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Crime and Punishment - Part 3

#179: Oct. - Dec. 2021 (Fiction)
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Robert Tulip

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Re: Crime and Punishment - Part 3

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In the spider’s web. Raskolnikov has to claim the goods he pawned with the woman he murdered. He is the only one that has not yet come forward. He goes with his friend Razumihin for an interview with the detective, Porfiry. Will he escape detection?
R feels that he is under suspicion, just from the way the policeman winks at him. And then this: “Your things, the ring and the watch, were wrapped up together, and on the paper your name was legibly written in pencil, together with the date on which you left them with her...” Surely this alone is grounds enough for him to be a suspect
Conversation about R’s delirium, and his extravagant gift to the family of his dead acquaintance, seems to send him deeper still into the pit of obvious guilt. When the policeman then says “If only you knew how you interest me!” the reader feels this will not end well.
Dostoyevsky takes us on a long excursion into the paranoid guilty mind, with thoughts flashing through R’s brain like lightning. And then, in a slightly awkward but profound interpolation, the conversation turns to the merits of socialism. This is worth examining in some detail. We apparently see here Dostoyevsky’s own rather reactionary assessment of the dangers of communist revolution.
Razumihin argues that for socialists, everything is ‘the influence of environment,’ and nothing else. This extreme determinism reflects the Marxist idea of dialectical materialism, the total exclusion of personal will and freedom from analysis of causality, excluding human nature by seeing social organisation as the sole moral factor. Further, socialists “believe that a social system that has come out of some mathematical brain is going to organise all humanity at once and make it just and sinless in an instant.” This mockery of the power of reason brings a premonitory chill for the modern reader, knowing as we now do how the cult of reason became the cult of Bolshevik terror and oppression. Socialist opposition to the doctrine of the soul comes from the fact that the soul won’t obey the rules of mechanics, or the socialist demand for a collectivist human identity that “is not alive, has no will, is servile and won’t revolt!” In a remarkable line, Dostoyevsky summarises the socialist paradox: “You can’t skip over nature by logic… It’s seductively clear and you mustn’t think about it.”
This quite exact prophecy of the culture of Stalinism opens the existential theme of individual freedom as the basis of ethics, and how the monolithic mentality of class war thoroughly rejects personal identity and creativity, instead seeing existence in collective rather than personal terms. And this leads to a further deepening of the murderer’s guilt – it transpires that Raskolnikov has written an article arguing that some men are above the law.
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Re: Crime and Punishment - Part 3

