“Our poor defenceless Russian boys and girls have their own eternal main point, which will be the basis of socialism for a long time to come..."

Dostoevsky’s crimes

by ROBERT BIRD

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Fyodor Dostoevsky was forty-three when he began work on what was to become Crime and Punishment. This was just old enough for him to count as an old fogey in the eyes of the young men and women who defined Russia in the 1860s and who found themselves slandered by Dostoevsky’s depiction of them as potential axe-murderers. For his part Dostoevsky felt vindicated when Dmitry Karakozov (aged twenty-five) made an assassination attempt on Alexander II that bore some resemblance to his protagonist Raskolnikov’s crime, just as his novel was commencing publication in the journalRussky Vestnik (The Russian Herald). Dostoevsky always fancied himself a prophet, but the French critic Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé attributed Karakozov’s crime to Dostoevsky’s penchant for stimulating the “demon of imitation”. Indeed, Dostoevsky sympathized with the young people’s desire for social justice, regarding their crimes as born more of impatience than malevolence. Yet crimes they were, and in a letter to his editor, the arch-conservative ideologue Mikhail Katkov (aged forty-eight), Dostoevsky diagnosed the pestilence afflicting Russian youth as nihilism:

“Our poor defenceless Russian boys and girls have their own eternal main point, which will be the basis of socialism for a long time to come, namely their enthusiasm for the good and the purity of their hearts. There are many swindlers and rascals among them. But all these school children and university students, of whom I have seen so many, have converted to nihilism so purely, so selflessly, in the name of honour, truth and true usefulness! Healthy science [or learning: nauka], of course, will wipe it out. But when might this occur? How many victims will socialism consume before then? And, finally, healthy science, though it will take root, will not destroy the chaff so soon because healthy science is still science, not a direct form of civic and social activity.”

Dostoevsky goes on to identify the antidote to nihilism as “freedom of speech” or “glasnost”, which will allow right-minded authors to “make all Russia laugh with positive clarifications of their [the nihilists’] teaching. Whereas now they are given the semblance of Sphinxes, riddles, wisdom, and mystery, and this tempts the naive”. Remaining true to his own youthful socialism, Dostoevsky saw the path to its fulfilment as much more fraught and dependent on discursive mediation. For all its suspense, Crime and Punishment was a considered contribution to the “science” of action.

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