I studied the Russian novel ‘Crime and Punishment’ back in 1964 as part of an English Literature course that year, so was interested to find the following article published as the Friday Essay in the on-line edition of ‘The Conversation’ earlier this month. Written by Kevin John Brophy, the Emeritus Professor of Creative writing at the University of Melbourne, on December 5th, he also was returning to the novel after 60 years, and claimed to be still ‘awed’ by it.
I share his reflections of ‘Crime and Punishment’ by Fyodor Dostoevsky below. Whether I ever make the time to reread the novel remains to be seen, perhaps Brophy’s return to it may suffice!
The old woman who once sliced our front garden hose with a knife has just walked past our home without pausing. Not long after the hose incident I confronted her with what she had done and she denied ever walking along our street, let alone cutting anyone’s hose, or even carrying a knife.
In fact she emptied her bag for me and there was no knife in it. I had been searching on the web about strange behaviour among the elderly and one source noted that it is not uncommon for aged women to carry a knife in their bag. I am not sure what this means, but each time I see the old woman (and I see her often on our street), I feel reassured when she manages to pass by our front garden without a glance in the direction of the hose – though the lingering question of the motive for her crime remains.
I am rereading Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment 60 years after first being enthralled by it, with the idea of testing myself against an experience I’ve long been convinced upended me as a teenage reader, then shaped me as a university student of the 1970s who channelled his version of Dostoevsky’s protagonist, Raskolnikov – a name that means something like “heretic”, or one who cuts themselves away from their community.
Rereading is a risk, of course, for the book might fail to stand up to my memory of it as powerful, original, frightening, scandalous and utterly compelling. It might no longer surprise me and I might have to shrink it back to a diminished place among books that are not, after all, lastingly great in my reading life.
Early on, a first surprise for me is that Raskolnikov was handsome. In my memory his figure is physically as repulsive as his psyche. But no, on the first page of the novel Dostoevsky is at pains to tell the reader that his student was attractive. Later, Raskolnikov’s sister, Dunya, who looks just like him, is repeatedly the subject of men’s desires on account of her beauty.
My second surprise in these early pages is the drunkard, Marmeladov, saying he’s drinking up his eldest daughter’s income from “the yellow card”, that is, from her work as a prostitute. Did I even know what the man was talking about when I was 14?
I was a Catholic boy from a family of nine children and being the first son, I was the one who would go into a monastery at 18 and last there for two years of study, silence and prayer. How was it that I had even come across such a novel on the faintly rural fringe of early-1960s Melbourne in the outer suburb of Watsonia, where soldiers of the second world war had been given blocks of land at bargain prices?
I had been a comics reader as much as a book consumer through my childhood and early teens, and Classic Comics had introduced me to a world of “classic” stories, including Dostoevsky’s. Classic comics made the stories look dramatic and serious. I wanted intensely to go further into that realm.
Like any young reader discovering the world’s rich history of storytelling I wanted to read what was beyond my understanding and capacity. The thick weightiness of Crime and Punishment (first published in 1866), a handsome paperback, its ultra-thin pages, the adult gravity of such small print and the dully serious, high-art cover, all of this made me feel I had arrived at something worth curling up with for days on end. The novel took a grip on me even through the fog of a devout Catholicism and the security of a tightly-guarded family circle.
Soon after we meet him, Raskolnikov receives a long letter from his mother promising money in a few days’ time, while going on to narrate a brief and apparently fortuitous courting of his sister by a vain and forceful businessman more than twice her age. And yet, his mother writes, this suitor appears to be kind and, as he says himself, without prejudice. She ends her letter remembering Raskolnikov as a child babbling prayers on her lap. “I fear in my heart”, she writes, “that you may have been affected by this latest fashion of unbelief.”
Not softened by his mother’s love, her generosity, or even by her fears, Raskolnikov goes out into the streets of St Petersburg with a face “distorted” by a “nasty, lugubrious, jaundiced smile snaking across his lips” as he vows never to allow his sister’s marriage to take place.
Throughout the first vodka-soaked chapters, not only does a man confess to living off his daughter’s prostitution, but a drunken teenage girl on the street, only partly dressed and most likely already abused, is openly followed by a man who wants her for his pleasures, and Raskolnikov recalls, or dreams (it is unclear) the beating of a horse to death, after remembering that he used to play in a certain cemetery where his brother, who died at six months, was buried.
In each episode, Raskolnikov seems to be both an element of Petersburg’s abject street life and a lone figure of sobriety, decency and compassion. He protects the young girl on the street until she is safe. He suffers for the horse. But we are also witness to the fact that he has already condemned his own soul for indulging in the desire to kill an old woman.
