Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

It is easy to get lost in the psychological and moral questions of Crime and Punishment. Let's begin visually, with one of the most arresting details.

After he has murdered the pawnbroker and her sister with an axe, Raskolnikov is dawdling about the apartment with no clear plan as to how to get rid of any evidence or where she has her money hidden.

He stood pensively in the middle of the room. A dark, tormenting thought was rising in him--the thought that he had fallen into madness and was unable at that moment either to reason or to protect himself, and that he was perhaps not doing at all what he should have been doing... "My God! I must run, run away!" he muttered, and rushed into the entryway. But there such horror awaited him as he had surely never experienced before. 

 He stood, looked, and could not believe his eyes: the door, the outside door, from the entryway to the stairs, the same door at which he had rung, and through which he had entered earlier, stood unlatched, even a good hand's breadth-ajar: no lock, no hook the whole time, during the whole time! 

This is described in such a "cinematic" way. You see his face in a reaction shot, before you see the open door. And the sentences are constructed so that the pertinent information "stood unlatched" follows twenty-six words after the subject "the door" is introduced. And the detail itself is the most unnerving, paranoid feeling: that one might have been observed "the whole time."

This paranoid experience of being exposed to the vision of others is the key to the whole novel. From the very first lines of the book, shame and visibility are in play. Going down the stairs from his garret, he avoids his landlady, wincing with cowardice at the very prospect of meeting her. And throughout, we are told that “He was least of all disposed at that moment to come face-to-face with anyone in the whole world, whoever it might be. All his bile rose up in him.”  Or again: “It seemed to him that at that moment he had cut himself off, as with scissors, from everyone and everything.”

The novel concerns the cowardice of trying to separate oneself from other people. Raskolnikov continually tries to "guarantee" (by his rudeness, his self-destruction, his sarcasm, his philosophy) that he will be spared the real, mundane, socially-bound, embarrassing, gross reality of life. It's not that he can "transcend" real life--he can't even face it! He is like a child who is too shy to ask the waiter for a refill of his Coke: and he confuses this with the most profound superiority.

His friend Razumikhin tells him: "The first thing you do in any circumstances is try not to resemble a human being." It is as though Raskolnikov's real cowardice is not his shrinking from the murder, his convulsions of guilt--rather, it is his antipathy towards the minor cares and substantial reality of social existence. He is impatient. What Raskolnikov is really terrified of is not that he will the multitudinous seas incarnadine. His real fear is of "petty," "vulgar" life--of getting tangled up in other persons at all. What he wants to be delivered from--to prove to himself that he is beyond, somehow--is just the real grind of affections and dependencies. And all of his nausea towards what is defective and impermanent around him is only, as it were, the fastidiousness of childhood! Not to get messy... "Had it been possible to go somewhere that minute and remain utterly alone, even for the whole of his life, he would have counted himself happy."

He mistakenly views the suffering in the world as demanding (as a response) definite, authoritative, world-historical solutions that would “prove” “once-and-for-all” the outlines of an abstract, final “new law” (or “new word”). Implicit in this demand is an idea of leaping outside of time, of somehow achieving a last word on all matters.

‘Where was it,’ Raskolnikov thought as he walked on, ‘where was it that I read about a man condemned to death saying or thinking, an hour before his death, that if he had to live somewhere high up on a cliffside, on a ledge so narrow that there was room only for his two feet--and with the abyss, the ocean, eternal darkness, eternal solitude, eternal storm all around him--and had to stay like that, on a square foot of space, an entire lifetime, a thousand years, an eternity--it would be better to live so than to die right now!’

Raskolnikov considers this lunar, isolated existence to be "life." (And compare with Svidrigailov's even more perverse idea that eternity is just a village bathhouse filled with spiders...) But this impatience and desire to telescope everything to its logical conclusion, is just what Christianity never meant for Dostoevsky. Raskolnikov's mistake is to think that God's presence would absolve anyone of trouble/mess/difficulty, that Christianity is “easy” and equally categorical. This is the meaning of the quotation, “If God does not exist, then everything is permitted,” from The Brothers Karamazov.

