Fydor Dostoevsky - 'Crime and Punishment', reviewed

Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment traces the inner life of the dark and tormented Raskolnikov after he murders two women.  Before the killing, Raskolnikov believes that his evil will be vindicated by the good he will do after stealing the woman’s money to launch his career.  However, after the murder, feverish guilt, anxiety and disgust at his actions overwhelm him.  In the background, Tsarist St Petersburg is a hellscape, sweltering hot and populated by bestial figures guilty of every vice.  The good are subjected to suffering and derision beneath a deaf heaven.  

Even after spending years studying the excesses and brutalities of 2000 years of human history, I found many sections of this book difficult to read.  For me, the most tragic characters of the book were those who had fallen from grace and clung onto their faded grandeur to the mocking of the heartless mob.  Katerina Ivanovna, a well born widow, driven to live in squalor, wracked by tuberculosis and seeing her daughter forced by pennilessness into prostitution is the foremost example.  To bear her suffering, she grips the nobility of her birth, weaving a desperate tapestry of delusion to set her apart from the urban poor.  To see this cruelly unwound by a taunting crowd of drunkards, and her and her young children forced onto the street, before she painfully expires epitomises the bleak cosmology of Crime and Punishment.  The soundtrack to this blind tyranny of fate is laughter.  It is the same cruel jeering that haunts Jean-Baptise in Albert Camus’ The Fall. 

My ideological takeaway of Crime and Punishment was the centrality of Christian morals to our psychology.  Dostoyevsky deliberately draws attention to this with the nightmare in the epilogue.  In this dream-sequence, Raskolnikov envisions a world where nihilism is universally accepted, and morality is derived directly from this philosophy.  What follows is a war of all against all, murder, rapine and endless bloodletting.  If this worldview is agreed upon, Raskolnikov’s utilitarian motives for killing the old woman hold up.  She brings misery upon her desperate clients, terrorises her simple sister Lizaveta, and hoards her stash of money, which will later be donated to a corrupt monastery.  If he was to kill her, the loss to society would be nothing, it would even be beneficial.  With the money, he could make something of himself and help others.  In Benthamite terms, the greatest happiness of the greatest number is ensured.  What is wrong with this? Well under Christian morality, Raskolnikov committed the vilest transgression against God.  It is considered abhorrent because of the imbibed sanctity of life that has permeated all recesses of our moral constitution.  Life is sacred because it was created by God, in his image.  Millenia of laws and culture promoting this has made murder, for any motivation a disgusting crime.  Without Christian assumptions, and utilitarian rationalism instead, Raskolnikov did no wrong.  This highlights both the prominence of Christianity to the Western mind, but also its importance.  Pursuing unbridled secularism to stark conclusions is dangerous. 

"They tried to speak, but were unable to.  There were tears in their eyes.  Both of them looked pale and thin; but in these ill, pale faces there now gleamed the dawn of a renewed future, a complete recovery to a new life.  What had revived them was love, the heart of one continuing an infinite source of life for the heart of the other."

Crime and Punishment is foremost a conservative book.  Nihilism is refuted.  Instead, Raskolnikov embraces Christianity, and combined with a regenerative love for Sonya, he completes something of a redemptive arc in the Siberian snows.  However, what I found disturbing was the grounds on which he recanted his murderous creed.  He never philosophically disproves his beliefs.  Nihilism and universal subjectivity are still very possibly true, this is never contested or shown to be false.  It is shown to be adverse to its followers, on the basis that pursuing it to its Nietzschean Untermensch conclusions are unbearable for most.  Raskolnikov quickly realises that he is not a Napoleon, and cannot live with death and suffering on his conscience.  Turning to the gospel and domesticity breathes new life into him.  However, this does not deny that Nietzschean supermen beyond good and evil could commit such acts and bear them, nor does it give Christian morality any more solid grounds than that it is good for the soul.  It has no origins in rational enquiry, or anything pertaining to objectivity.  The lack of this raises the question whether it is right to suspend rationality for unifying morality and social cohesion, even if this is tantamount to philosophical suicide.