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PHILIP RAHV
personal relation to the vIctIm. Also, the Napoleon motif, on
which so many changes are rung by Dostoevsky, is clearly trans–
posed by him to a Petersburg setting from mid-nineteenth-cen–
tury French fiction, Balzac and Stendhal in particular, both of
whom glorified Napoleon (the former covertly and the
latter overtly) and justified their ambitious plebeian heroes
by appealing to his illustrious example. Thus Raskolnikov
may be seen as
aJ
Russian version of Julien Sorel and Eugene
de Rastignac-the young man on the make who comes to the
capital from the provinces intent on a career and a conquest.
It is especially Balzac's
Le
Pere
Goriot
that suggests an influence
in the design of Raskolnikov's story. In his essay on Dostoevsky3
Georg Lukacs mentions the anecdote of the Chinese Mandarin
in Balzac's novel as containing the hint that the Russian writer
might have developed. The revelant passage
is
worth citing in
full. It occurs in a dialogue between Rastignac and his friend
the medical student Bianchon:
"What makes you look so serious?" asked the medical stu–
dent, taking his arm [Rastignac's] to walk up and down in front
of the palace with him.
"I am bothered by troublesome thoughts."
''Of what kind are they? You know that thoughts can
be
cured."
"How?"
"By yielding to them."
"You are laughing at me, without knowing what I mean.
Have you read Rousseau?"
"Do you remember the place where he asks the reader what
he would do, if he could become rich by killing an old mandarin
in China, by the sole act of his will, without stirring from Paris?"
"Yes."
"Well?"
"Pooh! I have already come to my thirty-third mandarin."
"Don't joke. Come, suppose you knew it were possible, and
that a nod from you would do it, should you consent?"
"Is he a very old mandarin? But young or old, sick or well,
my goodness-the deuce. No, I shouldn't."
