CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
403
critical readers, cannot overmuch concern ourselves with such
intimations of ultimate reconcilement and salvation. Our proper
~oncern
is with the present story, with the story as written.
Dostoevsky wrote the first of his four great novels in
monthly installments for the
Russky Vestnik,
where it ran serial–
ly between January and December, 1866. He was following
his
usual course of producing a long work under the immediate
pressure of editors and printers. In this instance, however, he
appears to have encountered very few difficulties in meeting the
magazine's schedule. And the ease with which he accomplished
the actual composition may have been partly due at least to
toevsky, as a number of critics have noted, appears to have been in–
capable of carrying out his declared intention to depict the renewal of
life on Christian foundations. On this score the late Leo Shestov made
one of the most sardonic notations:
"Crime and Punishment
ends with
the promise to picture the Christian rebirth of the hero. His words sound
as if he were binding himself with a sacred vow. And, in point of fact,
as a professed teacher of humanity, was not Dostoevsky in duty bound
to let us in on the secret of the new reality and fresh possibilities that
opened up to Raskolnikov? Yet our preceptor never managed to fulfill
that sacred vow. The same promise is encountered again in his foreword
to
The Brothers Karamazov,
where we are told that in order to portray his
real hero, Alyosha, he would need to write still another volume, as if
the existing book with its thousand pages lacked sufficient space to ac–
commodate the " new life." In the three novels he produced after
Crim'e
and Punishment
there is no mention of the sacred vow. Prince Myshkin
cannot be taken into account here.
If
he is the one representing the
"renewal" awaiting mankind . . . then there is no point whatever in
looking toward the future.... No, compared to Dostoevsky's other heroes
Prince Myshkin is a misfit. This novelist understood only restless, fractious,
struggling people whose search is never ended. No sooner did he undertake
to show us a man who has found himself and achieved tranquility than
he fell into fatal banalities. One thinks, for instance, of the elder Zosima's
dreams of "the coming wonderful union of men." What is this "wonder–
ful
union" if not another of those idyllic pictures of the future which
even the socialists-so maliciously ridiculed in his cellar by the narrator
of
Notes from Underground-have
by now learned to do without?"2
