Who He Is
Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, Rodya to his mother and sister, is the protagonist: a former law student in Petersburg, so poor that he has given up his classes and owes his landlady for the cubbyhole where he lives (chapter I of Part One), and the author of an article, written half a year earlier and published without his knowledge, that divides humanity into ordinary and extraordinary people (chapter V of Part Three). He kills the pawnbroker Alyona Ivanovna and, by accident, her half-sister Lizaveta (chapter VII of Part One), not to steal, but to discover which side of that very division he stands on (chapter IV of Part Five). The whole novel fits within the distance between the theory he wrote and the man who carried it out.
Trajectory
In chapter I of Part One he already arrives with the "thing" he has been turning over in his head for a month, and what the following chapters show is not a decision but a chain of shoves, beginning with the axiom he repeats to himself, drawn from the shame of having fled his landlady:
все в руках человека, и все-то он мимо носу проносит, единственно от одной трусости… это уж аксиома…, everything is in a man's hands, and he lets it all slip past his nose, purely out of cowardice... that is already an axiom...
In chapter V of Part One, weeping for the mare of the dream, he swears he could not bear it, and on the way back he overhears by chance, on Sennaya Street, the hour at which Lizaveta will leave the old woman alone:
Он вошел к себе, как приговоренный к смерти. Ни о чем он не рассуждал и совершенно не мог рассуждать; но всем существом своим вдруг почувствовал, что нет у него более ни свободы рассудка, ни воли и что все вдруг решено окончательно., He entered his room like a man condemned to death. He reasoned about nothing and was utterly incapable of reasoning; but with his whole being he suddenly felt that he no longer had any freedom of judgment or will, and that everything had suddenly been decided, once and for all.
In chapter VI of Part One, the narrator recounts the moral arithmetic he heard six weeks earlier from a stranger in a tavern, and which he never claims as his own:
Убей ее и возьми ее деньги, с тем чтобы с их помощию посвятить потом себя на служение всему человечеству и общему делу: [...] Одна смерть и сто жизней взамен — да ведь тут арифметика!, Kill her and take her money, so that with it you can afterward devote yourself to the service of all humanity and the common cause: [...] One death and a hundred lives in exchange, why, that is arithmetic!
The same chapter closes his preparation with the image that sums up his state:
Точно он попал клочком одежды в колесо машины, и его начало в нее втягивать., It was as if he had caught a scrap of his clothing in the wheel of a machine, and it had begun to draw him in.
In chapter VII of Part One, the day after the dream, the blow falls almost mechanically:
Он вынул топор совсем, взмахнул его обеими руками, едва себя чувствуя, и почти без усилия, почти машинально, опустил на голову обухом, He took the axe out completely, swung it with both hands, barely feeling himself, and almost without effort, almost mechanically, brought it down on her head, with the blunt side.
In chapter I of Part Two, the order is reversed, and the body begins to hand over what the mind still defends: he examines his clothes for blood before he examines his conscience, and what he feels first, at the police station, is not guilt but estrangement from others:
Мрачное ощущение мучительного, бесконечного уединения и отчуждения вдруг сознательно сказались душе его, a gloomy sense of tormenting, endless solitude and estrangement suddenly made itself felt in his soul, consciously.
In chapter II of Part Two, he hides the loot under a stone without having looked at what was in the purse:
Если действительно все это дело сделано было сознательно, а не по-дурацки, если у тебя действительно была определенная и твердая цель, то каким же образом ты до сих пор даже и не заглянул в кошелек и не знаешь, что тебе досталось, из-за чего все муки принял и на такое подлое, гадкое, низкое дело сознательно шел?, if this whole affair was really done consciously, and not stupidly, if you really had a definite and firm purpose, then how is it that until now you haven't even looked into the purse and don't know what you got, what you endured all those torments for, and consciously went to such a vile, disgusting, base deed?
