Crime and Punishment Archives - Mostly About Stories

A Question of Guilt – Dostoevsky’s “A Gentle Creature”

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novella “A Gentle Creature”, also translated as “The Meek One”, makes for unpleasant reading. We are immediately thrust into the aftermath of a suicide, where the surviving partner of a marriage attempts to come to terms with why his young wife chose to end her life. In times of grief, we can often blame ourselves for things that under the lens of cold reason are not our responsibility. But in “A Gentle Creature” the situation is far less innocent. Our unnamed narrator is as repulsive as any a man Dostoevsky created, and as he explores his memories it is impossible to avoid the fact that he is responsible for his wife’s death. Theirs was an extremely abusive relationship, one which remains as fresh and horrible today as it was then.

In “A Gentle Creature” Dostoevsky uses this setup, of a man trying to evade his own guilt, to create a brilliant character study. The relationship and its decline are thematically rich, making us think about the nature of moral responsibility and fate, about money and power, and finally about the written word itself. Beneath the story, which I found painful to read at times, there is much of value to discuss.

Quotations are from the translation by Ronald Meyer, but as I prefer the title “A Gentle Creature”, I will refer to the story using that name.

“A Fantastic Story” – the Narration of “A Gentle Creature”

“A Gentle Creature” has the subtitle “a fantastic story”, and before the story begins Dostoevsky explains his strange word choice. Though it is “realistic in the highest degree”, it has an element of fantasy in how Dostoevsky takes us along the memories and turmoil of the narrator’s heart as he tries to make sense of what has happened. We meet our narrator shortly after his wife’s death. “…Now as long as she’s here – everything is still all right”. Such an opening thrusts us in media res, as if we’ve suddenly been plugged in to our narrator’s thoughts. Our own disorientation reflects his own. Though the narrator tells us that “the horror of it for me… [is] that I understand everything”, half a page later he admits he keeps getting muddled.

The narrator is our only guide to the story, but he is not reliable at all. As he goes through his memories, he also interprets them. When he comes across badly, he gets defensive – “you see, I wasn’t badly brought up and have manners”. Though he claims to portray “pro and contra” impartially, he also blames his wife for her suicide. It’s not hard to see the games he’s playing. Just as he describes his relationship with his wife as a game, so too is his description of the past a kind of game. We are drawn into his world, a world with almost no dialogue, so that we are almost suffocated by his solipsism. But he still needs his readers. He addresses them from time to time, appealing for moral support. He wants them to justify his actions. His addressees are male – perhaps he hopes they’d be biased.

The Plot

Our narrator is a pawnbroker, Dostoevsky’s favourite profession. One day he notices a repeat client, a young girl of about fifteen or sixteen. She keeps bringing him things, and seems to be growing increasingly desperate. The narrator becomes interested, and decides to learn about her. It turns out that her parents are dead, and she lives with her aunts. These women are preparing “to sell her”, and a merchant has been chosen to be her husband. She doesn’t want this, but this is the 19^th century and she’s a poor woman and can’t easily defend herself. She uses the money she gets from pawning things to put adverts in the papers, hoping someone will hire her, as a governess for example.

The narrator decides to marry her instead. Compared to the shopkeeper, who has already beaten to death two wives, he must seem to the poor girl “a liberator”. She agrees to marriage. And here begins the horror of the story. The narrator, who first only had monetary power over her, now gains marital power. And as the story progresses, his power and his desire for control only grow.

“She should have appreciated my deed”.

From the very first, he expects her subservience and her respect. But this is a one-way street. He does not expect to have to offer anything to her in return. To her love – “she would throw herself at me with her love” – he presents silence. He enjoys the thought that he is “a riddle”. He creates “a complete system” for controlling her, and eventually the two of them stop talking altogether. Why does the narrator act this way? It’s both easy and difficult to say. At one point he claims to be aiming at a higher happiness for both of them, one that can only be reached through suffering. At another moment, he seems to think he’s Mephistopheles, using evil to work good.

In all of his decisions, there is no respect for what the girl thinks. In “A Gentle Creature” we hardly ever hear her speak. When she does speak, the narrator dismisses her through misogyny – “these outbursts were unhealthy and hysterical”. The narrator does not even let her go outside on her own. In all his planning, the narrator not only displays a desire for control connected with his profession as an accumulator of money, but he also shows an unwillingness to respect or acknowledge the variety of human experience, and the essential dignity of his young wife.

