Are you 'Ordinary' or 'Extraordinary'?

Crime and Punishment Week 19: Book Three, Chapter 5

Welcome to Week 19 of my slow-read of Crime and Punishment. This week’s chapter is Part Three, Chapter 5.

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This week’s characters

Characters in this week’s chapter:

Razumikhin • Porfiry Petrovich • Zamyotov

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In this chapter we meet Porfiry Petrovich for the first time and we get into a philosophical discussion based on an article that Raskolnikov wrote with the title, “‘On Crime’, or something like that.” It was published in the Periodical Review, something that Raskolnikov himself didn’t even know.

Part Three, Chapter 5 Synopsis

There’s an interesting scene when Porfiry Petrovich is introduced. As our two visitors enter, Razumikhin upsets an empty glass on a table and it falls and smashes to the ground. Porfiry responds with a line lifted right out of Act 1, Scene 1 of the Government Inspector by Gogol:

Why start smashing chairs, gentlemen? They cost the government money to replace.

I talk about it in this wee video.

I’m not sure of the relevance of the reference. Maybe a case of the author’s being influenced by another? I mean I will sometimes drop in a song lyric or something like that when I’m writing because it comes to mind during the creative process. It’s very cool to think of that on Dostoyevsky’s part.

Raskolnikov has gone to talk to the lead investigator, Porfiry Petrovich, about the items he’d pledged with the old pawnbroker and puts on an air of nonchalance as he enters the room with Razumikhin. He hopes to redeem his items, given his current state of impoverishment. He perceives a wink from Porfiry, which immediately makes him think, ‘he knows'!’ Remember how he felt that way when he was delirious in his room, or when he visited the police station after he was summoned.

The premise of Raskolnikov’s article is that humanity can basically be divided into two classifications:

1. The ordinary – those who solely provide the material, so to speak, for the propagation of others of their own kind;

2. The extraordinary – those who possess the gift or talent to say something new.

This is the premise of the whole novel and it’s discussed in detail in this chapter, as well as in a couple of excellent footnotes that I’ve mentioned below.

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There’s a footnote in the Oxford Classics edition of Pasternak-Slater’s translation that gives some more detail on the concept of extraordinary as discussed in other of Dostoyevsky’s works. It is attached to the quotation I have used below for the translation comparison.

People are somehow all subdivided... extraordinary: the narrator of Notes from Underground refers to social reorganization as an 'anthill'. However, Raskolnikov's idea of the 'great man' represents the first full elaboration of Dostoevsky's 'anthill theory' of slavery for the masses and freedom for the chosen few. Further conceptions of the 'anthill' are found in Shigalev's theory of ultimate slavery and social levelling in Devils and in Ivan Karamazov's 'poem' 'The Grand Inquisitor', in which the eponymous inquisitor replaces the misery of free will with 'miracle, mystery, and authority' to endow enslaved mankind with happiness.
— Oxford World Classics, 2017, p498

See also this footnote from the same quotation in the Oliver Ready translation:

“All because they are extraordinary”: The originality of Raskolnikov's argument about the moral rights of extraordinary men continues to exercise scholars; Tikhomirov calls it 'the Russian version of a certain pan-European archetype'. In his epic biography Joseph Frank mentions numerous literary precursors - including Schiller, Byron, Balzac and Pushkin - but gives pride of place to the radical critic Dmitry Pisarev's interpretation of Ivan Turgenev's nihilist hero Bazarov in Fathers and Sons (1862). Where others saw Bazarov in a satirical light, Pisarev exalted him as a solitary figure who rises above the mass of humanity and the fetters of his own conscience: 'Neither above him, nor outside him, nor inside him does he recognize any regulator, any moral law, any principle.' Dostoyevsky's colleague and friend Nikolai Strakhov (1828-96) observed (in Frank's words) 'that Pisarev had gone farther than other radicals along the path of total negation' and Dostoyevsky appeared to share this view. See Derek Offord, 'Crime and Punishment and Contemporary Radical Thought' in Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment: A Casebook; Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865-1871 (London: Robson Books, 1995), pp. 70-75; and Introduction. A more immediate source of Raskolnikov's emphasis on 'extraordinary' people appears to have been Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte's Histoire de Jules César, translated into Russian in 1865 and interpreted as a defence of Napoleon more than of Caesar. Perhaps this is the 'book' to which Raskolnikov's 'article' putatively responded. Ideas about rare individuals were in any case already in the air: twenty-five years earlier Thomas Carlyle's On Heroes, HeroWorship and the Heroic in History (1841) had greatly impressed Russian educated society (Boris Tikhomirov, S.V. Belov).