In the fever of chapter III of Part Two, he raves aloud, among earrings, chains, the stocking, and the fringe of his trousers, and in chapter VI of Part Two he provokes Zamyotov with the question that nearly gives him away:
А что, если это я старуху и Лизавету убил?, And what if it was I who killed the old woman and Lizaveta?
The only relief in this part comes from a gesture his theory did not foresee, giving the money he has to the family of a stranger, in chapter VII of Part Two:
Есть жизнь! Разве я сейчас не жил? Не умерла еще моя жизнь вместе с старою старухой!, There is life! Haven't I just been living? My life has not yet died along with the old crone!
It is in chapter V of Part Three that the doctrine is finally stated in public, in the house of Porfiry Petrovich, and it takes on the book's most complete formulation: first the correction he makes to Porfiry's summary, then the core of the division between the two groups.
Я просто-запросто намекнул, что «необыкновенный» человек имеет право… то есть не официальное право, а сам имеет право разрешить своей совести перешагнуть… через иные препятствия, и единственно в том только случае, если исполнение его идеи (иногда спасительной, может быть, для всего человечества) того потребует., I simply hinted that the "extraordinary" man has the right... that is, not an official right, but he himself has the right to permit his conscience to step over... certain obstacles, and only in the event that the execution of his idea (sometimes saving, perhaps, for all humanity) requires it.
Первый разряд всегда — господин настоящего, второй разряд — господин будущего. Первые сохраняют мир и приумножают его численно; вторые двигают мир и ведут его к цели., The first category is always master of the present, the second category is master of the future. The first preserve the world and multiply it in number; the second set the world in motion and lead it toward its goal.
The test already contains the verdict: he sustains the thesis in the abstract, with Newton, Lycurgus, and Napoleon, and recoils before every question that brings it close to himself (chapter V of Part Three). Later that same day, alone, he takes his own doctrine apart in two sentences (chapter VI of Part Three):
я не человека убил, я принцип убил! Принцип-то я и убил, а переступить-то не переступил, на этой стороне остался... Только и сумел, что убить., I didn't kill a person, I killed a principle! It was the principle I killed, but I didn't step over, I stayed on this side... All I managed to do was kill.
я действительно вошь, I really am a louse.
In chapter III of Part Four he breaks with his mother and sister and asks them to renounce him:
Что бы со мною ни было, погибну я или нет, я хочу быть один. Забудьте меня совсем. [...] А теперь, когда любите меня, откажитесь… Иначе, я вас возненавижу, я чувствую…, Whatever happens to me, whether I perish or not, I want to be alone. Forget me entirely. [...] And now, since you love me, give me up... Otherwise, I shall hate you, I feel it...
He then goes to the only place left to him, the room of Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladova, where, in chapter IV of Part Four, he does the two contradictory things that define him. First he attacks her faith, when she repeats that God will not allow the worst to happen to the children:
Да, может, и бога-то совсем нет, Yes, maybe there's no God at all.
Soon after, he bows down to the floor and kisses her foot, in the face of all human suffering:
Я не тебе поклонился, я всему страданию человеческому поклонился, It wasn't to you that I bowed, I bowed to all human suffering.
And before leaving he proposes that the two go on together as the accursed:
Мы вместе прокляты, вместе и пойдем!, We are cursed together, and together we shall go!
In chapter IV of Part Five he confesses, but not for the reason the scene suggests: he goes up to her room still flushed with his victory over Luzhin (chapter III of Part Five), and what he hands over is the fact, never the gesture. First he rules out money, his mother, and humanity as motives:
Я просто убил; для себя убил, для себя одного, I simply killed; I killed for myself, for myself alone.
Then he states the question he claims to have asked himself when he killed:
мне надо было узнать тогда, и поскорей узнать, вошь ли я, как все, или человек? Смогу ли я переступить или не смогу! Осмелюсь ли нагнуться и взять или нет? Тварь ли я дрожащая или право имею…, I had to find out then, and find out quickly, whether I am a louse like everyone else or a man! Will I be able to step over or not? Do I dare bend down and pick it up or not? Am I a trembling creature, or do I have the right...