The girl is kind – at first she does her best to love him. But through his coldness, the narrator attempts to reform her into a different person entirely. The fifth part of the first chapter in the story is called “The Meek One Rebels”, and there’s a degree of irony in it. The narrator has tormented her so much that she can no longer be herself. But then we might also think about suicide in connection with this. For many people, the decision to kill themselves comes as the consequence of losing their sense of identity. The narrator demands she break with hers. Her rebellion consists with an attempted liaison with one of the narrator’s old comrades (they were both in the army together), but the liaison does not work out. She is too morally pure, even then.

But the narrator still punishes her. He forces her to sleep on a different bed, behind a partition. The marriage is over. He makes her feel guilty for what he has driven her to. Later on, she declares that she is “a criminal”, even though she’s done precious little wrong.

Guilt and the Limits of Knowledge

Throughout “A Gentle Creature” we are asking why the poor girl killed herself. In some sense, it’s trivially simple. The narrator hurts her, abuses her, forces her into silence, and crushes her sense of self. But at the same time, it is still worth thinking about questions of responsibility as we read the story. The narrator may be an idiot when he suggests “I was forced to act as I did then”, as if he can simply excuse himself by invoking fate, but there might be value in questioning how far he is to blame, or at least, how he ended up in that position. I think the main problem is a failure of imagination on his part, coupled with the way that he refused to acknowledge her individual dignity.

Why imagination? He makes plans, but finds she doesn’t fit into them because he is unable to plan enough. That’s at least one level to the problem. But it goes further than that. Under the surface of “A Gentle Creature” there is a lot of pent-up feeling. The narrator is a bad person in action, but not at heart. He really is aiming at a kind of happiness, and I think he did love his wife. But he was unable to express that love. Whenever he wanted to, it came into conflict with his desire for control and the lack of respect for his wife caused by his misogyny.

As a result, instead of being kind, he was silent. Instead of talking about his feelings, he tells us that it is impossible, “what would she have understood?” The narrator blames her for dying when she did. If only she’d waited a little while longer, then things would have worked out. But he is at fault for driving her to suicide, and whether she did it earlier or later the important thing is that he drove her to it in the first place.

In the end, though, as much as we condemn the narrator, we can’t avoid thinking about how we determine responsibility to begin with. After all, in “A Gentle Creature” we only hear his side of the story – we never learn hers, and never will. And though he hardly portrays himself well, he’s also suffering from shock and grief, and isn’t thinking clearly either.

Why is the Narrator as he is?

Comparing the narrator of “A Gentle Creature” to that of “Notes from the Underground” is a sensible decision, as both, though talkative, never seem to get anywhere with their thoughts or with their lives. They seem trapped in small places, like characters from something by Samuel Beckett. But more than that, both of them are in a sense poisoned by their era. The girl in “A Gentle Creature” is from a different generation to her husband, and where he is cold and cruel, she is idealistic and hopeful (until he’s had his way with her). The narrator is someone who also clearly once had his own ideals, but failed to live up to them. When he was younger, he was a soldier, but he was forced from his regiment after failing to participate in a duel. He tries to call his actions courageous, but it’s hardly convincing.

He takes out his shame on her. He makes her feel ashamed of her own actions, above all for her love. But there is more to him than damaged pride. The end of “A Gentle Creature” is particularly difficult to read because the narrator finally seems to come to terms with his guilt. His worldview is spoiled, and he feels completely isolated. “I am alone with the pledges”. What had earlier given him power, even a sense of self – his money – now weighs down on him. He becomes aware of the emptiness of his life, and we have a feeling as he cries out with fear at the prospect of his wife’s body being removed from the house that perhaps his own suicide is not far off either. “People are alone on this earth” he thinks. That is his conclusion after so much suffering – both his and his wife’s. Fun.

Conclusion

“A Gentle Creature” ends bleakly, with a sense of terrible isolation. To be fair, it is bleak throughout. We watch a kind, hopeful, loving girl be destroyed in an abusive relationship, unable to express herself and controlled wherever she goes. There is, as with all suicides, a pervasive and nauseating feeling that if only we had a little more time, perhaps things would have been different. But for all the gloom, the story is still worth reading. The narrator is, in the Dostoevskian mould, perhaps a little too evil in thought, but his actions are believable and well-described. And however uncomfortable following his thoughts is, the twists and turns as he tries to justify himself remain fascinating.

