That was the work of the Devil, not reason!
Crime and Punishment Week 6: Part One, Chapter 6.
Welcome to Week 6 of my slow-read of Crime and Punishment. This week’s chapter is Part One, Chapter 6.
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This week’s characters
Characters in this week’s chapter in the order that they are mentioned. Raskolnikov isn’t mentioned because he’s mentioned in almost every chapter.
Part One, Chapter 6 Synopsis
All quotations in this post are taken from Roger Cockrell’s translation of 2022, Alma Classics, © Roger Cockrell 2022
Lizaveta is coming out at seven o’clock to do a deal as a trader. Raskolnikov had recently become superstitious and was to remain so. He sees special influences and coincidences, and this is when he starts to believe that he has no agency, that he’s being pushed and pulled by something else.
At the end of chapter 5 he set off for his room and took a different route. He doesn’t remember taking the decision to do that; it was fate, or coincidence or something. We learn that he became aware of the pawnbroker through an old friend and he soon finds himself there pawning a ring. On his way home, he goes into a tavern and overhears a conversation that sets the whole idea of the murder playing out in his head. A student and an army officer are playing billiards and drinking tea. During their conversation, they discuss the morality of a murder that’s done for the general good of mankind — another coincidence: ‘exactly such ideas had just been forming in his own head.’
This seemingly trivial conversation in the tavern was to have an extraordinarily powerful effect in determining his later course of action – as if there really were something preordained about it all, some guide to the future…
He goes back to his flat and sits, thinking in the dark. We get another message from his future self: ‘He could never remember whether or not he had thought about anything during that hour.’
As he’s preparing himself to go and commit the crime, we get an interesting tidbit from the narrator:
The more definite the decision, the more absurd and repugnant it immediately became in his eyes. Despite his agonizing inner struggle throughout the whole period, he was never—not even for a single instant—able to believe in the feasibility of his plans.
His lack of planning is astounding. He doesn’t even know where he’ll get the axe from. Yet he’s being pulled along as if he’s being channelled towards the end goal and he has to grab the tools along the way — ‘as if someone had taken him by the hand and pulled him along, blindly, irresistibly, with unnatural force and without any resistance. It was as though a piece of his clothing had become caught up in a wheel and he was being dragged along with it.’ So, planning be damned. He just has to hope that it works because his agency has been taken from him, and it’s happening one way or another.
His plans for retrieving the axe are thwarted when he sees Nastasya’s hanging up the laundry. This makes him angry.
He felt crushed, somehow humiliated even. He was so angry with himself he felt like laughing… He was seething with blind, almost bestial rage.
But then fate lends a hand. The caretaker’s lodge is empty and he sees the glint of something under the bench. It’s an axe!
‘That was the work of the Devil, not reason!’ he thought, with a strange grin.
He heads out with the axe’s hanging on the loop he’s sewn into his coat, trying not to walk in a way that would raise suspicions.
He generally avoided looking at passers-by—in fact he tried not to look at people’s faces at all, and to be as inconspicuous as possible.
Is this another pointer towards autism? It could be. Or is it just introversion? I don’t mean that he’s trying to be inconspicuous now, but that it’s his general modus operandi. I do exactly the same thing and have to make a conscious effort not to do that by way of masking, but if I’m tired or anxious, my avoidance techniques are legendary.
He gets to Alyona Ivanovna’s apartment and rings the bell several times before the bolt is drawn at the very end of the chapter. We get another message from the future:
Later, recalling in clear and vivid detail this moment—which would become stamped for ever on his brain—he could not understand how he had contrived to be so cunning… all thje more so since his mind at times seemed to cloud over, and he could hardly feel his body…
So we’re left on a cliff-edge, wondering whether fate will pull him along right to the end and he’ll actually go through with the murder. Do we even want him to go through with it? That’s an interesting question. Although, to be fair, I don’t expect anyone reading this far to be in any doubt, so perhaps we’re more concerned about how it goes down and what the consequences will be.
Let me know in the comments what you’re thinking here:
Do you want Raskolnikov to kill Alyona Ivanovna?
Is her murder morally justifiable?
At this point, does it feel inevitable?
Translation Points
I’ve chosen a quotation that deals with superstition and fate, as these are the key factors pulling Raskolnikov towards Alyona Ivanovna’s door.
The traces of superstition were to remain in him for a long time afterwards, becoming almost ineradicable. And throughout this entire process he remained inclined to see something strange and mysterious in it all - the presence, as it were, of certain special influences and coincidences.
There are other smaller sections in the comparison spreadsheet for this chapter, including how the translators have all dealt with what Cockrell has rendered the part of the conversation where the billiard players refer to Alyona Ivanovna as ‘a ghastly old bat…’.
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To focus on the moral point: to me it's certainly not morally justifiable in any way. Not in 'real life' and not in the context of the story. And I have a feeling Dostojevski thinks so too. There are several places in the text where Dostojevski describes how Raskolnikov's mind is unclear and feverish or how he's unable to think straight. At the very end for example, where R thinks that 'at times his mind was almost darkened and he was hardly aware of his physical existence'. So maybe Dostojevski is saying that R doesn't act out of any true moral conviction. And of course there really is no good reason why he should kill the 'old' woman (she's my age 😄).