CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
397
reality, feeling "as though an abscess that had been fonning
in
his
heart had suddenly broken . . . he was free from that
spell, that sorcery, that obsession." But the catharsis is momen–
tary, and he no sooner hears that the pawnbroker will be alone
in her flat the next evening than he is again gripped by his
obsession.
Another instance of the functional character of Raskol–
nikov's memory is the way he recalls the invalid girl to whom
he had once been engaged. "I really don't know," he says,
"what drew me to her then ... she was always
ill.
If
she had
been lame or hunchback, I believe I would have liked her
even better."
This
is a meaningful admission, and it is curious
that the numerous commentators on the novel should have
unanimously ignored it. It is as if they all wanted to spare
Sonia. For what prompts this memory if not his involvement
with Sonia, who is in her own way
ill
too? In the eyes of the
world and likewise of Raskolnikov in some of his moods she is
a morally deformed creature, an outcast, and "a religious
maniac" to boot. Physically too, the description of the invalid
girl has much in common with that of Sonia.
Yet, for all his living in the present, Raskolnikov wills and
acts with his whole past back of him; and it is for a very good
reason that we are not permitted to gain a privileged under–
standing of his past in the sense of entering
.a
series of
his
mental states anterior to the action. By denying us such intimacy
the author effectively prevents us from rationalizing the mystery
of the crime and its motive-the mystery which is never really
solved but toward the solution of which everything in the novel
converges. Now the study of Dostoevsky's manuscripts has
shown that he was himself disturbed no end by the indefiniteness
and uncertainty of Raskolnikov's motive, and he wrote a note
reminding himself that he must once and for all clear up the
uncertainty and isolate the "real" motive in order "to destroy,"
as he put it, "the indefiniteness and explain the murder this
way or that way"
(tak
iii
etak).
Fortunately he was able to