Reading anew the passage describing the beating of a horse outside a drinking house, (in my Penguin edition, translated by David McDuff), I remember that as a child I had seen a man do just this to a horse. Is it a true memory though? When I was a child I used to accept rides on a milkman’s cart in the mornings on my way to the local church to serve as an altar-boy at early mass, so it was not unusual to see horses in mid-1950s Melbourne.
Or perhaps while reading this passage I was reliving my first encounter with it as if it was a scene I had witnessed myself. I can’t be certain. The scene in the novel, horrific and gothic, is barely realist though utterly real. In my memory I have an image of my father driving me past a patch of grass outside flats along Murray Road in Coburg where we passed a man flogging a horse. My memory is that this was the first time I fully realised humans had absolute and merciless power over animals.
The beating to death of the horse works as the first murder in the novel, a climax to the phantasmagoria of cruelty, immorality, decadence and drunkenness we have been witness to in the early pages. The beating of the horse, so unsettling to Raskolnikov, is an uncanny rehearsal of the wanton brutality he’s contemplating committing himself. The novel swings between chaos encountered on the streets and an inner world of tormented thoughts with such pressing vertigo that one becomes a mirror of the other.
That the murder of the old woman happens so early in the book startled me then and still does. I remember wanting to know from the inside the mind of a character capable of such a crime. There was something of the voyeur to my desire, but something too of a hint that through this reading experience I was in connection with a real and dangerous part of myself.
And now, so much later, from this end of life, I perceive Raskolnikov not so much as a possible me, but as a victim of his thinking, reading, youthful extravagance, boundless ambition and of course his fashionable unbelief. The novel was possibly a dangerous one for me to be reading as a naïve 14-year-old.
It was nearly another ten years beyond my first reading Crime and Punishment when a late 20th century version of fashionable unbelief took me from the Catholic Church towards what I experienced as freedom from belief in God.
Through my twenties I lived at least partly as a version of Raskolnikov: a student, chronically poor, renting rooms in share houses, intense to a fault, absorbed in a feverish imagination, dressed in worn-out clothes. And like Raskolnikov, I chose to live this way. In the 1970s there were whole suburbs of students living like this around inner-city universities. But the murderer in Raskolnikov was seemingly forgotten by me at this time, perhaps in denial, but just as it is ignored through long passages of the novel.
Re-reading now the scene of the murder of the old woman, I am shocked that I had forgotten it was a double murder, and that the second murder was so cold-bloodedly executed on the old woman’s younger sister, the one whose life might have been, in Raskolnikov’s earlier thoughts, saved and transformed by the death of her miserly, oppressive, older sister.
At the moment of the double murder all sympathy for Raskolnikov should disappear. In fact, perhaps at this point of the novel some readers would simply abandon the book unwilling to go the journey with such a character for another 500 pages. In 1866, when it appeared in monthly instalments in The Russian Messenger, then an influential, progressive literary journal, the book caused a sensation. Some readers were so affected they felt ill. Many put the novel aside, though most, like me a century later, were unable to put it down.
The attraction of the book might have something to do with it being almost a crime, one feels, to keep reading after the murder scene. Other later works of fiction such as Nabakov’s Lolita, Robert Block’s Psycho, Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night, or Anais Nin’s diaries also powerfully attract as much as they repel and distress.
In hindsight, this was my introduction to intimations of a dark side to literature, leading me to writers such as Franz Kafka, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Sigmund Freud, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf and the agonied loneliness of so many characters in modernist novel after novel, on to the suicidal ruminations of Thomas Bernhard’s fiction, and even the tortured and hilariously desperate isolation of Gerald Murnane’s young men in his early works. Raskolnikov showed the way ahead to a century and more of misfits and misanthropes.
In a new biography of composer and writer Erik Satie, Ian Penman makes a plea for re-balancing the story of modernity:
Why this general tendency to fetishise ‘darkness’? Why is so much reflection about modernity tangled up with melancholy? Why do we overstress the abject, the obscene, the transgressive? […] I mean, don’t we all want to be happy? Why fight against it?
His plea for relief makes good sense, especially perhaps for music, but the crises in the hearts of characters from Mary Shelley’s monster onwards, through Charles Dickens’ villains, to the grotesque creations of Wilkie Collins and later Camus’ murderous Meursault, are too urgently conjured for this reader to turn entirely from them.
So I do keep reading this time and not out of any sense of duty to literature or my former self, but because the novel does, once again, grip. It compels me forward by the force of scene after scene that screws Raskolnikov closer and closer to whatever might be the punishment promised in the title.
And if his conscience does bring him to punishment, how are we to know what is just? And how might his heart or his thinking bring him to embrace his punishment? What would it mean for my feelings about him if he gets away with it or does not feel something like remorse and revulsion over what he has done?
