Makar Devushkin, Protagonist of "Poor People"
Sonya and Raskolnikov
The Issue of Mental Instability
and Raskolnikov’s Split Personality
Of all world writers Dostoevsky is probably number one for
attracting the interest of psychologists or medical doctors with an interest in
abnormal psychology. Dostoevsky himself was severely ill most of his life with
epilepsy, and with a nervous disease apparently consequent upon the epilepsy.
There is a fascinating book by James Rice, Dostoevsky
and the Healing Art, which deals in depth with Dostoevsky’s lifetime
struggle with his illnesses and the manifestations of emotional maladies in his
works.
Perhaps no other writer in world literature has so many
emotionally disturbed characters. In his very first novel, Poor People, we encounter a raft of such people, including the two
main characters, Devushkin and Varvara. In C
and P not only is the main hero severely deranged, but lots of others are
as well. Soon after her son’s arrest, his overwrought mother Pulkheria
Aleksandrovna goes out of her mind, and the consumptive Katerina Ivanovna
Marmeladova goes raving mad soon after her husband’s death, raging around the
streets and forcing her little children to beg.
Another example. Porfiry Petrovich, the police inspector
with a keen feel for human psychology that rivals Dostoevsky’s own, has a
nervous giggle, and his perpetual frantic movements suggest the sort of
character whose playacting in aid of his efforts to catch criminals has led his
mind a bit astray.
Raskolnikov, however, is the main character, and you cannot
make much of the book without coming to some understanding of his mental state,
which, from the very beginning of the action, is highly confused, even
feverish. He is constantly pulled in opposite directions by opposing forces
within his psyche. Time and again we see him almost intuitively doing good and
then rebelling against his own altruism. As Razumikhin says, “it is as if he
had two separate personalities, each taking turns dominating him.”
Early in the book (Part 1, Ch. 4), in an episode developed
out of Dostoevsky’s early story, White
Nights, Raskolnikov comes upon a drunk, abused girl staggering along the
street. His immediate impulse is to help her and rescue her from the lecherous
gentleman pursuing her. Only after he has managed to protect her, with the help
of a passing policeman, do we get the switchover in his personality. “An
instantaneous revulsion of feeling seemed as it were to sting Raskolnikov,” and
he tells the policeman, “No, forget it. Let him [the lecher] amuse himself. It’s
not our business.” After this the evil rationalizing side of him takes over for
the whole next page.
It’s almost as if Raskolnikov has a switch in his head and
that switch periodically flips over to one side or the other. Dostoevsky is
setting up a rather simple dichotomy here in the service of his religious
message: the devil and God are fighting for Raskolnikov’s soul within his
psyche. We see this sort of thing again and again, and it becomes too obvious
to belabor. After Raskolnikov has generously given what little money he has to
the Marmeladov family, the switch clicks over: “What a stupid thing to do,” he thought.
“After all, they have Sonya and I need it myself.” The sarcastic, prideful,
godless side of the character clicks over to manifest itself even during his
conversations with Sonya. See Part 4, Ch. 4.
Of course, deep down (we are to assume) Raskolnikov is a
good person. In the epilogue we learn that he had once helped a poor
consumptive student and his ailing father and had rescued two little children
from a fire. But his pride remains with him to the very end, and for Dostoevsky
pride in humanity is of the devil. Until Raskolnikov can humble himself as Sonya
tells him, he cannot hope to be saved.
Note that as Raskolnikov is on the way to the police station
to confess, he falls down and kisses the earth he has defiled. Sonya has told
him that he must do this and must say, “I am a murderer.” Bystanders begin
laughing when they see him on the ground: “It’s because he’s going to Jerusalem,
lads [says one of them], and he’s saying good-bye to his family and his
country. He’s bowing down to the whole world and kissing the famous city of St.
Petersburg and the soil it stands on” (Part 6, Ch. 8).
Sonya (and Dostoevsky) would like to believe that
Raskolnikov is bound eventually for Jerusalem, for expiation of his crime and salvation,
but he still has a long way to go. Sonya wants him to humble himself by kissing
the good earth, an ancient symbol of warmth and benevolence for Russians, but
note that here he ends up kissing the soil of St. Petersburg, the city that for Dostoevsky symbolizes all the
unease and malevolence that so works on his hero’s mind, and all the nefarious,
rational principles imported into Russia from the West.
Is the split in Raskolnikov ever resolved? I don’t think so.
Note that in the prison camp described in the epilogue he is still dominated by
pride and hatred for his fellow man. Dostoevsky would have us believe that in a
sudden burst of light—and of course with the help of the saintly Sonya—Raskolnikov
receives God’s grace:
“How it happened he himself did not know, but suddenly he
seemed to be seized and cast at her feet. He clasped her knees and wept. For a
moment she was terribly frightened, and her face grew white . . . . . . But at
once, at that instant, she understood . . . she no longer doubted that he loved
her, loved her forever and that now at last the moment had come . . .”
Unfortunately, this passage is far from believable. Here we
have a character who goes round and round—much like the Underground Man, that
prisoner of rationalization in Notes from
the Underground—alternating between Christian love and satanic hatred for 462
pages, and then suddenly, on p. 463, he finds salvation. This passage is what
is called empty rhetoric, forced by wishful thinking. You can almost see the
author prodding his reluctant protagonist here at the end of the book, forcing
him over into the camp of Jesus: “Come on! Get on over there. Stop resisting! I
said you’re saved.”
Of course, even Dostoevsky sensed the lack of verisimilitude
in such an easy solution to the dilemma of his schizo hero, so he immediately began
hedging around on the last two pages, suggesting that, no, Raskolnikov is not
really quite saved yet. What happened just now is merely the first step on his path to salvation.
Oddly enough, the novel ends by suggesting that before the character can find
peace at least one more novel will have to be written:
“But that is the beginning of a new story, the story of the
gradual renewal of a man, of his gradual regeneration, of his slow progress
from one world to another, of how he learned to know a hitherto undreamed-of
reality. All that might be the subject of a new tale, but our present one is
ended.”
This ending with the suggestion of no ending at all is
rather typical of the Russian realist novel of the nineteenth century. Gogol
ended the first part of Dead Souls by
promising great things in future volumes—including the redemption of his rogue
hero Chichikov. He never got those future volumes written to his own
satisfaction. Tolstoy finished off his heroine in Anna Karenina the best way a novelist can (with her death), but as
this long novel ends we see the male hero, Levin, struggling with depression,
doubting the meaning of life, contemplating suicide. His story is never
concluded. Russian writers like to mention “hitherto undreamed-of realities,”
but they seldom get around to treating those nebulous things in concrete terms,
and writing books that are totally finished.
“Dostoevsky understood only restless, fractious, struggling
people whose search is never ended. No sooner did he undertake to show us a man
who has found himself and achieved tranquility than he fell into fatal banalities”
(Lev Shestov cited in Norton Critical Ed. of C and P, footnote on p. 543-44).
Of course life is never finished either, not until you are
dead, so perhaps it is better to leave the characters with an open-ended path
ahead of them. As Grace Paley once wrote, “Everyone, real or invented, deserves
the open destiny of life.”
The Sudden Revelation (Ending of "Crime and Punishment")
