The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Fyodor Dostoevsky · a novel in six parts and an epilogue · forty-one chapters · 1866 · scored on Dostoevsky’s Russian, with Constance Garnett’s translation (1914), the only one in hand, for sense and for every English quotation
Mode
Novel of crime and conscience; murder story, novel of ideas and tragedy in one narration
Mythos
The threshold and the step across; Lazarus dead four days and raised; the earth kissed at the crossroads; Napoleon deflated under an old woman’s bed
Phase
From a hot evening early in July, through the murder that closes the first part, to the confession at the police office; then a Siberian prison a year and a half after the crime, to a morning on the river bank
Presentation
Fiction; six parts and an epilogue in forty-one chapters, the murder ending the first; a third-person narration held close to the murderer, the epilogue told in summary
Register
From Marmeladov’s tavern Slavonicisms, Luzhin’s officialese and Porfiry’s deferential “he-he” to fever, nightmare and the Gospel of Lazarus read aloud
Scale
One former student, two poor households and an investigating magistrate, in one city in the summer heat
Governing Proposition
A former student kills an old pawnbroker with an axe to test a theory, and kills her sister, who walks in; the rest of the book follows him through fever, three duels with an investigating magistrate and a confession to a girl who sells herself to feed her family, to a kiss on the earth of the Haymarket, the police office and a Siberian prison. The wager of the novel is that the calculus which weighs one life against a hundred destroys the man who does the weighing, that the theory fails first in the body, and that what raises him is not an argument but a love.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“В начале июля, в чрезвычайно жаркое время, под вечер, один молодой человек вышел из своей каморки”
“On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge.” The young man has no name for pages, and the first thing the novel tells of his walking is that it hesitates. He is going to rehearse. He knows it is “exactly seven hundred and thirty” steps from his gate to the house where an old pawnbroker lives; he climbs her stairs, rings, and is let in: “Step in, my good sir.” He pawns a silver watch, studies the room for later, and as the setting sun lights its yellow paper a thought crosses his mind: “So the sun will shine like this then too!” (I.1). The act he has not named is already in the sentence.
Around that walk the novel builds six parts and an epilogue, forty-one chapters, which ran in The Russian Messenger through 1866 and were revised for a separate edition in 1867. The murder falls in the last chapter of the first part, and more than four fifths of the book follow it, so that the subject is not the act but what comes after it: a man living inside his crime. Speech rises as the book goes on, from under half of the first part to nearly two thirds of the third, fourth and sixth, until the novel becomes a sequence of duels: three interviews with the investigating magistrate, Porfiry Petrovitch (III.5, IV.5, VI.2), two scenes with Sonia, two with Svidrigaïlov. Then the Epilogue, about a thirtieth of the length, tells the punishment of the title in summary and with almost no speech, at a distance the rest of the book never takes.
The title says what the book is built of. The Russian noun for the crime, преступление, is formed on преступить, to step across, and the verb the novel keeps returning to is переступить, to overstep. Its places are thresholds: stairs and landings, doors on the latch, bells rung and rung again. The narration is in the third person and almost never leaves the young man, Raskolnikov, so that the reader climbs the stairs with him, keeps his count and shares his fever. Its Russian is full of вдруг, suddenly. In this book the will moves first, and the reasons follow.
Movement II
In a tavern a drunken clerk, Marmeladov, tells him the story of his family: a consumptive wife, Katerina Ivanovna, her small children, and his own daughter Sonia, who has taken the yellow ticket to feed them. His plea is for a place: “Ведь надобно же, чтобы всякому человеку хоть куда-нибудь можно было пойти”
“For every man must have somewhere to go.” His hope is a Last Judgment at which the drunkards too are called: “Ye are swine, made in the Image of the Beast and with his mark; but come ye also!” (I.2). Next morning a letter from his mother tells Raskolnikov that his sister Dounia is to marry a prosperous man, Luzhin, for the family’s sake and his, and he sees at once what the marriage is: Sonia’s sale under a better name (I.3, I.4).
That night he dreams he is a small boy walking with his father past a tavern, where drunken peasants pile into a cart drawn by a little sorrel mare and beat her to death because she cannot gallop. “My property!” shouts her owner, Mikolka. The boy runs screaming through the crowd, puts his arms round her “bleeding dead head and kissed it, kissed the eyes and kissed the lips”, and is carried away sobbing: “Father! Why did they... kill... the poor horse!” (I.5). Raskolnikov wakes, renounces his plan and feels free. Crossing the Haymarket on the way home, he overhears that the pawnbroker’s sister, Lizaveta, will be out at a given hour the next evening, and the old woman alone. He would remember it afterwards as “the predestined turning-point of his fate” (I.5).
