Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky died in January 1881 at the age of fifty-nine, from a pulmonary hemorrhage, in a St. Petersburg apartment his wife had finally managed to furnish after two decades of their slow climb out of debt. He had published The Brothers Karamazov three months earlier. He had been a convict in Siberia, an epileptic since his twenties, a compulsive gambler until the gambling nearly killed him, and the father of four, two of whom died as small children. The Russian state buried him at public expense. Forty thousand people walked behind the coffin.
I do not write an obituary for a man whose obituaries have been written a thousand times. I write an obituary for one of his books — for Crime and Punishment, which was his first unambiguous masterpiece, published in 1866, and which has been doing particular damage to particular young readers for one hundred and sixty years.
The damage is this. Crime and Punishment is the first novel in European literature to insist — on every page, with Dostoyevsky’s peculiar suffocating intensity — that a man’s interior life is the real weather of his days, and that the exterior events are only what the weather picks up and throws around. Raskolnikov kills a pawnbroker and her half-sister in the first hundred pages. The remaining five hundred pages are not a police procedural. They are a weather report. They are what happens to a young man’s mind when it has done a thing it cannot unthink, and has to continue walking around St. Petersburg buying cabbage and arguing with landladies and falling in love with a prostitute and sweating through his shirt in the late Russian summer, while the thing he cannot unthink rearranges every molecule of his perception.
Before this book, the European novel was mostly exterior. Jane Austen is exterior. Dickens is largely exterior. Balzac is furniture and money and position and weather outside the skull. Dostoyevsky moves the camera inside. Crime and Punishment is the first great novel where nothing of importance happens in a room or on a street — it all happens in the space between Raskolnikov’s frontal lobe and his own jaw, and the rooms and streets are set dressing for the real action.
Every interior novelist who came after him is paying a debt to this book. Kafka is paying the debt. Mann is paying it. Bellow is paying it. Camus is paying it loudly and with footnotes. The entire Russian-inflected American novel of the 1950s and 60s — Malamud, Roth, Salinger in his late mode — is Dostoyevsky’s bill coming due in a new currency.
Where he got it wrong: the ending. The epilogue. The Siberian redemption scene where Sonya’s Bible does the work it has been promising to do. I do not believe it. I have never believed it. A great many readers smarter than I am believe it, and I will not fight them, but the final pages of Crime and Punishment feel, to me, like Dostoyevsky flinching — letting his own religious conviction override the logic his novel had spent six hundred pages constructing. Raskolnikov’s redemption is not earned. It is granted. Dostoyevsky will earn it properly, in Karamazov, fourteen years later. Here, he is still apprenticed to the possibility of grace he wants to believe in.
What he got right, forever: Porfiry Petrovich. The investigating magistrate who does not accuse Raskolnikov, does not trap him, does not use evidence — but simply talks to him, in conversations that are the closest thing literature has produced to a human being reading another human being’s mind in real time. The Porfiry scenes are the reason this book is read a hundred and sixty years later by first-year university students who have never read another Russian novel. You recognize Porfiry. You recognize what he is doing. You have been Porfiry’d by your mother, your spouse, your best friend, the person who finally, gently, made you admit the thing.
Fyodor Mikhailovich, rest easy. You wrote the book that makes a young person’s interior life feel like a place that can be described, and therefore like a place that can be survived. You made the weather report a genre. You are still the best at it. We are still catching up.
A related vagobond.com piece: Travel Writing — Dangerous Business.
Readers and fans of Crime and Punishment will really enjoy Hasan i-Sabah and the Garden at Alamut — my novel about a killer who believes, for a while, that he is permitted. Different century, different mountain, same weather inside the skull. Have a look and let me know what you think.
CD Damitio writes at indignified.substack.com — essays on utopias, dystopias, and the spaces between. Free to read. No algorithm, no sponsored content. His books can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/CD-Damitio/author/B001JP7NWA
CD Damitio writes INDIGNIFIED — utopias and dystopias explored. Free to read.