Compared with The Double, “A Gentle Creature” is far more psychologically interesting, and (surprisingly for Dostoevsky!), a good exercise in concision. It is not as enjoyable as Crime and Punishment, in part because it has little positivity, and no Sonya waiting at the end. But that’s no reason not to give “A Gentle Creature” a chance the next time you have an hour free. It certainly won’t disappoint you.

Author as Prophet: the Problem with Late Tolstoy

Towards the end of his time writing Anna Karenina Tolstoy had something of a spiritual crisis and it almost killed him. He suddenly realised that the life he was living was pointless. Worse still, he was unable to identify any way of living that would return a sense of meaning to it. In A Confession, a short work of non-fiction published soon after the conversion, Tolstoy describes being driven nearly to suicide as a result of his despair. The only way out of his predicament except for suicide, as Tolstoy saw it, was through belief in God. The spiritual transformation that then came over him had profound implications for his work and the rest of his life. He eventually abandoned the city, lived like a peasant in the countryside, and began a career as a pamphleteer. What fiction did come this period was blunt and didactic, with rare exceptions like Hadji-Murat.

Many people would consider Tolstoy one of the greatest writers of all time, but they rarely have the late Tolstoy in mind. The late Tolstoy is a strange creature and just as strange a writer. I’m currently reading his only novel from the period, Resurrection, which partly prompts this post. The other prompt is that I’m dipping into essays by the wonderful American writer Wendell Berry, who seems to have sprung from the cradle just the same as Tolstoy eventually became. Berry is a defender of the old and simple ways, of a faith bound closely to the soil. I like Berry a lot, but something’s bothering me about his writing, just as Resurrection is bothering me, and just as other things Tolstoy wrote late in life have bothered me.

By “bothered”, I do not mean that my spirit is touched – it’s not that kind of bothering. If anything, the problem is the opposite. The problem is that I’m struggling to care. It’s all well and good to simply accuse the late Tolstoy of didacticism, but I think there’s some value in trying to go into detail to answer what exactly has gone wrong. There must be a reason why Anna Karenina and War and Peace are beloved by all, but Resurrection has failed to be resurrected from its canonical grave. In this essay I’d like to have a go working it out.

Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?

To begin with, it’s worth going back and thinking about Dostoevsky and his own fiction. Both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are world famous, but generally people prefer one or the other. I started out life as a huge fan of Dostoevsky, but now I’m in Tolstoy’s camp. What Dostoevsky does well is often called polyphony, after the name given it by the literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin. By “polyphony” I mean that Dostoevsky creates a great many characters who seem to be existing independently of their author. Their views are no longer Dostoevsky’s own. But more than that, their views are so developed, and so passionately felt, that the characters seem like they cannot be the creation of Dostoevsky at all, but rather real figures, animated by belief. I cannot think of any other writer who has written people who feel so intensely as Dostoevsky’s characters do.

For a young person, these kinds of characters are well-suited to themselves. When you are young you want desperately to believe in something. Almost without exception we were all, in our youth, hopelessly idealistic. Dostoevsky provides, in a way, a buffet of ideas for us to try. But over time we come to realise that these ideas are for the most part incompatible with a good life. Suicides, murders, and despair are the keynotes of Dostoevsky’s fiction, and they are so because they are the consequences of the characters’ ideas. Those few characters who seem to find happiness are religious, like Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov, or Sonya. These characters are not particularly interesting. After all, we say, religion is for idiots.

Tolstoy’s Early and Middle Fiction

Tolstoy’s fiction before his late period is not the battleground of ideas that Dostoevsky’s is. There are characters who believe passionately, such as Levin’s radical brother in Anna Karenina, but they are few and far between. Most characters do not believe in anything, at least not actively. Anna Karenina wouldn’t say she believes in love – she just does. The same would go for Vronsky and his honour, or Dolly and her family. These people are unideological because they are all striving for one thing – a good life. Dostoevsky’s characters don’t really seem to care about happiness, and they are not striving for anything in particular. For them, the act of searching is enough. They just need some kind of outlet for the passionate feeling they have within them. The outlet’s nature, whether murder or kindness, is neither here nor there.

