Part Five Chapter One opens with Pyotr Petrovitch, the jilted fiancé of Raskolnikov’s sister Dounia, dealing with “the black snake of wounded vanity gnawing at his heart.” He imagines the might-have-beens regarding how he could have avoided the breakup, which he finds unbelievable, and nurses a dark hatred toward Raskolnikov to whom he assigns total blame.
Pyotr Petrovitch is lodging in St Petersburg with Andrey Semyonovitch Lebeziatnikov, a young man who holds the latest fashionable progressive nihilist opinions. This relationship affords our author the opportunity for yet another intriguing sub-sub-plot. Described with quite a dollop of whimsical irony as part of “powerful omniscient circles who despised everyone and showed everyone up”, this progressive fellow is introduced to us as a simpleton, of the type who “of course” make no sense whatsoever in anything they say. And yet Dostoyevsky tells us their meaningless gibberish is greeted with exaggerated and distorted importance.
We learn that “Andrey Semyonovitch was an anæmic, scrofulous little man, with strangely flaxen mutton-chop whiskers of which he was very proud. He was a clerk and had almost always something wrong with his eyes.” This delicate descriptive palette is just warming up to Dostoyevsky’s full character assassination. Get this:
“He was one of the numerous and varied legion of dullards, of half-animate abortions, conceited, half-educated coxcombs, who attach themselves to the idea most in fashion only to vulgarise it and who caricature every cause they serve, however sincerely.”
Read that one again. Have you ever called someone a “half-animate abortion”? I get the impression this is a wider social broadside directed toward the woke community of the day.
Not surprisingly, the co-lodgers begin to dislike each other, even without these secret denunciations being made explicit. At issue seems to be the content of progressive opinion.
The wokists of St Petersburg were preparing for the communist revolution by condemning Christianity, establishing communes, rejecting baptism and encouraging adultery. Dostoyevsky is signalling his disapproval of these modern cultural and political trends. The characters get to talking about the funeral that Raskolnikov foolishly paid for, including its implications for feminism, termed ‘the woman question’, how in future fighting will be abolished, and how essential it is to always be on the lookout for opportunities for enlightenment propaganda, even where this is seen as offensive, such as by seeing prostitution as a welcome, respectable and vigorous protest against the organisation of society.
This vignette of communist culture offers a rather chilling preview of Russia’s descent into the mad hell of Stalinism, well prepared in the ideological insanity of the nineteenth century.
The young commu-nihilist Andrey Semyonovitch explains his vision of the future, saying “what is stupid here is sensible there, what, under present conditions, is unnatural becomes perfectly natural in the community.” This is Dostoyevsky’s idea of giving the condemned man enough rope to hang himself.
Andrey Semyonovitch’s numerous further comments include gems like suggesting cleaning cesspools is better than the painting of Raphael or the writing of Pushkin, expressing his anger at the uselessness of art. He argues against any personal privacy, offering the foolish rationalisation that “it’s always a stumbling-block to people like you, they turn it into ridicule before they understand it.”
Dostoyevsky provides the profound insight into communist thinking that understanding such absurdities requires that the novice must have “a firm faith in the system.” The point is that the alleged logic of communism is really nothing but religious faith inverted. The arrogant confusion, bigotry and ignorance of these allegedly progressive ideas helps to explain the emotional power of the communist contempt and disdain for every tradition, and why communism inevitably descends into tyranny.
Enter Sonia the prostitute. Pyotr Petrovitch gives his apologies for not being able to attend the extravagant funeral that Sonia’s mother has arranged, and discusses the family finances. He accuses Andrey Semyonovitch of trying to groom and seduce her, which the young communard denies, expressing a boldly puritan ethic.
The chapter ends with discussion of the merits of paternalistic charity, and the need to keep money out of the hands of people who cannot manage it, and why it is that men insist on only raising their own genetic children, in conflict with the communist principles of free love and abolition of marriage and the family as social institutions. The communist secretly marks the supposedly reactionary attitude of the bourgeois on these points, suggesting they will be grounds for future retribution.
I found all this quite profound. Still today, the progressive political movement claims to be on the side of reason, logic, evidence and science, but all this is just a myth, a rationalisation for preconceived ideological positions that are primarily emotional. For when any actual evidence contradicts their prejudice, progressives are just as bigoted as conservatives in their facility to ignore inconvenient information.
Crime and Punishment shows this syndrome is an enduring feature of modern political culture, and what a truly difficult thing it is to ground our opinions in evidence.