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Here is Porfiry’s summary of Raskolnikov’s article:
“You maintained that the perpetration of a crime is always accompanied by illness. Very, very original, but... it was not that part of your article that interested me so much, but an idea at the end of the article which I regret to say you merely suggested without working it out clearly. There is, if you recollect, a suggestion that there are certain persons who can... that is, not precisely are able to, but have a perfect right to commit breaches of morality and crimes, and that the law is not for them.”
Raskolnikov smiled at the exaggerated and intentional distortion of his idea.
“What? What do you mean? A right to crime? But not because of the influence of environment?” Razumihin inquired with some alarm even.
“No, not exactly because of it,” answered Porfiry. “In his article all men are divided into ‘ordinary’ and ‘extraordinary.’ Ordinary men have to live in submission, have no right to transgress the law, because, don’t you see, they are ordinary. But extraordinary men have a right to commit any crime and to transgress the law in any way, just because they are extraordinary. That was your idea, if I am not mistaken?”
“What do you mean? That can’t be right?” Razumihin muttered in bewilderment.
Raskolnikov smiled again. He saw the point at once, and knew where they wanted to drive him. He decided to take up the challenge.
The detective has discovered that R submitted an article to a magazine which was published without R’s knowledge in another magazine. It appears his published ideas directly incriminate him in murderous psychology, but Porfiry wants to allow R to explain.
The idea as R goes on to explain to the detective is that “an ‘extraordinary’ man has the right... that is not an official right, but an inner right to decide in his own conscience to overstep... certain obstacles, and only in case it is essential for the practical fulfilment of his idea (sometimes, perhaps, of benefit to the whole of humanity).”
The immediate hint is that R has used this doctrine of superiority to justify murdering his victims, based on the claim that advances in knowledge can rightly come at the expense of human life. From the abstract potential for advances in astronomy to justify murder, R infers that “legislators and leaders of men, such as Lycurgus, Solon, Mahomet, Napoleon, and so on, were all without exception criminals, from the very fact that, making a new law, they transgressed the ancient one.”
This way of thinking is similar to the ubermensch idea from Nietzsche that devolved into totalitarian tyranny with Stalin and Hitler. For R it, as the rationalisation of his crime, it is just about petty resentment. His poverty and exclusion lead him to justify his fantasy of his own exceptional status. And yet Porfiry has still not said a thing to directly accuse R of murder.
R describes “men who have the gift or the talent to utter a new word” - those great ones who “seek in very varied ways the destruction of the present for the sake of the better.” These dictators construct a totalising worldview, an ideology that creates a new social mythology, able to wade through blood. They may be condemned in their generation but are later venerated as men who “move the world and lead it to its goal.”
Building on his critique of socialism, outlined above, Dostoyevsky is providing a glimpse into totalitarian thinking, a psychology that over the next century would drench the world in sorrow and suffering.
As they discuss how to identify such superior men, R explains that “the great geniuses, the crown of humanity, appear on earth perhaps one in many thousand millions.”
Porfiry continues with “unconcealed, persistent, nervous, and discourteous sarcasm” as R “raised his pale and almost mournful face and made no reply” to Razumihin’s astonishment that he could be serious. Dostoyevsky is warning of the strange and dangerous coherence within the totalising logic of socialism, a logic that R has . He presents a prophetic vision of how Lenin and Trotsky would come to entrance and fascinate the Russian nation with their soulless materialism of “bloodshed in the name of conscience”, in a way that Stalin would then apply to absolute power.
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Re: Crime and Punishment - Part 3

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Robert Tulip wrote: Fri May 20, 2022 12:37 am Conversation about R’s delirium, and his extravagant gift to the family of his dead acquaintance, seems to send him deeper still into the pit of obvious guilt. When the policeman then says “If only you knew how you interest me!” the reader feels this will not end well.
I would have liked to see the character of the policeman Porfiry sketched out more fully, perhaps with some personal backstory. This trait of curiosity at the "meaning" of Raskolnikov's illness, monomaniacal critique of morality, and likely guilt is in many ways opposite to the other great literary policeman of 19th C. fiction, Victor Hugo's Inspector Javert. D's Porfiry is patient and holds back, by contrast with Javert's obsessive and impulsive pursuit. Porfiry considers larger implications and issues of character, while Javert is blinded by his own need to repudiate his tainted family background. Both seem merciless, each in his own way. One a spider, the other a bloodhound.
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Re: Crime and Punishment - Part 3

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This conversation with the detective is far too polite and intellectual to be classed as a police interrogation. Nothing so uncouth as an accusation or charge is mentioned. And yet, when Porfiry asks R “What if some man or youth imagines that he is a Lycurgus or Mahomet--a future one of course--and suppose he begins to remove all obstacles.... He has some great enterprise before him and needs money for it... and tries to get it... do you see?” the reader must inevitably wonder why this line of questioning arises if the detective does not consider R a suspect. At the next line, “Zametov gave a sudden guffaw in his corner”, the only plausible reason for the amusement is his admiration of how Porfiry is gradually drawing the fly into the web without arousing its suspicion.

