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Crime and Punishment - Part 4

#179: Oct. - Dec. 2021 (Fiction)
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Crime and Punishment - Part 4

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Crime and Punishment - Part 4

Please use this thread to discuss Part 4 of Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
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Re: Crime and Punishment - Part 4

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Part Four

After the high heavy psychological drama of the close of Part Three, with Raskolnikov privately accused of murder and apparently under police suspicion, Part Four begins with a return to domestic concerns. Svidrigaïlov, widower of Marfa Petrovna and acquaintance of Raskolnikov’s mother and sister in the country, appears in R’s room and proceeds to tell a tale of seeing his dead wife several times as a ghost, warns against the marriage of R’s sister Avdotya Romanovna to Luzhin, and offers ten thousand rubles to encourage her to break it off. R responds quite strangely, rudely suggesting S is an impudent liar and rejecting his request to convey the offer.

While R is consumed by guilt, he is still able to engage in the family business of who-whom - deciding who should marry whom. But he spurns this apparent golden opportunity to achieve the break for his sister that he had himself advocated to her directly. His basis for this inconsistency seems to be his psychological derangement rather than anything rational and considered.
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Re: Crime and Punishment - Part 4

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Chapter Two of Part Four brings the confrontation between Dounia’s fiancé Luzhin and the Raskolnikov family. While rather confusing in its details, the rupture caused by this heated argument appears impossible to repair. Luzhin asks Dounia to choose between him and her brother, and she chooses her brother, leading her fiancé to abandon the wedding plans. Constantly the reader must wonder, what would these people do if they knew R is a murderer? It is like these domestic concerns proceed in a parallel universe, blissfully unaware of the real context that must shortly bring their dreams crashing down.

The chapter begins with a summary of the conversation between R and Svidrigaïlov in the previous chapter, helping us put the rather complicated relationships in order: R explains to his friend Razumihin that Svidrigaïlov is “that landowner in whose house my sister was insulted when she was their governess. Through his persecuting her with his attentions, she was turned out by his wife, Marfa Petrovna. This Marfa Petrovna begged Dounia’s forgiveness afterwards, and she’s just died suddenly. It was of her we were talking this morning. I don’t know why I’m afraid of that man. He came here at once after his wife’s funeral. He is very strange, and is determined on doing something.... We must guard Dounia from him.”

The murder secretly overshadows everything. The consequences of ignorance of his guilt of the crime continue with Razumihin telling R how he has defended him to the police, leading to the rather decisive but understated thought from the murderer, “Strange to say, till that moment it had never occurred to him to wonder what Razumihin would think when he knew.” R has managed to block out the psychology of his systematic deception of everyone around him. Here for perhaps the first time he admits the inevitability of his detection and punishment, starting to ponder how those he has betrayed through his pretense of innocence will react.

Luzhin arrives to meet his fiancee, and is immediately perturbed by the presence of R, whom he had specifically asked should not be present. How will this open disobedience be handled? Dostoyevsky gives a remarkable insight into the psychology, describing Luzhin as one of the class of people “who, directly they are crossed in anything, are completely disconcerted, and become more like sacks of flour than elegant and lively men of society.” The reader is left to wonder at the wisdom of this apparent contempt for his wishes.

Luzhin proceeds to engage in slanderous gossip about Svidrigaïlov, accusing him of murder, child rape, frittering his money and persecuting a serf into suicide. Dounia objects, starting the slide of the conversation toward breakdown. The tension accelerates when R then breaks his mute silence to give a partial account of his conversation with Svidrigaïlov about meeting Dounia and giving her money, bringing Luzhin to ask again why R is even in the room in defiance of his direct request. Dounia leaps to her brother’s defence, but this only escalates the problem, as it transpires that her love for R will lead to sacrificing her marriage prospects. Luzhin finds this strange and offensive, even contemptuous, and proceeds to explain that Dounia must choose between him and her brother, accusing R of maliciously twisting his words in their previous conversation. The tension of this direct confrontation is unbearable, with Luzhin quivering with fury.

