Sean Ogilvy
The struggle between faith and the consequences of its absence lies at the center of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866). From the novel’s outset, any reader possessing the slightest familiarity with the author can see the groundwork being carefully arranged for Raskolnikov’s eventual spiritual enlightenment. But as Mikhail Bakhtin suggests, the profundity of Dostoevsky’s unique polyphonic fiction reveals itself in each character’s voice as it develops its own directly signifying discourse. In other words, his characters are not rough-and-ready compositions; they operate as autonomous consciousnesses, fully valid carriers of their own individual words (Bakhtin 5). As just such a character, Raskolnikov must —if Bakhtin’s theories are to be accepted—wander misguidedly toward either salvation or damnation on his own, without Dostoevsky’s ideological input overtly dictating the trajectory of his inner life.
The problem of Raskolnikov’s spiritual regeneration in the epilogue is perhaps the most controversial subject in Dostoevsky scholarship. Bakhtin, ever the opponent of finalization, contends that Raskolnikov’s posthaste redemption represents a monologic contamination of Dostoevsky’s personal ideology in an otherwise supremely dialogical narrative. Along the same lines, Konstantin Mochulsky critiques the epilogue as a “pious lie,” stating that the hero’s conversion is both unearned and improbable given what the reader understands about his psychology (312). More approvingly, Janet Tucker notes the stark difference in narrative time between the two sections, claiming that the anarchic pacing of the core novel gives way in the epilogue to a “great pause,” or that Raskolnikov enters into “Orthodox time” (453). The disjunction, then, is not merely the result of an ideological imposition; rather, it is suffused throughout the structure of Crime and Punishment. While other analyses have questioned the diegetic compatibility of the epilogue with the main body of the novel, fewer have taken Dostoevsky’s rationale for the epilogue’s inclusion seriously. This essay will argue that Bakhtin’s account of Dostoevsky’s polyphony overlooks the theological and biographical tensions shaping the epilogue, which does not resolve Raskolnikov’s development but renders his redemption inconclusive, maintaining the author’s characteristic polyphonic style.
Born in 1821 to devoutly Orthodox parents, Dostoevsky learned to read and write under the tutelage of his mother, who used the New and Old Testaments as lesson material for her children. Between his mother’s instruction and his father’s insistence upon the family visiting Moscow’s various temples and historical sites, Christianity made a profound impression on the young writer (Dirscherl 43). Dostoevsky’s faith, though hard-won and always subject to self-scrutiny, remained with him for the rest of his life, evident throughout his collected letters and later works. At the time of his artistic ascendence, Russia’s intellectual milieu was fragmented into, on one side, the Slavophiles and, on the other, the Westernizers. While the former promoted the isolationist upholding of traditional Russian Orthodox beliefs, the latter urged the integration of Western cultural and political practices, including rationalism and liberalism. It was with the latter, too, that the young Dostoevsky fell in, particularly through the influence of the radical Vissarion Belinsky. Much like Christianity had enraptured him as a child, so too did revolutionary political thought in his early twenties. According to his later recollections, Belinsky’s nascent socialism “captured our hearts and minds in the name of something very noble” (A Writer’s Diary 286). Belinsky, Dostoevsky recalls, teased the young writer endlessly for his love of Christ: “believe me, you naïve fellow, believe me, that your Christ, were he born in our time, would be the most undistinguished and ordinary of men; he would be utterly eclipsed by today’s science and by those forces that now advance humanity” (A Writer’s Diary 129).
However near to its destruction Dostoevsky’s faith came during his flirtation with radicalism, it reemerged with vigor after his narrow escape from execution at a Siberian labor camp, where he had been imprisoned for his involvement in the Petrashevsky Circle (Dirscherl 48). In an 1854 letter to Mme. N. D. Fonvizina, Dostoevsky finalizes his position regarding Russia’s schismatic intellectual scene: “If someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth, and it really were that the truth lay outside Christ, then I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth” (Selected Letters 68). That Dostoevsky here—perhaps rhetorically, though no less sacrilegiously—alludes to a “truth” outside of Christ is reflective of his often-unorthodox mode of Christianity, wherein belief and doubt are two sides of the same coin (Harrison 388). As John Givens remarks, “In an age of growing secularism, Dostoevsky believed self-consciously and polemically, well aware of his own doubts and the wrathful critique of religion the new materialism of the 1860s brought to bear.” This unresolved tension between belief and disbelief reappears as a structural crux in the epilogue, where redemption is promised without result. It is through such inner discordance, at once believing and disbelieving, that the characteristic polyphony of Dostoevsky’s writing emerges, finding form in characters like Rodion Raskolnikov.