Steve Jobs used to preface his big announcements such as the iPhone by saying “one more thing”. And so when R takes his hat to leave, the detective’s one little question comes up. The first part is whether R fancied himself an extraordinary man, to which the contemptuous reply is “quite possibly”, an extraordinary statement that invites accusation. It prompts Zametov to blurt out “Perhaps it was one of these future Napoleons who did for Alyona Ivanovna last week?”

But the real ‘one more thing’ is still to come. With “a most good-natured expression”, the detective asks if R saw painters at work at the murder flat. While R is “almost swooning with anxiety to conjecture as quickly as possible where the trap lay”, Razumihin leaps in to defend his friend, observing that the painters were only there on the day of the murder, and so the question implies obvious suspicion of guilt, whereas R pawned his good three days earlier.

The great thing in this writing is the careful deliberate gradual ratcheting of the tension. The device of a police interrogation without any accusation of suspicion generates a heavy atmosphere. The unspoken sense of guilt and inevitable punishment for the crime is reflected in the last line of chapter 5, “They went out into the street gloomy and sullen, and for some steps they did not say a word. Raskolnikov drew a deep breath.”
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Re: Crime and Punishment - Part 3

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Robert Tulip wrote: Thu May 26, 2022 5:36 am This conversation with the detective is far too polite and intellectual to be classed as a police interrogation. Nothing so uncouth as an accusation or charge is mentioned. And yet, when Porfiry asks R “What if some man or youth imagines that he is a Lycurgus or Mahomet--a future one of course--and suppose he begins to remove all obstacles.... He has some great enterprise before him and needs money for it... and tries to get it... do you see?” the reader must inevitably wonder why this line of questioning arises if the detective does not consider R a suspect. At the next line, “Zametov gave a sudden guffaw in his corner”, the only plausible reason for the amusement is his admiration of how Porfiry is gradually drawing the fly into the web without arousing its suspicion.
As I recall, my dominant impression of this section was Porfiry's mistaken assumptions, such as that R might have a great enterprise in mind. Porfiry is quite insightful, but connects the correct blunt facts for the wrong reason. He gets the megalomania of R, based on his writing, and suspects he is the murderer, but does not correctly intuit the connection between the two. No matter, perhaps. He may be just "shaking the tree" to see what falls out: what reaction R will be seized by.

Yet it may also be a case of overthinking, and Dostoevsky may even mean for us to see it that way. The intellectual Porfiry may, by making a mistake or two, provide some comfort and calm to the desperate and fevered Raskolnikov, allowing him to regain some of his equilibrium and avoid collapsing in confession. As long as the authorities are merely human, he can imagine himself superior. Quite a contrast with Sherlock Holmes, and one I am inclined to think about.
Robert Tulip wrote: But the real ‘one more thing’ is still to come. With “a most good-natured expression”, the detective asks if R saw painters at work at the murder flat. While R is “almost swooning with anxiety to conjecture as quickly as possible where the trap lay”, Razumihin leaps in to defend his friend, observing that the painters were only there on the day of the murder, and so the question implies obvious suspicion of guilt, whereas R pawned his good three days earlier.
This is quite the switch-up. In a move now familiar to viewers of police shows, Porfiry dangles a potentially incriminating piece of evidence. But Razumihin, no brilliant intellect, detects the flaw. By including a friend who is motivated to see Raskolnikov as innocent, Dostoevsky puts a stumbling block in the way of the policeman's clever maneuver. Raskolnikov must guess what else Porfiry might know, and what denials he can get away with. Razumihin can respond on the face of the implication and give a straightforward refutation. A beautiful demonstration of the power of innocence, and it flew by me unnoticed when I read it.
Robert Tulip wrote:The great thing in this writing is the careful deliberate gradual ratcheting of the tension. The device of a police interrogation without any accusation of suspicion generates a heavy atmosphere. The unspoken sense of guilt and inevitable punishment for the crime is reflected in the last line of chapter 5, “They went out into the street gloomy and sullen, and for some steps they did not say a word. Raskolnikov drew a deep breath.”
I agree that it is masterful. On my reading, it conveyed to me a sense that we were meant to feel R's tortures of the damned, convicted by his own conscience and trapped in his own lies. Now I see as well how it is wrapped in a clever cat and mouse plot. Thanks for the unpacking.
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Re: Crime and Punishment - Part 3

