The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece by Kevin Birmingham
By Timothy Sandefur
New York: Penguin, 2021
432 pages, $20.35 hardcover
Anyone who has read Fyodor Dostoevsky’s masterpiece Crime and Punishment can testify to the spooky exactitude of the novelist’s psychological insight and the haunting ways in which his characters act on some of humanity’s worst motivations. Its protagonist, Rodyon Raskolnikov, is an immortal figure in world literature largely because of the complexity of the reasons for which he murders his landlady and her niece.
Sometimes he claims that the killing is a political blow against exploitative capitalists—but he’s not really a politically minded character. Sometimes, he recites Hegelian or Nietzschean notions about “superior” people being exempt from the moral rules that apply to others—but he’s a sickly misanthrope, practically the opposite of an Übermensch. He conceals his crime, terrified of being caught, and he’s tormented by his own conscience, which manifests as kindness to the unfortunate and indignation at the way his sister’s fiancé mistreats her—neither of which are reactions one would expect from a revolutionary or a sociopath.
In the end, the reader finds that, notwithstanding his bravado, Raskolnikov is moved to kill out of a nebulous desire to demonstrate his efficacy—simply to prove that he can—which he vaguely thinks will somehow affirm his authenticity or significance in the universe. Or, as Kevin Birmingham puts it in this lively examination of Crime and Punishment’s writing, “he doesn’t murder to be a Napoleon or to be a lawgiver or even to rule over others. . . . [Raskolnikov says] ‘I just wanted to dare.’ . . . He doesn’t kill for an idea. Raskolnikov kills for nothing” (312).
Birmingham’s book sets out to examine the tangled motives of both the character and his creator by detailing the turbulent atmosphere in which Dostoevsky composed Crime and Punishment and the personal and financial pressures that operated on him as he wrote. In particular, Birmingham highlights the real-life crimes of Pierre François Lacenaire, a Frenchman who robbed and murdered a man in 1834 and became a celebrity thanks to a highly publicized trial at which he claimed that his crime was meant to protest economic inequality. Well-read and articulate, Lacenaire published poems and magazine articles from his jail cell and went to the guillotine unrepentant. Dostoevsky knew the story thanks to old news reports that he reprinted in a magazine he edited in 1861, before writing Crime and Punishment.
Birmingham describes Lacenaire’s crime and execution alongside Dostoevsky’s own life story in alternating chapters—an effective device for bringing drama to what might otherwise be a dry, even depressing story about a writer who was sick, unhappy, and often penniless, scribbling out novels to pay off his gambling debts. But how much does the Lacenaire murder really tell us about Crime and Punishment? The reality, as Birmingham acknowledges, is that Dostoevsky found inspiration for the novel not just in that crime, but in many other incidents and personalities. And as Birmingham lays these out, it eventually becomes clear that the Lacenaire case was a relatively minor factor in the composition of the novel.
More significant was Dostoevsky’s membership, beginning in the 1840s, in a coven of political dissidents called the Petroshevsky Circle. In 1849, its members were arrested for conspiring against the government and were sentenced to death. The czar commuted their sentences—literally at the last second; they were standing on the gallows when the reprieve came—and sent them to a Siberian prison camp instead. For four years, Dostoevsky lived there among many actual murderers, whose personal tales were at least as great an influence on the writing of Crime and Punishment as the Lacenaire killing. Their stories, as well as his own participation in a criminal conspiracy, lent the novel its acute perception into the psychological experience of lawbreaking.
And that psychology is one of the book’s most memorable features. Dostoevsky uses a variety of techniques, including hallucinations and dreams, to give the novel an intensity and credibility that few authors have matched in the century and a half since. Raskolnikov fluctuates so convincingly between paranoia and brazenness, shamelessness and guilt, that the result is an almost telepathic portrayal of the criminal mind-set.
But the book is not just an exercise in psychology, let alone a reflection on the author’s personal struggles. Its claim to the status of classic arises as much from its philosophical elements. Among the most important of these is Dostoevsky’s portrayal of nihilism, a cultural fashion in his day. Nihilism—the ideological embrace of nothingness—was a movement fostered in part by the Russian government’s intense authoritarianism and in part by rising secularism and capitalism in the West. Politically excluded from the benefits of Western progress, and with their traditional faith shattered by scientific discoveries and cultural revolutions, many young, intelligent Russians opted instead for this anti-ideology—which had important consequences for literature. “Nowadays,” says a character in Ivan Turgenev’s 1862 novel Fathers and Sons, “the most useful thing of all is rejection—we reject” (192). Nihilists rejected not just religion, but all political, social, and moral ideals—including reason and science. “Being a nihilist meant training your attention on small facts so that you will not lose yourself in bewildering fantasies,” Birmingham writes (195). But this was also destined to foster a sense of alienation and impotence.
Dostoevsky not only read Fathers and Sons but praised it emphatically and, within a year, published his own short novel, Notes from Underground, which examined nihilism’s psychological and philosophical elements with an astute perceptiveness. Its unnamed narrator relates his frustration at a world that takes too little notice of him and stands indifferent to his will. He seethes about minor affronts to his dignity, not out of any profound grasp of life’s meaninglessness, but simply because he longs for some kind of recognition. But even when he gets it—in the form of a prostitute who mistakes him for a bold hero—he finds no joy; instead, he tries to humiliate and debase her. Like Shakespeare’s Iago or Milton’s Satan, his spiritual emptiness masquerades as ambition, but it’s only a desire for undeserved superiority—a pedestal from which he can scorn the world. Notes from Underground reveals that nihilism is a pose, not an ideal. It’s a pseudointellectual Band-Aid for people who lack self-esteem or the tools with which to build it.