Now we find a great irony, as R indirectly compares himself to Jesus Christ, implying his action in giving all his money to the prostitute daughter of his drunkard acquaintance (in a gesture of unstated expiation of his crime) shows he is morally superior to Luzhin. Naturally this is the breaking point, as R’s perspective looks insane from any normal worldly view, but his sister still sides with him against her fiancé. When Luzhin then explains he had thought to rescue Dounia from a sullied reputation, Razumihin leaps up and threatens him with physical violence, Dounia calls him mean and spiteful, and he leaves full of blame and vindictive hatred toward Raskolnikov.
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Re: Crime and Punishment - Part 4

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Chapter Three

Luzhin is mortally offended by Dounia’s rejection of him, as the marriage was central to his plans for social advancement. Seeing her as destitute and defenceless, his power game included mention of gossip that he fully knew was false. As the master of gratuitous character assassination, Dostoyevsky describes him as one who “sometimes even gloated in solitude over his image in the glass.” The self-satisfied narcissism describes a well-known social type who gains prestige through wealth alone, as the author takes us into Luzhin’s mind, his affronted sense of undeserved injury. His calculated admiration for Dounia sees her as “a girl of pride, character, virtue, of education and breeding superior to his own (he felt that), and this creature would be slavishly grateful all her life for his heroic condescension, and would humble herself in the dust before him, and he would have absolute, unbounded power over her.” Imagining he can use what we now call coercive control, Luzhin is now in the grip of what seems a hideous joke.

Back with the family, who feel they have dodged a bullet. Maintaining an attitude of sullen indifference, Raskolnikov explains Svidrigaïlov’s high-minded offer of ten thousand roubles to Dounia, expressing his grave suspicions about the bona fides of this generosity. Razumihin opens another strange interlude as he dreams of how he will spend Dounia’s money, investing it in publishing. The façade of normalcy suddenly collapses as Raskolnikov departs, telling his mother and sister he doubts if he will see them again. He alarms them by saying “now if you love me, give me up... else I shall begin to hate you, I feel it.... Good-bye!”. This can only create the alarming fear that he plans suicide. His sister’s eyes flash while his are dull. Razumihin calls him insane but cannot persuade him to stay.
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Re: Crime and Punishment - Part 4

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I have decided to return to Crime and Punishment after a break.

Chapter Four of Book Four tells the story of the conversation between Raskolnikov and Sonia in her room. First, the room:
“Raskolnikov turned away quickly and sat on a chair by the table. He scanned the room in a rapid glance. It was a large but exceedingly low-pitched room, the only one let by the Kapernaumovs, to whose rooms a closed door led in the wall on the left. In the opposite side on the right hand wall was another door, always kept locked. That led to the next flat, which formed a separate lodging. Sonia’s room looked like a barn; it was a very irregular quadrangle and this gave it a grotesque appearance. A wall with three windows looking out on to the canal ran aslant so that one corner formed a very acute angle, and it was difficult to see in it without very strong light. The other corner was disproportionately obtuse. There was scarcely any furniture in the big room: in the corner on the right was a bedstead, beside it, nearest the door, a chair. A plain, deal table covered by a blue cloth stood against the same wall, close to the door into the other flat. Two rush-bottom chairs stood by the table. On the opposite wall near the acute angle stood a small plain wooden chest of drawers looking, as it were, lost in a desert. That was all there was in the room. The yellow, scratched and shabby wall-paper was black in the corners. It must have been damp and full of fumes in the winter. There was every sign of poverty; even the bedstead had no curtain.”
Having set the scene, the conversation brings the cruel and bleak situation of their lives into view. Sonia’s father died a drunk, and her mother is a crazy TB-riddled pauper with other children. She is a whore. Raskolnikov is the secret murderer of her best friend, Lizaveta, whom it turns out has given Sonia a Bible. In fraught emotion, Sonia describes her mother Katerina Ivanovna, preparing for her husband’s funeral that Raskolnikov funded:
“Her mind is unhinged, haven’t you noticed it? At one minute she is worrying like a child that everything should be right to-morrow, the lunch and all that.... Then she is wringing her hands, spitting blood, weeping, and all at once she will begin knocking her head against the wall, in despair.”
Her father had asked her to read a book, and she seems to fear her cruel refusal contributed to his death. At which Raskolnikov ratchets up his own cruelty to Sonia, telling her it would be better if her mother died. Sonia cannot bear the idea of her brothers and sisters destitute. When she tells Raskolnikov that God will protect her sister, he responds with one of the famous lines of the book, “But, perhaps, there is no God at all.”

Sonia’s blank bewilderment at this frank atheism gives way to reproach and tears. He kisses her foot, and says in doing so he “bowed down to all the suffering of humanity.” He asks “how this shame and degradation can exist in you side by side with other, opposite, holy feelings?” He suggests she kill herself. The wild brutality of this confrontation between secret murder and angelic whore is dangerous and penetrating in its psychology. Sonia wants to live for the children. But maybe it will send her insane. Observing that “not one drop of real depravity had penetrated to her heart”, he wonders about a third even more revolting alternative to suicide and madness – sinking into depravity with a heart of stone.