— Oliver Ready, Penguin Books, 2014, p538

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So this philosophical concept was in the zeitgeist around the time that Dostoyevsky was writing. He himself added a lot to the discussion, not just in Crime and Punishment but also in his other works.

In Raskolnikov’s mind, the extraordinary have a right to commit crime to further their goals. Such people, however, are exceedingly rare. He breaks it down into numbers:

• One out of a thousand individuals possess at least a modicum of independence.

• One in ten thousand will possess a greater degree of independence.

• One in a hundred thousand will have greater independence still.

• Geniuses will be one out of millions.

• The greatest geniuses of all, the pinnacle of humanity, will only arise after many billions of people have lived their lives on this earth.

What’s shocking to Razumikhin is that Raskolnikov allows for the shedding of blood as something that can be sanctioned by conscience. Porfiry agrees. Raskolnikov goes on to elucidate that ‘those with a conscience will suffer, if they acknowledge that what they’ve done is wrong. That will be their punishment – apart from a spell in prison, of course.’ We can take from that that Raskolnikov does acknowledge that what he has done is wrong—he’s been suffering since before he committed the crime. In fact, he wrote in his article that illness often accompanies the committing of a crime. That idea certainly came home to roost with Raskolnikov himself! I get the impression that he meant physical illness, rather than mental illness, although who can say?

The question Porfiry then goes on to ask him—in true Columbo style—is whether Raskolnikov considers himself to be one of those ‘extraordinary’ people. He replies: ‘You may well be right… If I were to overstep an obstacle in that way, I certainly wouldn’t tell you about it.’

Again with the overstepping.

We know that Raskolnikov does indeed think of himself in that way. We also know that he really isn’t. The question is: does Porfiry know?

Later on, Porfiry lays a trap in his questioning when he asks Raskolnikov whether he remembers seeing an open apartment with two decorators inside when he called at the pawnbroker’s apartment with his pledge. Raskolnikov spots and deftly avoids the trap and Razumikhin goes on to call it out as a ridiculous line of questioning, because, as we know, the decorators were there on the day of the murder, not the day that Raskolnikov called by with his pledge.

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Raskolnikov 1 | Porfiry 0

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Next week we’ll be looking at the final chapter in Part Three, bringing us roughly to the half-way point in the novel. How are you enjoying it so far? Are you finding it easier to read than you expected? Is it bringing to mind anything else that you’ve read? Let me know in the comments!

All quotations in this post are taken from Roger Cockrell’s translation of 2022, Alma Classics, © Roger Cockrell 2022

Translation Points

Let’s take a look at Porfiry’s explanation of how he understands Raskolnikov’s thesis about ordinary and extraordinary people:

"No, that's not quite it," Porfiry answered. "The whole point is that we are all divided into two categories: the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘extraordinary’. The ordinary must live in obedience to the law and do not have the right to transgress it, because, you see, they are ordinary – while the extraordinary have the right to commit all kinds of crimes and violations of the law precisely because they are extraordinary. I think that's what you're saying, if I'm not mistaken?"

This is the quotation that yielded the two explanations in the footnotes I copied above. If you would like to see how the translators rendered this text, head over the to the comparison spreadsheet by clicking the button below.

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