Sermon in a Tavern

In her contribution to Dostoevsky and the Christian Tradition, Diane Thompson offers a brilliant analysis of Marmeladov’s speech to Raskolnikov at the beginning of Crime and Punishment.

Everything he says is seasoned with grandiloquent references to the gospels, and especially to the Passion and last judgment narratives. He says of himself “Behold the Man,” but hastily adds “I have the image of the beast.” “I should be crucified,” he says, but then he adds his hope that he and his daughter Sonya, who has become a prostitute to support her impoverished family, will find forgiveness.

The effect is comic and “carnivalesque,” but Thompson doesn’t beliefe it is inappropriate: “A drunkard enjoys a carnival
freedom from decorum; he can proclaim and he can scandalise. We
may detect here a hidden polemic with official Christianity whose
respectable adherents would and in this scene a gross and shocking
travesty of the Gospels. This carnivalised situation is in complete
accord with the Christian spirit; Christ lived among the lowest
classes, mingling with sinners, social outcasts, the poor, the downtrodden
and humiliated. The whole meaning of His mission would
collapse were He not present here, in the Petersburg misery” (72).

Te speech constitutes “a nineteenth-century variation on an old
Christian style, the sermo humilis, which lends dignity to any theme or
speaker, no matter how lowly, humble or comic, because it combines
them with the most sublime and serious of topics, Christian salvation
and redemption,” and, because it sticks in Raskolnikov’s mind, it sets off the redemptive arc of the novel (73).

This is superb. Putting “holy” words in the “profane” mouth of a drunk, Dostoevsky is flirting with blasphemy, as Shakespeare does by putting Pauline ecstasies in the mouth of Bottom the weaver. But the comic, nearly farcical setting doesn’t desacralize the words, because the words are made for just this place, this “Petersburg misery.” As Thompson says, if a Petersburg drunk cannot quote the Bible in a tavern, then we are of all men most miserable; we are still in our sins.