Page:Crime and Punishment - Garnett - Neilson - 1917.djvu/19

Rh Some students, indeed, have chosen to transform both subject and character, and have looked on Raskolnikov as a political criminal, disguised after the same fashion as Dostoevsky himself may have been, in his "Memories of the House of the Dead." But this version appears to me to arise out of another error. A few days before the book appeared, a crime almost identical with that related in it, and committed under the apparent influence of Nihilist teaching, though without any mixture of the political element, took place at St. Petersburg. These doctrines, as personified by Turgenev in Bazarov, are, in fact, general in their scope. They contain the germs of every order of criminal attempt, whether public or private; and Dostoevsky's great merit lies in the fact that he has demonstrated the likelihood that the development of this germ in one solitary intelligence may foster a social malady. In the domain of social psychology and pathology, the great novelist owes nothing to anybody; and his powers in this direction suffice to compensate for such imperfections as I shall have to indicate in his work.

The "first cause" in this book, psychologically speaking, is that individualism which the Slavophil School has chosen to erect into a principle of the national life—an unbounded selfishness, in other words, which, when crossed by circumstances, takes refuge in violent and monstrous reaction. And indeed, Raskolnikov, like Bazarov, is so full of contradictions, some of them grossly improbable, that one is almost driven to inquire whether the author has not intended to depict a condition of madness. We see this selfish being spending his last coins to bury Marmeladov, a drunkard picked up in the street, whom he had seen for the first time in his life only a few hours previously. From this point of view Eugene Aram has more psychological consistency, and a great deal more moral dignity. Raskolnikov is nothing but a poor half-crazed creature, soft in temperament, confused in intellect, who carries about a big idea in a head that is too small to hold it. He becomes aware of this after he has committed his crime, when he is haunted by hallucinations and wild terrors, which convince him that his pretension to rank as a man of power