Dostoyevsky is one of the masters of the Russian realistic school. His best known novel, “Crime and Punishment,” is a psychological study of great power. It describes the atrocious murder of two women, an old money lender and her sister, by a young student, Raskolnikoff, and the train of events which afterwards led to the confession of the murderer and his transportation to Siberia.
Raskolnikoff has no sufficient motive for the crime, but he is led by the contemplation of Napoleon and other great men who have committed crimes to feel that he, too, is an exceptional creature, authorized to violate all laws of morality, and that he is guilty of no sin in killing the old women. His immediate purpose is robbery, to get the money necessary to prosecute his studies; yet so blunderingly does he go to work that he secures but little, and can make no use of it. The way in which his half crazed, vacillating intellect is finally induced to make a confession, is delineated with great dramatic skill. The examining magistrate, Porphryrius, also an eccentric, certainly shows great ability, not only in discerning the criminal, but in bringing him by gradual stepsinto a frame of mind which leads to confession, where there is no other sufficient evidence of guilt.
Most of the individuals described in the book are morbid, and some of them are grotesque; yet the reader is impressed with the consciousness that, in spite of inconsistencies and paradoxes, the story must be essentially true to the peculiar nature of the characters described.
The maudlin babbling of the drunkard Marmeladoff, giving the story of his debasement and the ruin and dishonor into which he has plunged his family, is just such talk as that kind of a man would indulge in when in liquor, and the picture which it sets before us is revolting, but infinitely pitiful and real. All the dreadful things which happen afterwards in the drunkard’s household—his tragical death, the insanity of his wife, and the beggary of their children—lie heavy upon our hearts, while they convince us that we are in a world where such things are realities.
In the girl Sonia, the eldest daughter of this household, we have the remarkable spectacle of a self-sacrificing, devoted and beautiful character, who has been constrained by necessity and by pity for her little brothers and sisters into a life of shame.
The most incomprehensible person in the story is one Svidrigailoff, an unscrupulous man of the world, given to sensuality, who commits suicide in a most unaccountable way after a nightmare. He is a character which puts at fault all calculations of what a man will do under given circumstances.
In strong contrast with the rest of thedramatis personæ, the mother and sister of Raskolnikoff display a dignity, strength of character and womanly tenderness which show us that Dostoyevsky is able to portray a normal and healthy character, a thing which might be otherwise in doubt.
This novel, dealing as it does with the submerged tenth of society, contains such a preponderance of repulsive features that it is by no means agreeable, nor even desirable, reading for the general public. Its tendency undoubtedly is to generate some of the morbid characteristics it describes.