Dostoevsky, Berdyaev, and Shestov. Three Russian Apostles of Freedom. Daniel Francis McNeill
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is now strange in a way different from what it was before. Before his manner was strange because of his silence and his need to be separate from people around him. Now his manner is strange because of the way he talks to people in his surroundings. His need to talk seems like perhaps the first steps from his former silent madness ruled by his mind towards the Marmeladov kind of madness that has its origin in human feeling. But in Dostoevsky’s understanding of psychology, the mind and the soul are enemies and neither show any mercy to the other until one gives in to the other and commits itself because of its defeat to be the other’s servant. Raskolnikov has felt a minor touch of compassion and pressed five kopecks into the hand of a girl. He has sent off words of feeling and poetry to the astonished ears of a stranger. Something is making him speak. What if this something continues to put pressure on him? What if it presses him not to just talk but to talk about it? He had but one thought earlier when he left his room. His complete thought was “that all this must be ended today, once for all, immediately; that he would not return home without it, because he would not go on living like that.” Raskolnikov like Marmeladov has now a need to get everything out in the open.
His wanderings this night through the Hay Market and other places around Petersburg where normal people are doing normal things trying to enjoy the evening include a series of accidents. He tries to get information from hucksters in the Hay Market who had dealings with Lizaveta. He speaks to a young man standing before a shop. But he makes no progress with his questions. The young man quickly tires of talking to him and directs him laughing to an eating-house saying “you’ll find princesses there too.…La,la”. He crosses a square and pushes his way into a dense crowd of peasants. “He felt an unaccountable inclination to enter into conversation with people. But the peasants took no notice of him; they were all shouting in groups together.” He wandered off silently to a marketplace that he knew well with dram shops and eating-houses. He saw women running in and out of various festive establishments. From one came the sounds of singing, the tinkling of a guitar and shouts of merriment. He passed a drunken soldier swearing and smoking a cigarette. A beggar was quarrelling with another beggar and a drunk was lying right across the road. Life, in other words, the bald unthinking life of real people, humans, is all around him. He is now in the midst of life unfolding not intentionally but accidentally. Two women speak to him seductively. One asks him for six kopecks for a drink and he gives her fifteen. A woman “pock-marked…covered with bruises with her upper lip swollen” but nonetheless alive and, so to speak, greedy to continue living to her last breath sets Raskolnikov to thinking about life. “‘Where is it,’ thought Raskolnikov. ‘Where is it I’ve read that someone condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he’d have only the room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once! Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!’” But Raskolnikov is still thinking not living and his thinking has him in such a firm grip that it will not allow him to live like those around him.
He remembers why he has come out, to get some newspapers to read what has been written about the murders. He enters a spacious and clean restaurant and orders tea and newspapers. Suddenly, as he searches the newspapers, the head clerk of the police station that he has recently visited on a matter not related to the murders, sits down smiling at his table. Zametov tells him that he has visited him recently at his room when he was lying on his couch sleeping. Raskolnikov talks to him strangely and insultingly. He accuses him of drinking champagne at others expense. He accuses him of taking money corruptly and profiting from everything. Zametov has sat down for friendly conversation and tells Raskolnikov he is speaking strangely and must still be unwell. The conversation goes on back and forth argumentatively with no normal human connection between the murderer and the police official. They begin on the subject that Raskolnikov has just been reading about in the newspapers, the murders of the two women. Raskolnikov gives a long description of what he would have done if he were the murderer to hide the objects that were stolen from the dead pawnbroker. But he describes to Zametov in great detail how he actually hid the objects under a stone without admitting to Zametov that he was the murderer and as though he were simply imagining for Zametov’s benefit how he would have hidden the objects. Zametov calls him a madman because he is fed up with Raskolnikov’s wild, strange imaginings. “‘And what if it was I who murdered the old woman and Lizaveta?’ he said suddenly and – realized what he had done.” Zametov decides Raskolnikov is merely joking or playing with him maliciously and refuses to believe him. But Raskolnikov has really said it! He has gotten the truth in his mind out in the company of men! It jolts him and he soon leaves the restaurant. “He went out, trembling all over from a sort of wild hysterical sensation, in which there was an element of insufferable rapture.” But this touch of sudden, intense life comes from a daring intentional act of the mind not from a sudden touch of remorse in the soul.
4
A series of accidents happen to Raskolnikov but his behavior is so intentional, intentional to the extreme, that when he sees evidence that a young girl, Sonya, the daughter of Marmeladov, possesses something infinitely gentle and unworldly in her soul, some hidden spiritual power that protects her from the world around her – – even when Raskolnikov sees clearly that such a spirit lives within her and he also understands that because of what is in her soul he himself is permanently joined to the young woman forever, even at such a moment that has all the appearance of a miracle, it does not affect his feelings because his rational madness, even in the face of a miracle, will not let him set his soul free.
Raskolnikov’s meeting with Marmeladov in a tavern after his visit to the old pawnbroker was the first accident. They do not know each other, yet Marmeladov is moved somehow to talk to young Raskolnikov and pour out his remorseful feelings to him without any restraint. We accept it as a reasonably possible occurrence because Raskolnikov is a completely believable character, an intelligent young student pursuing some odd adventure. Marmeladov’s ravings present us with a nice contrast to Raskolnikov’s rationality to such an extent that we do not hear with any feeling the odd things the father says about his daughter Sonya who has been driven to prostitution by her miserable poverty. Yet what a superb accident it is to set a young man soon to become an axe murderer of two women at the same table in a dismal tavern with a madman! The religious language Marmeladov uses appears to us to be nonsense. The concrete belief he expresses, that his daughter Sonya’s sins will be forgiven, is nonsense and the absurd reasoning he uses to explain why Sonya will be saved is nonsense carried to the extreme. Sonya will be saved because she has “loved much”. It is such nonsense that our minds do not allow us to see that something has already slipped secretly into Raskolnikov’s soul and our souls. Love! But we do not feel this love and our minds automatically reject it as nonsense. Marmeladov does feel it but he is nothing but a madman. His dear daughter is on the streets prostituting herself and he dares to say that she will be forgiven because she has loved! “Thy sins which are many,” Marmeladov raves, “are forgiven thee for thou hast loved much.” We are happy when the scene moves on and we are past such nonsense about the power of “love”. We must soon also hear mad talk from Marmeladov of people, drunkards, “made in the image of the beast”, who will be received into Christ’s kingdom, not because they love but because “not one of them believed himself to be worthy of this”. It is all nonsense that serves only as a nice contrast to the refined rational madness of Raskolnikov. We do not look for any new development of “love” in our story because it is about murder.
The next accident is that Marmeladov is so weakened and so drunk that he can not walk home unassisted. Raskolnikov is thus diverted from his extreme adventure of the mind by the practical job of helping his new acquaintance home. Because of his help, he finds out accidentally the address of Marmeladov’s family and even enters the room where his wife and three stepchildren live. Sonya, Marmeladov’s daughter, is not there and there seems little chance that Raskolnikov will ever meet her since she lives in another residence. He leaves on a window unnoticed the last few kopecks he has in his pockets for the starving family. On the stairs as he leaves the building, he regrets leaving the money thinking of the absent Sonya and her profession. He thinks not of how she will be saved by love but instead that money earned by her profession will provide food