Raskolnikov's is an abstraction that doesn't want to “touch down” in the messiness of quotidian life. The investigator Porfiry is always taunting him with not being able to endure questioning, of (basically) trying to confess to anyone whoever just to get it over with. It is this impatience that is the key to Raskolnikov's character. He commits the murder in order to find out already what kind of person he is, to make this some objective fact, to leap over once and for all. He keeps "trying, so to speak, to make everyone talk the sooner and thus put an end to it all at once”

The decisive scene in the novel is when Sonya reads the raising of Lazarus passage from the Gospel of John. People will want to read this as Sonya proselytizing Raskolnikov, trying to convert him to Christianity, or just being naively faithful and devoted. It is none of this. The "resurrection scene" in this scene is not the Biblical story. It is what is happening IN LIFE right in front of her. She emphasizes that Christ has lain in the tomb for four days. That is, she emphasizes the time, the endurance, the non-transcendence of days and days of hopelessness. The "redemption of Raskolnikov's soul" is not a metaphysical event of divine salvation. It is occurring in this tiny room, right then.

On the last page, the embrace of the long penal sentence ("seven years, only seven years!") is a sign of embracing temporality, of patience with cares and insufficiencies... whereas the crime, the leap into abstractions and out of human cares, was an attempt to escape temporality.

The irony of the novel is that it is the atheist Raskolnikov who is obsessed with "eternity," and with a perspective of unchangeable truth that he can leap into, from out of worldly time. And it is the Christian, Sonya, who is pledged to the language of "four days" and "seven years," i.e. is committed not to the transcendental but to the world in front of her.

The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky

What does it mean that Dostoevsky was a Christian? And how is it that we are able to "forgive" him for  this, and to go on reading him? It does seem that, for all the continual chatter about the incompatibility of religion and science ("reason"), an even more pronounced schism is between religion and culture. Christianity is simply not to be taken seriously, to the point where proclaiming oneself an atheist is seen as sufficient evidence for being a thinking person. Christian "literature" is shelved separately from real literature in bookstores.

If we go on reading Dostoevsky, it is because his Christianity is surely of its time and culture, vaguely regrettable, perhaps "aesthetic" rather than fundamentalist at its root, and something we should overlook. Most of all, these beliefs are to be understood as something we know all about already: "Dostoevsky's Christianity" is a description jotted down in lecture, next to the dates of his birth, death, and publication of his major works.

Here is a website that considers Dostoevsky's isolated statements, biography, and crude summaries of his work from the point of view of a monolithic Russian Orthodoxy. This seems to me exactly the wrong approach, and a most un-Dostoevskyan approach. Nonetheless, there is a great deal of truth in noting that while Dostoevsky's "presentation of God, Christ, and sin are generally aligned with the theological thought of Christian orthodoxy," on the subject of salvation, "Dostoevsky is considerably less than a student of the New Testament could wish," as "Dostoevsky almost seemed to embrace an in-this-life purgatory."

I think there is a danger in representing, as these quotations from his biographer Joseph Frank do, Christianity as something Dostoevsky has whittled down to a necessary, but problematic tenet: "Dostoevsky was to say…that the problem of the existence of God had tormented him all his life; but this only confirms that it was always emotionally impossible for him ever to accept a world that had no relation to a God of any kind." or, "Dostoevsky to be a believing Christian in his own way, inwardly striving to accept the essential dogmas of the divinity of Christ, personal immortality, the Second Coming, and the Resurrection."

It seems rather to me that Dostoevsky, in his art, is not preserving a last outpost of Christianity, one that might "tip over" into doubt and rejection, such that his novels stage this siege of faith--not at all. Rather, Dostoevsky's Christianity is simply NOT a "problem of the existence of God," "of the divinity of Christ, personal immortality, the Second coming, and the Resurrection." Dostoevsky's Christianity is not weakened by these subtractions, it is not tenuous or vulnerable because it lacks definite answers to these metaphysical questions. 

There is a quote by Wittgenstein that gets at some of what Dostoyevsky is doing: 

Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For "consciousness of sin" is a real even tand so are despair and salvation through faith. 

Christianity in Dostoevsky's novels is a "dialogic" and contested space between characters, involving their personalities and situations--rather than a deus ex machina or cop-out. Dostoevsky is hardly recommending a satisfied bourgeois existence of religious prescriptions and church-going: in Crime and Punishment, almost the only Christian presence is the prostitute Sonya. No one gets their ticket to salvation stamped by faith in an afterlife or through remitting sins by confession.(You will notice that confessing-sin is one of the great pastimes in his novels; confession does not score points with God here.) 

Dostoevsky succinctly lays out his plan for The Idiot:

The main thought of the novel is to depict a positively beautiful individual. There is nothing more difficult than this on earth and especially at present... On earth there is only one positively beautiful person--Christ.  

