Tristan Bruns
“I tend to think of human beings as huge, rubbery test tubes, too, with chemical reactions seething inside. When I was a boy, I saw a lot of people with goiters. […] Those unhappy Earthlings had such swollen thyroid glands that they seemed to have zucchini squash growing from their throats. All they had to do in order to have ordinary lives, it turned out, was to consume less than one-millionth of an ounce of iodine every day.”
Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions, 1975
Human beings create things in their own image and that reflects their tastes; machines, physical or conceptual, designed by humans are no exception. In literature, human-machine hybrid characters have driven the stock plots of fiction for generations. It is not difficult to envision an education in humanity taught by machine-men, from graphic fiction, like Iron Man and Transformers, to works rooted in teleological investigation, like Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein and Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot.
The character Raskolnikov in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866) is a fabrication of a machine-man, a metaphor to communicate the author’s observations regarding human morality. As a machine-man, i.e., an individual whose behavior is dictated by the maintenance of their corporal parts and systems, Raskolnikov’s failure to maintain his bodily components causes a malfunction in his brain that leads to a severe mood disorder called major depressive disorder (MDD) (Nikulina, Spatz Widom and Czaja 309). Dostoevsky systematically proves this to be the case through moments of clarity that occur whenever the character eats, sleeps, and engages in exercise, indicating that a proper assessment of Raskolnikov must necessarily include the consideration of the character’s mental condition as being caused by a cycle of self-neglect, depression, and low self-esteem.
Many scholars ignore Raskolnikov’s biomechanical motivations in favor of a metaphysical or spiritual impetus. Peter Marchant implies matricide as the motivation for Raskolnikov’s murder of the pawnbroker, that the pawnbroker, an old woman, is a stand-in for his mother, and that his “mother’s death releases the pair of them of their loads” (12). Louise Dauner applies Jungian philosophy by arguing that he is seeking a unified self, that “Raskolnikov’s psychic problem, then, is that of individuation; of uniting his two polar functions, Thinking and Feeling, or merging the contents of the conscious and the unconscious” (203). David Matual states the fundamental theme of the book as “the metamorphosis of Raskolnikov and his reconciliation with God as symbolized by the story of Lazarus” (54), and George Gibian presents the novel as an attack on rationalism, that Dostoevsky “set himself the task of exposing the evils of rationalism by presenting a laboratory case of an individual who followed its precepts and pushed them to their logical conclusion” (979)—the logical conclusion being to reject rationalism and accept God and the will-to-suffer.
Scholars who decipher Raskolnikov’s ends through religious and metaphysical means inspire refreshed readings of the work but detract from Dostoevsky’s pedestrian motivations. Raskolnikov obeys the rules of a human machine, a homo ex machina, and his salvation lies not in the judgement of God or Carl Jung but in the proper self-maintenance of his fleshly parts and systems. One must agree with Paul the Apostle, who says in 1 Corinthians 6:19-20 that “your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit […]. You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore, honor God with your bodies.” In other words, the spirit is tied to the body—whether the former conceived of the latter or vice versa makes no difference. If Raskolnikov is to be analyzed through a religious and spiritual lens, and the consideration of the body is a contractual obligation, then any spiritual analysis of the character is incomplete without the consideration of the state of his body.
Dostoevsky leaves numerous clues that the deterioration of Raskolnikov’s body has a direct effect on his actions and attitude. Raskolnikov shows signs of having a severe eating disorder. Non-Suicidal Self-Injury and eating disorders often occur simultaneously in a person’s life (Ernhout, Babington, and Childs 1). Raskolnikov shows that he is “non-suicidal” in two instances: He contemplates and rejects suicide after witnessing a young woman’s attempt to take their own life in Part II; he rejects suicide again in his decision to turn himself in to the authorities at the end of Part VI. Furthermore, Raskolnikov can be read as contradistinctive to the character Svidrigailov, the Nietzschean Übermensch who musters the will-to-power to take his own life. Raskolnikov is “self-injuring” (e.g., in his rejection of food even when he is hungry and has the financial means to procure it). Self-injurers show elevated levels of dissociation (i.e., a mental process of detaching from reality, thoughts, feelings, memories, or sense of self) among individuals with eating disorders (Smith, Kouros, and Meuret 44). At the beginning of Part I, we are introduced to Raskolnikov as he slips into a “complete blankness of mind” and the narrator reveals that, “At these moments he would become conscious that his ideas were sometimes in a tangle and that he was very weak; for two days he had scarcely tasted food” (2). While sitting in a tavern before his meeting with Marmaladov, he is physically and emotionally weak, and he knows the cause—”He longed for a drink of cold beer, and attributed his sudden weakness to the want of food” (8). In short, Raskolnikov’s aloofness and torpor are not the result of spiritual or metaphysical degradation but the result of a lack of adequate nutrition.
