Dostoevsky, Berdyaev, and Shestov. Three Russian Apostles of Freedom. Daniel Francis McNeill
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other characters in other Dostoevsky novels taking other forms, but it is always the same theme and the same judgment on their author’s part: an extreme reliance on reason alone becomes an insane aberration and drives a human completely away from any solace that can come to him from the soul. Sonya offers Raskolnikov during their interview a way to reach down into his soul and drink the gentle waters of his soul’s salvation but he does not go in the direction she offers.
In a dark room lit only by a candle, Sonya and Raskolnikov sit and talk. It is eleven at night. She is frightened by his unexpected visit at a late hour but happy to see him. He says that her stepmother, Katerina Ivanovna, used to beat her insinuating that the two have a bad relationship but Sonya explains that she loves her stepmother and that they are a close family. She expresses compassion for the sick woman with feeling as she speaks of the hardships of her life. Raskolnikov asks if she knew Lizaveta, the girl he murdered, and she answers that she did. As the talk goes on, he asks himself how she can live with such suffering, her own and her family’s. He paces up and down the room thinking for five minutes in silence. “His eyes were hard, feverish and piercing, his lips were twitching. All at once he bent down quickly and dropping to the ground, kissed her foot.” He explains that he has not bowed down to her but to “all the suffering of humanity”. He says after a few moments that “your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing”. He is now “almost in a frenzy”. “Tell me how this shame and degradation can exist in you side by side with other, opposite, holy feelings?” It appears that he is going in the direction of the soul. He can not resist trying to know how she can be such a good person and live such a foul life. He cried to himself, “How can she sit on the edge of the abyss of loathsomeness into which she is slipping…? Does she expect a miracle?”
“‘So you pray to God a great deal, Sonya?’ he asked her.
Sonya did not speak; he stood beside her waiting for an answer.
‘What should I be without god?’ she whispered rapidly, forcibly, glancing at him with suddenly flashing eyes, and squeezing his hand.
‘Ah, so that is it!’ he thought.
‘And what does God do for you?’ he asked, probing her further.
Sonya was silent for a long while, as though she could not answer. Her weak chest kept heaving with emotion.
‘Be silent! Don’t ask! You don’t deserve!’ she cried suddenly looking sternly and wrathfully at him.
‘That’s it, that’s it,’ he repeated to himself.
‘He does everything,’ she whispered quickly, looking down again.”
The conflict is the same throughout most of Dostoevsky’s works. It fascinates him to put side by side the angelic opposite the unholy, the good opposite the loathsome, faith opposite unbelief, the mystical opposite the rational. Usually there is somewhere a hint of a divine and miraculous world that flashes light very dimly towards his characters, a light that never quite reaches most of them, that never becomes a bright flash into their soul that might save them. Sonya is clearly an angel despite her profession and Raskolnikov is clearly a devil supported by the unrelenting power of the mind. They meet in a dark room lit only by a candle. Sonya’s soul is bright with love. Raskolnikov’s soul is a dark abyss and his mind a solid bridge above it.
Then a miracle takes place. Raskolnikov understands with his mind, objectively, that a secret divine presence is within Sonia. He accepts with his mind that God is alive within her protecting her even though he is unable or unwilling to jump across the gap between his mind and his soul, influenced by Sonya, to repent and to be saved. He asks himself, “What held her up – surely not depravity? All that infamy had obviously only touched her mechanically, not one drop of real depravity had penetrated to her heart; he saw that.” He noticed a book on the top of a chest of drawers as he paced up and down the room. He picks it up and sees that it is a copy of the New Testament. She reveals that Lizaveta, the murdered young woman, brought it to her. He asks her to read the story of Lazarus whom Jesus raised from the dead. She hardly dares to read it to him because she says he does not believe but he insists and she reads. “Raskolnikov saw in part why Sonya could not bring herself to read to him and the more he saw this, the more roughly and irritably he insisted on her doing so. He understood only too well how painful it was for her to betray and unveil all that was her own. He understood that these feelings really were her secret treasure, which she had kept perhaps for years, perhaps from childhood, while she lived with an unhappy father and a distracted stepmother crazed by grief, in the midst of starving children and unseemly abuse and reproaches.” He sees with the eyes of his mind inside Sonya’s soul. He sees miraculously without feeling anything miraculous that a miracle is the source of her life, a hidden source.
She reads the whole story of the raising of Lazarus from the dead. In the night, in the dark room lit just by a candle, the murderer watches a saintly young girl reading “distinctly and forcibly as though she were making a public confession of faith”. When she finishes her long reading, the two are silent in the dark room for five minutes. They have known one another since Marmeladov spoke of his daughter to Raskolnikov in the tavern saying passionately that her salvation is certain because she “has loved much” and they have been joined mysteriously since Sonya entered his room suddenly and angelically to invite him to attend her father’s burial and her stepmother’s reception, joined perhaps also when Sonya sent to him her stepsister Polenka with her childish love, and now joined forever because Raskolnikov has uncovered her secret strength, the divine love that lives in her soul, joined forever because now he has seen her faith as she read to him the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from death. But joined as they are they are also separated! It is a kind of miracle in reverse that Dostoevsky has invented. They are joined miraculously but at the same time they are adversaries. Raskolnikov will not move an inch from his imprisonment in his mind and believe. The truth is that he is so locked in the embrace of his mind that he is powerless to move to the other part of his being, the place where in Sonya’s being she lives truly. But Sonya will not move an inch either. She accepts him as the partner of her life forever but never does she accept his condition of unbelief. A silent war goes on between the soul of one and the mind of the other.
Breaking the five minute silence, Raskolnikov confesses to her that he has broken completely with his family. “‘I have only you now,’ he added. ‘Let us go together.…I’ve come to you, we are both accursed, let us go our way together!’”
“‘Go where?’ she asked in alarm and she involuntarily stepped back.” “‘How do I know? I only know it’s the same road, I know that and nothing more. It’s the same goal!’”
They go on talking feverishly back and forth, joined and separated, talking words that come from different centers of being. Sonya has read to him from the New Testament, read as a public confession the words of belief that Martha said to Jesus, words that she read as though they were her own and words that she read as though if Raskolnikov could say them as his own, his heart might open to love and he might believe. She said before him with religious feeling, “Yea, Lord: I believe that Thou art the Christ, the Son of God which should come into the world.”
But Raskolnikov will not say such words as his own. She asks him after talking much what is to be done.
“What’s to be done? Break what must be broken, once for all, that’s all, and take the suffering on oneself. What, you don’t understand? You’ll understand later…Freedom and power, and above all, power. Over all trembling creation and the antheap!…That’s the goal, remember that! That’s my farewell message.”
He is soon off away into the night after admitting to Sonya that he knows who murdered her friend Lizaveta and that if he comes back the next day, he will tell her who it is. But not for a moment does the idea enter her head that the murderer could be Raskolnikov. She is as extremely good in her thoughts as he is extremely bad in his.
He visits Sonya again at her room with the intention of confessing to her that he is the murderer of Lizaveta, her friend. But he is unable to confess the truth at once and instead tortures her with questions about who is worthy to live and who to die.
“‘You better say straight out what you want!’ Sonya