Welcome to Week 4 of my slow-read of Crime and Punishment. This week’s chapter is Part One, Chapter 4.
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This week’s characters
Characters in this week’s chapter in the order that they are mentioned:
Raskolnikov • Nastasya • Praskovya Pavlovna • Vakhrushin • Pulkheria Raskolnikova • Dunya • Svidrigailov • Marfa Petrovna • Luzhin
Part One, Chapter 4 Synopsis
All quotations in this post are taken from Roger Cockrell’s translation of 2022, Alma Classics, © Roger Cockrell 2022
Mr Luzhin can to go hell!
We get Raskolnikov’s response to his mother’s letter and he’s not a happy bunny. He understands that Dunya is sacrificing herself for him and it has made him quite angry. In fact, the narrator goes onto say that, ‘had he and Mr Luzhin met at that moment, he would probably have killed him.’ He’s got that killer in him!
We get Raskolnikov’s thought process on the ‘seemingly kind-hearted’ Mr Luzhin’s kindness on sending on the women’s bags and allowing them to travel third class. It’s all very transactional and he can’t understand how his mother can’t see it. He knows that Dunya would ‘rather live on black bread and water than sell her soul — rather give up her comfort for her moral freedom, which she wouldn’t exchange for all Schleswig-Holstein, let alone for Mr Luzhin’. So why is she agreeing to this marriage to Luzhin? It’s for Rodya.
The answer is clear: she is not doing it for herself or her own well-being: she wouldn’t sell herself even to save her own life. No, she’s selling herself for someone else! For someone she loves, someone she adores! That’s the nub of it: she’s selling herself for her brother, for her mother!
He goes on to compare what Dunya is sacrificing with Sonya Marmaladova’s sacrifice, saying that Dunya’s ‘side of the bargain … will be luxurious comfort, while with Sonya we’re talking about starvation and death.’ He states that this sacrifice will not happen, he will not allow it. But how can he prevent it? What right does he have? Isn’t he already accepting their sacrifices by taking the money his mother has had to borrow against her pension?
And then we get a glimpse into something that I’ve mentioned before: trauma:
Yet none of these questions were new or unexpected: he had agonized over them for a long time now. They had long since begun to tear at his heart. His present anguish had its origins in the long-distant past: it had grown, gathered strength, matured and become concentrated, until it had taken the form of a single, terrible, horrendous and outlandish question torturing his heart and brain, insistently demanding an answer.
We aren’t told what these origins in the long-distant past were. It goes on to get ever darker:
He clearly had to stop all this passive anxiety and suffering, all this worrying over unresolved issues… In any event, he had to decide to do something, or …
“Or maybe renounce life altogether,” he suddenly cried in a frenzy, “meekly accept my fate as it is once and for all and stifle everything within me, giving up any right to act, live and love!”
This is followed by his remembering Marmeladov’s questioning him about whether he knew what it meant when one has nowhere to go.
My belief in this trauma in Raskolnikov’s past gets stronger with each reading of this novel. I think that his murdering Alyona Ivanovna is an attempt at his not renouncing life altogether. I get the feeling that he’s been pretty close to giving up before, but wants to grab life with both hands and do something big, something that will enable him to hold on. “For everybody needs at least somewhere he can go…”
Professor Yuri Corrigan has written a book about Dostoyevsky’s characters’ suffering from trauma. The book is called Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self, published by Northwestern University Press. I haven’t read the book, but I have read a few reviews and some interviews the author has given, including an excellent panel discussion on a podcast published by the University of Oxford called Dostoevsky at 200: A roundtable. Oliver Ready has reviewed the book for The TLS. You may need a subscription to read the full article: Human, being - A ‘stunning’ companion to a great literary edifice.
The Drunk Girl
We’re suddenly reminded that Raskolnikov had left his apartment block at the end of chapter 3 and all of this thinking was taking place on K— Boulevard in the middle of a very hot day. He spots a young girl, aged 15 or 16, looking the worse for wear. She’s clearly drunk. Across the street is a well-dressed ‘gentleman’ who appears to be looking at the drunk girl as prey. Raskolnikov approaches him and calls out to him as, ‘Svidrigailov', a name that would have meant something to contemporary Russian readers. Cockrell’s footnotes inform us that it was a name from an 1862 report in Iskra, featuring a rich landowner and his lackey, Svidrigailov, who was ‘the embodiment of an unsavoury and shady character.’1 They come to blows, whereupon a police officer appears. Raskolnikov explains the situation of the young girl’s being preyed upon by this Svidrigailov-type, and it looks as though she has already been taken advantage of. So, we learn that Raskolnikov’s base response is to protect the weak, but only until his traumatised self takes over and he changes his tune.
At that moment, Raskolnikov suddenly felt as if he had been stung by something. His entire mood changed, in an instant.
He goes from caring about the young girl’s well-being, having given over 20 copecks to the police officer to help get the girl home, to shouting at him to ‘leave them alone. Let him have a bit of fun… Let them eat each other alive – why should I care?’
It’s another example of his being torn, split in two. Part of him cares so much for humanity that it can be hard to bear, and the other part is full of contempt for it all. There’s a constant battle going on in his head and it’s grinding him down and making him ill. He plays out the young girl’s potential future in his head: prostitution, drink, beatings, her life over by the time she reaches eighteen or nineteen. It makes him think of Dunya’s sacrifice again, using the word percentage to describe how people are divided between the abused and the abusers.
He remembers that he was on his way to see Razumikhin, one of the only people with whom he’s formed a bond, or ‘not quite a bond, but he was certainly more open and forthcoming with him.’
Translation Points
I’ve picked up on the powerful quotation I’ve shared above about Raskolnikov’s trauma.
Yet none of these questions were new or unexpected: he had agonized over them for a long time now. They had long since begun to tear at his heart. His present anguish had its origins in the long-distant past: it had grown, gathered strength, matured and become concentrated, until it had taken the form of a single, terrible, horrendous and outlandish question torturing his heart and brain, insistently demanding an answer.
All eight translations are in the comparison spreadsheet.
I also made a quick video update on this point.
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Crime and Punishment, Roger Cockrell, p523
Everything in this chapter seems to add to that feeling of suppressed trauma: Raskolnikow's anger, the oppressive heat, the pointlessness of saving this one girl... Dostojewski keeps on building tension and then releasing it a little, then adding to it again until it becomes almost unbearable. And of course chapter V makes it even worse...