Three reasons to murder: A few marginal notes on Crime and Punishment (1866)

Do we sweat the blood of our victims due to guilt or joy? Are their screams the ones that creep into our nightmares? Is the existential burden of those sacrificed added to the life of the murderer? In order to explore the scope of some of these questions, we will briefly ponder on the three paths in which Dostoevsky seems to be moving, carrying his indomitous Raskolnikov on the back, by examining the significance and reasons for the ultimate crime.

The Peterburgian writer, as is well known, went ahead for decades to the existentialist tradition that would develop a very similar topic under his influence and shelter. Surprisingly enough, the Russian novelist was tacitly commissioned to give literary body to the Kierkegaardian project, whose original thinker was never devoted to the creation of fiction literature. The story of Raskolnikov is, without further ado, the nineteenth-century incarnation of the fear and trembling that grieved Abraham when he was entrusted with the sacrifice of his firstborn, Isaac. This, for obvious reasons, is not the place to reason on the sadistic inclination of a deity that poses, as his capricious purpose, to subject the creatures he decided to bring to life to a torture of this magnitude. But it is striking to determine the symbolic parallels that are hidden behind the internal martyrdom of both figures. First of all, the pre-eminence of the route must be noted, that is, the ritual transit suffered by our characters. While it is Abraham, hero of faith, who walks for more than three days from Hebron to a mount in the region of Moriah to sacrifice his son, being tormented by Isaac’s recurring questions regarding the whereabouts of the animal that will be delivered in holocaust to Yahweh; Raskolnikov roams unstoppable on sidewalks and alleys of the Russian metropolis, certainly, when the sickness upon death that’s devouring his soul let him breathe to get up from the reviled couch that serves him as a bed. We have then the quintessential formulation of a protagonist-pilgrim who must mobilize elsewhere to find the destiny —disastrous or glittering— that has been granted him, even when the bloodiest and most hostile battle is fought between the boundaries of his own mind.

Raskolnikov, suffocated by the unusual circumstances that articulated the achievement of a perfect crime, decides to carry his cross and climb Calvary. However, neither the old usurer, nor Isabel Inanovna —who stands out as the insipid and unfortunate collateral that always blow up having little to no involvement in the unfolding events—, could be considered as Raskolnikov's sacrificial victims. There is no person who can bear the dread of assuming that place. These poor women were only minor catalysts of a colossal explosion in the inner core of a prostrate man. The being that was immolated by the hands of Raskolnikov, therefore, cannot be other than himself. There is, then, a unique and materialistic hero who, in the vertigo of existence, while being hit by winds that neglect gods and despise hope, has decided to start a pilgrimage (offering relentlessly clues about his absolute responsibility of the crime) towards the burial mound which the demiurge of the period —time and an anguished consciousness— has indicated as the place to make the maximum sacrifice. The bourgeois society of Czarist Russia already perceived that, right at its core, internal struggles were brewing, which could lead to an epoch cataclysm. This would happen decades later, responding affirmatively to the social fragility that Dostoevski already distinguished since the mid-nineteenth century. It would be this same society that snatched our new Abraham, atheist and evicted, the servant who accompanied him and the son who was to become receptacle of the holocaust. It stripped him of the knife that was in charge of spilling the blood to consecrate the libations, giving him back a rope and a stool, as well as the precise indications to carry out the act that defines everything. Raskolnikov, as we have read for more than a hundred years, would throw himself up to the voluptuosities of self-annihilation, but not before clarifying some of the reasons which sustain the truths that led him, in the first instance, to the consummation of the crime.

To feel alive killing. Making sense of a life plucking the baton to others. It's the ill-fated premise of Woody Allen's Irrational Man; whose main character, Abe Lucas, plans a perfect crime inspired by the story of Raskolnikov. The question lies in a qualitative gradation of the reflective processes of the murderer. Raskolnikov's three ways of conceiving murder only embody the concatenation of levels of consciousness over the totality of a murderous action.

After the confession of our hero to Sonya Marmeladova, these three degrees are violently precipitated in the middle of the crime's justification speech. First, Raskolnikov proposes a historical comparison exercise that allows to objectively quantify the act of killing, whether as reflection, desire or accomplished action. Although it's the most superficial phase, Dostoevski's genius shines with more questions than answers: can one be a criminal being a hero? Raskolnikov admits, humiliated, that the mere conception of the doubt about the form and the consequences of a homicide, distances him from the terrain of the Hyperboreans, of the Übermensch (before Nietzsche). However, it’s this same recognition that enlights him the superhuman path, investing him with the Napoleonic authority that has found its source of energy beyond good and evil.

But our Raskolnikov quickly renege on his words, nervous and frightened, lost at his ramblings. In this second path, he's humanized. Returning to Earth and to those who still hold him to this world. But everything surrounding him is an unbalanced excess that impels the hero to the despair of finding himself with no answers, as being so poor. He turns his head, pretending to forget himself, and faces a torn mother who grows old day by day. The mother who works to death trying to provide a better future for her son, and the son who kills to be able to return to that same mother everything received. Valid questions abound once again: can one truly live at the expense of everything? Even at the expense of the sacrifice of those we appreciate the most? Because this is always the case. If we leave a family nucleus to form another, do we, in the long term, do more than bury some (the blood family) to work and strive to prepare in advance the funeral of the others (the family formed)? Dostoevsky's recipe for this intermediate step, is summarized in an eternal saying no, in order to later have the integrity of affirming life.

We have the final stage. To murder by excess of self-love. It's a futility to stop and settle if the one who is being trampled is an ignoble and evil animal or a human; because this is not about them, but about oneself. Raskolnikov knows very well that his dilemma doesn't lie in the Napoleonic question nor a messianic complex. He recognizes the weariness of life as he had known it until then. To please his mother, to see his sister smile, to share a few drinks with his scarce acquaintances, to believe that what others wanted for him would be precisely what would make him happy. This relief pushes, by antonomasia, toward a renunciation of life. From self-abandonment to excessive leisure, from this to unrestricted thinking, from deep reflection to the detailed planning of the maximum crime. The descent of a broken man to the confines of the underworld which is enclosed in his head. Descend-in-oneself. In a world of beasts, Raskolnikov, through an arrest of courage, outlines a project that imposes an exclusively intellectual dialectic on morals. This would overcome, therefore, any need for justification. It would legitimize audacity over the act, daring over the victim. However, it demands in return a certain introspective character, since there is a significant difference between killing by being bewildered or overwhelmed, and deliberately murdering. Careful with that axe, Eugene.

The utopian reward at the end of the rainbow is a resplendent chest enclosing all power. Raskolnikov knows that to pursue an answer which shows him that he has the right to exercise it, even to conceive the question, responds by itself to hesitation, and in a way that’s contrary to his own interests. In order to murder without thinking-in-killing, to kill for oneself, there can be no mediation of any economic need, nor sacrifice for the family, the party, or the country. Everything then is reduced to a binary rigidity that demands a definitive answer: Are you a worm or a man?

“I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it.
And... I was... really... I was alive”.
W.W. [Vince Gilligan]

Note: The famous portrait that illustrates this writing is an 1872 oil on canvas, work of the Russian painter Vasily Grigorevich Perov. Currently (11/20/2018 - 02/16/2019), it's on display as part of the Exhibition Pilgrimage of Russian Art. From Dionysius to Malevich, at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. I would like to thank the gallery for authorizing this use of image.