The surname Raskolnikov is derived from the Russian raskol, meaning “schism” or “split.” The Oxford English Dictionary defines raskol in its church-historical sense as the “schism in the Russian Orthodox Church which followed the excommunication in 1667 of those who refused to accept the liturgical reforms of Patriarch Nikon (1605-81).” Not only is Raskolnikov’s name a signifier of a parallel time in Russian history, but it also symbolizes a personal split between faith and its corruption, central to Raskolnikov’s struggle. Unsurprisingly, Bakhtin eschews mention of the etymological and historical weight of this name, a silence that is consistent with his methodological resistance to symbolic or allegorical readings of Dostoevsky. However, such symbolism, it will be shown, clarifies the ideological terrain of Crime and Punishment without creating a sense of contradictory finalization.
Raskolnikov’s schism is representative of Russia’s larger split in the mid-1860s. Russian society was becoming increasingly unstable, torn between an uncompromising and anxious regime and its zealous opponents (Tucker 444). Dostoevsky observed in a letter to his publisher, The Russian Messenger, that there seemed to be in the younger generation of Russians—even among the highly educated and well inclined—a growing and extreme “inconstancy of our principles” (Selected Letters 222). The nihilism depicted in Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky thought, represented the most pernicious threat faced by Russian youth. Its mass appropriation told of the moral and spiritual disorientation of their time. Thus, Raskolnikov, in order to expose the inherent dangers of nihilism, must experience the consequences of this worldview to the furthest possible extent.
In his treatise “On Crime,” Raskolnikov argues that humanity is divided into two conflicting groups, ordinary and extraordinary men. Recalling the contents of his article to Porfiry, he explicates that “those who are even marginally capable of uttering some new word, must, by their nature, necessarily be criminals” (181). He adds that the extraordinary man can justify any action, even one that ends in wading “through blood,” if only it brings about some new idea. His Napoleonic daydream falls almost immediately flat, however, when his initially theoretical concept of self is put to the test. As Michael Stoeber writes, “Raskolnikov willed beyond his powers and never assimilated the fact that justice is will” (36, emphasis Stoeber’s). His failure is made clear by his own admission: Raskolnikov “didn’t kill a person, [he] killed a principle” (191). What collapses, then, is not will-qua-will, but Raskolnikov’s psychological capacity to sustain the identity that such willing demands. The difficulty is that he is unable to relinquish his self-conception as an extraordinary man despite failing to appropriate that role for himself. The murder creates, in Bakhtin’s terms, a new intensity in Raskolnikov’s inner dialogism. At once, the dusty old moralism of his pious upbringing—evident in his familiarity with Scripture and his mother’s fervent religiosity—comes to loggerheads with his failed proto-Nietzschean coup de volonté. The tension among Raskolnikov’s conflicting “I-positions” generates the central suspense of Dostoevsky’s narrative, which has less to do with whether Raskolnikov will evade Porfiry’s persecution and more to do with the oscillations between self-doubt and self-deception that define his fractured consciousness. Thus, subject to a new onslaught of opposed dialogical positions, Raskolnikov admits to Sonya that he is “the same kind of louse as everyone else,” incapable of “stepping over” (291). It is important to note that in Crime and Punishment, there exists no archetypal overman, free from, as Nietzsche puts it, the sickness of guilt. There is only, in Raskolnikov’s words, the louse.
Michael Stoeber argues that Dostoevsky leaves it to the reader to decide whether primacy lies with the will or with God, though Dostoevsky makes clear through the character of Svidrigailov where the selfish path of egoic willing will lead. What Raskolnikov cannot at the behest of his conscience become, Svidrigailov has carried out to its logical conclusion. Up until he faces Dunya’s conclusive rejection, his appetites have been largely fulfilled by duplicitous and empty willing. Devoid of existential meaning, he muses that an afterlife, if it exists, must surely resemble “a little room, something like a country bathhouse, sooty, with spiders in all the corners, and that’s the whole of eternity” (201). Tortured by his dreams in the Adrianople Hotel and without hope for redemption—the belief in which would contradict his materialistic world-view—he is left without recourse. The reader is reminded of Marmeladov’s famous question, one cogent for Raskolnikov as much as Svidrigailov: “[D]o you really understand, dear sir, what it means when a person has nowhere else to go?” (33). Dostoevsky analogizes suicide with going to America (355), a country whose influence represents the breakdown of Russian Orthodox values in favor of secular utilitarianism. Contrary to the analyses of both Bakhtin and Stoeber, Dostoevsky strongly suggests an evaluation of secular utilitarianism and nihilism: that is, divorced from the possibility of redemption (which separates Raskolnikov from Svidrigailov), we confront the consequences of a will unmoored from moral and spiritual guidance. It must be noted, however, that this anti-nihilistic position is one which Dostoevsky fails to concretize in the open-ended epilogue.
