CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
405
this can be said even while conceding that the rather stagey woes
of the Marmeladovs are inducive of some moments of weari–
ness. A somewhat Dickensian family with deviations toward
Russian intensity, they are of course the very embodiment of
the Petersburg misery. But Raskolnikov is aJso a child of that
misery, patently belonging to the world of the insulted and
injured, though in him the humility and submissiveness of that
world's human mixture are turned inside out. He is the first of
its inhabitants to attempt its redemption by making a bid, in
however futile .and hideous a fashion, for freedom and power.
Intrinsically his figure is a composite of the typical pro–
tagonists of Dostoevsky's earlier and later fiction. Morbidly
estranged as he is from life and ceaselessly brooding in his
cupboard of a room, he at once brings to mind certain traits of
the underground man as well as of the daydreaming recluse
portrayed in such stories of the 1840's as "The Landlady" and
"White Nights"-the recluse who, suffering from nearly patho–
logical depression and nameless guilt-feelings, keeps to himself
and lives a life of wishful fantasy. At the same time Raskol–
nikov represents a startling departure from the recluse type in
that, having overcome the latter's masochistic need for self–
abasement, his aggression is no longer turned inward but out–
ward. He is quite as much a fantast as the daydreaming recluse,
but his fantasy has left behind it all
Schwarmerei
and noble
aspiration a la Schiller: it has taken on the color of blood. A
complete egoist on one side of his nature at least and a sur–
prisingly candid one at that, he is filled with the wrath of
outraged pride and a furious impatience to break out from his
trapped existence even at the risk of self-destruction. Moreover,
to see him from this angle of vision, as the Dostoevskyean hero
in
process of evolution, is to note another new element in him,
namely, that he is an intellectual
pur sang,
recklessly yielding
himself to the passion of thought and caught at last in the toils
of an idea, mastered by it to the point of monomania. Thus the
novel of which he is the protagonist has a double aspect. In virtue
