The prophecy in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment

I consider Fyodor Dostoevsky as one of the best Christian and conservative writers in world literature. He had a very true and profound sense of Christianity, an understanding of human psychology and a compassion for people that is very rare to find even in many so-called Christians today. His characters, even when they are very evil, are never dehumanized. He often gave to his evil characters an effort to understand them and a chance for redemption. For this reason and many other similar aspects that emerge in his novels, I like to give him the attribute of Christian Individualist. In many of his novels emerged the focus on the individuals as a solution to society problems and a criticism of many upcoming collectivist ideologies such as Marxism, Socialism, left Radicalism, French Revolution type liberalism, Utilitarianism and Utopianism.

I focus on the novel Crime and Punishment here. I write supposing the reader has already read the novel or has no intention of reading it, SPOILER warning.

Crime and Punishment has as a protagonist a negative hero, Rodion Raskolnikov. Raskolnikov is a young sort of intellectual neo-laureate who is in a very difficult financial situation. He is not able to fit in the society in such a way to find a way of living and struggles with hunger and debts. I find analogies between the character of Raskolnikov and many typical intellectuals who found it hard to live decently in their current economic system. Because of this reason, they used their intellectual abilities to blame the economic system they lived in. Many early Marxists and Socialists, even in Russia, were in fact intellectuals.

Raskolnikov is also getting sick and worried for his poor mother and sister, he cannot think of any dignified way to make money. Finally, one day he figures out a very awful plan: he decides to murder an unscrupulous elderly pawnbroker in order to steal her ownings. The old lady pawnbroker Alyona Ivanovna is like a stereotype of a bad capitalist: she makes money through lending and accumulates wealth. She is a very greedy and stingy individual and many people despise her. Raskolnikov, given his intellectual and idealistic tendencies, psychologically and ideologically rationalizes this terrible intention. He falls into a radical socialist mentality that was spreading through Russia from Western Europe in that period. A mentality that Dostoevsky considered as a mix between French Liberalism and English Utilitarianism, but that Russians often called it just Nihilism. That mentality was the seed of Bolshevik Socialism. You may ask what do Liberalism, Utilitarianism and Socialism have in common? Why Russians at that period tended to conflate all of them into a single definition? Contextually to Dostoevsky period and place, all those new ideologies were seen as an enemy to the current conservative, monarchical and religious system, as an enemy to traditional family, religion, monarchy and even to traditional bourgeois system and life. Dostoevsky used to study all these ideologies and travelled through Europe. He came into the conclusion that such new ideas were extremely dangerous. One of his famous works, Demons, talks more extensively on this issue.

Personally, I do not consider myself as a typical conservative, not even traditionalist. I consider myself as an Individualist who recognizes the important role of Christianity in promoting an Individualist mentality, even without being aware or defining it. In Dostoevsky, I notice a lot of Individualist feelings and understanding along with the Christian morality and conscientiousness.

The ‘amazing’ self-rationalizing idea Raskolnikov had was that murdering an individual is not morally wrong if it is done for the greater good. This is essentially Collectivism, the simplest way to define it. Raskolnikov convinced himself that he was more deserving than the elderly pawnbroker to own her wealth. He thought that the elderly pawnbroker really didn’t need so much wealth given she was childless and she wouldn’t make a better use of the money that he himself would. He also thought she was a greedy and evil individual and that people like her are not useful, or even worse, are harmful for the society. He therefore, convinced himself that murdering her not only wasn’t morally despicable, but that even was good, a service for the community. He also had some megalomaniac ideas and liked to consider himself like a sort of superior individual, like Napoleon, and that such superior individuals must be exempted from the laws that are made for common people, and must rule them.

Raskolnikov eventually murders Alyona Ivanovna, but in the attempt he is caught by her sister who is a very kind and submissive person and Raskolnikov already knew and sympathized. Despite this, he finds no other reasonable solution than to murder her too in order to cover his crime. Shocked by what he had done, he couldn’t even find the strength to steal all the pawnbrokers’ money. He ends up hiding the few amount of money he stole and never looking up for it again. He gradually starts to realize the gravity of the crime he has done and regrets it.

When the novel was published for the first time, in Russia in 1866, many liberal critics accused Dostoevsky of making a wrong caricature of all the radical ideologies that were spreading at the time. The idea that such collectivist ideologies would represent a great danger for the Russian society seemed unthinkable to them. But history very clearly confirmed Dostoevsky’s preoccupations: 52 years later, on 1918, Bolsheviks revolutionaries executed all the members of the Romanov family, including children, and lead to the rise of one of the cruelest totalitarian dictatorships in human history. The Raskolnikov mentality that Dostoevsky describes, the mentality that it is right to murder certain individuals for the sake of the common good and/or steal their wealth to better redistribute it, became the default mentality of quite all the people in his country.

Many critics observed that in some specific parts Dostoevsky’s novels, and especially in a dream seen by Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, there is an allusion of an apocalyptic future that resembles the disasters of the 20th Century such as the two World Wars, Nazism and Communism. But in my opinion, these people missed out the fact that the entire plot of Crime and Punishment is in fact prophetic. Raskolnikov’s profile is quite identical to the common Bolshevik revolutionary: he is young, student, he is poor, born into disadvantaged conditions, he cannot find a way to sustain himself, he is angry towards the society and towards more privileged people, and he holds the same radical ideas. If we think at the essence of the events, we notice that Bolsheviks did on a greater scale what Raskolnikov did in a small, individual scale. The socialist revolutionaries were enraged against the most privileged part of the society and essentially wanted to steal their wealth to redistribute it. But they rationalized this desire by holding and promoting the idea that there was nothing wrong at doing it as long as it served the greater good. Therefore, murdering and stealing became suddenly on their eyes a good, a moral act. Just like Raskolnikov, many socialist revolutionaries and particularly the better educated, thought that they were more deserving to hold the wealth than people like privileged landowners and aristocrats. Especially because they thought that they would be able to use the confiscated wealth in a better way, by helping the poor and needy. Raskolnikov thought that he would use the stolen money to help his mother and sister, and give some charity to people he thought better deserved it. The same for socialist revolutionaries: they thought that murdering the Royal family and some aristocrats and people who opposed them during their way was a necessary evil to be done for the greater good. And that simply distributing the confiscated wealth among common people would lead to a better future for all. In the novel, Raskolnikov failed on everything good he planned to do after his crime, and quite the same happened with communists in Russia. Eventually, Communism was a disaster even to the common people.

Dostoevsky may seem as extremely conservative in this article, but he was not. I consider an extreme conservative a person who never wants to challenge the status quo, the current reality, that fears that every change, every revolution will end up disastrously. Dostoevsky didn’t think that the Russian economic system at his time was good and perfect, in fact for many reasons it was pretty awful. The economy was based mostly on rents and not enough on economic exchange. Social mobility was quite absent, quite the only way you could improve your status was through marriage. In fact, you can learn a lot about 19th Century Russian economic system by reading Dostoevsky. He criticized a lot of aspects of the current system and society he lived in and thought that the type of pacific contribution by using art and literature, is a better way than using weapons.  In this sense, Dostoevsky was never a protector of the status quo. He was just certain that there were some important institutions that needed to be preserved, like private property, family and religion, and that the new upcoming radical ideologies would just end up making the country worse. As in fact it really happened.