‘Crime and Punishment’: A Story of Madness and Murder
A review of ‘Crime and Punishment’, by Fyodor Dostoevsky; Penguin Books, 1968.
In Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky thrusts us into the tangled streets of St. Petersburg, illuminating a city that is grim, tough, and vividly rendered. The story centres on Rodion Raskolnikov, a poor, proud former student who persuades himself to kill in a defiant philosophical act. In tracing the contours of Raskolnikov’s unravelling mind, Dostoevsky goes beyond crime and consequence to explore guilt, pride, and the urge for redemption. Through each character, he raises moral questions that stay with us, or ought to stay with us, long after the tale ends.
We meet Raskolnikov as, thin and feverish, he leaves his flat to walk the squalid slums in a mental state as grim and muddied as the backdrop. He is pitiable yet monstrous, mentally at odds against ordinary ideas of right and wrong. The cityscape is the landscape of his divided soul: the streets are narrow, wet, and bleak; rooms are invariably cramped and dim; the air smells stale. Every street he walks, every room he enters, seems to drive him deeper into the despair that holds all of Dostoevsky’s characters to ransom.
The cityscape is the landscape of his divided soul.
Foreshadowing Nietzsche’s mad idea that there exist übermenschen, empowered to live ‘beyond good and evil’ Raskolnikov builds a case for murder. He is special; the pawnbroker he will kill leads a worthless life. Her death will serve a ‘greater good’ by freeing him from penury. And then he killers her – Alyona Ivanovna – and her innocent sister, Lizaveta. Despite the build-up, it comes suddenly, like a rupture in reality. But now, with terror, Raskolnikov sees his intellect is no match for human nature and the moral law. Neither his massive pride nor his utilitarian reasoning can survive under the weight of regret and dread, visions and guilt. The murder shatters his illusions, exposing both the horror of violence and the emptiness of its reasons.
Dostoevsky sets the extraordinary cleverness of Raskolnikov against the ordinary goodness of his circle – a goodness he admired in the common folk who filled his church services. Raskolnikov’s friend Razumikhin is kind and grounded; his mother Pulcheria and sister Dunya, resilient as well as compassionate. Thus we see the folly of a life lived too intellectually, too divorced from messy reality. It is a truism that the clever can reason themselves to bad conclusions. ‘A little knowledge,’ wrote Alexander Pope in 1711, ‘is a dangerous thing.’ Painfully, we see that Raskolnikov’s friends and family stand for better parts, thwarted parts, of his fractured self. He is pushed further into doubt and fear.
His real foe is not, then, the police inspector, Porfiry Petrovich, nor is it the law. It is his own troubled soul. What he has done? Porfiry is more a mirror to Raskolnikov than his pursuer, probing the murderer’s mind without setting traps. Their meetings, tense and darkly comic, bring Raskolnikov by degrees to see his own weakness. Porfiry’s calm, almost fatherly approach suggests patience: the truth will out, soon enough. The climate of dread grows thick.
‘A little knowledge,’ wrote Alexander Pope in 1711, ‘is a dangerous thing.’
Crime and Punishment. The stress is less on the crime, more on the punishment – yet the punishment is equal to the crime, as in the contrapasso justice of Dante’s hell. The crime, in other words, is the punishment. And its cause can be nothing more or less than the madness that springs from pride and isolation. In 1790, attacking the abstract, theoretical reasoning that led to the French Revolution, Burke wrote that we ought to be afraid to ‘put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; for we suspect that this stock in each man is small.’ The individual is foolish; the species is wise. Raskolnikov’s attempt to live by his own lights, as it were, to be extraordinary, only shows how ordinary he is – and how much better off he would be if he humbled himself accordingly.
Dostoevsky renders this intensely psychological lesson in raw, even visceral prose, blending short, sharp sentences with feverish, fragmented narration. His style shifts violently between clarity and confusion, mirroring Raskolnikov’s oscillating mental states: moments of lucidity are broken by frantic, disjointed thoughts. We are not to be comforted, but forced to face a world where the moral law has been broken, where right and wrong have been blurred, and where high ideals and abstraction falter and collapse under the weight of concrete reality.