After more conversation about God, he finds her Bible, which it turns out was a gift from Lizaveta, whom Raskolnikov had murdered with an axe. He demands she read the miracle of Lazarus coming back from the dead at John 11. Despite finding it wrenches her heart, Sonia reads the story, her voice breaking like an overstrained string.

After the Bible text, he says “I came to speak of something.” My first thought was he planned to confess his crime, but he deflects this by saying he will abandon his family. He seems to suggest they run off together, and concludes by saying “If I come to-morrow, I’ll tell you who killed Lizaveta.... Good-bye.”

Behind the arras, as it were, Svidrigaïlov, suitor to Raskolnikov’s sister Dounia, has heard the whole conversation.
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Re: Crime and Punishment - Part 4

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Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote:“Ah, my dear fellow! Here you are... in our domain”... began Porfiry, holding out both hands to him. “Come, sit down, old man... or perhaps you don’t like to be called ‘my dear fellow’ and ‘old man!’--_tout court_? Please don’t think it too familiar.... Here, on the sofa.”
Raskolnikov sat down, keeping his eyes fixed on him. “In our domain,” the apologies for familiarity, the French phrase _tout court_, were all characteristic signs.
“He held out both hands to me, but he did not give me one--he drew it back in time,” struck him suspiciously. Both were watching each other, but when their eyes met, quick as lightning they looked away.
“I brought you this paper... about the watch. Here it is. Is it all right or shall I copy it again?”
“What? A paper? Yes, yes, don’t be uneasy, it’s all right,” Porfiry Petrovitch said as though in haste, and after he had said it he took the paper and looked at it. “Yes, it’s all right. Nothing more is needed,” he declared with the same rapidity and he laid the paper on the table.
A minute later when he was talking of something else he took it from the table and put it on his bureau.
This description of the meeting of the murderer and the detective shows mastery of psychological construction. Dostoyevsky begins by alluding to the idea that Raskolnikov is a fly caught by a spider, in the domain of the waiting predator. The familiarity of the policeman is a device to set the criminal at ease and encourage loose confession. R seeks to make the meeting transactional, about his pawned watch, which P affects to disregard. The observation that their eyes, windows on the soul, could not bear to meet, illustrates the tension in the encounter.

The hint of the opening sentence, the criminal in the domain of the police, is expanded by Porfiry, with the psychology of investigation laid out like bringing a moth to a flame, still with no direct charge or accusation:
="Fyodor Dostoyevsky" wrote:“Through a law of nature he can’t escape me if he had anywhere to go. Have you seen a butterfly round a candle? That’s how he will keep circling and circling round me. Freedom will lose its attractions. He’ll begin to brood, he’ll weave a tangle round himself, he’ll worry himself to death! What’s more he will provide me with a mathematical proof--if I only give him long enough interval.... And he’ll keep circling round me, getting nearer and nearer and then--flop! He’ll fly straight into my mouth and I’ll swallow him, and that will be very amusing, he-he-he! You don’t believe me?”
Raskolnikov made no reply; he sat pale and motionless, still gazing with the same intensity into Porfiry’s face.
“It’s a lesson,” he thought, turning cold. “This is beyond the cat playing with a mouse, like yesterday. He can’t be showing off his power with no motive... prompting me; he is far too clever for that... he must have another object. What is it? It’s all nonsense, my friend, you are pretending, to scare me! You’ve no proofs and the man I saw had no real existence. You simply want to make me lose my head, to work me up beforehand and so to crush me. But you are wrong, you won’t do it! But why give me such a hint? Is he reckoning on my shattered nerves? No, my friend, you are wrong, you won’t do it even though you have some trap for me... let us see what you have in store for me.”
The pale and motionless intensity of the unaccused murderer's gaze plays to our own imagination of how we might all react in a comparable situation of extreme hidden guilt. The existential psychology of the gaze reflects how our demeanour shows our mind. The study of appearance, systematised in philosophy as phenomenology, can treat the gaze as the entry point to a whole worldview, with the whole of Raskolnikov's being revealed, to those who have the essential concealed information. The gaze reveals the mind. Existential angst is seen in the eyes as a source of trauma. The policeman Porfiry lacks the clues of Raskolnikov's guilt, and interrogates him in the most friendly and engaging way to draw out the confession.
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Re: Crime and Punishment - Part 4

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Porfiry's mindless chatter is almost as noticeable as Raskolnikov's guilty silence. I think there is a sort of pas de deux going on here, oddly reminiscent of Hugo's Inspector Javert and Jean Valjean (and perhaps Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling, undoubtedly influenced by both earlier stories). Porfiry believes that if he gives R enough rope, the man will hang himself, but must fashion a way to keep him on tenterhooks rather than let R sidetrack the meeting into something we would now call his "comfort zone". But of course this puts Porfiry in a suspended tension himself.

