I kicked off my Summer Reading List with Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. By kicked off I mean, I read the first 150 pages or so of the book over Winter Break, and didn’t pick the book back up again until Spring Term was done on May 2. Over the last couple of years I’ve been trying to read the greats of Russian literature that no one forced me to read when I was younger. Though I’ve been teaching in the Slavic Department for years, my formal education was primarily in English departments, so there’s been a fair amount of self education I’ve undertaken about Russian history, culture, and literature. (Though the interpretative skills and teaching techniques I was trained in while getting my degrees are the same across disciplines, so it’s more a matter of teaching myself the background than it is some actual skill.)

Anyway, over the past couple of years I’ve taught Dostoevsky’s The Double and Devils, and I’ve also read The Brothers Karamazov on my own. (I also read Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Anna Karenina. I actually liked War and Peace — don’t let the heft scare you off. And do read Ivan Turgenev’s Sketches from a Hunter’s Album: it’s absolutely lovely.) So, y’know, on to Crime and Punishment. There’s an entire Dostoevsky Studies subdiscipline in Slavic Studies, and I don’t have anything to add to it here: these are just my impressions and observations. It strikes me that people don’t read a lot of classic literature for entertainment, and I think that’s a shame sometimes. Some of it’s really interesting.

But that having been said, let me just come out and say it: Crime and Punishment is about 175 pages too long. (My copy was 630 altogether.) All 175 of those unnecessary pages come in the first half of the book. (Though there are vivid gems of insight and powerful writing in this front half as well — the scene in which Raskolnikov dreams of a childhood memory of a drunken peasant beating an old mare to death for sport basically punched me in the throat, and I found myself hastily brushing tears away at the bar, where I was reading over a happy hour beer.) In one of my classes, the students read Pushkin’s “The Bronze Horseman“, Gogol’s “Diary of a Madman“, and Dostoevsky’s “The Double” one after the other, and we discuss the different forces that each author seems to posit as the starting point of madness. Pushkin and Gogol wrote the pieces I assign contemporaneously, and I basically agree with James Billington that Pushkin’s work highlights the overwhelming power of natural and historical (including political and governmental) forces as a source of chaos and madness for the common man — that is, the natural disaster of the flooding of the Neva coincides and works with the descriptions of St. Petersburg’s monumentality and the will of Peter the Great, who built the city out of a wasteland over the bodies of the thousands of men who died in their conscripted labor; together these forces assault the lowly clerk in ways he’s powerless not only to contravene but even to fully grasp. Pushkin’s Yevgeni might be the first “humble clerk” of Russian literature — he’s also the victim of forces that Pushkin seems strangely ambivalent about, which suits Pushkin’s biography: an aristocrat with a Western cultural bent, he points to the destructive power of government without indicting it. On the other hand, Gogol’s “Diary” is a partisan attack on social immobility and the toll it takes on his own humble clerk — read in tandom with “Nevsky Prospect“, another short work of his from around the same time that deals with the theme of madness, Gogol’s opinion of class relations in Russian society is harsh and clear: the cruelty of a social structure that puts people in their place will, in fact, make you crazy.

Dostoevsky’s work comes later, and his themes are much more psychological. When HIS humble clerk goes mad in “The Double”, it seems to be from a combination of his own existential crises; the inhumanity of others towards him; and HIS inhumanity towards THEM. Dostoevsky is consistently driven to explore this rift between people — it’s a central concern of Brothers K as well. He’s also the great psychologizer of characters: it’s not what’s happening around them, it’s what’s happening within them, at least in large part.

And yet, whereas we spend most of Crime and Punishment tracking Raskolnikov’s inner state, as he hovers close to insanity and is finally redeemed, what I find most unavoidable about the novel is the constant presence of the crushing poverty that Raskolnikov and all of his fellows are borne down under. For me, anyway, it’s impossible not to see Raskolnikov’s claim that certain Napoleons among men have a (a)moral “right to crime” as arising from his destitution. Though Dostoevsky doesn’t formulate it this way, it strikes me that the sheer unfairness of Raskolnikov’s situation — how hopeless and overwhelming is his lack — has to be the source material for the conclusion that certain men can and may do anything necessary to rise above the rest of the (squalorous) world. Maybe I just want to make Dostoevsky a Marxist critic because that’s my wont — he himself had no such leanings, as he was explicitly opposed to radicalism and particularly the nihilism of Russian revolutionary circles — but having accurately depicted the crushing world of Raskolnikov, he’s led me, probably against his will, to radicalism over the poverty Raskolnikov et. al. suffer under. (Though Dostoevsky DOES want to document the sickness of Russian society, and DOES want to fix it; however, he wants to fix it with a return to religion and “traditional” Russian cultural values, not with like, socialism. So he and I differ in that. Ahem. ANYWAY.)

And certainly, if whoring is a crime, poverty is directly responsible for Sonya’s sins, though she is actually the moral redeemer of the tale. This brings us to the seeming central concern of the book: Dostoevsky is desperately trying to convince either us or himself of the redemptive power of Christ. In the three major works I’ve read by him, Dostoevsky confronts again and again a problem that I myself — and I would suspect many modern Christians — have come up against over and over again: the problem of the desire for belief in an atheist world. (This is another idea that Billington has mused upon.) By atheist world, I mean that thinking people, intelligent people, like Dostoevsky and myself, are familiar with and are bound to accept the truth of scientific and cultural conclusions that situate one squarely outside the realm of traditional, orthodox teachings about Christianity (and many other religions). And yet there is the yearning for belief — how are these things reconciled? Dostoevsky once wrote in a letter, shortly after he was released from a labor camp, “If someone were to prove to me that Christ was outside the truth, and it was really the case that the truth lay outside Christ, then I should choose to stay with Christ rather than with the truth.” Such a thing may be an affirmative choice; but it is also, ultimately, an unreconcilable position. And so Dostoevsky spends literally thousands of pages “proving” the effectiveness, the affectiveness, of this choice. In Crime and Punishment, Sonya, who is described explicitly by Raskolnikov as a holy fool (a uniquely Russian concept that is deeply fascinating and maybe I’ll tell you about sometime), ecstatically reads the passage from John’s gospel about the resurrection of Lazarus to Raskolnikov — and though the breakthrough is not immediate, it is this encounter that forms the beginning of his redemptive journey: turning himself in, going to a labor camp, and, finally, arriving at a literally mysterious and apparently mystical epiphany of love and dedication, which Dostoevsky assures us, on the last page of the novel, is in fact a real and irreversible moment of redemption and transformation. Well, then.

The thing is, Dostoevsky writes so smartly about the interior of the human mind, he observes the outside world so acutely and precisely, that after he has demonstrated to the reader for many, many pages how sharp and how true are his observations and interpretations that he would seem to have built up the authority necessary to then render a mysterious, imprecisely drawn, and apparently unconveyable moment as though it, too, were the absolute and unavoidable truth. This happens at the end of Crime and Punishment, it happens at the end of the The Brothers Karamazov, and I’ve got The Idiot on my list, so I’ll let you know, but I’m not getting into any bets against it. I think Dostoevsky has a lot of people convinced — but I’m not sure I’m convinced, and I’m not sure Dostoevsky’s convinced, though both of us want to be. At the end of Crime and Punishment, I wasn’t thinking about Raskolnikov’s salvation, I was thinking about Dostoevsky’s doubt. The former is a great and hopeful triumph — the latter is profoundly tragic. Or maybe I’m wrong, and Dostoevsky was an unquestioning believer.

But I doubt it.