Notes to CRIME AND PUNISHMENT The Icon and the Axe

The Icon and the Axe

Among American scholarly works on Russian history and culture perhaps none ranks higher than James H. Billington’s monumental, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (Alfred A. Knopf, 1966). Billington chose this title because for him “Nothing better illustrates the combination of material struggle and spiritual exultation in Old Russia than the two objects that were traditionally hung together in a place of honor on the wall of every peasant hut: the axe and the icon.”

Billington goes on to outline briefly the symbolic importance of these two objects throughout Russian history. Much of what he says has direct application to the plot and themes of Crime and Punishment. Pre-Christian tribes in what was to become Russia used axes for money and buried them ritually with their owners. Even after the coming to Russia of Christianity in 988 AD the axe remained important as the primary weapon in close-range fighting and the implement used by frontiersmen to fell trees and build structures.

Russian proverbs make frequent reference to the axe: “The axe is the head of all business; “You can make it through all the world with only an axe.” Here are a few more in Russian: “Мудер, когда в руках топор, а без топора не стоит и комара (roughly: he’s a real wise guy with an axe in his hands; take away his axe and he’s a buzzing mosquito);” “Без топора по дрова не ходят (Don’t go out chopping and leave your axe at home;” “Мужика не шуба греет, а топор (It’s not a fur coat warms a peasant; it’s an axe).”

When you are astounded by something someone has done or said you say, “Меня как обухом по голове (literally: It’s as if someone hit me on the head with the blunt end of an axe).” Which is exactly what the old usurer lady in C and P must have had ringing through her mind, since she was literally hit on the head with that blunt end.

As the Russians consolidated their new civilization in the Upper Volga region after the coming of Christianity and began spreading out to the eastern frontier, they used the axe to hack out clearings, to fell trees and build fortifications. Only in relatively recent times historically were nails widely used in building, let alone saws and planes. 

The peasants used axes for terrorizing the landed nobility in uprisings throughout early Russian history, and the tsars used axes to put down the uprisings.

The axe was also “the standard instrument of summary execution . . . . Leaders of the revolts were publicly executed by a great axe in Red Square, Moscow, in the ritual of quartering. One stroke was used to sever each arm, one for the legs, and a final stroke for the head” (Billington).

The axe was always associated with political rebellion, and here is where the instrument as used by Raskolnikov in C and P is especially appropriate. Several critics have pointed out that Raskolnikov’s act of murder is symbolically an act of political revolution. He chooses to kill someone who has no political significance, but he is inspired to do so by political ideals and rhetoric of the radical left of the times. 

In the early 1860s, at the very time that Dostoevsky was formulating his plans for the novel, the radical thinker Dobrolyubov was summarizing the Utopian Socialist program of his colleague and friend Chernyshevsky’s book, What Is To Be Done? as “Calling Russia to Axes.”

Both Notes from the Underground, the work of fiction published directly before C and P, and C and P itself are vehement polemics with Chernyshevsky’s ideas and principles. No doubt Crime and Punishment is in some respects a political allegory, suggesting the danger of radical ideas when some misguided someone decides to act upon them.

By the late 1860s the notorious revolutionary Sergei Nechaev had set up a “secret society of the axe.” Dostoevsky died in January, 1881, and in March of that year the terrorist group known as “People’s Will” achieved their greatest triumph when they succeeded in assassinating the “Tsar Liberator” Aleksandr II. They used bombs, however, rather than axes. 

This was already the sixth or seventh attempt on the tsar’s life, the first being in 1866. It was as if that murder were in the Russian air, and Russian history could not go on until it was achieved. Despite all of Dostoevsky’s writings—both fiction and nonfiction—about the wrongheadedness of radical left dogma, the dangers of putting such dogma into practice, the ideas had a momentum of their own, moving almost inevitably along until the October Revolution of 1917.

If you read the testimony at the trial of one of the perpetrators of the assassination in March, 1881—a man named Andrei Zhelyabov—it sounds as if one of Dostoevsky’s characters were talking, spewing out revolutionary slogans but throwing in a love for Jesus Christ in the bargain. Later on, in the early years of the Russian Revolution, the great poet Aleksandr Blok put Christ at the head of a group of marauding revolutionary sailors, in his controversial poem, “The Twelve.” [On Zhelyabov, see Norton Critical Ed. of C and P, p. 559]

Written at the dawn of the twentieth century, Anton Chekhov’s play, The Cherry Orchard, emblematic of the end of the landed nobility in Russia, and even foreshadowing the end of Imperial Russia itself, concludes with the sounds of an axe, chopping down the trees in the orchard. The image of the axe carries over into Soviet times, since in 1940 the most brilliant of the men who made the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Leon Trotsky, was assassinated in Mexican exile. He was hit over the head with an ice axe, which remained implanted in his skull.

While researching demographics and health issues in the Soviet Union, the American scholar Murray Feshbach discovered that the most common murder weapon in the country was still the axe. There had always been strict gun-control laws, and Soviet society was still quite rural, so the axe tended to be the weapon most accessible to the average Russian. 

As for the modern Russian Federation, I have not seen statistics about murder weapons. One thing for sure: firearms in Russia are still tightly controlled. If the Russian Federation had the kind of gun laws that the U.S. has, the whole country probably would have been wiped out by now.

Billington’s other overriding symbol of Russia, the icon or religious image, is also directly relevant to Raskolnikov and major themes of C and P. Raskolnikov’s inner struggle, the dominant theme of the novel, is really a struggle between the icon and the axe. After he kills the old pawnbroker he throws down the icons or crosses on her body, symbolically rejecting the Russian Orthodox Christian tradition that was so important to him in his childhood. Of course, if we are to believe the rays of brightness that shine into the epilogue, the saintly Sonya will eventually win Raskolnikov over, turning him from the path of the axe back to that of the icon.