PHILIP RAHV
perplexity and outrage with which he undertook to carry out
his
"loathsome scheme." But, then, it was a hideous old harpy he
killed, not the Czar of all the Russias.
Whatever the manifest theme of the novel, its latent theme
is not that of crime as such or the criminal's innate need of
punishment but the right to violent rebellion. It was the
violence that Dostoevsky condemned, even as he was secretly
drawn to it, fearing that
if
let loose it would tear down the
authority both of heaven and earth, and Raskolnikov goes
down to defeat to prove his creator right.
In its aspect as a polemic against the radical generation
of the 1860's-whose obscurantist rationalism and notion of
enlightened self-interest as the motive-force of human conduct
Dostoevsky began satirizing in
Notes from Underground
-
the
novel depends on the sleight-of-hand of substituting a meaning–
less crime for a meaningful one. But if that were all,
Crime and
Punishment
would not be the masterpiece it undoubtedly is.
The very substitution of one type of crime for another set prob–
lems for Dostoevsky which he solved brilliantly by plunging his
hero into a condition of pathology which ostensibly has nothing
to do with the "heroic" theory by means of which he justifies
himself. In
his
article "On Crime" Raskolnikov wrote that the
perpetration of a crime is always accompanied by illness, and
that is an exact description of his own case, though he believes
himself to be another kind of criminal altogether, one acting
from rational calculation and in the interests of a higher idea;
the irony of his self-deception is among the finest effects of
the book. And it is astonishing how well Dostoevsky was able to
preserve the unity of his protaJgonist's character, to present him
as all of a piece in spite of the fact that we are dealing not with
one but with several Raskolnikovs. There is Raskolnikov the
altruist and there is Raskolnikov the egoist, "a despot by
nature"; there is the crypto-revolutionary Raskolnikov and there
is the self-styled genius who demands power as
his
right and as
the guaranty of his freedom; then of course there is the neurotic