And he reaches the conclusion that the rest of the book will charge him for:
Разве я старушонку убил? Я себя убил, а не старушонку! Тут так-таки разом и ухлопал себя, навеки!.., Was it the old woman I killed? It was myself I killed, not the old woman! Right there, in one stroke, I finished myself off, forever!..
In chapter II of Part Six, Porfiry accuses him without proof and offers him a way out:
Как кто убил?.. — переговорил он, точно не веря ушам своим, — да вы убили, Родион Романыч! Вы и убили-с…, What do you mean, who killed?... he said, as if not trusting his own ears, why, you killed him, Rodion Romanych! You're the one who killed, sir...
In chapter V of Part Six, Arkady Ivanovich Svidrigailov reduces his theory, in front of Dunya, to just another theory:
Тут была тоже одна собственная теорийка, [...] по которой люди разделяются, [...] на материал и на особенных людей, то есть на таких людей, для которых, [...] закон не писан а, напротив, которые сами сочиняют законы остальным людям, материалу-то, сору-то. Ничего, так себе теорийка; une theorie comme une autre, There was also a little theory of his own here, [...] according to which people are divided [...] into material and special people, that is, into people for whom, [...] the law is not written, and who, on the contrary, compose the laws for the rest of humanity, the material, the refuse. Nothing much, just a little theory; une theorie comme une autre.
In the square, in chapter VIII of Part Six, he performs half of the rite Sonia taught him, and the words freeze on his tongue:
Он стал на колени среди площади, поклонился до земли и поцеловал эту грязную землю, с наслаждением и счастием., He knelt in the middle of the square, bowed down to the ground, and kissed that filthy earth, with delight and happiness.
The confession only comes out at the police station, dry:
Это я убил тогда старуху-чиновницу и сестру ее Лизавету топором и ограбил., It was I who killed, back then, the official's widow, the old woman, and her sister Lizaveta, with an axe, and robbed them.
In chapter I of the Epilogue, the court reads the crime as a passing disturbance, and he himself, when asked, gives poverty and helplessness as the cause:
подоспела новейшая модная теория временного умопомешательства, которую так часто стараются применять в наше время к иным преступникам, the newest fashionable theory arrived in time, that of temporary mental derangement, which in our day is so often applied to certain criminals.
причиной всему было его скверное положение, его нищета и беспомощность, желание упрочить первые шаги своей жизненной карьеры с помощью, по крайней мере, трех тысяч рублей, которые он рассчитывал найти у убитой, the cause of everything was his wretched situation, his poverty and helplessness, the desire to secure the first steps of his life's career with the help of at least three thousand rubles, which he counted on finding with the dead woman.
In chapter II of the Epilogue, privately, he rejects this explanation and all the others: what sickens him in the Siberian prison is wounded pride.
его гордость сильно была уязвлена; он и заболел от уязвленной гордости, his pride was greatly wounded; he fell ill from his wounded pride.
Until the penultimate page his position is unchanged:
он не раскаивался в своем преступлении, he did not repent of his crime.
The dream of the plague returns his doctrine on a planetary scale:
всякий думал, что в нем в одном и заключается истина, each one thought that the truth was contained in him alone.
And the turn, when it comes, is not an argument defeated by another argument:
Вместо диалектики наступила жизнь, и в сознании должно было выработаться что-то совершенно другое, Instead of dialectics, life arrived, and in his consciousness something entirely different had to take shape.
Themes Embodied
Raskolnikov's function in the novel's architecture is not to be the guilty party who is being sought. He is the laboratory in which an idea that is correct on the inside proves false on the outside. Dostoevsky gives him a theory with no internal logical incoherence and then observes what it does in a body, and the answer is that the body protests before reason does. That is why the book never refutes the doctrine of the extraordinary man with a counterargument: every serious objection comes from outside his head, from Dmitry Prokofich Razumikhin, who knows nothing of the crime, and from Zamyotov, who insinuates, both in Porfiry's house (chapter V of Part Three), from Sonia, who does not argue (chapter IV of Part Four), and none of them convinces him; they only wear him down.