That this is the case is evident in comparison between an ill-fed Raskolnikov and one whose physical needs are sated. In Part VI, Chapter 1, the landlady’s servant, Nastasya, brings him food; “he ate and drank with appetite, almost with greediness. His head was fresher, and he was calmer than he had been for the last three days.” He finds relief from his mental anguish, as the narrator says, “He even felt a passing wonder at his previous attacks of panic” (408). In Part II, Chapter 3, during a checkup with the doctor, Zossimov, Raskolnikov’s faithful friend, Razumikin, feeds him several spoonfuls of soup, causing this reaction in Raskolnikov: “He moved back to his chair, pulled the soup and meat in front of him, and began eating as though he had not touched food for three days” (115). After Razumikin and Zossimov leave, Raskolnikov “leapt out of bed” and finds his mind clear (120). He drinks a half glass of beer and, perhaps due to his malnutrition and low body weight, immediately “sank into a deep, sound, refreshing sleep” (121, emphasis mine). Raskolnikov sleeps often but never feels refreshed unless his rest is preceded by nourishment and hydration, the resources necessary for bodily self-repair.
Raskolnikov’s eating disorder impairs him physically, mentally and socially, and consequently leads to his poor quality of life. One study found that self-esteem “contributed most to [quality of life]” among patients with eating disorders (de la Rie, Noordenbos and van Furth 1511). The study also found that social “impairment of [eating disorder] patients includes occupational and educational impairment, disrupted family life, interpersonal problems and difficulties in social adjustment” (1511-12). Raskolnikov exhibits these symptoms: he drops out of college, experiences relationship anxiety, avoids his family and friends, and is reclusive. Thus, his behavior correlates with the symptoms of low self-esteem caused by malnutrition brought about by a severe eating disorder.
Raskolnikov’s inability to maintain his biological systems is exacerbated by his subjection to severe poverty and trauma. His diet is not only meager, but his apartment is a dilapidated tenement, and his clothes are in rags. Even his hat, which is worn out, rusty, torn, bespattered, brimless and bent, draws attention as he walks down the street, as when a drunken passerby, “bawling at the top of his voice and pointing,” refers to him mockingly as a “German hatter” (3). Raskolnikov has been impoverished his entire life, growing up fatherless and poor in the countryside with his mother, Pulcheria Alexandrovna, and his sister, Dunya. A study found that childhood family poverty is a precursor to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, crime, MDD and impaired academic achievement (Nikulina, Spatz Widom and Czaja 309). Trauma also shows a large and significant direct effect on high-risk behaviors (O’Hare and Sherrer 217), and when people are oppressed, they tend to internalize inferiority (Husum and Edvardson 221). In short, the combination of food deprivation and low self-esteem due to poverty causes Raskolnikov to experience sudden swings of mood and energy, from pusillanimous to pernicious, whipped back and forth like a flag flapping in a turbulent, shifting wind.
It is hard to imagine that Dostoevsky would include these physiological details arbitrarily. Symptoms for MDD match Raskolnikov’s demeanor completely: poor concentration, feelings of excessive guilt or low self-worth, hopelessness about the future, thoughts about dying or suicide, disrupted sleep, changes in appetite or weight and feeling very tired or low in energy (Monroe and Reed 69). A one-to-one comparison to these symptoms sufficiently describes Raskolnikov’s mental state. His thoughts are often described as straying “aimlessly” (48), “swarming in his brain” (83), and “sick and incoherent” (121). He feels guilt over his inability to take care of his mother, who calls him in her letter “our one hope, our one consolation” (38). He shrinks from his grand reemergence into society by immediately hiding the money he stole from the murdered pawnbroker under a rock in a deserted courtyard with no plans to return. He considers suicide. He wakes from a “broken sleep” (25) after his first encounter with the equally depressed (and consumptive) Katerina Ivanovna. He is emaciated by malnourishment. He spends a third of the book in a pathetic, feverish state and sleeps for days. Dostoevsky’s inclusion of these details at strategic points in the narrative supports the machine-man metaphor, as Raskolnikov’s physical state acts as a direct corollary for his actions and their consequences.
Since manic depression was not clinically diagnosed until the twentieth-century, Dostoevsky would not have had access to this list; with no such resource, he therefore drew from experience. Raskolnikov can be viewed as a mimetic representation of his creator, as is explained in detail by W. D. Snodgrass in the article “Crime for Punishment: The Tenor of Part One”:
In August of 1866, when he began work on Crime and Punishment, [Dostoevsky’s] circumstances were remarkably like those of his hero […]. He had pawned his wardrobe and valuables, then had been cheated on an object he especially loved by a woman pawnbroker. When he could not keep up room rent, he was abused by the hotel manager and the waiters who (like the landlady and the maid in the novel) would not deliver any food except tea, ‘because he didn’t deserve it.’ The servant who watched him at night reported that he had ‘murder on his mind.’ Thus, his own Wiesbaden situation, though translated into the terms of his earlier life in St. Petersburg, is carried directly into the novel as the situation of the student, Raskolnikov. There, it is offered as one of the factors leading him to murder. (203-4)
One may also consider how Dostoevsky’s experience in prison is mirrored in Raskolnikov’s character. In The House of the Dead (1862), Dostoevsky recalls his time in Siberia “working under escort in the barracks together with two hundred ‘companions,’” but that he was “obliged to get accustomed to it” (16). Among them were murderers who were “so gay and so free from care, that one might have made a bet that their conscience never made them the least reproach” (18), i.e., the kind of murderer that Raskolnikov wished to be, as articulated in his published article, “On Crime” (240). The House of the Dead saw Dostoevsky get to know his fellow prisoners intimately, many fitting a description of Raskolnikov. Snodgrass explains why the author would be so cryptic about his protagonist’s motives:
There, [Dostoevsky’s life] is offered as one of the factors leading him to murder. Yet, it is not misfortune or poverty which are decisive; they occur to most of us with no such drastic result. The crux lies in the protagonist’s reaction to those difficulties. It is hardly surprising, then, that Dostoevsky hesitates to offer, abstractly, a motive which might be so damaging to his readers’ (or his own) opinion of himself (204).