Porfiry has the advantage of a focused goal, but must use deflection and diffusion to avoid letting Raskolnikov have the intellectual's chosen ground, namely that of debating and intellectual maneuver. Raskolnikov is still convinced his superiority will let him get away with it, but has lived with himself as the guilty party long enough to begin realizing that is not a satisfactory choice of a life. Thus he is thrown back on his inner world, where he is now quite uncomfortable. Porfiry counts on this, as any society counts on the conscience of its members, but is "stuck" with playing a waiting game, in confrontation but with the confrontation kept as invisible as the crime and its details,
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Re: Crime and Punishment - Part 4

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Porfiry comments that all young people put intellect above everything. On one level a mindless exaggeration, on another it is an acute social observation, reflecting Dostoyevsky’s cynicism about the prospects for socialism as an intellectual political system, with its denigration of heritage and experience, and his concern about the emotion of youthful naivete imagining it is purely logical. This speech, which Raskolnikov has likened to a cat playing with a mouse, becomes a critique of pure reason, with the observation that armies that should win on paper often lose in the field. Wit plays tricks. Wit can lie, but temperament betrays. He raises the example of Raskolnikov’s previous intellectual description of the “special case”, the great man who can use his wit to achieve a moral status above ordinary people, a Napoleon of Crime, like Eliot’s Macavity the Mystery Cat - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macavity . Porfiry as much as accuses him of the crime by implying that when R fainted in the police station it attracted suspicion that he was the murderer. But “as much as” is not a criminal charge. We continue to sail close to the wind.

Immediately the teasing stops, as R demands to know if Porfiry suspects him of committing the double murder. The detective responds with masterful feigned alarm and sympathy, just continuing the cat and mouse game. The conversation hardens, as the policeman claims to have complete knowledge of the suspect, mentioning the incident when R rang a bell at a flat and strangely asked about blood. The worry remains that R’s obvious mental illness may mean he is playing a complex double game of pretending to be the murderer while in fact being innocent. Now the sly philosophical psychology comes up – would the real murderer insist he is rational or accept that he is delirious? Porfiry is concerned that R is behaving in ways opposite from what is expected, while R worries that he is being gaslighted.

Still, Porfiry insists that he has no suspicion that R is the murderer, citing as evidence that his mention of going to the flat – the murder flat – at 11pm was not phrased as a question but just an observation. R cannot bear this non-accusation – here is a sublime example:

“What a business I’m having with you!” cried Porfiry with a perfectly good-humoured, sly and composed face. “And why do you want to know, why do you want to know so much, since they haven’t begun to worry you? Why, you are like a child asking for matches! And why are you so uneasy? Why do you force yourself upon us, eh? He-he-he!”

This just whips R into a frenzy of fury, insisting the police have no evidence to charge him.
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Re: Crime and Punishment - Part 4

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Part Four concludes with more twists and turns than you could imagine.

In Chapter 6, the detective springs a surprise on his unaccused interrogatee, and on himself.

Unlocking a door in his office, a strange man enters, a prisoner by the name of Nikolay:
“There was a determined gleam in his eyes; at the same time there was a deathly pallor in his face, as though he were being led to the scaffold. His white lips were faintly twitching.”
Nikolay confesses to the double murder, which we know Raskolnikov actually committed.

The emotions elicited by this mad turn of events are entirely confusing. Relief mingles with astonishment and guilt. It is as though R wanted to be found guilty, wanted to be convicted and punished for his crime. A palpable sense of disappointment seems to appear as R contemplates this insane miscarriage which could let him go free. And the detective is not fooled, saying to himself and then repeating to R “it was not his own tale he was telling.”

At this, Porfiry compares R to Gogol, famous author of Dead Souls. I wonder if this invokes Gogol’s central critique of the empty vulgarity of Russian culture, implying with a dark veiled threat that the police see R as a dead man walking.

R reflects on the false confession:
“The consequences of this fact were clear to him at once, its falsehood could not fail to be discovered, and then they would be after him again. Till then, at least, he was free and must do something for himself, for the danger was imminent.”
As he prepares to finally depart to the funeral of his drunkard acquaintance that he paid for with his mother’s hard earned money, R is confronted at his door by a further potential lifeline: the man who had been at the murder flat when R returned to the scene of his crime and spoke deliriously about blood. It turns out this fellow was locked in the next room during R’s conversation with the police, and the discussion has fully convinced him of R’s innocence. The twists and turns of the tale continue.
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