CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
419
rorist is a political criminal, and
if
he is to be vindicated at all
it is by an appeal to historical necessity; no such appeal is open
to Raskolnikov.
Of course he has at
his
disposal a theory justifying his
crime, and I have already indicated one source of it in Balzac.
Another and more important source, to my mind, is Hegel's
concept of the historic hero (the agent of the World-Spirit)
and his victims. The enormous influence of the Hegelian phi–
losophy In Russia during the late 1830's and the 1840's is well
known; the period of this influence coincides with Dostoevsky'S
youth and it would have been impossible for him to escape it.
But that he was in fact concerned with
it
is shown, moreover,
by his letter (of February 22, 1854) from Siberia to
his
brother
Mikhail asking that he send him, among other books, Hegel's
Philosophy of History.*
It is strange that this source, far from
esoteric, should have been overlooked. I imagine that scholars
and critics have been so carried away by the apparent analogy
between Raskolnikov (in his theory of himself, that is) and
Nietzsche's Superman as to have missed a more substantial
likeness, though one which is more in the nature of a caricature
than an exact replica. It is only in the vulgarized popular ver–
sion of the Superman that Raskolnikov's theory reminds us of
him; so far as Nietzsche's actual idea of the Superman goes,
as a product of a mutation of the human species, there is no
resemblance. It is in Hegel rather that we discover a direct and
obvious source of Raskolnikov's notion of inferior and superior
men, the superior ones having the right to commit bre<l1ches
of morality while their inferiors are obliged to mind their busi–
ness, which is to stay put in the common rut. Now what Dos–
toevsky has done in devising Raskolnikov's justification is to
convert into a theory of human nature what is in Hegel not a
*
"Send me the Koran, and Kant's
Critique of Pure Reason,
and
if you have the chance of sending me anything not officially, then be
sure to send Hegel, particularly Hegel's
Philosophy of History.
Upon
that depends my whole future."
