CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
415
Balzac's Paris, as Arnold Hauser has remarked, is still a roman–
tic wilderness, "a theatrical setting painted in chiaroscuro con–
trasts, a fairyland in which dazzling riches and picturesque
poverty live side by side,"· whereas Dostoevsky describes the
metropolis in somber colors, taking us into its reeking taverns
and coffin-like rooms, bringing to the fore its petty-bourgeois
and proletarian types, its small shopkeepers and clerks, students,
prostitutes, beggars and derelicts. True as this is, there is also
something else in Dostoevsky's vision of Petersburg, a sense
not so much of romance as of poetic strangeness, a poetic
emotion attached to objects in themselves desolate, a kind of
exaltation in the very lostness, loneliness and drabness which
the big city imposes on its inhabitants, as
is
so poignantly
brought out
in
the scene when in an evening hour Raskolnikov
stops on a street corner to listen to a sentimental song ground
out on a barrel-organ and sung by a girl in a cracked and
coarsened voice.
"Do you like street music?" said Raskolnikov, addressing a
middle-aged man standing idly by him. The man looked at him,
startled and wondering.
"I love to hear singing to a street organ," said Raskolnikov,
and his manner seemed strangely out of keeping with the subject.
"I like it on cold, dark, damp evenings-they must be damp--when
all the passers-by have pale green, sickly faces, or better still when
the wet snow is falling straight down, where there's no wind–
you know what I mean? and the street lamps shine through it...."
"I don't know.... Excuse me. . . ." muttered the stranger,
frightened by the question and Raskolnikov's strange manner....
Catching Raskolnikov talking to himself on the street,
Svidrigailov says to him: "This
is
a town of crazy people. . ..
There are few places where there are so many gloomy, queer
influences on the soul of man as
in
Petersburg." There is
indeed something peculiarly Petersburgian about Raskolnikov,
and not merely in the sense that he belongs to its "proletariat
