Crime and Punishment

FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

Foreword

“I want to do an unprecedented and eccentric thing, to write thirty printed sheets [480 printed pages] within the space of four months, forming two separate novels, of which I will write one in the morning and the other in the evening, and to finish them by a fixed deadline. Do you know, my dear A

Fortunately, Dostoevsky managed to bring off this “unprecedented...thing,” though not quite in the way he envisaged. Work on one novel, which had been appearing serially in the Russian Herald since January 1866, continued to preoccupy him into the fall, and meanwhile not a word of the book for Stellovsky got written. Finally, on the advice of friends, he hired a stenographer, the young A

The attempts of critics and literary scholars to define, or simply account for, what they have found in these novels may remind one of the Hindu parable of the blind men describing an elephant, each by feeling a different part—”a snake,” “a hog weed,” “a tree,” “a broom,” “a wall.” Dostoevsky's own summaries in his letters and notebooks tend to be dry, schematic, and therefore misleading, because no novels are less dry or schematic than these. Furthermore, he was always ready to revise his plans when new material, discovered in the process of writing, demanded it. Thus he wrote to his friend Baron Vrangel, in December 1865, that the story he had been working on for several months (the first version of Crime and Punishment) had grown into “a big novel, in six parts. I had much of it written and ready by the end of November. / burned it all. Now I can confess it. I wasn't pleased with it myself. A new form, a new plan captivated me and so I began over again. I'm working day and night, and for all that I'm not working very much. A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression . . .”A novel, at least a Dostoevsky novel, is a “work of poetry”—that is, a simultaneous composition on multiple planes—and the critics can therefore be forgiven their perplexity about where to take hold of it, since the first perplexity of criticism is that it must speak monosemantically of the polysemous.

But besides that, these were novels of a new kind, their multiple planes so divergent and even contradictory as to all but baffle definition. So much so that one line of criticism, rightly noting the dramatic technique and high seriousness of Dostoevsky's writing, has called his late works “novel-tragedies,” while another, with equal Tightness, finds their roots in Ménippean satire and a carnival sense of the world. Dostoevsky's uniqueness as an artist lies in his invention of a form capable of combining such opposites, of sounding such depths (carnival laughter has as much depth as tragedy), while never ceasing to portray the contemporary world, the everyday in all the detail of its everydayness. What's more, Dostoevsky's novels refuse to stay put in their own period, where the novels of Tolstoy, Turgenev, Goncharov have settled; they leap out of their historical situation and confront us as if they had not yet spoken their final word.

The question is what inspired this form-making impulse in Dostoevsky, what reality do his novels imitate, or can we still speak here of an “imitation of reality”? To suggest an answer, we must turn to Notes from Underground, published in 1864, just a year before he began work on Crime and Punishment. This paradoxical little novel marked a break, a new begi

Dostoevsky's polemics with the radicals of the 1860s appear to represent a change in his convictions, though such questions are never simple. He had started out in literary life as a liberal, critical of the imperial autocracy, sympathizing with the little man, drawn to the ideas of the French Utopians Fourier and Saint-Simon. In the late 1840s he had attended meetings of the clandestine Petrashevsky circle, which owned a printing press and pla

Was Dostoevsky's opposition to the radical ideology of the 1860s the expression of a repentant si

Clearly, the terms of this polemic, if polemic it is, go beyond the opposing of one set of ideas with another. Something strange seems to have happened to Dostoevsky after his return from exile. It is as if the world he had imagined in prison, the world of the blue sky and freedom, ceased to be recognizable to him, and another reality appeared in its place, one he was unprepared for and could only search out gropingly. In fact, he once described his experience of such an unca