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Robert Tulip wrote: Sun May 22, 2022 6:24 am Here is Porfiry’s summary of Raskolnikov’s article:
“There is, if you recollect, a suggestion that there are certain persons who can... that is, not precisely are able to, but have a perfect right to commit breaches of morality and crimes, and that the law is not for them.”
“No, not exactly because of it,” answered Porfiry. “In his article all men are divided into ‘ordinary’ and ‘extraordinary.’ Ordinary men have to live in submission, have no right to transgress the law, because, don’t you see, they are ordinary. But extraordinary men have a right to commit any crime and to transgress the law in any way, just because they are extraordinary. That was your idea, if I am not mistaken?”
I take this to be the kernel of the story, from Dostoevsky's point of view. All of his novels are woven around ideas, and this seems to be the idea he wanted to examine more closely. Of course it is familiar to any student of human affairs, and becomes the codicil that most elitists add to morality. As such, they are only looking at the limitations created by morality, and missing the fulfillment offered by a leavening of empathy in even the most extraordinary life. The observation of what Alexander did with the innovation of the phalanx, and what Napoleon did with a brilliant mastery of mobility and logistic, can be repeated for Wagner in music and Erdos in mathematic, and one might add Bezos or Rockefeller in business. The opportunity to do better what so many smart people had done before can be taken to be irresistible, but in these cases it comes with a questionable compromise of other virtues.
Robert Tulip wrote: The immediate hint is that R has used this doctrine of superiority to justify murdering his victims, based on the claim that advances in knowledge can rightly come at the expense of human life. From the abstract potential for advances in astronomy to justify murder, R infers that “legislators and leaders of men, such as Lycurgus, Solon, Mahomet, Napoleon, and so on, were all without exception criminals, from the very fact that, making a new law, they transgressed the ancient one.”
I found this notion unpersuasive, though it is possible that he meant it to be. Can the same writer who gave us the Grand Inquisitor scene be guilty of such clumsy argumentation? Maybe not, but maybe. D does not want us to believe criminality is justified by mere arrogance, And he does want us to get that Raskolnikov is a wannabe, a legend in his own mind. But I think he is taking the foil of a truly brilliant innovator's right to "break a few eggs" seriously, steel-manning it in a sense. I don't think it is Raskolnikov's inflated ego that he wants to take down but the isolation that the Nietzscheian imposes on himself, claiming it is inevitable because of the mediocrity around them without ever really trying to recognize the human goodness with which they are surrounded.
Robert Tulip wrote:This way of thinking is similar to the ubermensch idea from Nietzsche that devolved into totalitarian tyranny with Stalin and Hitler. For R it, as the rationalisation of his crime, it is just about petty resentment. His poverty and exclusion lead him to justify his fantasy of his own exceptional status.

R describes “men who have the gift or the talent to utter a new word” - those great ones who “seek in very varied ways the destruction of the present for the sake of the better.” These dictators construct a totalising worldview, an ideology that creates a new social mythology, able to wade through blood. They may be condemned in their generation but are later venerated as men who “move the world and lead it to its goal.”
Building on his critique of socialism, outlined above, Dostoyevsky is providing a glimpse into totalitarian thinking, a psychology that over the next century would drench the world in sorrow and suffering.
I am willing to believe that Dostoevsky had socialists and anarchists in mind when he wrote this. After all, Russian literature is littered with them. They were interesting, in a way that Attila the Hun was interesting to the Romans. However, I think his "critique" is far from thoroughgoing, and I must admit I missed this connection when I read the book.