Raskolnikov is also the axis by which all the other characters are measured, and this function makes him the protagonist even when he disappears from the scene. Luzhin states the theory without the historical disguise, and he reacts like a man who sees himself in the wrong mirror (chapter V of Part Two). Svidrigailov applies it without the least discomfort and becomes the sketch of what he would be without a conscience (chapter V of Part Five). Porfiry hands it back to him as method (chapter V of Part Four), and Sonia ignores it entirely (chapter IV of Part Five). Each of them exists to answer the question he asked with an axe.
What the novel establishes as his responsibility is not the moment he decides, but the moment he stops deciding. He never chooses to kill with the clarity with which he chooses, for example, to prevent his sister's marriage (chapter IV of Part One), and this gap is the subject of the book, not a flaw in its construction.
Divergent Readings
Raskolnikov can be read as mad in the classical sense or as lucid, and the divergence is worth more than any synthesis. In the reading that considers him mad, he is the intellectual who acted on his own theory and went mad for it, unlike the intellectual who only theorizes and keeps his hands clean.
Joseph Frank reads the opposite: the oscillation between motives is not a symptom of imbalance or of the author's hesitation, it is the subject itself, each layer of motive being a phase in the self-discovery of a man who does not know why he killed. What would, after the second blow, lead him to denounce himself (chapter VII of Part One) is also not fear:
At the moment he acts, "the dread took hold of him more and more," but what would lead him to give himself up is not fear but "the simple horror and repugnance at what he had done"; the conscience that his theory was supposed to have neutralized remains alive and reacts before reason can reach it.
The test to which he subjects his own idol (chapter VI of Part Three) contains a passage that psychiatric reading does not reach:
Нет, те люди не так сделаны; настоящий властелин, кому всё разрешается, громит Тулон, делает резню в Париже, забывает армию в Египте, тратит полмиллиона людей в московском походе и отделывается каламбуром в Вильне; и ему же, по смерти, ставят кумиры, — а стало быть, и всё разрешается., No, those men are not made that way; the true sovereign, to whom everything is permitted, crushes Toulon, carries out a massacre in Paris, forgets an army in Egypt, wastes half a million men on the Moscow campaign, and gets off with a pun in Vilna; and, after his death, they erect idols to him, and so everything is permitted.
The two readings diverge in something practical: if he is mad, the Epilogue is a cure and the theory never needed an answer; if he is lucid and discovers himself in stages, the Epilogue is the one point where the book should answer and does not. The third divergence, over whether the final conversion is genuine or a forced graft, is recorded side by side, without a choice, at the close of chapter II of the Epilogue.
Relationships
- Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladova: the counterpart, to whom he confesses before any authority (chapter IV of Part Five) and whose only remedy, kissing the earth in a public square, he refuses to carry out in full (chapter VIII of Part Six).
- Arkady Ivanovich Svidrigailov: the double without theory and without horror, who overhears the confession through the wall (chapter V of Part Five) and applies the same logic without any weight of conscience.
- Porfiry Petrovich: the investigator who surrounds him without proof, by pure psychology (chapter V of Part Four), and who offers him voluntary surrender as a way out (chapter II of Part Six).
- Pulcheria Alexandrovna Raskolnikova and Avdotya Romanovna Raskolnikova, mother and sister, from whom he separates before giving himself up (chapter III of Part Four, chapter VII of Part Six), and whose sacrifice for him is the intimate motive the crime was meant to resolve (chapter IV of Part One).
- Dmitry Prokofich Razumikhin, the classmate who supports him through his fever (chapter III of Part Two), who, without knowing of the crime, formulates the gravest objection to his theory (chapter V of Part Three), and who takes on his family when he abandons it (chapter III of Part Four).
- Julien Sorel, outside the novel: the older relative, the poor and intelligent young man of 1830 who also decides to act against the common yardstick, and whose hypocrisy raises the same question about character flaw or rational response.