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.

Notes on CRIME AND PUNISHMENT Motivations for the Murder

Motivations

Why did he do it? This is the central question of C and P, which is a murder mystery, but not what they call a “whodunnit.” This novel is a “whydunnit,” or a “I-done-it-but-I-don’t-know-why-I-dunnit.” Of course, in all of Dostoevsky’s fiction characters are ruled by subconscious impulses that they themselves are unaware of. Raskolnikov is mired in the cyclical processes of human reasoning, which Dostoevsky, the great anti-rational rationalist, treats with suspicion.

So, as one critic, Phillip Rahv, has put it, Raskolnikov is “the criminal in search of his motive” (Norton Critical Ed., p. 540-41). Why did he do it? The full complexity of the issue becomes manifest only about halfway through the book (Part 3, Ch. 5; p. 218-25 in the Norton Critical Ed.), when, for the first time we hear about the article he has published on crime. Much to the surprise of Raskolnikov, who was not even aware that his article had been printed, the police inspector, Porfiry Petrovich tells him that he has read it. The central point of the article is that human beings are divided into the ordinary and the extraordinary. The ordinary are like sheep, baaing their way passively through life, but the extraordinary have the right to overstep the boundaries of morality and law, to commit immoral acts in furtherance of their majestic goals. This overstepping provides the title of the novel, Преступление и наказание—the word for ‘crime’ in Russian, at its root meaning, suggests a “stepping across,” akin to the word “transgression” in English.

In his conversation with Sonya (Part 5, Ch. 5; p. 348-54), Raskolnikov’s confusion about his motive becomes apparent, when he goes through nearly every possible motivation for his crime, rejecting or revising each of them on the fly. Svidrigailov, who is conveniently eavesdropping on this conversation, later recapitulates the motivations to Dunya (Part 6, Ch. 5, p. 415). Here is roughly how the process goes in Raskolnikov’s feverish mind.

I did it because I was poor and I needed money to launch my career, but no, what I really wanted was to help my mother and sister and, after all, I had just received a letter from my mother describing how my sister Dunya was about to prostitute herself by marrying a despicable character, sacrificing herself to help me, but no, it wasn’t really that, what I wanted was to get money so that I could go about doing good, working toward the eradication of human evil and social inequality on earth, and I figured that by killing one contemptible old woman, who nobody on earth needed and who soon would die anyway, I could get that money and then atone for this one transgressive act by doing great good for the rest of my life, and, besides that, I was, after all, insane, or nearly insane, going nuts lying here in that cramped coffin of a room and actually physically ill as well, feverish, not even aware of what I was doing, but no, it wasn’t really that, what I wanted to be was a great man, a man who can transcend commonplace vulgar morality and become a superman, prove that he is above the ethics of the stupid baaing herd, a Napoleon, and I really could have been a Napoleon, I’ve got the stuff for it, but no, really I’m just a common louse like everyone else, but I had to know, you see, it was an experiment, I had to find out if I was a man or a louse, I had to know whether I really could overstep the bounds, whether I could do something that ordinary men are not capable of doing, and I didn’t really care about my mother and sister or the money, it was just the principle of the thing, and you know what’s the most despicable thing of all? By collapsing emotionally and physically the way I have, all I’ve really proved is that I’m a louse after all, Napoleon would have done it without even thinking about the sleaze of it, the immorality, he wouldn’t have worried for a moment about the ethics of the thing, he was beyond mere morality, a superman, but me, I’m a louse, and yet maybe I judge myself too soon and too harshly, maybe I still have great things in me, maybe I’m not a louse after all, yes I am, no, you’re not, etc., etc., etc., the round and round goes on.

In addition to the reasons Raskolnikov himself lays out, only to keep rejecting, there are several other possibilities: (1) His mental illness as the primary motivation. Certainly he would not have committed murder had he been in a balanced state of mind; (2) The idea that he is consciously seeking suffering. The “punishment” of the title operates even before he commits the crime, and he is punished in his own agonizing mind long before he is convicted and sent to Siberia. In this novel, as in so much fiction that Dostoevsky wrote, much is made of suffering as a means of purification of soul. Marmeladov says that he drinks not to relieve himself of guilt, but in order to redouble his sufferings. The peasant Mikolka, though not guilty, confesses to the crime in order to “accept his suffering” and suffer his way through to some redemption. As Porfiry Petrovich remarks, Mikolka is a “religious schismatic,” which in Russian is “iz raskol’nikov.” The very similarity of the word ‘schismatic’ with Raskolnikov’s surname suggests that this character is an alter ego of Raskolnikov. In fact, in summing up the possible reasons why Mikolka confessed (Part 6, Ch. 2, p. 383), Porfiry recapitulates Raskolnikov’s reasons for committing the crime. He ends up, once again, with suffering:

“Do you, Rodion Romanovich, know what some of these people mean by ‘suffering’? It is not suffering for somebody’s sake, but simply ‘suffering is necessary’—the acceptance of suffering . . . . . .  Mikolka desires to ‘accept suffering’ or something of the sort . . . . . What, can’t you admit that such fantastic creatures are to be found among people of this kind?”

(3) The issue of suppressed sensuality. Some psychological critics of Dostoevsky have suggested that Raskolnikov is, above all, a passionate character who has suppressed his own libido. In the text of the novel he is certainly a prude, and he reacts with revulsion to Svidrigailov’s openly expressed sensuality, his love for anatomy above all else. These same critics assert that one way Raskolnikov has of working out his repressed sexuality is murder. They comment on the sexual symbolism of the murder of two women, calling this a kind of sublimated rape.

Maurice Beebe mentions the succession of events just prior to the murder: the episode in which Raskolnikov encounters a drunken girl on the street, and saves her from a lecherous dandy pursuing her, followed by the mare dream (murder of a female horse), followed by his own acts of murder:

“The progression from seduced girl to beaten horse to murdered pawnbroker [and her sister] tells us much about the strain of aggressive sexuality that lies within Raskolnikov, a taint which he himself denies on the conscious level” (Beebe in Norton Critical Ed., p. 591).

In the epilogue of the novel Raskolnikov still struggles with motivations for his act. He is still suffering his way through to some kind of redemption, but we do not know if he will ever get there, because Sonya’s God of meekness and love still struggles in his soul with the devil of his pride. At any rate, by this late point in the novel it seems clear that the “superman motive,” his fierce pride and desire to prove himself better than other mere men, has taken precedence over the many other motivations for his crime.