CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
401
as a kind of hyperbolic suspense- suspense no longer gener–
ated merely by the traditional means and devices of fiction,
though these are skilfully brought into play, but as it were
by the very structure of human reality. To take this hyperbolic
suspense as a literary invention pure and simple is to fail in
comprehending it; it originates rather in Dostoevsky'S a;cute
awareness (self-awareness at bottom) of the problematical
nature of the modern personality and of its tortuous efforts
to stem the disintegration threatening it. Thus Raskolnikov,
like Stavrogin and other protagonists of Dostoevsky'S, is repre–
sented throughout under the aspect of modernity (the examin–
ing magistrate Porfiry Petrovitch sees him very specifically as
"a modern case") understood as spiritual and mental self–
division and self-contradiction.
It
is in this light that the search
for the true cause of the crime becomes ultimately intelligible,
the search that gives the novel at once its form and meaning,
taking us where no psycho-thriller before or after
Crime and
Punishment
has ever taken us, into a realm where only the
sharpest psychological perception will see us through and into
another realm still where our response to ideas is impetuously
solicited: ideas bearing on crime and its relation to psychic
illne&> on the one hand and to power and genius on the other;
ideas about two kinds of human beings, ordinary and extra–
ordinary, with the former serving as mere material for the,latter
who arrogate to themselves the right "to overstep the line"
and remove moral obstacles at will; ideas concerning the super–
nal value of suffering and the promise of deliverance in Christ.
The principal characters (Raskolnikov, Svidrigailov and
others) are the carriers of these ideas, and if we are not to sever
the unity of thought and action, theory and practice, prevailing
in the Dostoevskyean world, it is necessary to take their ideas
for what they are, without reducing them, with the purely
psychological critics, to a species of "interesting" rationaliza–
tion,
Of,
with the formalistic critics, to mere "fictive matter"
drawn fortuitously from the intellectual sphere. That we must
