HERE WE ARE ONCE more on the same ground to which Dostoyevsky inevitably returns, as being the fundamental idea of Christianity as conceived by the Russian masses, namely, a belief in the innate efficacy of penitential suffering, especially when endured together, and as possessing the unique virtue for solving every difficulty.
To explain fully the singular relations, pious and sad, between these two beings, and so foreign to all the usual ideas evoked by the word “love,” and further to translate the expression preferred by the author, it is necessary to restore the etymological sense of our word “compassion” as understood by Bossuet, viz. “to suffer with and through another.” When Raskolnikoff throws himself at the feet of this girl who maintains her parents by her shame, and when she, despised of all, becomes frightened and tries to raise him up again, he makes use of a phrase which holds the synthesis of all the books we are studying: – “It is not before thee I kneel – I prostrate myself before the sufferings of all humanity.”
We may mention here in passing, that our author has never once succeeded in representing love unaccompanied by such subtleties – the simple and natural mutual attraction of two human hearts. He only knows it in the exaggerated forms: either when in connection with this mystic feeling of compassion towards an unfortunate being – of devotion without desire; or else the passions of the brute, if even contrary to nature.
The lovers he shows us are not made of flesh and blood, but of nerves and tears. Hence, an almost inexplicable aspect of his art. This realist who is prodigal with doubtful situations, and is crude in his way of telling them, never assails or disturbs the soul, but invariably confines himself to rending the heart. I defy anyone to find a single instance where sensual passions are evoked, even when woman is passed before us as a temptress. He only shows the nude under the surgeon’s knife on a bed of suffering.
On the other hand, and quite outside the incidents of absolutely chaste love, the attentive reader will find in each novel one or two pages pricked by what Sainte-Beauve styles a “point of Sadism.”
To be loyal, it is necessary to note these contrasts of this extravagant nature incapable of keeping to the “happy mean” between an angel and a beast.
The final issue can be easily surmised. The Nihilist, half conquered, hangs about the police office for some time longer, as a once savage animal, now tamed, comes crouching to the crack of the trainer’s whip. At last he confesses and is condemned. Sonya teaches him how to pray, and the fallen creatures are then raised up again after expiating together. Dostoyevsky makes us follow them into Siberia, and in the form of an epilogue exultingly seizes the opportunity for recapitulating a chapter out of the House of the Dead.
Even after removing from the book its principal characters, there would still be left among the minor ones sufficient food for the mind for many years to come. Take, for instance, the three characters, the underling Marmeladoff, the magistrate Porfir, the enigmatic Svidrigayeloff, the man who ought to have killed his wife, whose lover approaches Raskolnikoff to discuss crimes in general. I shall not make any extracts, for this book has been translated by M. Derély, whose version is one of the few translations which are not obscure; but if there are any of our novelists who wish to improve the methods of realism without sacrificing any of their own style, I have much pleasure in referring them to the speeches by Marmeladoff with their funeral wakes, and especially the scene of the murder. It is impossible to forget them after having once read them. There are worse things yet, such as the scene where the murderer, always haunting the fatal spot, reconstructs the whole affair for his own entertainment, where he rings the cracked bell of the apartment, to make the horrible moment more realistic when listening to its discordant sound.
