Notes on CRIME AND PUNISHMENT Motivations for the Murder

Motivations

Why did he do it? This is the central question of C and P, which is a murder mystery, but not what they call a “whodunnit.” This novel is a “whydunnit,” or a “I-done-it-but-I-don’t-know-why-I-dunnit.” Of course, in all of Dostoevsky’s fiction characters are ruled by subconscious impulses that they themselves are unaware of. Raskolnikov is mired in the cyclical processes of human reasoning, which Dostoevsky, the great anti-rational rationalist, treats with suspicion.

So, as one critic, Phillip Rahv, has put it, Raskolnikov is “the criminal in search of his motive” (Norton Critical Ed., p. 540-41). Why did he do it? The full complexity of the issue becomes manifest only about halfway through the book (Part 3, Ch. 5; p. 218-25 in the Norton Critical Ed.), when, for the first time we hear about the article he has published on crime. Much to the surprise of Raskolnikov, who was not even aware that his article had been printed, the police inspector, Porfiry Petrovich tells him that he has read it. The central point of the article is that human beings are divided into the ordinary and the extraordinary. The ordinary are like sheep, baaing their way passively through life, but the extraordinary have the right to overstep the boundaries of morality and law, to commit immoral acts in furtherance of their majestic goals. This overstepping provides the title of the novel, Преступление и наказание—the word for ‘crime’ in Russian, at its root meaning, suggests a “stepping across,” akin to the word “transgression” in English.

In his conversation with Sonya (Part 5, Ch. 5; p. 348-54), Raskolnikov’s confusion about his motive becomes apparent, when he goes through nearly every possible motivation for his crime, rejecting or revising each of them on the fly. Svidrigailov, who is conveniently eavesdropping on this conversation, later recapitulates the motivations to Dunya (Part 6, Ch. 5, p. 415). Here is roughly how the process goes in Raskolnikov’s feverish mind.

I did it because I was poor and I needed money to launch my career, but no, what I really wanted was to help my mother and sister and, after all, I had just received a letter from my mother describing how my sister Dunya was about to prostitute herself by marrying a despicable character, sacrificing herself to help me, but no, it wasn’t really that, what I wanted was to get money so that I could go about doing good, working toward the eradication of human evil and social inequality on earth, and I figured that by killing one contemptible old woman, who nobody on earth needed and who soon would die anyway, I could get that money and then atone for this one transgressive act by doing great good for the rest of my life, and, besides that, I was, after all, insane, or nearly insane, going nuts lying here in that cramped coffin of a room and actually physically ill as well, feverish, not even aware of what I was doing, but no, it wasn’t really that, what I wanted to be was a great man, a man who can transcend commonplace vulgar morality and become a superman, prove that he is above the ethics of the stupid baaing herd, a Napoleon, and I really could have been a Napoleon, I’ve got the stuff for it, but no, really I’m just a common louse like everyone else, but I had to know, you see, it was an experiment, I had to find out if I was a man or a louse, I had to know whether I really could overstep the bounds, whether I could do something that ordinary men are not capable of doing, and I didn’t really care about my mother and sister or the money, it was just the principle of the thing, and you know what’s the most despicable thing of all? By collapsing emotionally and physically the way I have, all I’ve really proved is that I’m a louse after all, Napoleon would have done it without even thinking about the sleaze of it, the immorality, he wouldn’t have worried for a moment about the ethics of the thing, he was beyond mere morality, a superman, but me, I’m a louse, and yet maybe I judge myself too soon and too harshly, maybe I still have great things in me, maybe I’m not a louse after all, yes I am, no, you’re not, etc., etc., etc., the round and round goes on.

In addition to the reasons Raskolnikov himself lays out, only to keep rejecting, there are several other possibilities: (1) His mental illness as the primary motivation. Certainly he would not have committed murder had he been in a balanced state of mind; (2) The idea that he is consciously seeking suffering. The “punishment” of the title operates even before he commits the crime, and he is punished in his own agonizing mind long before he is convicted and sent to Siberia. In this novel, as in so much fiction that Dostoevsky wrote, much is made of suffering as a means of purification of soul. Marmeladov says that he drinks not to relieve himself of guilt, but in order to redouble his sufferings. The peasant Mikolka, though not guilty, confesses to the crime in order to “accept his suffering” and suffer his way through to some redemption. As Porfiry Petrovich remarks, Mikolka is a “religious schismatic,” which in Russian is “iz raskol’nikov.” The very similarity of the word ‘schismatic’ with Raskolnikov’s surname suggests that this character is an alter ego of Raskolnikov. In fact, in summing up the possible reasons why Mikolka confessed (Part 6, Ch. 2, p. 383), Porfiry recapitulates Raskolnikov’s reasons for committing the crime. He ends up, once again, with suffering:

“Do you, Rodion Romanovich, know what some of these people mean by ‘suffering’? It is not suffering for somebody’s sake, but simply ‘suffering is necessary’—the acceptance of suffering . . . . . .  Mikolka desires to ‘accept suffering’ or something of the sort . . . . . What, can’t you admit that such fantastic creatures are to be found among people of this kind?”

(3) The issue of suppressed sensuality. Some psychological critics of Dostoevsky have suggested that Raskolnikov is, above all, a passionate character who has suppressed his own libido. In the text of the novel he is certainly a prude, and he reacts with revulsion to Svidrigailov’s openly expressed sensuality, his love for anatomy above all else. These same critics assert that one way Raskolnikov has of working out his repressed sexuality is murder. They comment on the sexual symbolism of the murder of two women, calling this a kind of sublimated rape.

Maurice Beebe mentions the succession of events just prior to the murder: the episode in which Raskolnikov encounters a drunken girl on the street, and saves her from a lecherous dandy pursuing her, followed by the mare dream (murder of a female horse), followed by his own acts of murder:

“The progression from seduced girl to beaten horse to murdered pawnbroker [and her sister] tells us much about the strain of aggressive sexuality that lies within Raskolnikov, a taint which he himself denies on the conscious level” (Beebe in Norton Critical Ed., p. 591).

In the epilogue of the novel Raskolnikov still struggles with motivations for his act. He is still suffering his way through to some kind of redemption, but we do not know if he will ever get there, because Sonya’s God of meekness and love still struggles in his soul with the devil of his pride. At any rate, by this late point in the novel it seems clear that the “superman motive,” his fierce pride and desire to prove himself better than other mere men, has taken precedence over the many other motivations for his crime.