As she waits for him in a nearby village, he falls ill and has that feverish dream.įor us, the dream poses a teasing question: Is it just a morbidly eccentric summation of the novel, or is it also an unwitting prediction of where we are going? Dostoyevsky was a genius obsessed with social disintegration in his own time.
Under the guidance of an eighteen-year-old prostitute, Sonya, who embodies what Raskolnikov sees as “ insatiable compassion,” he eventually confesses the crime, and is sent to a prison in Siberia. In the days after the crime, Raskolnikov vacillates between exhilaration and fits of guilty behavior, spilling his soul in dreams and hallucinations. Great men like Napoleon, he believes, commit all sorts of crimes in their ascent to power once they have attained eminence, they are hailed as benefactors to mankind, and no one holds them responsible for their early deeds. He has apparently been reading Hegel on “world-historical” figures. Is it really money that he wants? His motives are less mercenary than, one might say, experimental. He makes off with the pawnbroker’s purse, but then, mysteriously, buries it in an empty courtyard. Looking for money, he plans and executes the murder of an old pawnbroker, a “useless, nasty, pernicious louse,” as he calls her and then kills her half sister, who stumbles onto the murder scene. Petersburg and depends on handouts from his mother and sister. Raskolnikov, a twenty-three-year-old law-school dropout, tall, blond, and “remarkably good-looking,” lives in a “cupboard” in St.
What is this passage doing there, a few pages before the novel concludes? Recall what leads up to the dream. They did not know whom to accuse, whom to vindicate. They did not know whom or how to judge, could not agree on what to regard as evil, what as good. Everyone became anxious, and no one understood anyone else each thought the truth was contained in himself alone, and suffered looking at others, beat his breast, wept, and wrung his hands. Entire settlements, entire cities and nations would be infected and go mad. Never had they thought their judgments, their scientific conclusions, their moral convictions and beliefs more unshakeable. But never, never had people considered themselves so intelligent and unshakeable in the truth as did these infected ones. Those who received them into themselves immediately became possessed and mad. But these creatures were spirits, endowed with reason and will. Some new trichinae had appeared, microscopic creatures that lodged themselves in men’s bodies. Everyone was to perish, except for certain, very few, chosen ones. He had dreamed that the whole world was doomed to fall victim to some terrible, as yet unknown and unseen pestilence spreading to Europe from the depths of Asia.
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