Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, Part One, Chapter 6 commentary
100 Days of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment
100 Days of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment
September 1 - December 10, 2024
October 2
Crime and Punishment Part One, Chapter 6, 13 pages
Next passages:
I will try to finish reading the book illustrating this post - The Sinner and the Saint - and catch up on my posts over the weekend! If you read Crime and Punishment and the past - I can’t recommend it enough - if this is your first time reading the novel - please wait till December - and don’t read any of the introductions to your editions - they give everything away!!!
October 5
Crime and Punishment Part One, Chapter 7, 13 pages - end of Part One
October 6
Crime and Punishment Part Two, Chapter 1, 18 pages
Coincidences, coincidences - or are they?!
As Rodion was introduced to the pawnbroker who could help him out in his strained circumstances, he JUST HAPPENED to overhear the oddest conversation…
The pawnbroker, Alyona Ivanovna, is NOT a nice person… She torments her half sister Lizaveta, who is hard working, timid, long suffering, and continuously pregnant… Yes, she has this in common - EVEN the name - with Stinky Lizaveta in Brothers Karamazov…
AND this Alyona decided to leave ALL her money to “a monastery in N—y province, for the eternal remembrance of her soul.”
Now, are these reasons enough to KILL her - AND engage in the redistribution of her funds to deserving persons?!?!?!
"Excuse me, I want to ask you a serious question," the student began ardently. "I was joking just now, but look: on the one hand you have a stupid, meaningless, worthless, wicked, sick old crone, no good to anyone and, on the contrary, harmful to everyone, who doesn't know herself why she's alive, and who will die on her own tomorrow. You see? You see?"
The student Rodion is overhearing is the voice of radical social transformation birthed out of European Enlightenment, French Revolutions of 1789, 1830, and 1848 and utopian socialism, English utilitarianism, and German materialism - ALL the “-isms” troubling the Russian intellectual life in mid 19th century…
"Listen, now. On the other hand, you have fresh, young forces that are being wasted for lack of support, and that by the thou-sands, and that everywhere! A hundred, a thousand good deeds and undertakings that could be arranged and set going by the money that old woman has doomed to the monastery! Hundreds, maybe thousands of lives put right; dozens of families saved from desti-tution, from decay, from ruin, from depravity, from the venereal hospitals—all on her money. Kill her and take her money, so that afterwards with its help you can devote yourself to the service of all mankind and the common cause: what do you think, wouldn't thousands of good deeds make up for one tiny little crime? For one life, thousands of lives saved from decay and corruption. One death for hundreds of lives-it's simple arithmetic! And what does the life of this stupid, consumptive, and wicked old crone mean in the general balance? No more than the life of a louse, a cockroach, and not even that much, because the old crone is harmful. She's eating up someone else's life: the other day she got so angry that she bit Lizaveta's finger; they almost had to cut it off!"
And so, eliminate one undeserving human being who does not contribute to social wellbeing - and make a hundred deserving human being happy - how is this for a rational equation?! But how do we qualify socially valuable human beings?! AND who will evaluate the utility of their social functions?!?!?! AND THEN - who will do the killing?!?!?! Dostoevsky was deeply disturbed by all of these questions - and by the fact that that they were openly discussed in the troubled society that surrounded him - and was desperately looking for answers…
"You're talking and making speeches now, but tell me: would you yourself kill the old woman, or not?"
"Of course not! It's for the sake of justice that I… I'm not the point here...”
Killing for the sake of justice, for the sake of ideas - now THAT’S an idea… People BORN out of these ideas - instead of their own humanity… The very thing that troubled Dostoevsky on the last page of Notes from Underground…
And if Rodion hears these ideas discussed in the open - does this give him justification for implementing them?!?!?!
“But why precisely now did he have to hear precisely such talk and thinking, when…
exactly the same thoughts had just been con ceived in his own head? And why precisely now, as he was coming from the old woman's bearing the germ of his thought, should he chance upon a conversation about the same old woman? ...
This coincidence always seemed strange to him. This negligible tavern conversation had an extreme influence on him in the further development of the affair; as though there were indeed some predestination, some indication in it...”
Escapism of his feverish mind takes him to the vision of a gold infused stream in Egypt - and to the contemplation of the expansion of Summer Gardens all the way to Mikhailovsky Palace - why not?!?!?!