It might seem strange to lump nihilism into the same category as egoism—another philosophical trend of the age—but Dostoevsky did so, and there was a certain logic to this, one Birmingham sees embodied in Lacenaire. The morality of rational individualism that Enlightenment-era thinkers started sketching in the 18th century had morphed by the 1860s into what Birmingham calls “a radical skepticism in which one’s self is the only thing that undeniably exists and therefore the only thing that undeniably matters” (15). This was a pseudo-individualism better known as Romanticism (philosophical Romanticism, that is, not to be confused with the literary school of that name). It’s unfortunate that Birmingham fails to use the word because its absence can lead to confusion. Romanticist pseudo-individualism went beyond liberating the reasoning self from the constraints of an irrational culture or an oppressive state and tried to free the individual even from the “tyranny” of reality itself. Hence the “Byronic hero” who imagines that defying nature is a kind of bold self-assertion, when it’s just senseless self-immolation.
The bridge between nihilism and the Romanticist version of individualism was built in part by the philosopher Max Stirner, who in Birmingham’s words “weaponized egoism” by asserting that the highest ideal is the unobstructed will, and, therefore, that “violence, revolution, and crime were virtues” (15). Lacenaire did appeal to these notions in his confession, and it’s little wonder. Stirnerian individualism offered every excuse one might want for rationalizing thuggishness as some kind of genius. Dostoevsky’s first encounter with Stirner was not the Lacenaire case, however. As Birmingham notes, Stirner’s ideas were on the lips of several members of the Petroshevsky circle, too.
Another rationalization for crime was offered by utilitarianism, according to which the standard of moral value is the happiness of the greatest number—a proposition that can excuse even heinous cruelty. Raskolnikov occasionally cites this as justification for his murderous act, but this is belied in one of Crime and Punishment’s most vivid passages when he dreams of his landlady laughing at him as he swings the ax. Her contempt sends him into an uncontrollable rage: “but at every blow of the axe the laughter and whispering from the bedroom grew louder and the old woman was simply shaking with mirth.”1 The nightmare reveals that Raskolnikov is more preoccupied with his self-image than with any calculation of the long-term benefits of killing. “The consequences of an action do not concern him,” Birmingham concludes. “What concerns him is the nature of the actor. Raskolnikov grabs the ax to prove he is extraordinary” (290).
Another of the novel’s philosophic themes is the notion of determinism, also a popular idea in 19th-century Russia. But here, too, Birmingham’s analysis is imprecise. Examining Dostoevsky’s notes and rough drafts, he explains that the author planned at one point to have his character claim that “there is no free will” and that he killed his victims essentially “by chance”—an idea that would have comforted Raskolnikov by relieving him of a sense of responsibility (242). And this, too, bears a resemblance to the Lacenaire case: His lawyer told the jury, in an account Dostoevsky published in his magazine, that the Frenchman suffered from a delirium that “did not leave him his free will,” and therefore that his life should be spared (188).
But Birmingham doesn’t mention that Dostoevsky chose not to use this in _Crime and Punishment—_at least, not in this way. In the finished novel, Raskolnikov is, indeed, haunted by the idea of determinism—but not in his own actions. On the contrary, he ends the novel in prison, grumbling that he could have been satisfied “if he could have blamed himself” for being caught, but he cannot. His only regret is “in the fact that he had been unsuccessful and confessed” his crime. His “conscience,” Dostoevsky writes, “found no particularly terrible fault in his past,” except in this “simple blunder.”2 In other words, far from pleading that he can’t control his actions, Raskolnikov resents the fact that they’re all he can control.
This is significant because it points to a more startling omission from Birmingham’s account: religion. Although he does discuss the clash between nihilism and Dostoevsky’s Christianity, he deemphasizes the role religion plays in the novel. “Crime and Punishment is a novel about the trouble with ideas,” he writes (5). But although that’s true, Christianity was the framework for Dostoevsky’s ideas. This fact is made clearest by the character of Sonya, the prostitute who befriends Raskolnikov, urges him to confess, and even travels to Siberia with him when he’s sentenced—all to dramatize the Christian concept of salvation that formed the basis for so many of Dostoevsky’s novels.
But it also lies at the heart of his preoccupation with free will. The writer simply could not imagine a nonmystical explanation for volition, which is why his atheist characters are so obsessed with proving—to the world, but more importantly to themselves—that they are free to choose. For Dostoevsky, by contrast, free will is not an illusion—determinism is. It seduces those seeking to avoid responsibility, and it terrifies those who think the only way to vindicate their freedom is to violate the divine order. Even readers who reject the author’s religious premises can admire his sophisticated grasp of the philosophical and psychological forces that compete—and sometimes war—over the question of free will. Yet failing to appreciate the Christian foundation of the novel can leave a reader with an incomplete picture of Dostoevsky’s meaning.
There’s a term, Birmingham says, for the fleeting sensation—not quite vertigo—that people sometimes have when standing at a precipice: a brief temptation to jump that the French call l’appel du vide—“the call of the void” (7). This is what lies at the core of Raskolnikov’s jumble of motives: the irrational, and, in the end, banal impulse of someone who, unable to find a better way to prove himself, tries to force the world into acknowledging his significance by committing some horrifying and irreversible transgression. Dostoevsky associated that impulse with supernatural evils—ones the modern age was finding clever euphemisms to rationalize and excuse—but one need not believe in gods to admire the accuracy of his portraits of demons. Despite occasional oversights, The Sinner and the Saint offers a dramatic and enlightening introduction to the complicated context in which one of literature’s greatest and most horrifying novels was created.