Crime and Punishment
Reading Dostoevsky for the first time
There comes a time in every reader’s life when one stares at Dostoevsky’s name on the spine of a bok and sighs, reminiscing a time when they were confident enough, ambitious enough, to think they could plough through Crime and Punishment. Like the generations before me, and the generations before them, I have also fallen into this trap.
But after staring at this chunk of a novel for long enough, and after it has had enough time to yellow on my bookshelf, there is an itch to actually read Crime and Punishment. But above all, ashamedly, it is an itch to read it so that I can stop pretending as though I have.
This is what stuck with me after having finished Crime and Punishment for the first, but not last, time: the motivation, and justification, for murder.
Although Dostoevsky may have described in terrifying detail the crime, with blood that “poured out as from an overturned glass”, and the psychological trauma of a killer, nothing is more terrifying than the motivation and justification for the crime: the desire to be clever and the desire to be great. At the end of the day, it is impossibly, terrifyingly boring being average. But only great geniuses can kill.
Motivation
Crime and Punishment is about the tortured genius, except Dostoevsky turns the fascination with ‘tortured geniuses’ completely on its head. Its protagonist, Raskolnikov, is a troubled student who ends up killing a pawnbroker named Alyona Ivanova in her house. His initial motivation, or so Dostoevsky leads us to believe, is money. She has some, and he has none. So begins Crime and Punishment.
This plot unfolds in the first part (out of six) of the book. In my copy, it is included in the blurb. Because this is not the plot that keeps the reader on their toes. What keeps us flipping the page is a nagging feeling that money may have been the propeller of the crime, but an innate desire to be clever and better is what put the axe in Ivanova’s head.
Part I of the novel introduces Raskolnikov’s central tension as a person: a clever man with nothing to show for it. As Natasya (a cook in his building) says when she comes upon him laying on the couch: “But why, if you are so clever, do you lie here like a sack and have nothing to show for it?”
Raskolnikov is a clever man and intends to prove that he is one. He is, above all, curious as to whether he is just a “sack” on the couch or if he is a great man and a smart one. So Dostoevsky may have led us to believe that he killed because he wanted the money in Part I, but the truth explodes into a million chilling pieces in Part V, when Raskolnikov admits this:
“I wanted to kill for casuistry, Sonya, to kill for myself, and myself alone!”
As Victor Frankenstein’s experiment is a test of his capabilities to revive life, so is Raskolnikov’s ‘experiment’ a test of his capabilities to take it. Both eventually becomes terrified of their own actions, but in the moment of doing there is only one thought: can I do it?
The emphasis is on the doer and not the action. It is the man that matters because the monster and the crime is always secondary. It may be terrible, it may be murderous, but the very creation of Frankenstein’s monster and Ivanova’s murder proves this one thing: yes I can, therefore I am clever, therefore I am capable.
That is the downfall of genius, isn’t it? It demands an audience. It demands proof. And every man thinking they are capable of it falls prey to it.
Justification
“Would I dare to reach down and take, or not? Am I a trembling creature, or do I have the right…”
““To kill? The right to kill?” Sonya clasped her hands.”
Raskolnikov entertains and truly buys into the belief that the murder of Ivanova will benefit society in the long run — he will have the money to do the great things he was destined for, while the old woman who had hoarded her wealth all her life will have made no difference in life or in death. That is classic utilitarianism, the maximisation of good in society, taken a step too far.
So when Raskolnikov confesses to Sonya of his crimes, it does not come as a surprise that the words he uses are ‘take’ and ‘right’ — because fundamentally, these words belong to the same category: the self. To take is to own and possess what once was not yours, and to deserve a ‘right’ is to proclaim individuality in a world of billions. And for it to be a ‘right’ to ‘take’ someone that was never yours, to begin with, is the justification for both Raskolnikov’s murder and utilitarianism.
At the root of this is the idea that there are people who deserve to live and people who don’t, and those clever enough and those great enough will proclaim their ‘right’ in acts snatched from the pits of hell.
While his murderous crime is only taking utilitarianism a step too far, who is to say what lies just on the precipice of the line before it is crossed? What monstrous abyss awaits us at the edge? Dostoevsky criticises the philosophy of obtaining the greatest good when the concepts of greater and better and cleverer are defined and invented by men like Raskolnikov.
It is not, I don’t think, the crime nor the punishment that placed Dostoevsky in the realm of great authors. In fact, the crime and (capital) punishment itself takes up only a few pages of the novel, while the rest is dedicated to the anguished, stretched out time after the crime is committed and before the punishment is ordered. That state of limbo, where motivation falters and results in nothing to show for— not money nor genius, and where previously unbreakable justifications break under the tears of good people, is the ultimate punishment for Raskolnikov.
Crime and Punishment builds up a strong foundation, a theoretically indisputable cause and justification for murder, before absolutely demolishing it. Because real life is not theory, and that is all there is to it. It should be a crime that I’ve only now picked up Dostoevsky.
