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.