Spend a little time with Dostoevsky if you’re ever feeling a bit glum.

Prague 2011

Spend a little time with Dostoevsky if you’re ever feeling a bit glum:

Now, alone in his hotel room, he was forty-three years old. His wife and his beloved Mikhail had both died the previous year, three months apart. He was fifteen thousand rubles—several years’ income—in debt, none of his great novels had yet been written, and he was suffering from powerful epileptic seizures. Each one left him depressed and lost in a mental fog for days or weeks. It was increasingly difficult to write.

Even if you’re having a dreadful day, I do hope that Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky still beats you in a misery contest, especially during those days in 1865 when he made the perfectly reasonable decision to gamble his last rubles on roulette. Obviously this came with the perfectly reasonable consequence—leaving him trapped inside his hotel in Wiesbaden, unable to pay any more bills, no longer served any meals, and trying his best “to stave off hunger by remaining stationary.” At least his years of exile and forced labor in Siberia came with soup. But if you are indebted and sickly and consuming nothing but tea, evening walks are still free even if they require energy, and perhaps there’s no better time to feel—as Nabokov called it—the shiver of a novel.

One night, as he wandered through Wiesbaden, hungry and ill, an idea for a new story came to him, suddenly and with great clarity.

Kevin Birmingham supplies these quotes in his informative and necessary The Sinner and The Saint, which details the long road Dostoevsky took before gathering all the ingredients in his most famous novel: how he encountered the worst of society in Siberia, how he was troubled by the growing radical tendency in Russian life, and, most notably, how he discovered and republished the jailhouse memoirs of Pierre François Lacenaire—a French poet, wanderer, and unapologetic murderer. Not until Dostoevsky reached Wiesbaden, however, did he begin to put these ingredients together, in the first intimations of what eventually became the novel Crime and Punishment.

Dostoevsky began writing day and night by the candle nub in his room. The words filled his notebook pages alongside doodles and drawings. The outlines of leaves are strewn in the corners of several pages. Gothic arches and cupolas. A strutting figure emerges from a block of text on another page. He wrote the names of characters repeatedly in calligraphy. He drew their faces. On one page, in the middle of several snatches of writing—boxed-off notes, sudden passages, horizontal and vertical, marginal additions, additions to additions—Dostoevsky sketched the murderer’s face in shadow.

Of course Crime and Punishment is about murder in the same way that The Great Gatsby is about parties. Dostoevsky had spent much of the previous decade troubled about the direction of Russian society and, in particular, about the undercurrent of radical ideas that seemed to be bubbling up from under the surface. For a writer with strident opinions about the relation between ideas and actions, it felt just a little bit too combustable. What about the festering disillusionment in the countryside? How will the anger strike in the cities? What will come from the desperation and cynicism and resentment? To Dostoevsky’s eye, there was a growing bitterness on the streets, an indignation about daily life that needed an outlet. Murder seemed just a little too common. Some of the most newsworthy deaths looked pointless and cruel. Surely there would be a rupture.

Explore writing, travel, and literature—with a new issue every Friday.

That sketched murderer’s face from the notebook in Wiesbaden eventually became the character of Rodion Raskolnikov, a man with plenty of dreadful days, and a man who is certainly disillusioned—Dostoevsky imbued him with that always troublesome cocktail of internal grandiosity and outward servility. Raskolnikov ended up with enough arrogance to call himself an artist, yet enough shortcomings to be a failed artist. What comes next? Where does the rage go? In Dostoevsky’s pen we see how resentment and hostility and despair can lead to a murderous endpoint. Although murder mysteries were already a growing genre in the 19th Century, his twist was to turn the mystery away from who and toward the much more elusive why.

Yet Crime and Punishment, Birmingham notes, is usually described with a misplaced preposition. It is a novel “about the trouble with ideas. It is not a novel of ideas.” Raskolnikov strips his mind of all societal norms and dismisses any notion of law until there’s nothing left—so what, then, fills the void? What is Raskolnikov’s why? Dostoevsky’s apprehension about this void in the heart of society comes through in an 1865 letter to Ivan Turgenev.

Our time can be characterized in these words: that now, especially in literature, there is no opinion at all; all opinions are allowed, everything lives alongside everything else; there is no common opinion, common faith.

It is difficult to avoid the word nihilism, a term first popularized in the novel Fathers and Sons by Turgenev just a few years before Crime and Punishment, and that soon identified some of the revolutionary movements in Russia. At first glance these 19th Century groups simply rejected all authority. Nothing about the system was worth saving. But it didn’t take long to recognize what lurked underneath those rather commonplace desires. Amid feelings of insecurity, disgust, and disaffection, it is not quite satisfying to reject society, to go play another game, to simply stand up, walk away, and withdraw, because there’s also that ever-present desire to burn it all down. A child who isn’t allowed to play a game doesn’t always look for another game; sometimes they stick around to make sure that nobody else can play.

To Dostoevsky, the 1848 revolutions seemed senseless. “The age-old order of things is cracking and shattering,” he wrote. “At every moment the most fundamental principles of society threaten to collapse, sweeping the whole nation with them as they fall.

What’s most intriguing about Raskolnikov’s why is that he never finds an answer; he doesn’t, after his fever dreams and obsessions and regrets, truly understand why he committed the murders. The superficial desire for money is easily dismissed—he regularly forgets taking the money and almost seems indifferent about what he stole. Even when he states his intellectual reasons for the murders, when he justifies them with grand theories, he doesn’t hold the argument for long without dismissing it; all his reasons collapse from the slightest shove and are explained as mere excuses. There’s almost an absence in his mind, a missing component, right in the spot where he should have the explanation—but where, instead, every fleeting emotion and rational and impulse rushes in to fill the void.

Birmingham points to the French phrase l’appel du vide—or the call of the void—as part of Dostoevsky’s repertoire. This is the desire to experience the awful in all its vividness, to imagine a step toward what’s most dreadful, whether that’s a metaphoric or literal leap from the ledge and into the void. Perhaps you can even see how this thinking is extrapolated in several of his novels, especially once you consider his obsessions with gambling and his problems with money, how his life was filled with debt collectors and the constant threat of debtors’ prison, how he was forced to pawn so many of his possessions, how his pen seemed to ignite whenever he wrote letters about the impossibility of keeping up with his financial obligations.

You might reasonably ask why Dostoevsky wanted to find the most wayward step, or why it’s worth contemplating your own hatreds, but the practice, it seems, is more defensive than offensive. Dostoevsky worried about what happened once you strip away all the guardrails—if you were a nihilist, if your ethic promoted nothingness, what desire is left?

You might even picture a child playing with blocks, how there’s the desire of construction and creation and the excitement in seeing what’s imagined appear as what’s real; yet there’s also the undeniable and universal childlike desire to knock those blocks down and ensure that all that difficult to achieve order faces the loudest possible collapse. And these desires—both the former and the latter—aren’t exactly quenched once adulthood comes, as can attest anyone who spends a mere minute skimming the news. We might say that Dostoevsky’s worry was how a lack of the former leads to the latter. Obviously this isn’t an original observation, but, alas, perhaps the observation must be made anew with each generation. My favorite version comes from Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, published in the rather notable year of 1941.

Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.

How curious it is to remember that for the most visceral murder in all of literature—where the reader holds the axe, where the reader feels the weight of the repeated chops, where the reader sees the blood splatter and hears the weight of the bodies as they hit the floor—Dostoevsky wanted the victim to be a pawn broker.

Read More