He remembers too a student he once heard in a tavern telling an officer his own thought: kill the old woman, take her money and do a hundred thousand good deeds with it. “One death, and a hundred lives in exchange”, says the student, “it’s simple arithmetic!”, and her life is worth “No more than the life of a louse, of a black-beetle” (I.6). In the seventh chapter he kills her with the axe. While he is in the bedroom at her boxes, Lizaveta comes in, and she does not raise her hands to her face: “She only put up her empty left hand, but not to her face, slowly holding it out before her as though motioning him away.” He washes the axe in the kitchen bucket, and stands behind the door with it while visitors on the landing shake the latch (I.7). The first part ends there, with five sixths of the novel still to come.
Movement III
He hides the purse and the trinkets under a stone in a yard, and never opens the purse. Then he lies in fever, and comes round to be told: “For the last four days you have scarcely eaten or drunk” (II.3). He cannot leave the crime alone. He goes back to the flat, half delirious, and rings the bell again (II.6), wanting, as Porfiry will later put it, to feel “the cold shiver over again” (VI.2). At their first meeting (III.5) Porfiry has read an article of his in which, as he summarises it, “men are divided into ‘ordinary’ and ‘extraordinary.’” Raskolnikov corrects him only in degree: the extraordinary man has “an inner right to decide in his own conscience to overstep... certain obstacles”, and may, for the sake of his idea, “step over a corpse or wade through blood” (III.5).
In the street a stranger walks beside him and says one word: “Murderer!” (III.6). At home, in fever, he argues with himself: “я не человека убил, я принцип убил!”
“I didn’t kill a human being, but a principle!” And then: “переступить-то не переступил, на этой стороне остался”
“I didn’t overstep, I stopped on this side” (III.6). The murder was not the step across. The thought of Napoleon beside a pawnbroker’s trunk almost makes him laugh, “A Napoleon creep under an old woman’s bed!”, and he calls himself “an æsthetic louse”. The theory has failed in the body before any magistrate touches it.
He sleeps, and dreams he is back in the flat, striking at the old woman with the axe. She does not stir. He bends to look into her face from below, and “the old woman was sitting and laughing”, and at every blow the laughter from the bedroom grows louder (III.6). He wakes to find a stranger in his room. It is Svidrigaïlov, in whose house Dounia had been a governess, and the third part ends on his name.
Movement IV
Svidrigaïlov talks of ghosts and of the life to come. Eternity, he suggests, may not be vast: “вроде деревенской бани, закоптелая, а по всем углам пауки”
“one little room, like a bath house in the country, black and grimy and spiders in every corner, and that’s all eternity is?” (IV.1). That evening Raskolnikov goes to Sonia’s room and makes her read him the raising of Lazarus. She reads in shame, then in resistance, then in triumph. Martha says that her brother has been dead four days, and “She laid emphasis on the word four.” Raskolnikov has lain in fever four days. When she has finished, “Огарок уже давно погасал в кривом подсвечнике, тускло освещая в этой нищенской комнате убийцу и блудницу, странно сошедшихся за чтением вечной книги”
“The candle-end was flickering out in the battered candlestick, dimly lighting up in the poverty-stricken room the murderer and the harlot who had so strangely been reading together the eternal book.” (IV.4).
Porfiry plays with him at the second interview: “Have you seen a butterfly round a candle?” The guilty man, he says, will circle nearer and nearer until he flies into the investigator’s mouth (IV.5). At the moment of breaking, a house-painter, Mikolka, bursts in and confesses to the murders himself, falsely (IV.5, IV.6). The confession that matters is made to Sonia. Raskolnikov tries his motives one after another and drops each, until he reaches “for myself alone”, and the question beneath it: “Тварь ли я дрожащая или право имею”
“whether I am a trembling creature or whether I have the right”. Then the answer: “Разве я старушонку убил? Я себя убил, а не старушонку!”
“Did I murder the old woman? I murdered myself, not her!” Before he tells her, he sees Lizaveta’s face in hers, and Sonia in the same terror puts out her left hand (V.4).
Her answer is the earth: “Go at once, this very minute, stand at the cross-roads, bow down, first kiss the earth which you have defiled”, and say aloud, “‘I am a murderer!’ Then God will send you life again.” (V.4). Behind the partition, Svidrigaïlov hears every word. Katerina Ivanovna, turned out of her lodging after the memorial dinner, drives her children into the street to sing for coins, and is carried dying to Sonia’s room. Her last cry, in the Russian, is Уездили клячу!: they have ridden the nag to death. The mare of the dream has come back, in the mouth of a woman the city has worked to death. In the English she says only “I am done for!” (V.5).
