Sonya
Crime and Punishment: The Contrived Scenes, The Emotional Hysteria,
The Melodrama
What bothers me most about reading Dostoevsky’s fiction are
the melodrama, the overblown hysteria, and the hyper-theatrical staging of the
scenes. As the critic Mochulsky has stated, “The principal intrigue is tragic;
the accessory intrigues are melodramatic.”
Things are often staged in such a way that key characters
are thrown together for key scenes. Certain liberties are taken to make sure
that the central personages are properly placed. The well-off Luzhin, e.g., stays
in the same lodgings as the Marmeladov family, although it is more than
doubtful that even a skinflint such as he is would choose to live in such a
low-class tenement. Svidrigailov takes a room right next to Sonya, and this
puts him conveniently in a position to sit by the door and eavesdrop, as
Raskolnikov pours out his soul to her.
Typical of Dostoevsky’s theater is the scandal scene,
involving confrontations between characters, the building of tension in crescendos
of hysteria, followed often by a dramatic entrance, which builds the tension
still more. Interspersed with all this are a series of explosive incidents, each
usually more explosive than the previous one; a final dramatic entrance usually
precipitates the loudest and most devastating explosion.
Dostoevsky uses this technique in all of his novels. The
best example in C and P is the
funeral dinner for Marmeladov (Part 5, Ch. 2 and 3; p. 319-42 in the Norton
Critical Edition). The crescendo of hysteria is interrupted by the next
chapter, Ch. 4, the climactic scene of the whole novel, in which Raskolnikov
confesses to Sonya that he is a murderer, while perverse Svidrigailov sits on
the other side of the door, listening and chuckling to his evil self. Then Lebezyatnikov
appears, to inform Raskolnikov and Sonya that Katerina Ivanovna has gone mad,
and we’re off to the races again. Next comes the wild scene of the crazy woman
out on the streets of St. Petersburg, bewailing her fate and forcing her small
children to beg.
In the scene of the funeral dinner Dostoevsky brings in squalid
background characters—poverty-stricken people who come to the funeral dinner
largely because they are starving, and others who are there to gloat over
Katerina Ivanovna’s misfortune—thereby providing a background chorus of
squabblers, drunks and laughers for the main action, which involves, largely,
Katerina Ivanovna’s incessant efforts to retain at least a glimmer of dignity.
Dostoevsky is often taken as the most dead serious of writers, but there is
always a comic side to the scandal scenes. Dark comedy it is, yes, but comedy
nonetheless.
Of course, the main melodramatic intrigue here involves
despicable Luzhin’s attempt to frame Sonya, an episode that is worthy of
inclusion in the worst pulp fiction of that time. Or, to use another parallel,
this is a scene out of a sentimental soap opera today. Here is what Nabokov
says about sentimentality in his Lectures
on Russian Literature: “Remember that when we speak of sentimentalists,
among them Richardson, Rousseau, Dostoevsky, we mean the non-artistic
exaggeration of familiar emotions meant to provoke automatically traditional
compassion in the reader.”
Therefore, a big problem for me, and not only for me, is
Dostoevsky’s frequent overindulgence in emotion, combined with flashy, cheap
theatrical effects. With FMD using poor starving children to squeeze out the
reader’s tears is a common occurrence. This is what we get with the scene of Katerina
Ivanovna and her children on the street. Dostoevsky was already using these
kind of effects in his first published novel, Poor People, and he never got completely away from the device.
Another scene that parallels—for sheer melodrama—the scene
in which Luzhin accuses Sonya of stealing his money is the confrontation
between Svidrigailov and Dunya in Svidrigailov’s room (Part 6, Ch. 5). Here Dunya
ends up pulling a gun and shooting at her tormentor, grazing his scalp. This
grazing of the scalp thing reminds me of the old Western movies I watched on
Saturday afternoons as a child, and frankly, this whole scene is too overblown
to be taken seriously.
So much for the weak side of Dostoevsky. But let’s backtrack
a bit now. The fact that melodrama and sentimentality lessen the artistic
quality of many of FMD’s scenes does not mean that all of his scenes are weak and ineffective. For me the mare beating
scene is one of the most hideously effective scenes of violence in all of
Russian literature. While horrifying, it is devoid of melodramatic license, as
is the scene describing Raskolnikov committing murder—another piece of writing
that ranks high in the pantheon of world literature.
Note that these two scenes of violence are central to the
main plot, the story of Raskolnikov’s plight. Most of the melodramatic excess
comes in scenes more directly concerned with subplots of the novel, where Dostoevsky
is much a lesser creative artist. To repeat what Mochulsky wrote: “The
principal intrigue is tragic; the accessory intrigues are melodramatic.”
Of course, a big weakness of the novel as a whole is the lack of verisimilitude in the over-sentimentalized prostitute/nun Sonya. She is simply never very believable as a character.
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