crime and punishment (dostoyevksy, tr. david mcduff)

What brought my reading back to this strange, savage novel? In part it has been inspired by working on Rambert’s Repetition, in which a character at one point talks about how ‘everything was written, the truth was to be found in the fiction’, which chimes with the idea of the writer as amanuensis and prophet. In part it was to explore a thought in my head that the world of St Petersburg described in my memory was akin to the worlds that lie just down the road, or even sometimes across the road, in the Americas I now inhabit.

Crime and punishment is a tale from the underworld. An anti-murder mystery, where we know who did it from the very start. Here is the paradox, because we know the criminal is not the image of the desperate criminal, but rather the sensitive student, Raskolnikov, almost likeable, forever intriguing, cursed by his very hand as it enacts the murder he has intellectually decided to commit. In another world, he might have become the muddied intellectual with a career in academia or ‘the media’. But in the impoverished conditions he lives in, his intellect and imagination prove to be the road to hell, or at least Siberia, rather than a comfortable bourgeois lifestyle in Ealing, to pick a name out of the hat. All of which goes to show that the problems of an impoverished society don’t just impinge on the underclass. They also lead to a deformation of the idea of education, or, to put it another way, a Nietszchean re-evaluation of the idea of education: not as a means of furthering the health of society, but as a means of advancing the individual.

Raskolnikov crumbles under the weight of the moral bind he has placed himself in. He would be a superman, but he can’t sustain the illusion. But in his endeavour, as described by the author, we can indeed see the future written, the future which would lead to the Russian revolution, but would also lead to fascism and the love of the figure of the all-powerful leader. The fragile cat’s cradle of society only needs to lose a few threads for the whole thing to unravel. In these Americas, there will be Raskolnikovs aplenty. Driven to desperate acts in the name of their own higher purpose. Nothing much has changed, the great cities and the less-great cities continue to be the site of desperate, unheeded struggles, hidden behind the shop windows of fashion stores and car dealerships.