CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
425
who acts out his illness through a murder intellectually rational–
ized but inexplicable except in terms of an unconscious drive.
After all, he conceives an "insurmountable repulsion" to Alyona
Ivanonva, the old moneylender, weeks before he elaborates his
murderous plan. Dostoevsky confronted the hazard of these
contradictions with unequalled mastery. His capacity to com–
bine
th~m
creatively in a single brain and a single psyche, while
staving off the danger of incoherence at one end and of specious
reconciliation as the other, is the measure of the victory scored
in this novel by the imaginative artist in him over the ruthless
polemicist.
NOTES
1.
Dostoevskii: z;izn
i
tvorchestvo
(Paris, 1947), p. 243 ff.
2. Dostoevskii
i
Nitsshe: filosofiya tragedii
(St. Petersburg, 1903).
3. Der russische Realismus in der Weltliterature
(Berlin, 1949), p. 178.
4. The Social History of Art,
(New York, 1952), Vol. 2, p. 854.
5. Encounter,
November 1956.
6. The Portable Nietz;sche,
edited by Walter Kaufmann (New York,
1954),
p.
602
ff.