Movement V
Porfiry comes to his room for the last interview. He sets aside the house-painter’s confession, describes the crime as the work of a man who “murdered two people for a theory”, and when Raskolnikov asks who then is the murderer, answers: “Why, you, Rodion Romanovitch! You are the murderer” (VI.2). In the Russian the accusation keeps the particle of deference, Вы и убили-с: it was you who killed, sir. He does not arrest him. He tells him to confess, and to live: “Станьте солнцем, вас все и увидят”
“Be the sun and all will see you.” (VI.2). Svidrigaïlov, refused by Dounia (VI.5), spends his last night among dreams, and at dawn, in a thick mist, stops before a man in a copper Achilles helmet at the gates of a house with a tower. “This isn’t the place.” Svidrigaïlov leaves his message: “When you are asked, you just say he was going, he said, to America.” Then: “Svidrigaïlov pulled the trigger.” (VI.6).
Raskolnikov, “only twenty-three” (VI.7), goes to the Haymarket, kneels in the middle of the square and “kissed that filthy earth with bliss and rapture”. The crowd laughs; a drunken workman says, “He’s going to Jerusalem, brothers” (VI.8). At the police office he loses his nerve and goes out, finds Sonia waiting in the yard, and goes back up: “It was I killed the old pawnbroker woman and her sister Lizaveta with an axe and robbed them.” (VI.8). In the Epilogue the trial is told in a few paragraphs. The court cannot see why he never opened the purse, which held “three hundred and seventeen roubles and sixty copecks” (Epilogue, I), and he is sentenced to eight years in the second class. Sonia follows him to Siberia. In prison he still finds in his past only “a simple blunder which might happen to anyone” (Epilogue, II).
Ill in the prison hospital, he dreams of a plague out of Asia, of microbes endowed with intelligence and will, under which “Each thought that he alone had the truth”, and men kill one another in senseless spite. Then, on a morning by the river, with the steppe opening beyond it “as though the age of Abraham and his flocks had not passed”, he falls weeping at Sonia’s knees: “Их воскресила любовь, сердце одного заключало бесконечные источники жизни для сердца другого”
“They were renewed by love; the heart of each held infinite sources of life for the heart of the other.” (Epilogue, II). The Russian verb is the verb of raising the dead, and it closes the frame that Lazarus opened. Under his pillow lies her New Testament, “the one from which she had read the raising of Lazarus to him”, and “He did not open it now”. The novel ends by refusing to claim more than it has shown: “But that is the beginning of a new story”.
Act III · The Twelve
Length is not the question; whether each part is required by the one act is, and nearly every part is. Each subplot is a version of the murder. Dounia’s engagement to Luzhin repeats Sonia’s sale under a better name, and Raskolnikov says so (I.4). Luzhin’s economics of self-love is the theory as a businessman holds it. Svidrigaïlov is the theory lived without remorse, and his suicide answers the question the axe asked. The Marmeladovs are the “simple arithmetic!” (I.6) made into persons. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the slack the subtractive test still finds: Lebeziatnikov’s socialist chatter (V.1), Razumihin’s drunken lectures (II.4, III.1), the memorial dinner kept longer at farce than its turn needs (V.2), and an Epilogue whose summary hurries what it has to carry.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: an idea can possess a man before he knows he holds it, and the reasons come after the will. Raskolnikov gives his mother, Napoleon, the good of humanity, the test of himself and “for myself alone” (V.4), and none is the cause. The calculus that weighs one life against a hundred (I.6) makes a person a louse, and the man who weighs finds he has killed himself: “Did I murder the old woman? I murdered myself, not her!” (V.4). Poverty is a family economy that sells its daughters. It holds without the faith: Porfiry, no believer, sees a man who “murdered two people for a theory” (VI.2). Held off the top because Sonia is more icon than person, the resurrection is announced rather than shown, and one sentence of the narrator’s gives a racial slur as observation (VI.6).
