Crime and Punishment is one of two long novels Dostoyevsky wrote during a four month frenzy in 1886. [1] His amazing rate of production may explain some of the novel’s unusual features—both the exuberance, discursiveness and spontaneity of the narrative and the consequent difficulty of summarising it. Richard Pevear, in the foreword to his own translation, compares the many conflicting characterisations of Crime and Punishment to, “the Hindu parable of blind men describing an elephant, each by feeling a different part—‘a snake,’ ‘a hog weed,’ ‘a tree,’ ‘a broom,’ ‘a wall,’” but then annexes to this platitude a remark that seems to deny the use of summarising any novel: “The first perplexity of criticism is that is must speak monosemantically of the polysemous.” Few will want to quarrel with Pevear when he opines that criticism is no substitute for art. “The life of the novel,” he observes, “is not in the conception but in the performance, which eludes summary.” But when we reflect on his next assertion—that, therefore, his translation of the novel is the best commentary on the novel—one is reminded of Borges’ parable of the cartographer who had no tolerance for simplification and so drew up his map of the kingdom on a scale of 1:1; a map that was coextensive with and completely covered the territory it represented and thus completely absurd and useless. Pevear is right that the territory cannot be fitted to the map but he is wrong that the map is therefore useless. It is precisely because Crime and Punishment is so plethoric, so polyphonic, that a summary is useful. It what follows it will my concern to summarise a single but central theme of this story of sin and redemption: The profound lesson it offers us about the spiritual life. Rodion Raskolnikov is a talented law student who has run out of money and been forced to curtail his education. The scene is therefore set when, at the start of the novel, he takes an axe to an elderly pawnbroker and her disabled sister and makes off with the contents of their strongbox. The money will allow Raskolnikov to finish his studies and set up a new life for himself—but actually, this is almost an afterthought for him. His real interest lies in something that he has been feverishly brooding over in his tiny rented garret in the weeks leading up to the crime: The idea of committing murder to prove that his superior intelligence sets him above the law. [2] What is so strange, so initially perplexing, is that Raskolnikov thereafter shows himself to be a man of good conscience. In one scene, he gives the entirety of an unexpected and much-needed financial windfall to a poor widow, Katerina Ivanovna, so that she can pay for her husband’s funeral; in another, he befriends and defends Sonya—a teenage girl who, to her intense mortification, has been forced into prostitution by her destitute family. He is also appropriately disgusted at the exploits of the wealthy sensualist Svidrigalov and offended by the machinations of the callous opportunist Luzhin—men who, to give a personal edge to the offence, have arrived in the city to pursue his beautiful sister, Dunya. Viewed in the round, Raskolnikov cuts a very paradoxical figure: He is a kindhearted and compassionate axe-murderer. Clearly, something has gone badly wrong with him and at first one wonders if he is only confused intellectually. It seems reasonable to suppose that his moral intuitions are more or less sound but he has taken a wrong turn in his thinking—something that could easily be straightened out, so long as the lesson were preceded by the appropriate complement of suffering in order to mortify his vanity. And so I found myself having imaginary arguments with Raskolnikov in which I drew on the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. Man, as a rational animal, is naturally ordered towards the moral good. To do evil is therefore to frustrate the ends which define what it is for us to flourish given the kinds of things we are. It is logical: No man can be above the moral law if pursuing the moral good is the telos of man—any more than a clock of sufficiently superior construction can be above the purpose of keeping good time. If only Raskolnikov could be made to understand all this, I thought, the whole moral crisis would be resolved. Reading the last few pages of Crime and Punishment, it seems doubtful that Dostoyevsky would agree with me. The reason is that Raskolnikov’s psychopomp is not a philosopher but the brokenhearted whore, Sonya. It is at her urging that Raskolnikov reluctantly turns himself in to the police near the end of the novel—though even at this late stage of the narrative he does not feel the slightest remorse but only a personal humiliation. Since committing murder he has been plagued—almost incapacitated—by attacks of anxiety and distress and these, he knows, have no place in the psychology of an Ubermensch. His experiment has therefore proven that he is not a genius and so he drifts into his sentence of hard labour in Siberia out of a hopeless resignation to his own fate and spends his first few months of penal servitude in a state of moral and spiritual stupefaction. He dislikes, and is disliked by, the other prisoners. Sonya, who has made an impressive vow to follow him to the ends of the earth, has followed him into exile and visits him regularly—but Raskolnikov hardly notices her. He is irritably indifferent to the unpaid grunt work, the patchwork rags he is forced to wear, the wretched food. His only regret is that he was too stupid and too weak to murder with total impunity. And then his redemption comes suddenly and unexpectedly. Early one morning, Raskolnikov is sitting on a log by the river on a short break from making bricks. Sonya approaches and, almost inaudibly, sits down beside him. Pale and careworn, she gives Raskolnikov her hand as she has done so many times before. Usually, Raskolnikov takes it “as if with loathing,” but on this occasion he experiences a sudden sunburst of comprehension. For the first time, he realises how amazing it is that Sonya, in her private hell of suffering, should be feeling for him, a