Crime and what?

Oliver Ready offers an insightful analysis of Crime and Punishment in the latest TLS.

As Ready says, the book’s title creates expectations about its contents: “A ready-made title, Crime and Punishment suggests a ready-made plot. A man will commit a crime. He will be caught. He will be punished. His fate will revolve around the conflicts between freedom and conscience, the delinquent individual and the punitive state. Justice, no doubt, will be done.”

What Dostoevsky wrote, however, was anything but straightforward: “At one level the novel we go on to read satisfies all of these conventional expectations. At another all of them are unsettled, if not thoroughly undermined. We read of murders committed by a handsome young man whom it would be difficult to identify precisely with the radicals of the 1860s (though some offended young readers contrived to do so) or with its unhandsome author. Disturbingly, this man is unsure that his gruesome acts were crimes at all; unsure at times that they even happened. For much of the book he even seems to forget one of his murders entirely. The reality of punishment also eludes him for an unreasonably long time, despite his best efforts. In his mind everything begins to merge: past and future, right and wrong, perpetrator and victim, crime and punishment. The opposition stated by the title, so familiar and in its way so comforting, begins to dissolve for the reader, too; a dark joke, perhaps – like Dostoevsky’s own ‘execution’? – yet no less serious for that.”

One of the factors that unsettles things is the “psychogeography of St. Petersburg, that most abstract and intentional city in the world (as Dostoevsky called it). Raskolnikov lives in a “cupboard” that his mother presciently calls a “coffin.” Beyond his little corner, the city itself is a welter of disorientation: “the overcrowded, shabby area of St Petersburg’s Haymarket district, with its narrow, twisting streets, its fetid canal (or ‘Ditch’) and its filthy stairwells, drinking dens and connecting courtyards, through which tradesmen, prostitutes and criminals ‘hurry and scurry.’”

The novel is not, Ready rightly notes, a “whodunnit” but a “whydunnit,” but motivations are multiplied to the point that they lose their explanatory power. Raskolnikov kills for ideological reasons (e.g., society is better without that old lady), for family reasons, out of resentment about his failures, because he is criminally insane, etc. etc. on and on. Behind all these, Ready suggests that the reason for Raskolnikov’s crime is his “utter passivity,” which is a kind of “spiritual death.” The ideas he adopts are not the result of study but “in the air,” and he gets battered around by circumstances rather than affecting them by his actions. 

Ready doesn’t think this counts as an “explanation,” and he goes on to discuss Dostoevsky’s notion of the relation of literature and life. But in stressing the fact that Raskolnikov is battered by every wind because he lacks spiritual rootedness, Ready gets to the heart of the novel, indeed to the heart of Dostoevsky’s fears for the human race.