Score: 9.5 / 10
Elevation here is mostly dread, and it rises often. The mare beaten to death, and the boy who “kissed the eyes and kissed the lips” of the dead head (I.5). The setting sun in the pawnbroker’s room (I.1). Lizaveta lifting her empty hand (I.7). Marmeladov’s Last Judgment of the drunkards, “but come ye also!” (I.2). The candle-end over “the murderer and the harlot who had so strangely been reading together the eternal book” (IV.4), the most rhetorical sentence in the novel, which the chapter around it has earned. Sonia’s face becoming Lizaveta’s at the confession (V.4). Svidrigaïlov’s night of dreams, the mist and the man in the Achilles helmet (VI.6). The steppe seen from the river bank (Epilogue, II). Held below the top because long stretches sit at ground level among landladies, clerks and the comedy of Luzhin, and grandeur is rare beside terror.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Myth built, and the book’s own words build it. The title’s noun, преступление, is formed on преступить, to step across, and the verb the novel returns to is переступить, to overstep: “I didn’t overstep, I stopped on this side” (III.6). The archetype is the threshold: stairs, doors, bells, a latch shaking. Lazarus is the spine. Raskolnikov lies four days in fever after the murder (II.3); Sonia reads John 11, and “She laid emphasis on the word four.” (IV.4); the Epilogue raises him with the verb of resurrection, her Testament under his pillow. The crossroads where he kisses the earth (V.4, VI.8) is the old Russian reverence for the earth, and Napoleon is the counter-myth, deflated to “A Napoleon creep under an old woman’s bed!” (III.6). Held below the top because the Epilogue closes the Lazarus frame by statement, not enactment.
Score: 9.3 / 10
The inheritance was the crime story and the feuilleton: Sue, Balzac’s question of whether one would kill a mandarin for a fortune, Hugo’s condemned man, and the Russian novel of poverty, Dostoevsky’s own among it. The swerve was to end the first part with the murder and spend five sixths of the book on its consequence inside one mind, so that the reader knows the killer from the start and the detective plot becomes a plot of conscience. It made the novel of ideas a thriller, and the thriller a tragedy. The wager was a novel that gives away its murderer before a fifth of it is read. Held below the top because the crime plot, the fallen woman and the investigating magistrate were inherited, and the many-voiced form this book begins is completed in later ones.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. The narration is in the third person but held to Raskolnikov’s consciousness, so the reader is inside the murderer from the first step on the stairs and shares his fever and his calculations. The detective form with the killer known makes every scene with Porfiry a question of whether he will confess, not of who did it: conscience in a civil-service uniform. The duels in speech, which raise the dialogue to nearly two thirds of the third, fourth and sixth parts, make the idea argue with persons. And the Epilogue’s turn from scene to summary, with almost no speech in it, is itself the passage “from one world into another” (Epilogue, II). Held below the top because the hold on Raskolnikov is broken for Svidrigaïlov, Luzhin and Dounia more often than the design needs.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: a century and a half of argument that has not settled the book’s hardest questions. The motive cannot be settled: the confession to Sonia offers motives in succession and withdraws each (V.4). Svidrigaïlov cannot be settled: his eternity as “one little room, like a bath house in the country, black and grimy and spiders in every corner” (IV.1) reads as despair, as theology or as a joke. The Epilogue is still argued over, as fulfilment or as imposition. The book yields formally too: on return the reader finds the beaten mare of the dream in Katerina Ivanovna’s dying words, and Lizaveta’s outstretched left hand in Sonia’s (I.7, V.4). Held a step down because its range of questions is narrower than the longest novels’, held as it is to one act and one mind.
Score: 9.5 / 10
The field is the book’s own tradition, Russian literature, and the novel moved it. Its force is a reorganisation of what a novel could do: follow an idea through a body into crime and out again, and make interior argument dramatic at the scale of a whole book. Outside the field its effect on the European novel and on the detective story, where Porfiry became the model of the investigator who knows and waits, is real; it is reception, and it is not added. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the book made Dostoevsky’s standing in Russia, and it set the line of the Russian novel of ideas and conscience that runs through his own later novels, the Symbolists and Andreyev, and through the Russian argument with it that went on into the twentieth century.
Score: 9.6 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over a hundred and sixty years, with nothing discounted for age. The text survives whole, as the author revised it for the separate edition of 1867. It has never been out of print or out of attention: taught across the world, translated into English many times, and staged and filmed again and again. The surface is partly fixed to its moment. The radical debates of the 1860s, the communes and the new people satirised in Lebeziatnikov (V.1), need notes. The core does not: a poor student, a theory and an axe. What holds the axis a step from the top is that topical surface alone.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Judged on the Russian, so far as it can be judged without hearing it. The command is of construction and voice. The plot is made with a watchmaker’s care: the latch shaking while he stands behind the door with the axe (I.7), the bell he rings again on his return to the flat (II.6), Mikolka’s false confession timed into the second interview (IV.5, IV.6), Svidrigaïlov behind the partition (V.4, VI.5). The voices are distinct to the particle: Porfiry’s deferential -с, Marmeladov’s Slavonicisms (“Behold the man!”, I.2), Luzhin’s officialese, Katerina Ivanovna’s genteel French. Charged: a prose hurried and repetitive in ways the serial deadline explains and only partly justifies; coincidence driving three turns (I.5, I.6, V.4); a slip in the time of day (VI.8); and the slur at VI.6. Sound is neither credited nor charged.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Lebeziatnikov lecturing on communes and the new marriage (V.1), and Svidrigaïlov putting the revolver to his temple before a man in a copper Achilles helmet: “When you are asked, you just say he was going, he said, to America.” (VI.6). They obey one law. Both are men living a theory to its end, one in farce and one in despair, and the book sets both between Sonia’s faith and Raskolnikov’s experiment. The comedy is never relief from the law; it is the law at low pressure. Chance obeys it too: the narrator calls the Haymarket meeting “the predestined turning-point of his fate” (I.5), and coincidence is the form providence takes in a city. Charged: the Epilogue’s register shifts further than the rest of the book prepares, and there are small slips of time (VI.8).