There are people in Tolstoy’s fiction who are after answers, who have that additional store of passion needed to demand a kind of seeking. They are the likes of Pierre and Andrei Bolkonsky in War and Peace, and Levin in Anna Karenina. But their crises are not the same as those of Dostoevsky’s heroes. Levin’s problem is that he is looking for an authentic and moral life. He wants to know how to live. He looks at the world of the city, where people like Stiva Oblonsky spend their days eating oysters and their nights chasing after women, and he’s disgusted. In the countryside, sitting on a haybale or cutting the wheat, he feels a kind of peace. We may call it a connection with God, but I think that that would be incorrect. What he feels is a oneness with the world, something that is more pantheistic than Christian.

Spiritual Vacuums, past and present

We can always look to Nietzsche as a great prophet of atheism, but he’s not the first by a long shot. From the Enlightenment onwards God and organised religion faced salvo upon salvo from intellectual circles, with nary any intellectually-grounded fire returned. Society was left with an absent centre, a spiritual vacuum. This was filled in many cases with radical politics. Marx called religion the “opium of the masses”, the implication being that revolutionary communism was what they really should be smoking. Nationalism also filled the void. At first that nationalism was well-intentioned, a unifying force, as it was in Italy, Germany, Greece. But in the 20^th century both Marx’s teachings and nationalism morphed into horrible monsters, leaving millions and millions of dead as a result. Nietzsche, of course, proposed his own solutions to “nihilism”, but they’ve hardly filtered out and aren’t always to everyone’s taste to begin with.

So we are left today with an even greater blank than there existed back then. Nationalism nowadays is reactionary and selfish, while left wing politics can seem so focused upon marginalised groups that any utopian thinking about the greatest marginalised group of all – the working class – appears to have fallen by the wayside. More importantly, it’s not even clear if there are enough workers left to really have a revolution. Marxism has, in some sense, just fizzled out.

Our modern-day preachers, such as Jordan Peterson, attempt to fill the void for their followers. Peter Singer’s Effective Altruism attempts to provide a philosophically-sound answer to the question of what we must do, telling us that we should give away as much as we can and focus on raising the world’s happiness in utilitarian terms. Nationalism and Islamic terrorism, meanwhile, both work by preying upon those who feel dislocated from the world they inhabit. The hatred many people feel for “outsiders” is not driven by the outsiders themselves, but by the need to feel something. And anything is better than nothing. For, there are plenty among us who feel just that – nothing, or else depression and despair. For those people, the conditions of late capitalism have successfully snuffed out their hope. And hope is one of the few things capable of expanding into the space left by the spiritual void.

One Reason Why we Read Tolstoy

To people today, characters like Levin and Pierre – and their novels – are attractive because they record a search for meaning. Not for that passionate, violent meaning that dominates Dostoevsky’s works. Most of us don’t need something to die for; we just want something to live for. We want that peace and calm in our (possibly non-existent) souls. Tolstoy’s fiction, with its emphasis on the simple, rural life, is all about that quiet faith which people once-upon-a-time would have found in religion, but now they cannot get from it for any number of valid reasons. Anna Karenina’s faith is attractive because there’s nothing to believe in except that Levin’s searching is worthwhile. There’s no God at the end of it, whatever Levin seems to think. There’s simply a sense of wholeness. A good, humble life – a virtuous life – has filled the spiritual vacuum he had once had.

And when we read Anna Karenina or War and Peace, we get the sense that we too can see the gap within us filled too, if only we go out and seek the answers, and then live them when we find them.

The Late Tolstoy – The Prophet Defeats the Disciple

After Tolstoy had his conversion, he had all the answers. No longer was he content to describe the path to harmony, he wanted to force that specific harmony upon us. As time went on that harmony became ever more specific, and ever harder to stomach. A simple life became a particularly Russian peasant life. A kind of vague pantheism became a radical form of anarchic Christianity. For some people, this is to their liking. But I have spent enough time in the Russian countryside of the present day to have my own view on what the Russian peasant’s life was probably like, and it’s not exactly positive. Tolstoy’s earlier works are so effective because they see the value of searching; his later works seem only interested in the destination.

