CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
421
Western commentators on the novel who has not overlooked
its aborted political meaning, which emerges again and again,
as when Raskolnikov dissociates himself from his friend
Razumihin's abuse of the socialists. He understands very well
that rebellion can take another form, the collective form advo–
cated by the socialists. After all, what the socialists want, he
remarks to himself, is the happiness of all.
As
it happens, how–
ever, he is not the one "to put his little brick into the hap–
piness of all," for what he wants is to live properly here and
now. Into his manuscript Dostoevsky inserted the following
passage (later deleted) into a speech of Raskolnikov's: "What
care I what will come to pass in the future. Is it possible to live
at present? I cannot pass by with indifference all these horrors,
this suffering and misery. I want power." Power for what
purpose? Presumably to do good, to alleviate the suffering and
misery. He is in a state of fatal self-contradiction, however, in
that he attempts to further a common end of an altruistic
character with egoistical and purely private means.
In
order to
test his strength he needs more than anything else the support
of a social faith. This is plainly seen by the examining magis–
trate, Porfiry Petrovitch, who is the one figure in the story who
can be said manifestly to speak for the author, and it is he who
says to Raskolnikov: "You made up a theory and then were
ashamed that it broke down and turned out to be not at all
original!
It
turned out something base, that's true, but you are
not hopelessly base! .... How do I regard you? I regard you
as one of those men who would stand and smile at their torturer
while he cuts their entrails out, if only they have found faith
or God."
It
is significant that the phrase is "faith
or
God,"
not faith
in
God, as if to say that there are other faiths besides
the traditional one.
That Raskolnikov stands in an inauthentic relation to
his
crime is thus confirmed by the author's spokesman in the
novel. The crime does not truly belong to him, and that is the
reason he affects us as being almost ludicrously inadequate to
