a constant background chorus for the plot are filthy and vulgar. If you cannot tolerate vulgarity and filth, both physical and psychic, you probably should not try reading Dostoevsky.

The self-denigrating Marmeladov, in the final throes of alcoholism when he appears, is one of those abject characters so frequently met in Dostoevsky’s works—all of them originating in his first novel, Poor People. His life is bankrupt, his self-respect gone, and he has turned to drink in desperation. Here we have again the social theme of poverty, but Dostoevsky always links his social issues and themes to broader psychological and religious issues.

In terms of psychology Marmeladov is a masochist, a man who finds a perverse joy in his own debasement and humiliation. The great psychologist Dostoevsky often makes it clear that if pleasure is not to be found anywhere else, the human animal will find pleasure in pain. As so frequently in Dostoevsky’s works Marmeladov’s tragic condition is described partially in comic terms. In telling his sad story to Raskolnikov upon their first meeting, he says, in his mock-lofty way of speaking (much of this style is lost in translation): “осмелитесь ли вы, взирая в сей час на меня, сказать утвердительно, что я не свинья? (dare you, in beholding me at this very selfsame moment, assert with conviction that I’m not a pig?)” Meanwhile, a chorus of sneering laughers in the tavern provide the background music for Marmeladov’s tale.

He later takes pleasure when his raving wife Katerina Ivanovna physically abuses him, dragging him by the hair about their squalid hovel: “’This is sweet satisfaction to me! This gives me not pain, but plea-ea-sure, my dear sir!,’ he exclaimed, while he was shaken by the hair and once even had his forehead bumped on the floor.”

Another frequent feature of Dostoevsky’s narratives is the issue of human pride debased. Dostoevsky’s poverty stricken characters are always touchy, always seeking for ways to repair their injured pride. Katerina Ivanovna has only her green shawl to remind her of one glorious moment in her life: the day when she performed a shawl dance for the governor upon her graduation from a fashionable school for young ladies. She clings to that shawl and the memory of that dance because it is all she has to remind her that she was once somebody. The shawl, in fact, makes it all the way through this novel of almost five hundred pages, ending up on Sonya’s shoulders in Siberia.

Katerina Ivanovna’s pride cannot stand the condition of being a nobody, of nonentity. Once again here, we have the ontological malaise that destroyed Dostoevsky’s hero Devushkin in his first novel, Poor People. A character is so debased that he/she begins doubting her/his own existence. Katerina Ivanovna ends up going insane later in the novel. In Part I her wounded pride drives her to behave cruelly toward those around her, especially toward her stepdaughter Sonya, whom she taunts unmercifully and drives to prostitution.

Of course, when Sonya returns with her first earnings, thirty pieces of [biblical] silver, Katerina Ivanovna prostrates herself before the angelic Sonya and kisses her feet. As so often in Dostoevsky’s works, pride, love, cruelty, and hatred are all mixed up in a character’s insides. The thirty silver roubles also suggest, of course, the religious overtones of the tavern scene, which find full expression in Marmeladov’s invocation of Christ: “He will pity us, He who pitied all men and understood all men and all things . . . . . . And He will say, ‘Come unto Me! I have already forgiven thee’ . . . . . . And He will forgive my Sonya, He will forgive her.”

Therefore, very early in the book Dostoevsky provides his ultimate religious message in the words of the abject alcoholic Marmeladov. This is the message that Raskolnikov will have to learn if he is to be forgiven, and forgive himself, for his crime. Later on, when Marmeladov has died, Sonya takes over the role as spokesperson for Christianity in the novel.

In sum, the subplot of the Marmeladov family, basically melodramatic in the way it is presented, suggests, at least obliquely, all the major themes of the novel: psychological themes, religious and philosophical themes, socio-political themes.

                                                       

D. Shmarinov                                                         
                                                         Marmeladov in the Tavern