Resurrection

Take Resurrection. I am about half-way through, and I have definitely read enough to comment on it. Tolstoy’s story is not very subtle, not because he’s forgotten how to write but because didacticism, convincing us that he’s right, is now the most important thing. Take the very first sentence, in Rosemary Edmonds’ translation:

“Though men in their hundreds of thousands had tried their hardest to disfigure that little corner of the earth where they had crowded themselves together, paving the ground with stones so that nothing could grow, weeding out every blade of vegetation, filling the air with the fumes of coal and gas, cutting down the trees and driving away every beast and every bird – spring, however, was still spring, even in the town.”

This is great prose, but it is impossible to read this without feeling Tolstoy behind it. The late Tolstoy can no longer see objects without also seeing the way they fit into his moral system and feeling obliged to put them within said system. And this quickly becomes grating.

Resurrection is, from the title onwards, not exactly coy about its moral bent. A young man, Prince Nekhlyudov, finds himself on jury duty, tasked with judging for murder and theft a girl who he had once seduced. It turns out that his careless seduction, one winter’s night, of this servant girl, led to a whole string of events resulting in her presence in the courtroom some years later: she became pregnant, was kicked out, found work again and lost it, and eventually became a prostitute, her job when the murder took place. Nekhlyudov recognises his complicity in her fallen nature and determines to set things right, whatever the cost. Thus begins the process of his spiritual regeneration.

He breaks off his relations with a young lady, moves out of his house, gives away most of his land to his peasants, and is within a hundred pages far further down the path to a new life than Levin or Pierre managed to get in almost a thousand. Tolstoy is in such a rush to show us the wrongs of the world through Nekhlyudov’s refreshed eyes that he completely forgets to make Nekhlyudov truly breathe to begin with. His conversion is all too brief, and it feels cheap. In my head I can easily picture Tolstoy standing behind his hero with a whip, forcing Nekhlyudov to morally contort himself into the shape Tolstoy demands of him rather than letting things take their natural course.

But Nekhlyodov is not our only hero, for we also follow Maslova, the prostitute he wronged. She smokes; she drinks; she’s rude and rough. But when I read about her I can’t help but feel I’m basically just reading a list of things Tolstoy doesn’t approve of, things that Maslova will undoubtedly abandon once she’s been redeemed herself. Compare Maslova with Raskolnikov. Raskolnikov never feels like he’s waiting for redemption. There’s no sense of inevitability there. In a religious sense, perhaps, but not in a thematic sense, from the perspective of the story itself. Maslova, however, needs to be redeemed. Tolstoy just can’t leave her alone.

Both Maslova and Nekhlyodov feel like pawns upon the pages of Tolstoy’s novel, and their only purpose seems to be to advance Tolstoy’s views. They don’t seem to have any kind of independence, either of thought or of action. Reading the late Tolstoy doesn’t feel like a journey – it feels like being shackled and dragged along a specific path. We know where the destination is when we set out, whereas with Levin or Pierre we always have the feeling that there are other roads, other options for them to potentially take.

This lack of human freedom in Resurrection, when it’s coupled with Tolstoy’s didacticism, is exhausting. Like Karolina Pavlova in A Double Life, Tolstoy’s anger leaves Resurrection feeling unbalanced. It is too clear who is good and who is bad. Every detail, from Nekhlyudov’s golden cufflinks to Maslova’s drinking, seems to have its purpose as a criticism of the world as it lies before Tolstoy’s eyes. He can’t see anything without judging it, and the judgements are always unfavourable. In spite of Tolstoy’s determination to bring us to the good life, what actually happens is that the experience of reading Resurrection is depressing. And not because it’s a story about prisons.

The Death of Ivan Ilyich

A good comparison for Resurrection is another one of Tolstoy’s later works, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, which I reread recently. Ivan was published in 1886, ten years before Resurrection, and it shows. The novella still tries to take us towards a good life, but the methods are more subtle, and the work as a whole is more joyous.

The Death of Ivan Ilyich is first and foremost an extremely funny book. Tolstoy absolutely hates Ivan’s stupid boring vapid existence, but he understands that it’s better to dismantle it through laughter than try to annihilate it with a diatribe. Take the moment one of Ivan’s friends beholds his dead body and thinks “the only thing he was certain of was that in this situation you couldn’t go wrong if you made the sign of the cross”. Or how the first thought of people, hearing he’s died, is “a feeling of delight that he had died and they hadn’t”. In undermining the solemnity of the occasion Tolstoy has his purpose – he wants to show the citizens as selfish, unvirtuous, and themselves unprepared for death. But he does it in a way that’s a joy to read.

