Notes to CRIME AND PUNISHMENT Sophie's Choice

Sofie’s Choice

Throughout the action of C and P Dostoevsky’s religious message is that Raskolnikov must follow the path of Sonya towards salvation, rather than the path of Svidrigailov towards perdition. For a short time after Svidrigailov kills himself, Raskolnikov seems himself to be on the verge of suicide. Eventually, with the help of some serious nudging in the ribs by his creator Dostoevsky, Raskolnikov seems to choose—in the epilogue of the novel—Sonya’s path of self-sacrifice and renunciation of the ego.

One of the central religious and philosophical questions of the book is the question Raskolnikov puts to Sonya (Part 5, Ch. 5). “If you had to choose who was to die, Luzhin or Katerina Ivanovna, which one would you choose?” Sonya answers that this is God’s business: “Who made me a judge over my fellow human beings?” Of course, Raskolnikov has already judged and chosen whom to kill, has already played God when he committed murder. Sonya is telling him that human beings have no right to make such choices.

But in a way Dostoevsky is begging the question here, since Sonya is made to choose only hypothetically; she is not really forced to choose between a dead Luzhin and a dead Katerina Ivanovna. In reality the question is not so easily resolved as Dostoevsky suggests. In the film “Seven Beauties” by the German filmmaker Lina Wertmuller the German woman commandant in a prison camp forces the Italian prisoner Pasqualini to pick six of his fellow prisoners to be shot. If he refuses to pick six, then the whole barracks will be shot. What would Sonya do?

In refusing to make a choice you may be simultaneously making a choice. This is the central issue in William Styron’s twentieth century novel Sophie’s Choice. Note that the female characters in this novel and in C and P have the same name: Sofya. Sonya is a nickname in Russian for Sofya, and the character’s full name is Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladova. In choosing this name for his main heroine Styron certainly must have had Sonya Marmeladova and the question Raskolnikov put to her in mind.

Styron’s Sophie arrives with her two children, a boy and a girl, at a German concentration camp during WW II. One of the guards tells her that she must choose which of the children is to die. She can save one of them, but not both; if she refuses to choose, both children will die. Sophie chooses to send her little daughter to the crematorium, thereby saving her son. Then she spends the rest of her life in agony over the choice she made. This to some extent parallels the way Raskolnikov suffers over his choice to commit murder. Sophie is forced to answer the hypothetical question posed by Raskolnikov to Sonya, and she ends up taking Svidrigailov’s way out: suicide.

                                         

                             Dostoevsky Monument in Moscow, Sergei Merkurov, 1913