Crime and Punishment

It seemed, in the end, that all this world, with all its inhabitants, both the strong and the weak, with all their habitations, whether beggars' shelters or gilded palaces, at this hour of twilight resembled a fantastic, enchanted vision, a dream which in its turn would instantly vanish and waste away as vapor into the dark blue heaven. Suddenly a certain strange thought began to stir inside me. I started and my heart was as if flooded in that instant by a hot jet of blood which had suddenly boiled up from the influx of a mighty sensation which until now had been unknown to me. In that moment, as it were, I understood something which up to that time had only stirred in me, but had not as yet been fully comprehended. I saw clearly, as it were, into something new, a completely new world, unfamiliar to me and known only through some obscure hearsay, through a certain mysterious sign. I think that in those precise minutes, my real existence began . . .

Most important are the further details of this experience:

I began to look about intently and suddenly I noticed some strange people. They were all strange, extraordinary figures, completely prosaic, not Don Carloses or Posas to be sure, rather down-to-earth titular councilors and yet at the same time, as it were, sort of fantastic titular councilors. Someone was grimacing in front of me, having hidden himself behind all this fantastic crowd, and he was fidgeting some thread, some springs through, and these little dolls moved, and he laughed and laughed away.

The ambiguous laughter of this demiurge or demon can be heard in all of Dostoevsky's later works. Here, in germ, was the reality that challenged his powers of imitation, an indefinite “something new,” a completely new and unfamiliar world, prosaic and at the same time fantastic, which could have no image until he gave it one, but was more real than the vanishing spectacle he contemplated on the Neva. That he recorded this moment of vision when he did suggests that in some way he was reliving it.

Behind the ideas of radicals like Chernyshevsky, Dostoevsky could hear the demiurge's laughter (not that he underestimated the serious consequences of these ideas; he foresaw them only too clearly). His response was the world as viewed by the man from underground, whose ruminations are circumscribed by the same ideas, but who has recognized that his life ca

No one before Dostoevsky had ever written such a book. That it failed in its immediate purpose, as a reply to the radical ideology of the day, is not surprising: its dialectic was much too complex for the purpose, and artistically it was too strange, even offensive, for the common reader. Indeed, to make such admissions about oneself as the underground man does, and to lash out with such sarcastic wit at the most self-evident “truths” of society and human reason, is more a transgression than an argument, as the nameless hero is aware. Notes from Underground gives voice to the double-mindedness, at once guilty and defiant, of the conscious transgressor. But the man from underground transgresses only inwardly, philosophically, for the sake of a truth that he clings to although he ca

In Crime and Punishment, published two years later, the hero is an actual transgressor—the “theoretician-murderer” Raskolnikov. And the relations between the viewer, the spectacle of the world, and this “something new” or “something different” (betrayed by the demiurge's laughter), essentially the same in Notes from Underground and in the “vision on the Neva,” appear once again. Indeed, there is a passage in part two of Crime and Punishment that almost exactly parallels the moment Dostoevsky had described in Petersburg Visions. The day after he commits the murder, Raskolnikov is crossing a bridge over the Neva and stops to gaze at the city:

He stood and looked long and intently into the distance; this place was especially familiar to him. While he was attending the university, he often used to stop, mostly on his way home, at precisely this spot (he had done it perhaps a hundred times), and gaze intently at the indeed splendid panorama, and to be surprised almost every time by a certain unclear and unresolved impression. An inexplicable chill always breathed on him from this splendid panorama; for him the magnificent picture was filled with a mute and deaf spirit...He marveled each time at this gloomy and mysterious impression, and, mistrusting himself, put off the unriddling of it to some future time. Now suddenly he abruptly recalled these former questions and perplexities, and it seemed no accident to him that he should recall them now.

The loud laughter has here become a chill breath, the demiurge a “mute and deaf spirit”—the riddle remains, but the tonality has darkened considerably. Raskolnikov received this impression many times; it does not come as the result of his crime; on the contrary, he recalls it now as if his act were somehow the first step in its unriddling. Crime and Punishment is a highly unusual mystery novel: the most mystified character in it is the murderer himself.

We know a good deal about the genesis of the novel from Dostoevsky's letters and notebooks. When he went abroad in July 1865, he had plans in mind for two separate works—one, a long novel to be called The Drunkards, dealing with “the current problem of drunke

In its new form, the novel retained the general features of the hero as he had outlined them for Katkov, but the material was greatly expanded, and it was no longer cast as a confession. By chance, close to the begi