Score: 9.3 / 10
The orders held are many, and one question holds them: whether a man may step across. Consciousness, rendered from within at a depth few novels reach; the family, in two households, Raskolnikov’s mother and sister and the Marmeladovs, whose economies decide the plot; poverty and its trades, pawnbroking, prostitution, drink, debt and the tenement; the state, in the police office, the investigation, the court and Siberia; ideas, as utilitarianism, Napoleonism and socialism argued by persons; the sacred, in the Gospel and the earth; and the city, Petersburg in the July heat, as a moral climate. What holds the axis is what stays thin or absent: the natural order, which opens only on the Siberian river bank; history, present only as Napoleon’s name; the country, the upper classes and war. One city and one consciousness set the ceiling.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
Pressure on Tradition at 9.6, then The Unconcealment, The Bottomless Well and The Imperishable at 9.5. A novel that made the following of an idea through a body into crime and out of it the line of the Russian novel of conscience; a disclosure that the calculus of lives destroys the calculator, which holds without the faith; a motive, a Svidrigaïlov and an Epilogue still argued over after a century and a half; and a text whole and continuously read for a hundred and sixty years, its core untouched by its topical surface.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.9, held by the slack the subtractive test still finds: Lebeziatnikov’s chatter, Razumihin’s drunken lectures, the memorial dinner kept longer at farce than its turn needs, and an Epilogue whose summary hurries what it must carry. Next above it, The Encompassed at 9.0: one city and one consciousness, with the natural order, history, the country and war thin or absent. The sound of the Russian sentence is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.9 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.4, The Inner Law at 9.3, The Made at 9.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: Pressure on Tradition at 9.6, The Unconcealment at 9.5, The Imperishable at 9.5, The Archetypal Deep at 9.3 and The Swerve at 9.3 clear the bar of 8.5, the nearest by eight tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 8.9, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 9.0. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Преступление и наказание (Prestuplenie i nakazanie), scored as one novel in six parts and an epilogue, forty-one chapters, the Epilogue part of it on every axis. It ran in The Russian Messenger through 1866, and the author revised it for a separate edition in 1867; the novel as he completed and revised it is the unit. Every score is judged on the novel in Dostoevsky’s Russian, which is not in hand. Russian is quoted on this page only where its words are certain, and where the translation loses a point that turns on the Russian, the sense is given in plain words, unquoted. Translation · Constance Garnett’s (Heinemann, 1914), Project Gutenberg e-text #2554, for sense and for every English quotation on this page, each checked against the e-text character for character. It was used because it is the only version in hand, and because it is fluent, complete and sound in its divisions. Its English is not charged to the novel. It smooths the novel’s verbal links, and two of its losses bear on the reading: Katerina Ivanovna’s dying cry, Уездили клячу!, becomes “I am done for!” (V.5), which cuts the return of the mare from the dream, and the Epilogue’s воскресила, raised from the dead, becomes “renewed”, which cuts the line back to Lazarus. The best version available, Oliver Ready’s, is preferred because it keeps what the Russian does with voice, Porfiry’s clipped deference, Marmeladov’s mock-Slavonic grandeur, Luzhin’s officialese, and the novel’s black comedy; Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s is closer for sense, keeping repetitions and word-roots that Garnett smooths. Neither is in hand, and neither is quoted. The divisions, proportions, share of speech and the place of the murder carry over from the Russian; the word counts do not, and the shares given on this page are measured in the English. The sound of the Russian sentence, how far its haste reads as fever and how far as deadline, and the register of each speech level as its first readers heard it, are beyond this reading, and are neither credited nor charged. Names follow Garnett’s spelling. Citations are by part and chapter, IV.4 being Part Four, chapter 4; the Epilogue’s two chapters are cited as Epilogue, I and II.