Where Resurrection is blunt, Ivan is full of wonderful ironies and subtleties. Things that stuck out for me included the way Ivan receives his fatal injury while decorating his drawing room – meaning that he literally dies because of the banal existence he’d been living. Another moment was when Ivan is lying there dying, and his daughter’s fiancé comes and talks about an actress with him instead of showing any kind of compassion. The novella is really funny, and yet it is perfectly capable of conveying a serious message too. In fact, the seriousness is heightened by its contrast to the levity. When Ivan tells himself at last that “death has gone”, it’s a magical moment. In Resurrection, which is entirely drab, there’s far less room for any spiritual manoeuvre.

An Evangelical is Rarely Convincing…

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve spent some time volunteering in a prison, so I know a little about what Tolstoy describes in Resurrection from personal experience. I also once volunteered in a community project with people who had Down’s syndrome. Both of these experiences proved life-changing, but there’s a reason I don’t write about them, either fictionally or non-fictionally. That reason is, simply put, that I don’t think there’s much value in talking about them. The greatest lesson I took away from both experiences is that experience is much more important than thought. This is not something I can transfer, really, in writing. I don’t want to be like Tolstoy and tell people what to think. I have my views on rehabilitation, just as I have my views on everything else, but I have no desire to evangelise.

This a good time to think back to Dostoevsky again, who I deliberately brought up at the beginning. What happens in the fiction of late Tolstoy is something akin to what we would see in Dostoevsky’s works if they had only one fully-developed character – Tolstoy himself. Without showing the possibility of passionate alternative views, of the sort that (for example) each of the Karamazov brothers offer in their novel, Tolstoy sucks the ideological air from his late fiction, leaving only his own viewpoint. But in doing so, he sucks more than ideology from his pages – in some real sense he removes the life from his stories altogether.

Tolstoy’s “Good Life” in Practice

And Tolstoy himself, who ultimately lived what Dostoevsky simply had his characters feel, is the best argument against his own late fiction. He did not really find the good life – he just found something that eased his conscience and he tried to force it upon others. He tore his family apart through bickering and pettiness. Aside from stunts like making shoes by hand and walking to far-off monasteries, he could never bring himself to fully abandon his aristocratic position and home. He became an object of ridicule, or else of pity. And though he had his followers, I don’t think he was happy. Not in the way that Levin becomes happy, at least.

The spirit of searching, of passionate inquiry, that dominates Anna Karenina and War and Peace, is fundamentally unideological. It doesn’t tell us how to think, only to think. But once Tolstoy’s views are calcified in his old age, there’s no longer any point in us readers thinking for thinking’s sake – thinking now only has value inasmuch as it can lead us to Tolstoy’s views. And this demands not a garden of delightful ideas, but a path along an empty alley, at the end of which stand Tolstoy and his beliefs, and nothing besides.

Stories- not Authors – Change Us

I don’t think I can respect any writer who writes without a sincere desire to make the world a better place; but I also don’t think I can truly enjoy a writer who lets that desire overwhelm their stories and whatever else they might be able to say. The fire within them must be for the act of striving after answers, and not for the answers themselves.

Tolstoy’s mistake in his later fiction is that he forgets that although many people come to fiction to learn, they come to learn for themselves, and not to be told what to think. That is why, I think, the best fiction, in the sense of morally best as well as greatest, has always been didactic not in the sense of telling us what to think, but in reminding us of the value of thinking, of trying to find the answers for ourselves. The best fiction does not change us – it helps us to change ourselves. Anna Karenina, like War and Peace, shows what changing looks like. Both do little more than that, and for that we should be thankful.

Conclusion

The question “what must we do” has bothered me almost my entire life. I have looked everywhere for the answer, and though I have found many answers, including in Wendell Berry and Tolstoy, I have never found something that made me think it was worth giving up the search and stopping where I stood. The day we stop seeking is the day we stop growing; it is the day we lose our dynamism and become boring. It is a bitter irony that those searching for goodness and the good life are often better and kinder people than those who’ve stop at a certain idea of goodness and way of living, thinking they’re finished. Life itself is also much more interesting when we keep ourselves searching. Tolstoy himself, perhaps, understood this at the very end. A. N. Wilson ascribes to the dying Tolstoy the following words: “Search, also go on searching”.

Here at least, the late Tolstoy is absolutely right.