But in composing the novel, Dostoevsky realizes, in his biographer's words, that "Sanctity is not a literary theme."

A quick summary of the novel would go like this: Prince Myshkin, an epileptic and a dreamer, returns to Russia from a Swiss asylum, so that he comes into the world as an innocent, a stranger, really a pure and celibate soul. "He knows nothing understands nothing, neither people nor sounds, a stranger to everything and a castaway." Immediately he is sucked into the depraved, envious, and hysterical machinations of materialist, ideologically-rent St. Petersburg society, which variously treats him as an embarrassment, a novelty, a sucker, and a threat. But if the prince is a beautiful soul, there is no outlet for it in this world. "All the souls are ulcerous, all the foundations are unstable, all the wellsprings are poisoned." The prince's every intention is misunderstood, every action goes awry, his apologies and his understanding are turned into weapons, "his love does not save, but destroys." He is more like Don Quixote than perhaps any other character in literature (Dostoevsky makes this comparison himself)*: he has no field of action except grotesque misunderstanding and the diversion of his purpose and noble character into their opposites. The novel ends with one of the darkest, most unnerving scenes in world literature: Myshkin shares a repulsive nocturnal vigil with the murderer of the desperate, self-defeating woman they both love. They are found in the morning:

Meanwhile it had grown quite light; he finally lay down on the pillows, as if quite strengthless now and in despair, and pressed his face to the pale and motionless face of Rogozhin; tears flowed from his eyes onto Rogozhin's cheeks, but perhaps by then he no longer felt his own tears and knew nothing about them... In any case, when, after many hours, the door opened and people came in, they found the murderer totally unconscious and delirious. The prince was sitting motionless on the bed beside him, and each time the sick man had a burst of shouting or raving, he quietly hastened to pass his trembling hand over his hair and cheeks, as if caressing and soothing him. But he no longer understood anything of what they asked him about, and did not recognize the people who came in and surrounded him.

* In his diary entries on Don Quixote, Dostoevsky treats the delusional knight with utter seriousness. Against the romantic idea of Don Quixote's "impossible dream" which casts a rosy, ennobling glow over the banal, disenchanted world-- Dostoevsky sees in Don Quixote the "needless ruination" of a great and "realist" mind. That is to say, we all read the novel as a series of mistakes, illusions, misreadings by this character, but Dostoevsky (quite remarkably) analyzes Don Quixote's intensity of soul, the mechanics of his conviction, that is to say the inner idea, considered independently of his miscues. 

Myshkin is similarly unable to decode reality, and is imprisoned within his impotence and a perspective incommensurable with the "mimetic desire" (Girard) of those around him. "The laws of social life were not written for him," says Mochulsky. Here too we find the needless ruination of a beautiful spirit. 

At first appearance, then, the novel is a simple thought experiment. "Q: What if a totally good, innocent person were to arrive in the world? A: The madness of the world would rise up against him, defeat him, destroy his idea of beauty, and pervert everything around him until he went insane." And this is plainly how things stand. Myshkin is a Christ-figure with no salvation to distribute, who does not rise again, who is scorned and punished for his goodness, who accomplishes no positive acts. (Joseph Frank remarks that Raskolnikov has more "good works" to his credit than Myshkin). And the forces at work against him are just as plainly the corrosive anti-values of materialism which threaten to pull him in: "He had the feeling that if he remained here just a few more days, he would certainly be drawn into this world irretrievably, and this world would henceforth be his lot."

Like Crime and Punishment and Notes from the Underground, The Idiot is thoroughly penetrated by a paranoid sense of exposure and observation. In Crime and Punishment, this has a double sense: on one hand, Raskolnikov, being guilty, is obsessed by the threat of discovery and suspicion. On the other hand, his crime itself has an "audience" in the sense of being meant to confirm objectively Raskolnikov's transcendence of mundane reality by "stepping over." Raskolnikov cannot bear to be seen by his landlady, to whom he owes rent, but at the same time is exposing his deeds and resolve to the supposed judgement of the world spirit.

In The Idiot, the collapsing and exposing power of vision is rendered in modes of physical experience: 

[Dostoevsky's new form of the "inobjective body"] is given in certain modes of experience: sickness, for instance, is as much subjective as objective; so is violence, and so is life with others, the "invasive" presence of the other (hence the privileged place Dostoevsky gives to doorways and thresholds, to sudden entrances and unexpected meetings)... The novel, broadly speaking, is an exploration of what it means to be flesh.

