I met an old schoolmate at my friend’s wedding last week. He was drunk out of his mind, rattling off facts about Baudrillard and Balinese poetry to me (it was the only wedding out of three he had to attend that month where he didn’t have to behave decently, aka not be dead drunk). Naturally, the conversation turned to Dostoevsky. The point of Crime and Punishment, he asserted, was that Man wants to suffer. To suffer is human nature. That was only a surface-level reading, I countered. The suffering is Rodya’s punishment. What about the crime? The crime, he said, is secondary. Suffering is the point of the novel. The crime is the setup. We seek out suffering, we desire it. Rodya wants to suffer. The physical crime: the killing of the pawn hag. The mental crime: egoism. Through the suffering process, he argued, Rodya finds redemption. This is the spiritual center of the novel. Redemption through suffering.
This argument was compelling yet vexing to me. In my traditional Bakhtinian reading, C&P was a polyphonic novel. Rodya personified the Western liberal. Rational egoism and utopian socialism. A self-made superman where individualism justifies murder. The crime is the ultimate act of egoism. To take another’s life to prove your theory that their soul is worth less than your own. Juxtaposed with Russian sobornost and Christ in the figure of Sonya. The former appears within Rodya himself, when he inexplicably gives almost all his rubles to the Marmeladovs for the funeral. In another sequence, Rodya stops a drunk man from attacking a vulnerable young girl. He calls a policeman who doesn’t really help. What does he do next? He gives the policeman money. Why would he perform such absurdly uneconomic acts of charity, when he had close to no money left? This is the greatest contradiction of the novel. Rodya’s ideology is individualism, yet his body’s spontaneously uneconomic actions betray him.
The immediate, cynical explanation by Luzhin was that he did so for some form of sexual repayment. Luzhin is a purebred bourgeois bastard after all. He can’t comprehend non-transactional relationships. And after all, the Marmeladovs’ oldest was a whore… This explanation is complicated further during Rodya’s trial. It’s revealed that when he was in university, Rodya rushed into a burning building like Peter Parker (sin superpoderes) in Spiderman 2 and rescued a child (though she probably wasn’t Chinese).
It then becomes apparent that Rodya’s body itself becomes a site for discourse. Katz and other scholars have pointed out that the mare dream represents the split personalities present within Rodya. He is at once the “innocent child, bloodthirsty peasant and tortured nag”. The peasant wants to commit the murder to prove his Great Man Theory. The innocent child Rodya’s horror, not at the consequences but the thought of committing the sin itself. The nag, however, is more complicated. Is it Rodya suffering the immediate material consequences of his future sin, or is it his victim soul tortured by the abstract (his half-baked ideology) and the concrete (his crime)?
The innocent child is also particularly eye-opening to us. The child is empathetic and humane, throwing himself in harm’s way to protect the nag. Isn’t this similar to how Rodya saved the kid Spiderman style? We read these acts of charity and the innocent boy as a personification of Russian sobornost (communion, collective salvation). The murderous peasant is the facet of Rodya that pushes him to commit double murder as an act of brutal transgression. It is his attempt to break away from that intrinsic altruism.
Yet in the epilogue, Sonya drags Rodya back from the brink and grants him salvation.
This was my understanding of the novel, a tug-of-war between sobornost Christ-salvation versus evil Western egoism. I explained this to my friend poorly, after all I had not expected to be discussing Borges and Russian realism at a wedding, and we quickly trailed off into other topics.
Finally we can reach a synthesis of ideas. If the novel is about a battle of philosophies, perhaps the suffering is what brought Rodya back from the brink. Because despite his horrible crime (killing the pawnbroker was bad enough, but the innocent Lizaveta too?), Dostoevsky clearly shows that even Rodya is worth saving. Sonya alone isn’t enough to convince him. Perhaps Rodya’s suffering, him as the “tortured nag” was necessary for him to reject the savage peasant and choose the path of the gentle young boy.
So was suffering the point? I think it’s yes and no. The suffering, the “tortured nag”, was the site of discourse. It was the crucible where Rodya’s subconscious sobornost conquered the “bloodthirsty peasant”, that imported egoism. The crime, the killing of the mare, Lizaveta and the pawnbroker, was the catalyst, only after which a new Rodya could, painfully, be born.