Crime and Punishment Revisited

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment is among the most accessible “classics” of world literature because its tale of murder and its consequences is immediately exciting. All the same, it took me about three attempts before I first finished it. I am now reading it a third time, and each time I feel I understand the book a little better. So far, I have read the first two parts of the book’s six, and I am already overflowing with impressions and observations that I would like to share. The book is so thought-provoking, that simply writing a post at its completion would be to do it an injustice.

World of Decay

I think the thing that has struck me the most this time round is just how grim and depressing the world of Crime and Punishment really is. Within the first two parts we have Marmeladov’s death, an attempted suicide, and plenty of other suggestions of abuse and suffering, not to mention the murder of the pawnbroker which forms the heart of the work.

Colour

Part of this grimness is delivered through Dostoevsky’s use of colour, especially the colour yellow, the traditional colour of sickness and decay. When we find it throughout the entire world of Crime and Punishment’s Saint Petersburg we are left with the feeling that the world itself is falling to pieces. We have Raskolnikov’s wallpaper, the “yellow glass filled with yellow water” that he is given at the police station, the yellow face of the woman who attempts suicide, Sonya’s yellow ticket legalising her work as a prostitute, and most memorably, the “ominous yellowish-black spot” that marks Marmeladov’s fatal wound from the horse’s hoof. There is also the red of blood. When Raskolnikov awakes in the beginning of part II he worries that his clothes are covered in it. Then, when he meets a member of the police later on, he is drenched in it – but in this case it’s Marmeladov’s.

A yellow and decaying wall — While I would like to say that the Saint Petersburg of today could not play host to a similar tragedy to that of Crime and Punishment, I feel like I’d be lying. Just last year a professor here killed and dismembered his student and tried to throw the pieces of her body and himself into the Neva river. Anyway, this is a view onto the inside of my courtyard. When I first moved in, my girlfriend said it looked like it had come from a Dostoevsky novel. Luckily the inside of my flat is nicer.

Clothes and Money

But colour is not the only thing that gives this world its feeling of decline. Money is constantly in focus in these early chapters, whether it be the landlady’s demands for rent, or else Marmeladov’s suffering family watching him drink his salary away, or else of course the pawnbroker herself with her miserliness. Like the characters themselves, who are always on the brink of destitution, we are unable to avoid reading about money in these chapters. Clothing in Crime and Punishment has a similar role, making us aware of the essential poverty of most of its characters. Razumikhin’s joke when he shows Raskolnikov the new clothes he has bought him, that “we have to make a human being out of you”, nonetheless expresses a fundamental truth about poverty’s ability to dehumanise its sufferers. These people can barely even dress themselves with dignity.

Women

But I think the final sign of decay that I’ve found hardest to avoid is Dostoevsky’s representation of women. In Crime and Punishment the women we come across are exclusively downtrodden and suffering. The differences between them concern simply whether they try to maintain some kind of dignity, like Raskolnikov’s mother and Marmeladov’s wife, or fail to, like the woman on the bridge who attempts suicide. Once, we meet a group of them: “some were over forty, but there were some younger than seventeen; almost every one of them had a black eye”. Dunya, Raskolnikov’s sister, suffers for him in a horrible job in their hometown. Sonya, likewise, suffers for her own family. Only by taking economic responsibility onto themselves to try to save others can the women have a chance of saving themselves. Even Nastasya, Raskolnikov’s comparatively not-falling-apart maid, has a “morbidly nervous laughter”. Everyone’s on edge here.

Crime and Punishment as a Horror Movie

Connected with the feverish yellow world of Crime and Punishment is the feeling I have had with this reading that Dostoevsky’s novel has a particularly intense portrayal of reality and bodies not far from their portrayal in works of horror, especially movies. Of course, there is the dinginess of the world, but there is also the murder itself. When Raskolnikov stands outside the pawnbroker’s door, he feels that “someone was standing silently just at the latch, hiding inside and listening, in the same way as he was outside, and also, it seemed, with an ear to the door…” Perhaps I am not explaining it well, but what I mean is this image of fear and closeness to mortal peril is just the sort of thing that we see in Alien when the xenomorph is right next to Ripley, but not yet aware of her.

A scene from the movie Alien 3 where Ripley, a human, is very close to an alien, but so far undetected — A scene in Alien 3 where Ripley has a close encounter with the xenomorph. In Crime and Punishment there are a lot of moments where characters seem to be unnaturally close to each other, both physically and sometimes spiritually, with the same horrific effect.

