CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
395
this effect is a triumph of Dostoevsky's creative method-a
triumph because the instantaneous
is
a quality of Being rather
than of mind and not open to question.
As
the vain efforts
of so many philosophers have demonstrated, Being
is
irreducible
to the categories of explanation or interpretation.
The .artistic economy, force and tempo of Part I
is
sus–
tained throughout the novel. (The epilogue, in which hope and
belief play havoc with the imaginative logic of the work, is
something else again.) There is no wasted detail in it, none
than can
be
shown to be functionally inoperative in advancing
the action and our insight into its human agents. And it is
important to observe that the attaining of this fullness and
intensity of representation is conditional upon Dostoevsky's
capacity to subdue the time element of the story to his creative
purpose. Readers not deliberately attentive to the time-lapse
of the action are surprised to learn that its entire span is only
two weeks and that of Part I only three days. Actually, there
is no real lapse of time in the story because we are virtually
unaware of it apart from the tension of the rendered exper–
ience. Instead of time lapsing there is the concrete flow of
duration contracting and expanding with the rhythm of the
dramatic movement.
Least of all is it a chronological frame that time provides
in this novel.
As
the Russian critic
K.
Mochulsky has so aptly
remarked, its time is purely psychological, a function of human
consciousness, in other words the very incarnation of Bergson's
duree reele.
1
And it is only in Bergsonian terms that one can do
it
justice. Truly, Dostoevsky succeeds here in converting time
into a kind of progress of Raskolnikov's mental state, which
is not actually a state but a process of incessant change eating
into the future and expanding with the duration it accumulates,
like a snowball growing larger as
it
rolls upon itself, to use
Bergson's original image.
This effect is partly accomplished by the exclusion from
Raskolnikov's consciousness of everything not directly pertain-