Rather I think he has the novelist's eye to see the human weakness. It isn't so much the depraved willingness to let the end justify horrible means that he is seeing, but rather the horrible way the personal pursuit of power becomes the lens through which every question is seen, blinding the ruthless to complexities and the consequences of neglecting other virtues. I think the horror seen by Dostoevsky here is not so much the Holodomor of Stalin's genocide in Ukraine as the dismantling of Soviet strength by Stalin's paranoid drive to eliminate any challenge. The moral nihilism of the ubermensch becomes, in D's imagination, the social nihilism of the individual who tries to set all the rest of humanity at nought in practical terms, which can then be seen to be a doomed enterprise (Stalin's and Mao's apparent success notwithstanding.)
Robert Tulip wrote:Dostoyevsky is warning of the strange and dangerous coherence within the totalising logic of socialism, a logic that R has . He presents a prophetic vision of how Lenin and Trotsky would come to entrance and fascinate the Russian nation with their soulless materialism of “bloodshed in the name of conscience”, in a way that Stalin would then apply to absolute power.
Yes, I think "dangerous coherence" is well put. We can easily become enslaved by an idea which seems to offer the chance to rule.

Prophecy is not prediction so much as it is imagery. Well-known exceptions tend to dominate the reputation of prophecy in the public mind, cases where some Cassandra is seen to forecast doom correctly. Yet the true inner dynamic of prophecy is very much like that of poetry: to discern in one or a few concrete images the hidden soul of a larger force being played out in events.

America has some well-known prophecies in its public mythology. Washington's warning against foreign entanglements and Eisenhower's warning against the military-industrial complex both discerned nascent threats that could be perceived but were hardly inevitable. "Go West, young man!" married the restlessness of youth in search of opportunity with the perception of remarkable developments on America's frontier. Woody Guthrie's anthem of California's shiny deception, "If you ain't got that Do-Re-Mi" is, I would argue, a clearer and more relevant prophecy than Don Henley's "Hotel California." (I might add that "The Band Played 'Waltzing Matilda' " for all its overwrought schmaltz, plays a somewhat similar role in defining a generation's ethos in Australia.) Yet there were just as many misplaced diagnoses and clumsy metaphors, and we can easily see that prophecy is discerned in hindsight with the powerful imagery mattering more than the prescient vision.

For that reason we should pay more attention to the subtleties of D's character analysis than to the bloody image of the ax murders or the cat and mouse suspense of the police game.
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Re: Crime and Punishment - Part 3