And was it, after all, a motiveless crime? Was it an act of unfeeling pride so misguided and mangled that one has to feel equal horror and sympathy for a killer who can sometimes act so selflessly? Is Raskolnikov finally as capable of love as he is of murder?
Current events snag on the novel as I read it this time. Its questions swirl around the criminal trial and sentencing of Erin Patterson, found guilty of murdering three members of her extended family with a carefully prepared meal of death cap mushrooms (a conviction she is now appealing). An almost unimaginable crime. Everyone with an interest in the case must imagine for themselves what might have been going on inside her as the murder was planned. A growing number of videos and podcasts explore what might have been Patterson’s motivations. At her public sentencing, Justice Beale at last addressed her directly on the reasons for her crimes with: “Only you know why you committed them.”
And as with Raskolnikov, Patterson is smart, but she was clumsy too. When Raskolnikov defends himself against accusations of being a lecher, accusations manufactured by his sister’s suitor, Luzhin, he remarks about him (but equally about himself), “He’s a clever man, but in order to act cleverly, cleverness alone is not enough.”
I don’t sympathise with Raskolnikov, but I don’t turn from him as a monster either. He can be compassionate without being saintly, generous to his last kopeck, honest to his own detriment, and instinctively respectful of those who suffer – and yet there he was with the axe in that room.
At almost breakneck speed Dostoevsky lets the murderer loose on the streets, where he encounters more prostitutes, gives away money, mock-confesses to committing the axe-murder at a night club, watches a suicidal woman jump into the city’s main canal only to be rescued against her will, possibly saving him from the same experience.
Then, as he is on his way to the police station to make an actual confession, he rescues the drunken Marmeladov from under the panicked horses of a barouche and delivers him, dying, to his destitute family, summoning a doctor and leaving the new widow with all the money (his mother’s gift) he has in his possession.
In almost every respect he seems an innocent in a world of depravity. Of course Dostoevsky is playing with his readers, daring us to sympathise with this young man, to witness his compassion, and to put aside for pages at a time the knowledge of the double murder he has committed. This is such a risky skating across thin ice that one does not want to stop following until the far bank is reached. I have no idea what my young self was making of all this beyond deciding to read on through it trusting the storyteller and trusting that the story would be a large and lasting one because it is, well, Russian, a masterpiece, and a “classic”.
I am shocked all over again by the fact that Raskolnikov himself does not seem to remember that he killed not just “one old woman”, but two women. He is repeatedly far too ready to minimise his crime.
When the young, accommodating docotor Zosimov begins talking at length out of vanity and pride, as most characters in the novel do when they launch into speeches, he tells Raskolnikov’s mother and sister, that Raskolnikov might be displaying a certain idée fixe, suggesting a case of “monomania” – a condition so interesting that he, Zosimov, is conducting a special study of it.
Monomania? I don’t remember this word quite popping out at me that first time the way it does now. It is strangely medical, strangely decisive. After some reading on it I discover that this was a relatively recently invented psychiatric diagnosis introduced to medicine in the first two decades of the 19th century partly through a Dr Etienne-Jean Georget who first defined Monomania as an idée fixe – a single pathological preoccupation in an otherwise sound mind.
After Georget’s published speculations on whether criminals could be defended on the basis that a monomania might diminish their culpability, French lawyers took up this line of defence so enthusiastically that the diagnosis had become discredited by the 1850s. You might say that monomania became a legal idée fixe.
For Dostoevsky’s readers it might have been a medical-sounding word, but one that also rang of sham psychiatry. In this scene the diagnosis washes through mother and daughter and Zosimov leaves in a hurry. But reference to the diagnosis keeps recurring, and oddly it will finally be tangled with Raskolnikov’s fate.
In a remarkably tense scene in the central police station, Detective Porfiry Petrovich exposes Raskolnikov’s authorship of a philosophical article that argued for the superiority of certain rare individuals above the norms of common humanity. These individuals can and apparently, must, commit crimes in order to do the work that will benefit humanity.
Raskolnikov tries to say his article is no more than a mild acceptance of what history has demonstrated, until, from the corner of the room, Amyotov, to whom Raskolnikov had made his mock confession, says, “Perhaps it was some budding Napoleon who did in old Alyona Ivanovna with an axe last week.”
Reading this now, it is difficult not to think of the sovereign citizens movement, far right conspiracy theorists, white supremacists, cults of the Christian kind and others who consider themselves to be outside norms and law – an often smart and always disturbing minority presciently described in Dostoevsky’s novel. Raskolnikov is an outrageous outsider, and like many of the far right conspiracists now, initially his complaints and suspicions about the hypocrisies of the powerful are acute and accurate until the line of argument takes him to its farthest reaches, to murder.
