CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
417
the edict of Peter the Great, who undertook, with the savage
rationality typical of belated and alien converts to progress, to
transform his backward domain all at once into an efficient
state militarized along modern lines. The self-will and precipi–
tate style of this operation brought into being a city without
roots in the past or in the vast rural hinterland, the center of
alienation and of everything novel and foreign violating the
national traditions and the patriarchal mode of life. It was
in Petersburg that in a fashion peculiM to it the imperial
bureaucracy exerted itself to westernize the country from above
while the turbulent and seditious "proletariat of undergradu–
ates," impelled by other motives and a nobler vision, strove to
effect the same end from below. Thus the material brutality
of the caste pressing down upon society from the top met its
counterpart in the tragic spiritual brutality of the dissident
intelligentsia forcing the issue lower down.
No wonder the Slcwophils hated Petersburg. Khomaikov,
a leading ideologue of their faction, spoke of it as a city of dead
beauty, where "all is stone, not only the houses but the trees
and inhabitants as well." The Marquis de Custine, visiting the
capital in 1839, could not believe that it would endure. "I have
seen no place that is more penetrated with the instability of
human beings," he wrote. Penetrated with the instability of
human beings--a: marvelously apt phrase which we can apply to
the Dostoevskyean world as a whole with but a slight shift of
context. You will find this singular instability in Raskolnikov,
to be sure, but you will also find in him more than a trace
of that savage rationality characterizing the champions of the
Petersburg period in Russian history and subsequently the
revolutionary elite. He emerges from that "literate world of
reckless youth," as Bakunin called it, in which the latter pro–
fessed to see the hope of the revolution, and he is the epitome
of those traits of which Alexander Herzen gave an account of
incomparable precision in
his
Memoirs.
"We are greatly given,"
he noted, "to theoretical pedantry and argumentativeness. This