Characters are haunted by a need and fear to be seen, to be judged, and at the same time to shamefully conceal themselves, to lie, to be thrown into capricious and unpredictable frenzies that seemingly exist only to frustrate a rational observer (and are maddening for the reader). Thus, for Rogozhin, "the need for an interlocutor seemed more mechanical than moral; somehow more from distraction than from simple-heartedness; from anxiety, from agitation." 

Suffering is on display, it is an invitation to be discussed and seen: "Among the Japanese, an offended man supposedly goes to the offender and says to him: 'You have offended me, for that I have come to rip my belly open before your eyes,' and with those words he actually rips his belly open before his offender's eyes, no doubt feeling an extreme satisfaction, as if he had indeed revenged himself."

Keeping this in mind, let us turn to what almost everyone agrees to be the decisive motif in the novel, Holbein's painting of Christ taken down from the cross. From Ippolit's "explanation":

This picture portrays Christ just taken down from the cross. It seems to me that painters are usually in the habit of portraying Christ, both on the cross and taken down from the cross, as still having a shade of extraordinary beauty in his face; they seek to preserve this beauty for him even in his most horrible suffering. But in Rogozhin's picture there is not a word about beauty; this is in the fullest sense the corpse of a man who had endured infinite suffering before the cross, wounds, torture, beating by the guards, beating by the people as he carried the cross and fell down under it, and had finally suffered on the cross for six hours.... In the picture this face is horribly hurt by blows, open, the eyes crossed; the large, open whites have a sort of deathly, glassy shine. But strangely, when you look at the corpse of this tortured man, a particular and curious question arises: if all his disciples, his chief future apostles, if the women who followed him and stood by the cross, if all those who believed in him and worshipped him had seen a corpse like that (and it was bound to be exactly like that), how could they believe, looking at such a corpse, that this sufferer would resurrect? 

This is spoken by the atheist Ippolit (actually a somewhat insufferable character), who is one of Dostoevsky's "underground men." Atheism has a special place in Dostoevsky, as usually the murderers and suicides are proclaimed atheists. Atheism, by the way, has nothing to do with "not believing in God." 

[Rogozhin, the prince says,] doesn't believe in God. Only one thing struck me: it was as if that was not at all what he was talking about all the while, and it struck me precisely because before, too, however many unbelievers I've met, however many books I've read on the subject, it has always seemed that they were talking or writing books that were not at all about that, though it looked as if it was about that... The essence of religious feeling doesn't fit in with any reasoning, with any crimes and trespasses, or with any atheisms; there's something else here that's not that, and it will eternally be not that; there's something in it that atheisms will eternally glance off, and they will eternally be talking not about that. 

Back to our Christ. The other image in the novel that is really the same thing is the story, taken from Dostoevsky's own life, of a man sentenced to be executed, who is spared at the last second. How will this person live afterward? Will they be "resurrected" or will this encounter with death and hopelessness dissolve back into the quotidian cares and pushing of life? 

Let me wrap all this up. The person to-be-resurrected in the Holbein picture is not Christ but the viewer (the apostles, not shown, but also the viewer of the painting). The body of Christ is a mangled piece of human flesh, but not-asserting its divine, teleological fate is the "truly Christian" act. To be placed in front of a suffering mortal is not (as it is for Rogozhin) the moment to LOSE FAITH. This is what Christianity shows us: pained, powerless, matter that is nonetheless trying to "live beautifully" and failing, being defeated. 

The greatest blasphemy is the idea that Christ "set himself up," that his betrayal and execution are of no concern to him, that he was still going to get off the hook by being resurrected. Dostoevsky resolutely rejects this. This is the idea of a Rogozhin who stands defiantly "in full view and it seemed that he deliberately wanted to be in view. He stood like an accuser and a judge." Christ is not like Rogozhin. His death is not something performed-for-the-gaze-of-the-other. 

In Dostoevsky's novels, we run away from each other and from ourselves, we me make ourselves sick, we wallow in shame, we flee into explanations that degrade us (materialism), we worship unhappiness (our own and others'). Dostoevsky's Christianity is hard to hold onto--that's the point--but it asks of us to attend to the pain of others, to not perversely "win" within our own downfalls, to allow ourselves to be forgiven. (This last is what we do not do.) At its most challenging, The Idiot has Myshkin ask (just before falling into  an epileptic fit), "Is it really possible to be unhappy?" This is not an empirical question. There are executioners. We do not have to be our own.