Sometimes an image seems to have been thrown into a novel just to see what will happen. Like a stone into a pond, a fishing line into surf, a boot into a crowd, a hat into the air. The troubling and provocative figure of Svidrigailov appears, a wealthy widower infatuated with Raskolnikov’s sister, possibly guilty of murdering his wife, and almost certainly guilty of raping a disabled girl – a twisted mirror image of Raskolnikov if Raskolnikov ever fully embraced the nihilism and exceptionalism he wrote of in his journal article. It is Svidrigailov who suggests eternity might be a small room no larger than a country bathhouse with soot on the walls and spiders in every corner. In fact, he says, this is the way he would have it if he had been given the job of designing things.
Do I remember first encountering this image of eternity? I think I do, and it connects for me with room 101 in George Orwell’s 1984, only here it is not the ultimate in torture, it is all there is that can be hoped for. The lasting effect of this image of eternity might have had something to do with the standard Catholic versions feeling, to me, either bland or illogical or too medieval.
Svidrigailov’s empty, cobwebbed room said more about the frightening nature of the idea of eternity than anything I had come across.
Sonya, Marmeladov’s prostitute-daughter, takes an increasingly central role as the book nears its end. She might herself be a lost soul, or a figure of Christ himself, perhaps a type of Mary Magdalene, a figure of blind faith, or of stubbornness beyond sense, and loyalty beyond reason.
Progressive critics at the time of publication condemned the novel for attaching Sonya to conservative (that is, peasant) Christian beliefs. But, as with much literature, the story is open to many ways in, so that reading it in 2025, Sonya for me is a figure simply of love, and of the simplest most willing love offered to one person from another. She doesn’t ever ask Raskolnikov to pray to her God, but only to accept love. If monotheism could be a form of monomania, she is not disfigured by it, despite her faith.
When Raskolnikov comes to confess his crimes, it is to her, and it is the killing of her friend, Alyona’s younger sister, Lizaveta, that he must most shamefully explain: that she was killed for simply being there. “How, how could you, a man like you […] do a thing like this?” Sonya has to ask.
Raskolnikov takes himself through the reasons: he killed because the money to be stolen would see him through a university degree in style. But no, he did not even rob the woman properly and the little he did take he buried away. He says he killed her to know if he could kill “without a thought”; or he killed the old woman because she was after all “a louse – a loathsome, useless, harmful louse”.
Sonya makes the only reply possible: “But that louse was a human being!”
Her statement echoes all the way to Kafka’s Red Peter, the killers Dick Hickock and Perry Smith from Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Patrick White’s Mr Voss and Lionel Shriver’s Kevin. Even if there was no conscious connection with Crime and Punishment for Kafka as he wrote The Metamorphosis, I cannot but think that Kafka’s story is a long meditation in response to Sonya’s cry.
To Sonya the only way out for Raskolnikov is to confess and accept the suffering that comes with shame. But the novel spins on possibilities to the very end as a scapegoat emerges who might stand in for the murderer, thus creating a last opportunity to avoid both punishment and even conscience.
On the final pages of the novel this time, I had tears in my eyes. I was exhausted, wrung out, needing Raskolnikov to be punished, but still hopeful for the young man he sometimes was, and I had for a time thought I was.
Perhaps the novel, in the end, inspires the reader to match Sonya’s love for a man who in all reasonableness does not deserve love or for that matter faith or respect. Having uncovered that flip side of pride, which is shame, in justice we should leave him in that state. But I felt tender towards him.
I suspect that as a 14-year-old I felt this tenderness too, and perhaps in response to Sonya’s love for him. This feeling though has never diminished my horror at his act, a horror mingled with a strange sense of relief that the act took place in a book of fiction so that I could bear it.
Some others have asked me how I could have ever wanted to emulate a murderer or side with a man who thought he was a superior exception to all moral values. I ask myself this question too and the only answer I can reach for is that reading the novel is something of a chaotic experience and that to be open to this figure of Raskolnikov is to find something dark within oneself that’s not easy to shrug off or deny.
In literature a subterranean world of wild emotions and thoughts normally repressed, controlled and civilised can be given explicit and shocking presence – and this might be one aspect of the book that helped make me, for life, a reader.
The novel this time has done a different kind of work on a different me, but again it has been a powerfully affecting work. I remain grateful to it and in awe of it.
Sometimes these days I stop to talk with the hose-cutting old woman as she passes along our street. I have learned her name and some of her history, including her grief for a son suddenly lost. I’m not sure that she always remembers who I am, but in speaking to her she comes alive for me in new ways. She is not dangerous, she is not insane or useless, and definitely not harmful. No need for us to talk any more about the knife. She is someone I am coming to know a little and I hope our encounters on the street help her to feel the safety of recognition.
].
All in all, a good read, especially for a rainy day.”:
Site Title 
