CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
409
whose psyche is prepared to receive them. He rejects all dogma,
including that of the atheists, as he is given to relativizing all
possible ideas, whether of belief or unbelief. Whereas Raskol–
nikov does not believe in a future life, Svidrigailov speculates
that perhaps the future life does exist but that there are only
"spiders there or something of that sort." "We always imagine
eternity as something beyond our conception, something vast,
vast! But why must it be vast? Instead of
all
that, what
if
it is
one little room, like a bathhouse in the country, black and
grimy and spiders in every corner, and that's all eternity is?"
As
for vice, he chides Raskolnikov for his moral prejudices, con–
tending that in sexual vice "there is at least something perm–
anent, founded indeed upon nature and not dependent on
fantasy, something present in the blood like an ever-burning
ember, forever setting one on fire and maybe not to be quickly
extinguished even with years. You agree that it's an occupa–
tion of a sort." Admitting that it is a disease, like everything
that exceeds moderation, he defends his indulgence in it by
claiming that to give it up would mean that he would be
forced to shoot himself. Clearly, his metier is not the simple–
minded villainy of melodrama but a species of objective cruelty
(as in
his
doing away with his wife and driving his footman to
suicide ) which is in a sense a form of meditation upon life
beyond good and evil translated into practice. Therefore he
is at the same time capable of acts of sympathy and kindness,
as when he helps the Marmeladov orphans and lets Dounia
go after cornering her. Good and evil are never ends to him
but simply the available, even if sometimes redundant, means
of convincing himself that it is possible to continue living. Hence
the actions he performs strike one as transpiring somewhere
outside himself, for they are at bottom experiments conducted
by a self which is itself an experimental projection.
It has been observed often enough that every literary
artist genuinely an innovator creates his own audience.
This
is
