Notes on CRIME AND PUNISHMENT The Petersburg Spirit, the Exultation of Slime

Staircase in St. Petersburg

The Atmosphere of Crime and Punishment: the Decadence of the “Petersburg Spirit”

I find it interesting that C and P is set in mid-summer, a time of bounteous sunlight and warmth in St. Petersburg. When I’m reading this somber novel I always have the feeling that I’m trekking through the St. Petersburg of autumn, with its chill, its cold rain and darkly oppressive air.

“It is possible to speak if not of a school then surely of a Petersburgian genre in Russian literature, of which Dostoevsky is in fact the leading practitioner. Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman is doubtless the outstanding poem in that genre, as Gogol’s “The Overcoat” is the outstanding story and C and P the outstanding novel.” In Russian literature the Petersburg Spirit embodies, largely, gloom, angst, the uncanny and macabre.

“Dostoevsky describes the metropolis in somber colors, taking us into its reeking taverns and coffin-like rooms, bringing to the fore its petty bourgeois and proletarian types, its small shopkeepers and clerks, students, prostitutes, beggars and derelicts. True as this is, there is also something else in Dostoevsky’s vision of Petersburg, a sense not so much of romance as of poetic strangeness, a poetic emotion attached to objects in themselves desolate, a kind of exaltation in the very lostness, loneliness and drabness which the big city imposes on its inhabitants.”

                         Philip Rahv, “Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment”

Dostoevsky was always fascinated by the Haymarket District, one of the slummiest parts of the city in the mid-nineteenth century, with its center on Haymarket Square (Сенная площадь). Here is where Raskolnikov went down on his knees and kissed the earth on his way to confess the murder. In the 1860s Dostoevsky lived in this area, on the corner of Carpenter’s Lane and Little Tradesmen Street. His daughter Lyubov—who was in her own right a character out of a Dostoevsky novel—later described him as roaming about Petersburg in the 1840s, “through the darkest and most deserted streets . . . . . He talked to himself as he walked, gesticulating and causing passersby to turn and look at him.” This makes a good story, but Lyubov probably relied mostly here on the idle rovings of characters out of her father’s works.

In Dostoevsky’s time the Haymarket area had the highest population density in the city. “A local landmark nicknamed the Vyazemsky Monastery was a great block of slums owned by Prince Vyazemsky, which served as the location of the Crystal Palace tavern in C and P” [Adele Lindenmeyr article in Dostoevsky: New Perspectives, p. 100]. There were eighteen taverns on Raskolnikov’s small street [Srednaya Meshchanskaya Street (Little Tradesmen St.)]. In 1865 an official government commission was established to investigate the overcrowding, disease, drunkenness and immorality of the Haymarket District.

After the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 peasants migrated to the city, looking for work. This influx strained he city’s already inadequate water supply and health services. Sanitation was bad. There were cholera epidemics. Into the Soviet period, and even after, the city had a reputation for bad drinking water. After one of Raskolnikov’s fainting spells (Part 2, Ch. 1) he comes around to find himself “sitting in a chair, supported by some person on his right, with somebody else on his left holding a dirty tumbler filled with yellowish water.” Yellow, incidentally, is one of Dostoevsky’s favorite colors in C and P, emblematic of the psychic malaise that pervades the novel.

You can still get a pretty good idea of the way things looked in the 1860s if you wander today around the so-called достоевские места (places associated with Dostoevsky, located mostly in close proximity to the Griboedov Canal). Certainly most of the taverns and dives are gone, as are the houses of prostitution, but there is still that same grimness of atmosphere, which has nothing in common with the architectural splendor of the area down by the Neva River, with its Russian baroque or neoclassical buildings. As late as the Soviet period you could still visit the prototype for Raskolnikov’s little coffin of a room, although I doubt if this is possible anymore. A photo taken out of that window provides the cover art on the Norton Critical Edition of C and P.

In Part 6, Ch. 3, Svidrigailov lectures to Raskolnikov on the Petersburg Spirit: “I am sure lots of people in St. Petersburg talk to themselves as they walk about. It’s a town of half-crazy people. If we had any science in this country, the doctors, lawyers and philosophers could conduct very valuable research in St. Petersburg . . . .  There are few places that exercise such strange, harsh and somber influences on the human spirit as St. Petersburg. What can be accomplished by climate alone!”

Sometimes you wonder how much of the malaise belongs to the spirit of the city, and how much of it is Dostoevsky’s own malaise, which he imposes on the city. Here is a description of Raskolnikov out on the streets, greedily breathing “the dusty, foul-smelling, contaminated air of the town,” listening to street singers (Part 2, Ch. 6):

“’Do you like street singing?’ asked Raskolnikov of a passerby, no longer young, and with the look of an idler, who had been standing by him near the organ-grinder. The man looked oddly at him, in great astonishment. ‘I do,’ went on Raskolnikov, with an expression as though he had been speaking of something much more important than street singing; ‘I like to hear singing to a barrel organ on a cold, dark, damp autumn evening—it must be damp—when the faces of all the passersby look greenish and sickly; or, even better, when wet snow is falling, straight down, without any wind, you know, and the gas-lamps shine through it.” 

Here we have an aesthetic exultation in slime, something about Raskolnikov’s sick soul that recalls what he once said about his strange fiancée: “I probably would have loved her even more, had she been lame or hump-backed.”

Among Russian writers Dostoevsky is probably best at describing how something in the human soul can derive artistic inspiration, not only from the beautiful, but also from the deformed and perverse. With the Decadent and Symbolist literary movements of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries came a lot of writers who portrayed this artistic exaltation of the squalid. Dostoevsky was their precursor, although he was officially still part of the school of Russian Realism.