414
PHILIP RAHV
niate it . . . but they yield to it if it persists, and kneel to it
when they find that they cannot suppress it." There
is
a remark–
able parallel between this formulation and Raskolnikov's view,
passionately expounded to Sonia, that "whoever
is
strong in
mind and spirit will have power over men. Anyone who
is
greatly daring
is
right in their eyes. . . . I divined that power
is only vouchsafed to the man who dares to stoop and pick it
up. There is only one thing, one thing needful: one has only to
dare." Clearly, Vautrin's genius who bursts like a cannon-ball
among
his
fellow-men bears an uncommon resemblance to
Raskolnikov's criminal of genius who dares assert the right
inherent in his superiority and whose criminality
is
soon for–
given or forgotten as he becomes a lawgiver and leader among
men. However, in constructing Raskolnikov's theory of the
relation between power and genius, Dostoevsky borrowed from
more than one source; Balzac
is
but one of them.
It
is
possible to speak if not of a school then surely of a
Petersburgian genre in Russian literature, of which Dostoevsky
is in fact the leading practitioner. Pushkin's "The Bronze
Horseman" is doubtless the outstanding poem of that genre, as
Gogol's "The Overcoat"
is
the outstanding story and
Crime
and Punishment
the outstanding novel. One must be aware
of its author's profound response to Petersburg and of the
masterly way in which he appropriated it to imaginative pur–
poses in order to perceive that as the scene of Raskolnikov's
crime the city is one of the essential constituents of the story,
more foreground than background, a unique urban setting
charged with multiple meanings, of which one of the more
urgent emerges from Dostoevsky's preoccupation with the
Petersburg misery and
his
depiction of it in a manner demon–
strating his solidarity with its victims.
As
a novelist of the
modern metropolis he was of course in the line of Balzac and
Dickens, by whom he was greatly influenced, though there is
a marked difference in
his
representation of the city and theirs.
