422
PHILIP RAHV
his
deed, as when he faints in the police station the day right
after the murder, even though there
is
as yet no suspicion at–
tached to him, and calls attention to himself in other ways too.
In
spite of all his protestations to the contrary, he is prostrate
with guilt and the yearning for punishment.
It
is
not that he
lacks the strength to kill and bear the responsibility for it to
the end, but that he killed for himself alone, deranged by un–
conscious urges and over-conscious theories, rather than for
the common cause to which his "nihilistic" generation was
dedicated; and that is also the secret of Sonia's hold on him.
There is no social substance in his anarchic individualism, as
there is none in Sonia's idea of Christian salvation.
Sonia, "the eternal victim so long as the world lasts," is
a small thin girl of eighteen, every feature of whose face reflects
"a sort of insatiable compassion." Raskolnikov turns to her in
his
need because, as he tells her: "Weare both accursed, so
let
us go together." She is the very embodiment of meekness and
humility (far more so than Myshkin or Alyosha), and only
Dostoevsky, with
his
uncanny powers of representation, could
have brought her to life without blundering into mawkish
sentimentality. But though he so brilliantly persuades us of her
reality as a novelistic creation, this in itself in no sense consti–
tutes a "proof" of her idea of Christian salvation. She proves
quite as much the Nietzschean negation of it.
It
appears to me
that it is precisely in his characterization of Sonia, rather than
of Rasholnikov, that Dostoevsky's insight coincides with that of
Nietzsche; the fact that the Russian arrives at that insight by
way of assent, and the German by way of dissent,
is
scarcely
to the point here. Thus Nietzsche speaks in
his
Antichrist
of
"that queer and sick world into which the Gospels introduce
us--as in a Russian novel, a world into which the scum of
society, nervous disorders, and 'childlike' idiocy seem to be
having a rendezvous." Sonia is truly an inhabitant of that
world, and she has the stirring charm of the mixture it exhibits
-"a mixture of the sublime, the sickly and the childlike." No-
