Notes on CRIME AND PUNISHMENT Gogol Conjures up Raskolnikov Before He Exists

                                             Raskolnikov Conjured Up in "Dead Souls"

Sometimes it’s amazing how much influence Nikolai Gogol had on Dostoevsky. There’s a passage in Gogol’s Dead Souls, describing Chichikov’s return to the provincial town where he is staying, feeling in high spirits after his recent purchase of dead souls from the landowner Plewshkin.

So typical of Gogol’s style in his masterpiece, the action suddenly veers off out of Chichikov’s carriage, and we find ourselves in St. Petersburg, making the acquaintance of a young romantic dreamer who sticks his nose into the novel only this one time, and then vanishes like the wind.

“The thunderous rattling of the carriage and its leaps into the air made the occupant [Chichikov] notice that it had reached a paved way. The street lamps were not yet lit; only here and there had lights begun appearing in windows of the houses, while in the lanes and the blind alleys scenes and conversations were taking place inseparable from this time of day in all towns where there are many soldiers, cabbies, workmen, and beings of a peculiar species who look like ladies, wearing red shawls and shoes without stockings and who dart like bats over the street crossings at nightfall.

“Chichikov did not notice them, nor did he notice even the exceedingly slim petty officials with slender canes who, probably after taking a stroll beyond the town, were now returning to their homes. At rare intervals there would come floating to Chichikov’s ears such exclamations, apparently feminine, as ‘You lie, you drunkard, I never let him take no such liberties as that with me!’ or: ‘Don’t you be fighting, you ignoramus, but come along to the station house and I’ll show you what’s what!’ In brief, [and here we are suddenly in the northern capital, URB] such words as will suddenly scald, like so much boiling water, some youth of twenty as, lost in reveries, he is on his way home from the theater, his head filled with visions of a Spanish street, night, a wondrous feminine image with a guitar and ringlets.

“What doesn’t he have in that head of his and what dreams don’t come to him? He is soaring in the clouds and he may have just dropped in on Schiller for a chat, when suddenly, like thunder, the fatal words peal out over his head, and he perceives that he has come back to earth once more, and not only to earth, but actually to the Haymarket, and right by a pothouse, at that; and once more life has taken to strutting its stuff before him in its workaday fashion” [Dead Souls, Part I, near end of Ch. 6; I use the Guerney translation here].

Note the image of Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), the German poet whom Russians of the nineteenth century considered the embodiment of romantic idealism. Schiller is mentioned several times in Crime and Punishment; at one point Svidrigailov calls Raskolnikov “a Schiller,” and in the hero’s mixed up personality there is certainly something of the romantic idealist.

Most fascinating about the Gogolian passage, however, is the way it seems to conjure up—some twenty years before Dostoevsky invented him—the dreamer Raskolnikov, wandering the Haymarket in a daze, amidst all the drunken squalor, trying to concentrate on the dreams and murderous schemes in his deranged head.

Raskolnikov Ascending