The incomprehensibility of violence is also an example of this. Raskolnikov’s terrifying dream, when he witnesses the brutal murder of a horse for very little reason, corresponds to that lurking question always present in horror movies with a vaguely humanoid villain – why? Why is this happening, why does this have to happen? When Raskolnikov is forced to kill the pawnbroker’s sister we are faced with another such moment, when the “why” we previously had – to give the crone’s money away to those who need it – is suddenly rendered inadequate, now that it seems to require a wholly innocent victim as well.

Dostoevsky’s language in Crime and Punishment has its own violent intensity too, such as when Raskolnikov feels “as if a nail were being driven into his skull”, or when he looks like he “had just been released from torture”. Our murderer’s mental tension is the same tensed suspense of a good horror movie, where danger is just around the corner.

Ideas and Responsibility

And then there are the ideas. I would not like to go into too much detail before I have finished the book, but I’d at least like to make some observations on the chessboard as it sits before me, as it were.

An illustration to Crime and Punishment by Nikolay Karazin, showing the moment Raskolnikov is forced to kill the pawnbroker's sister to defend himself from capture. — An illustration to Crime and Punishment by Nikolay Karazin, showing the moment Raskolnikov is forced to kill the pawnbroker’s sister to defend himself from capture.

For in Dostoevsky, there is always a war between ideas. We have by this point been introduced to one of Raskolnikov’s motivations in killing – that he could do some good with it by giving away the old woman’s money. But this theoretical approach has already come up against the unpredictability of the world – firstly in that he didn’t succeed in escaping with the money, secondly in that he was forced to kill the sister. Meanwhile, Razumikhin and Luzhin have already began arguing about the new ideas of progress, economic and otherwise. Extreme and self-centred rationality, we have already heard, will lead people to think it’s okay to put a knife into people. Obedience to much to a system is dangerous, as the wonderful image of Raskolnikov being dragged forwards, “as if a piece of his clothing had been caught in the cogs of a machine”, illustrates.

Glimpses of Redemption

Even as these two initial parts show some of the depths of the human soul, they also begin laying the foundations for later redemption. Raskolnikov’s isolation at the police station, “a dark sensation of tormenting, infinite solitude and estrangement suddenly rose to consciousness in his soul”, which is “more a sensation than an awareness, an idea”, is important for giving us understanding of the way that life is feeling just as much as it is idea. Marmeladov, in some way a double of Raskolnikov – they both have close encounters with horsemen and their whips – in his dying moments comes to understand the sacrifice that his family have made for him, and in doing so finds an implicit redemption, when he sees Sonya, “humiliated, crushed, bedizened, and ashamed”, for the first time in her prostitute’s garb. It is too late to change for life, but not too late for death.

Raskolnikov, meanwhile, through giving his money to Marmeladov’s family, has also found “a new, boundless sensation of a sudden influx of full and powerful life”. He has not found redemption yet, but he has taken his first step on the path to goodness, a journey that for me at least makes this novel so great.

Conclusion

For all this seriousness, I almost forgot to mention the humour in Crime and Punishment. Because this time round I’ve really started to find the whole thing quite funny. From this lovely exchange between Nastasya and Raskolnikov (one familiar, no doubt, to my fellow students) –

"Why don’t you do anything now?”
“I do something…” Raskolnikov said, reluctantly and sternly. 
“What do you do?” 
“Work…” 
“Which work?”
"I think.”

– to her comments when Raskolnikov awakes “And, what’s more, you were extremely interested in your own sock, extremely!”, with its equal measure for readers of humour and horror, Crime and Punishment is a hilarious book.

But the questions of guilt and redemption that lie at the heart of it are, and have always been, the ones that most appealed to me. I guess it was my Catholic upbringing that made me particularly aware of my own moral failures and need to atone for them, but I’ve always found these topics in literature, and elsewhere, the most compelling. Whether it be the Amnesia video games, to Tarkovsky’s Stalker, I’ve always enjoyed art that has challenged my ideas of personal responsibility, and shown how we can, and sometimes can’t, change. Perhaps it was thanks to Crime and Punishment that the first seeds towards my eventual time spent volunteering in prison were sowed. Who knows?

What do you think of Crime and Punishment and its themes?