Dostoevsky’s decision to hide the visceral humanity in the novel behind a shaky “Napoleon Complex,” a love story, and a tale of Christian suffering conceals an empathetic intention, that the author belies the harsh reality of poverty with religiosity and metaphysical abstractions. But Dostoevsky betrays this intention by writing Raskolnikov as all too human, that is, predictably mechanical, a physical body that suffers an ontological conundrum predicated on humiliation and hunger.
There is one final point that leads to the conclusion that Raskolnikov’s salvation lies not in philosophical and religious suffering and revelation but in the maintenance of his bodily parts. In the Epilogue, where he finds himself serving eight years in Siberia for the murder of the pawnbroker and her sister, he suffers what he calls the “horrors of prison life” (498): he performs hard labor, eats bad food (including thin cabbage soup with beetles floating in it), and wears patched clothes. Rather than being ashamed of these “fetters,” he soon grows to appreciate them. Hard work physically exhausts him and allows him a few hours of quiet sleep. Of the thin soup, he recalls that in “the past as a student he had often not had even that.” In The House of the Dead, Dostoevsky remarks that imprisonment in Siberia is to be surrounded by companionship through the mere proximity to others, a “compulsory life in common” (24), but again this is more than Raskolnikov had before, like the patched clothes Raskolnikov has been given, which “were warm and suited to his manner of life” (498). Thus, he adequately receives everything necessary that he lacked before going to prison—food, clothes, sleep, socialization and exercise—and it is no wonder that he begins to feel like a more stable human being.
The return of Raskolnikov’s melancholy following the ablation of his physical debilitations seems to refute the machine-man theory—his needs are met, but he nonetheless slips into the same mental routine. “It was wounded pride that made him ill,” says the narrator in an attempt by Dostoevsky to show Raskolnikov’s spirit being corrupted both in times of physical debilitation and flourishing—but this could be a misdirection (498). Raskolnikov is an unreliable protagonist, who lies consistently about his ideology and motives, as he does to Sonia during his confession and to himself about being a criminal mastermind with a heart of stone. However, this reversion to old habits and inability to break out of old programming seems to indicate that the spirit is dominant over the body.
The novel’s conclusion resolves this incongruity by asserting that the mind is a component of the body, one that requires the maintenance of its subordinate parts to function properly. Raskolnikov, after spending years in prison, can envision the end of his sentence, a marriage to Sonia (an industrious worker), and a life free from self-neglect, depression, and low self-esteem resulting from poverty. With his physical and emotional needs met, his symptoms of depression wane, and he “mechanically” picks up the Bible, the most convenient moral framework available, knowing that a set of acceptable values, any values, are necessary to cooperate with others (505). For Raskolnikov, Siberia was not a punishment but rehabilitation, and his acceptance of Christianity a heuristic stepping-stone to becoming a practicable member of society. Thus, the metaphysical analysis can now be completed through the reveal that Raskolnikov’s change of attitude and spiritual revelation are only possible through the upkeep of all his corporal parts.
As machines, humans function perfectly. Good designs prosper and bad designs fail. Failure to maintain one’s apparatus results in destruction. Raskolnikov is a metaphor for the importance of steady maintenance of the human body, where (to paraphrase Vonnegut) a decision that can affect one’s entire life depends on whatever micronutrients one ingested, or failed to ingest, for breakfast (4). As Leo Tolstoy said in his review of Crime and Punishment:
When he was killing the first old woman and still more her sister, he was not living his real life: rather, he was acting like a machine […]. [It] is then that one glass of beer, one smoked cigarette can impair the solution to the problem, hinder its solution, deafen the voice of the conscience, and cause the question to be decided in favor of one’s lower animal nature, as it was with Raskolnikov. (399, emphasis mine).
Dostoevsky’s true objective in Crime and Punishment is to suggest the will-to-not-suffer, that even the most diminished person has a chance at a social life if their basic needs are met. By treating the character as a malfunctioning machine that receives repair, Dostoevsky brings out his humanity, making Raskolnikov a superb addition to the literary canon of homo ex machina, the machines that teach us what it is like to be human.