CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
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understood in the simplest empirical sense of these terms. Dos–
toevsky was after all a Russian writer of his generation, a
generation ideologically inspired to exalt life over art and seeking
to justify the latter by citing the gifts of illumination ,and hopes
of betterment it ostensibly brings to life. Where Dostoevsky
twisted that common assumption to suit his creative practice was
by claiming to discern the essence of reality not in its typical
everyday manifestations but in the exceptional and fantastic.
He was unable to go beyond that formula toward the assertion
of a symbolic rather than literal correspondence between life
and the fictive worlds of
his
own devising. Hence the specious–
ness of his argument from life in his literary apologetics, as in
his
pointing to life's "amazing coincidences" in the letter to
Strakhov quoted above. The fact is that no coincidence copied
from life can make in the least plausible the kind of coinci–
dences, even the minor ones, you find in
en-me and Punishment,
such as the prosperous and respectable bourgeois Luzhin turn–
ing up in the same slum-lodging with the starving Marmeladov
family or Svidrigailov, a rich man, finding no better place to
stay in Petersburg than in the very same house where Sonia
lives, a house in which his flat adjoins the room where she prac–
tices her trade and conducts those incredible conversations with
Raskolnikov upon which he eavesdrops with the greatest relish.
It
is plain that Svidrigailov is situated where he is in order
to make it possible for him to learn Raskolnikov's secret a;t the
same time as he confides it to Sonia; an important turn of the
plot depends on it. This is a calculated coincidence different
in kind from those, however improbable, that life offers.
It
belongs to the stock-in-trade of melodrama, and Dostoevsky
learned the use of it in
his
assiduous reading of Hoffman,
Dickens, Balzac, Sue, and a host of lesser authors of crime–
thrillers and adventure stories.
It
is in literature rather than in unprocessed life that you
find some of the sources of this novel, including its major plot–
element of a murder committed by someone who stands
in
no