Despite implicitly closing the question of nihilism for now, Dostoevsky is still unable to affirm wholesale the validity of religious redemption, the novel’s main proponent of which is Sonya Marmeladova. In the author’s notebook, he sketches his characters thus: “Svidrigailov is despair, the most cynical. Sonya is hope, the most unrealizable. Raskolnikov himself must say that. He attached himself passionately to both of them” (Dostoevsky, From…“Notebooks” 389). While Svidrigailov’s aim is to pull Raskolnikov more deeply into his nihilistic void, Sonya seeks to bring him toward a redemptive acceptance of his suffering. The influence of the two establishes itself in Raskolnikov’s consciousness, wresting his conscience now one way, now the next. Randall Havas shows the ways in which Porfiry ultimately fails, through his quasi-Socratic approach, to coax Raskolnikov into a soul-saving confession. Concluding his analysis, he writes of Porfiry that “he’s a lawyer, not a saint,” and that “Raskolnikov needs a saint” (168). Indeed, Sonya would be just such a saint. However, not even holy Sonya is able to bring Raskolnikov to a true, self-sacrificing repentance—at least not within the confines of Crime and Punishment.
Michael Katz contends that Sonya, as a woman in Dostoevsky’s fictive universe, is unable to single-handedly bear an idea or be more than an instrument of redemption (“Nihilism” 446). However, Katz’s reading of Sonya is limited. Sonya functions as a conduit for Dostoevsky’s prescription of divine truth: that suffering may bring us closer to God. The fact that she serves an ideological purpose is accepted by Bakhtin, who views Sonya as a monologic consciousness grounded in self-sacrifice, one who does not participate in ideological conflict (84). Sonya, despite her hope for Raskolnikov, lets him come to her much in his own way. She is committed to him whether he repents or not—which, of course, he never formally does. As Amanda Jiang points out, “[Sonya] is defined by her empathy [and] provides comfort for the suffering; her presence forges a bridge between sinners and God’s love” (24). She comes across as static because she represents the idea of spiritual salvation and complete, transferable faith. She is indeed less of a dialogic consciousness than she is a symbol. The bridge that she builds for Raskolnikov is one on which he must choose to walk, and yet, that bridge may be crossed and recrossed.
In a letter to Mme. N.D. Fonvizina, Dostoevsky writes, “I am a child of this century, a child of doubt and disbelief, I have been and shall ever be (that I know), until they close the lid of my coffin. What a terrible torment this thirst to believe has cost me and is still costing me, and the stronger it becomes in my soul, the stronger are the arguments against it” (Selected 68). This sense of himself as a spiritual child—yearning and uncertain—helps to illuminate Sonya’s role. Twice in the letter, Dostoevsky refers to himself as a child, returning to a time before the death of his pious mother, who provided his faith a much-needed maternal anchor. In the novel, the prisoners call Sonya “little mother,” and they turn to her, like children, to cure their unspecified, perhaps spiritual, ailments (377). Thus, Sonya becomes not only the hope that Raskolnikov needs, but the manifest spiritual grounding that Dostoevsky himself needs to transcend an unrelenting disbelief. Within the narrative, Sonya renders redemption possible but does not actualize it in any concrete way.
Bakhtin asserts that the ending of Crime and Punishment is overly conventional in its monologic finalization. Unsurprisingly enough, his assertion is not confined to the aforementioned novel, but to the whole of Dostoevsky’s oeuvre, excepting The Brothers Karamazov for the somewhat comical reason that it remains incomplete, as Dostoevsky died before he could complete the project in its entirety. It would seem, then, that any ending short of one that is entirely incomplete should fall into Bakhtin’s disfavor. As stated previously, his approach to Dostoevsky’s work, correct in its appreciation of the psychological complexity of a typical Dostoevsky character, causes him to eschew potentially enlightening analyses of any one of the author’s given works. Therefore, it must be shown that the epilogue transforms the novel’s dialogic conflict into a state of reduced intensity but does not resolve it.
Counter to Bakhtin’s prescriptive judgement, this section will take seriously the commonly noted aspects of the epilogue that lead to its intractability. It has already been noted that the anarchic prose style of the body narrative shifts in the epilogue to a more straightforward, measured prose. Excepting one important section, Raskolnikov no longer indulges in his characteristic dialogic monologues; instead, his thoughts appear more collected and move through two distinct orientations. The first of these stages is perpetuation. During the course of his despondent legal confession, Raskolnikov remains an enigma to the investigators and judges. They attribute the cause of his crime to poverty and temporary insanity—reasonably so, since this is what he leads them to believe (370). Raskolnikov’s behavior during the perpetuation stage is just what we have come to expect of him. He remains hopeless and alienated from his fellow man. As of yet, he is unbroken.