murderer, steadfast compassion and love. And all at once, “it was as if something lifted him up and flung him down at her feet.” Raskolnikov embraces Sonya’s knees, and in this position, begins to weep. And Sonya, though somewhat frightened by the spectacle, understands everything: “That he loved her, loved her infinitely, and that at last the moment had come…” It is notable in view of what follows that Sonya has not spoken one word to Raskolnikov about religion—let alone argued with him about it. True, after he confesses his terrible crime to her, there is a memorable scene in which whore and murderer read the New Testament together—“sitting side by side, sad and crushed, as if they had been washed up alone on a deserted shore after a storm.” But Sonya only reads a few verses from John because Raskolnikov demands it; and Raskolnikov only demands it because he wants to sneer sarcastically at her piety. The only time Sonya tells Raskolnikov to pray—specifically, to go to a crossroads, bow down, kiss the earth he has defiled and say to everyone, “I have killed!”—is when he turns to her, his face “hideously distorted by despair,” and begs her to tell him what to do. Even her bible, which is now under the pillow of his prison bed, is only there because Raskolnikov, on an obscure impulse, asked for it and Sonya quietly brought it to him. Until now he has not even looked at it. But after the scene on the riverbank, he finally picks up “the eternal book” and opens it. Clearly, Sonya's capacity for compassion and spirituality throughout the most appalling personal suffering has finally communicated to Raskolnikov the moral beauty of the Gospel more eloquently than any philosophical homily could do. But if we leave it at that—if we conclude that this scene merely signifies Raskolnikov's decision to follow Sonya’s good example of moral conduct—we have trivialised his moment of salvation. It is significant that Raskolnikov's epiphany on the riverbank should lead him directly to the New Testament and from there to, “his gradual regeneration, his gradual transition from one world to another, his acquaintance with a new, hitherto completely unknown reality.” It suggests that something far more profound—and far less sublunary—has taken place: Raskolnikov has made his first frightened contact with God. The idea that unconditional love—agape—brings us to a knowledge of God and that this is the message of Crime and Punishment is corroborated by Dostoyevsky’s last and greatest novel, The Brothers Karamazov. In reply to a woman plagued by religious doubts, Father Zosima—who is the spiritual mentor of Alyosa, the hero of the novel—makes the same point but more explicitly. “The more you succeed in loving,” he instructs her, “the more you’ll be convinced of the existence of God and the immortality of your soul.” [3] How can simply loving others draw us nearer to God? Here we need to remember an important theological point. Love is not a property that God instantiates or a quality that he exemplifies. Love, beauty, truth, knowledge, power—in the mystery of the trinitarian godhead, all these things are, in some way, ontologically identical with God. Thus 1 John 4:7 can state simply that, “God is love,” and add, “whoever loves has been born of God and knows God.” The same teaching was given a particularly fine expression by Pope Benedict XVI in a 2006 address to students at Gregorian University, Rome. “Knowing God is not enough,” he reminded them. “For a true encounter with God, we must love God. Knowledge must become love.” And then he contributes to our understanding of the point by supplying the reason. “Only the Holy Spirit can search the depths of God,” and so, “only by listening to the Spirit can we search the depths of the riches, the wisdom and the knowledge of God.” This, I suggest, is the lesson of Crime and Punishment and much of Dostoyevsky’s later work: That our salvation lies in love because love is knowledge of God raised to the highest possible degree.
[1] Dostoyevsky, who had an eye-watering gambling debt of 43,000 roubles, had just signed a Faustian contract with an unscrupulous Petersburgian bookseller. Under the terms of the contract, Dostoyevsky had to produce a publishable novel by the end of the year or the bookseller would own the rights to all his past and future works. Dostoyevsky wrote two novels simultaneously, working on one novel in the morning and the other in the evening, and completed both before the deadline: The Gambler and Crime and Punishment. [2] Readers with an interest in famous trials may remember that something of the kind once happened in the real world. In 1924, two students from the University of Chicago killed a fourteen year old boy in a back of a rented car and dumped his body in a culvert. The murderers—whose names were Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb—were the unlikeliest of suspects. Both were from affluent Jewish families; both were highly accomplished academically. And their only motive for the murdering the boy—a motive that grew out of an obsession with Nietzsche’s idea of the Ubermensch—was to demonstrate their superiority in getting away with it. It is therefore almost like a cosmic refutation that two stupid mistakes led to their arrest: First Leopold dropped a pair of glasses at the crime scene which were built to an unusual and traceable prescription; and then both claimed to have been driving Leopold’s car on the night of the murder when several witnesses attested it had never left the garage—including the chauffeur, who happened to be repairing it at the time. [3] Here it might be objected that many people love unconditionally and do not come to a knowledge of God. The reply to this objection is that an atheist who loves unconditionally is close to God but, unlike Raskolnikov, does not enjoy propositional knowledge of this fact. In the same way, one could experience the activity of a secret and powerful benefactor (sudden and timely financial windfalls, job interviews that go smoothly, traffic tickets mysteriously waived) without knowing the identity of this benefactor or even that he exists.