In the meantime - how to resolve the contradiction between the “darkening of reason” and “failure of will”?… Does Rodion have the courage to implement his convictions?!?!?! He certainly had been planning ahead - the pledge is heavy enough to feel valuable - and is wrapped well - it will occupy the pawnbroker for a few minutes… And now - the axe - for it must be the axe…
“He was now faced with the most important thing-stealing the axe from the kitchen. That the deed was to be done with an axe he had already decided long ago. He also had a folding pruning knife, but he could not rely on the knife and still less on his own strength, and therefore finally decided on the axe.”
But does one actually need to KILL to prove the strength of one’s ideological convictions?!?!?! Just you wait till we get to Demons in the fall of 2026… Dostoevsky was hearing this argument from the radical students who were ready to blow up the world - and they will succeed - one murder at a time…
“We may note, incidentally, one peculiarity with regard to all the final decisions he came to in this affair. They had one strange property: the more final they became, the more hideous and absurd they at once appeared in his own eyes. In spite of all his tormenting inner struggle, never for a single moment during the whole time could he believe in the feasibility of his designs.”
But what to do with that most human of entities - doubt?!?!?! AND conscience?!?!?!
“If he had ever once managed to analyze and finally decide everything down to the last detail, and there were no longer any doubts left—at that point he would most likely have renounced it all as absurd, monstrous, and impossible. But there remained a whole abyss of doubts and unresolved details.”
But how to prove that one is NOT a piano key?! NOT a cog of industrial machinery - how to assert one’s will?!?!?!
“This last day, which had come so much by chance and resolved everything at once, affected him almost wholly mechanically: as if someone had taken him by the hand and pulled him along irresistibly, blindly, with unnatural force, without objections. As if a piece of his clothing had been caught in the cogs of a machine and he were being dragged into it.”
And how to commit a WORTHY crime - and how to make sure that the will endures beyond a simple darkening of the soul?!?!?! The following passage is crucial for our understanding of the entire novel!!!
“At first-even long before—he had been occupied with one question: why almost all crimes are so easily detected and solved, and why almost all criminals leave such an obviously marked trail.
He came gradually to various and curious conclusions, the chief reason lying, in his opinion, not so much in the material impossibility of concealing the crime as in the criminal himself; the criminal himself, almost any criminal, experiences at the moment of the crime a sort of failure of will and reason, which, on the contrary, are replaced by a phenomenal, childish thoughtlessness, just at the moment when reason and prudence are most necessary. According to his conviction, it turned out that this darkening of reason and failure of will take hold of a man like a disease, develop gradually, and reach their height shortly before the crime is committed; they continue unabated during the moment of the crime itself and for some time after it, depending on the individual; then they pass in the same way as any disease passes. But the question whether the disease generates the crime, or the crime somehow by its peculiar nature is always accompanied by something akin to disease, he did not yet feel able to resolve.”
To be or not to be… To prove oneself or to withdraw into inaction… To step over the social restrictions AND acquire freedom from constraints?!?!?! And if one does - would all this constitute greatness?!?!?!
“Having come to such conclusions, he decided that in his own personal case there would be no such morbid turnabouts, that reason and will would remain with him inalienably throughout the fulfillment of what he had plotted, for the sole reason that what he had plotted-was "not a crime" ... We omit the whole process by means of which he arrived at this latter decision; we have run too far ahead of ourselves as it is ... We will only add that the factual, purely material difficulties of the affair generally played a most secondary role in his mind. "Since I will have kept all my will and reason over them, they, too, will be defeated in due time, once I have acquainted myself to the minutest point with all the details of the affair..." But the affair would not get started. He went on believing least of all in his final decisions, and when the hour struck, everything came out not that way at all, but somehow accidentally, even almost unexpectedly.”
Plus - our young radical can sew - such skill in making a loop for the axe inside his coat!!! For who in his right mind would walk across town with an axe in one’s hands?!?!?! A revolutionary… And we are not there yet… We are only testing the endurance of one’s will beyond the darkening of one’s soul… Incidentally, Mitya in Brothers Karamazov can sew too - which a crucial plot element!!! Such clever characters…
And so we begin the incredible passage where the readers are horrified and thrilled at the same time by Raskolnikov’s progress… He leaves - unnoticed… He steels the axe - unnoticed… The painters are in the empty apartment - but they don’t see him…
The door bell… the waiting… the sensing of the presence on the other side of the door…
End of Part One commentary on Saturday - Chapter 1 of Part Two on Sunday…
Brace yourselves…