The second stage, which follows the death of Pulkheriya Aleksandrovna, provides the groundwork for Raskolnikov’s tentative resurrection. This stage is traversal. The death of his mother, though attended to briefly, also represents the death of Raskolnikov’s ideological self, thus making way for his spiritual regeneration through personal suffering. After he learns of her death, Raskolnikov entertains his final relapse into a nihilistic ideology:
“My conscience is clear. Of course, it was legally a crime; of course, the letter of the law was broken and blood was shed […]. Of course, in that case, many benefactors of humanity […] should have been punished when they took their very first steps. But these people managed to carry out those steps, and therefore they were right; but I wasn’t able to, and therefore I didn’t have the right to allow myself to take that step.” (375-376)
That was the only way he acknowledged his crime: only that he had failed to see it through and had turned himself in.
Again, we see the dialogic consequence of Svidrigailov’s nihilistic influence. But, now more explicitly than ever before, it is countered by the influence of Sonya. His biological mother gone, Raskolnikov more fully accepts the guidance of Sonya, the “little mother.” He immediately, almost unconsciously, follows his thought with the deepest possible admission of regret: why hadn’t he killed himself? The answer, of course, can only be that he needs to see—in much the same way that he needed to test his will to power—if he can now cross over an altogether new threshold, that of resurrection: from spiritual death to sanctified life. This is affirmed by his remembrance of standing atop the bridge over the Neva, analogizing his divided consciousness. Clearly, the dialogism of Crime and Punishment does not disappear in the epilogue; rather, the tension between viewpoints slows down as Raskolnikov at least ostensibly comes to an understanding of himself. The potential for his spiritual redemption is left unfinalized and vulnerable to a Dostoevskian reversal.
That the possibility of faith opens to Raskolnikov during his imprisonment—and after realizing the error of falling into European rationalist-utilitarian moral reasoning—draws an obvious throughline to Dostoevsky’s own biography. It would be foolish, however, to argue that there is a one-to-one relational quality between the novelist and his character. To argue that Dostoevsky completely eschews moralization and didacticism would be equally haphazard. Dostoevsky began each of his narratives with an idea that he wished to communicate. The Idiot, for example, was written “to portray a perfectly good man,” (Selected 262) one who is, moreover, a modern Christ-like figure. Readers of Dostoevsky will know how well Myshkin fares. Crime and Punishment, as Dostoevsky presented it in a letter to M.N. Katkov (of The Russian Messenger), was meant to portray the eventual reintegration into society of a young student who has lost his way and killed an old woman: “The truth of God and the law of the earth take their toll, and in the end he is forced to denounce himself, forced, even if he should perish in jail, to rejoin people” (Dostoevsky, From…“Letters” 390). Under his pen, however, the narrative begs something different from him. What we receive instead is a story wherein the hero’s divided consciousness remains unfixed on either spiritual salvation or intellectual justification. As Givens remarks, here and throughout the entirety of the author’s oeuvre, the “faith narrative that Dostoevsky seemed determined to write all of his life seems to fail.” The promise of the hero’s regeneration is inconclusive, and his promise of faith is merely tentative.
Bakhtin, then, was wrong to deem the novel’s epilogue a monologic failure. Certainly, the disruption he senses is real, palpable in the tempo and rhythm of Dostoevsky’s prose and in the forcefulness of his rhetoric. Yet the epilogue reads less like an imposition of inordinate authorial control and more like an ellipsis. That inconclusiveness is not a defect; it is a faithful representation of the dialogical struggle for faith in the author’s own life. The political pressures of mid-1860s Russia—the radicalism of the Petrashevsky Circle and the holiness of Orthodox Russia—combined with the biographical aspects of Dostoevsky’s personal faith journey create the possibility of a dialogism between belief and unbelief in the author’s prose. The epilogue does not impose faith upon Raskolnikov but suspends him within it. “Could her [Sonya’s] convictions really become my convictions?” (380): Raskolnikov’s final words carry little conviction of their own. As such, the epilogue of Crime and Punishment leaves the reader with an ellipsis that preserves the tension between doubt and redemption rather than resolving it. As Bakhtin himself states: “nothing conclusive has yet taken place […] everything is still in the future and will always be in the future” (166). Yet, in the epilogue, he seems to have misrecognized his own principle. Read in this light, the epilogue is truly a fulfilment of the novel’s dedication to polyphony.