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Harry Marks wrote: Fri May 27, 2022 9:09 pm As I recall, my dominant impression of this section was Porfiry's mistaken assumptions, such as that R might have a great enterprise in mind. Porfiry is quite insightful, but connects the correct blunt facts for the wrong reason. He gets the megalomania of R, based on his writing, and suspects he is the murderer, but does not correctly intuit the connection between the two. No matter, perhaps. He may be just "shaking the tree" to see what falls out: what reaction R will be seized by.
Reading a book like Crime and Punishment, it is easy to miss details of the plot. I did not notice Porfiry making any assumptions. It seemed to me he was gathering information as a good detective. In the context of interrogation, the criminal guilt is best established through the words of his own mouth, prompted by open questions. Shaking the tree is the right metaphor.
Harry Marks wrote: Fri May 27, 2022 9:09 pm
Yet it may also be a case of overthinking, and Dostoevsky may even mean for us to see it that way. The intellectual Porfiry may, by making a mistake or two, provide some comfort and calm to the desperate and fevered Raskolnikov, allowing him to regain some of his equilibrium and avoid collapsing in confession. As long as the authorities are merely human, he can imagine himself superior. Quite a contrast with Sherlock Holmes, and one I am inclined to think about.
Calm dialogue is the best way to elicit information. Porfiry displays skillful use of this method of interview. He does not wish to forestall and contaminate the process by early statements of his own opinion. I did not read any of his comments as mistakes.
Harry Marks wrote: Fri May 27, 2022 9:09 pm
Robert Tulip wrote:...Razumihin leaps in to defend his friend, observing that the painters were only there on the day of the murder, and so the question implies obvious suspicion of guilt, whereas R pawned his good three days earlier.
This is quite the switch-up. In a move now familiar to viewers of police shows, Porfiry dangles a potentially incriminating piece of evidence. But Razumihin, no brilliant intellect, detects the flaw. By including a friend who is motivated to see Raskolnikov as innocent, Dostoevsky puts a stumbling block in the way of the policeman's clever maneuver. Raskolnikov must guess what else Porfiry might know, and what denials he can get away with. Razumihin can respond on the face of the implication and give a straightforward refutation. A beautiful demonstration of the power of innocence, and it flew by me unnoticed when I read it.
The structure of this conversation is well designed by Dostoyevsky. The four participants, the murderer Raskolnikov, his friend Razumihin, the detective Porfiry and the observer Zametov, banter in a mostly friendly way until this sting in the tail. The character of Razumihin is loyal and trusting to Raskolnikov, assumptions that the reader must note will inevitably come crashing down. This scene marks a decisive advance in the plot, as the fevered isolation of R finds it must explain itself to the world. R cannot possibly get away with his crime and live in his society concealing his guilt.
Harry Marks wrote: Fri May 27, 2022 9:09 pm I agree that it is masterful. On my reading, it conveyed to me a sense that we were meant to feel R's tortures of the damned, convicted by his own conscience and trapped in his own lies. Now I see as well how it is wrapped in a clever cat and mouse plot. Thanks for the unpacking.
Dostoyevsky is the great master of the psychological portrait. Every word chosen is like colour on a painter’s palette, deftly finding the exact tone to convey character. To say “that we were meant to feel R's tortures of the damned” well encapsulates D’s achievement in taking us inside the criminal brain. How a person in a situation thinks through their future, their options, tactics and emotional processing, helps to find words for what other people might do in comparable situations. The celebration of Dostoyevsky in existential philosophy, such as Kaufmann’s Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre, looks at “man's inner life, his moods, anxieties, and his decisions, that are moved into the center until, as it were, no scenery at all remains.”

https://www.academia.edu/8957206/Walter ... _to_Sartre
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Re: Crime and Punishment - Part 3

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Chapter Six of Part 3 opens with a strange conversation between Raskolnikov and his gullible innocent trusting loyal friend Razumihin, debriefing their police interview.

R is trying to conceal his guilt with the paradox that “the more cunning a man is, the simpler the trap he must be caught in.” It just shows how much he has been ruminating about how to best respond to efforts to trick him into an inconsistency. The irony of this conversation is that if he were actually innocent, there is no way he would be constructing such complicated stories about what he would have said if he were guilty. This discussion only serves to weave the web ever tighter. And indeed R recognises his error: "He was struck by the strangeness of his own frankness, and the eagerness with which he had made this explanation.” He feels such an increasing sense of uneasiness that he backs out of the meeting planned with his sister and mother.

He cannot stand the psychological torture, the relentless irritation, the sense of sweaty terror of concealing his crime. R madly rushes to his room to check the hiding spot where he had put the things he stole from the old lady. His conscience is breaking him down.

But now it gets worse. An unknown man is at his room asking for him, but races off. R follows him, and confronts him in the street. Part Three of Crime and Punishment ends with the dramatic climactic anonymous accusation, “articulately and emphatically, with a smile of triumphant hatred, looking straight into Raskolnikov’s pale face and stricken eyes” – “Murderer!”

The stress of his impossible situation overcomes him and R collapses into bed, thinking of nothing, followed by incoherent random raving to himself as his Napoleonic dreams collapse into febrile nightmares of axe murder in which the old lady refuses to die and merely laughs at him.

The chapter ends with the introduction of a mysterious stranger - Arkady Ivanovitch Svidrigaïlov.
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