Without the birth of Barkin's famous "Problems with Dostoevsky's Poetics," perhaps I would not have known that "Crime and Punishment" not only advances the dangerous psychological realism, but also the transcendence of "polyphony" and "monologue".
Lu Xun also compared Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment with Marx's Capital, saying that they were not written after adding coffee and smoking Egyptian cigarettes. He also said that at that time, the works of the Chinese people were simply beyond comparison with them. From this, Dostoevsky's position in the history of Russian literature can be seen.
In the mid-1860s, St. Petersburg, in general, was a gold market for bourgeois careerists and adventurers, and extreme poverty appeared at the bottom.
After Witnessing the hardships of the lives of the little people and being cornered, Dostoev picked up a pen and began to complain about this sick society and the division and numbness of human nature. His unique narrative style is considered by later generations to be the founding father of "modernism".
In the beginning, his protagonist was not yet Raskolnikov. With the failure of the serf reforms, he gradually became concerned with the rebellious youth who were looking for a path to reform, and began to create a crazy Raskolnikov.
Epilepsy, poverty, emotional frustration, loneliness, and division are mostly true portrayals of Dostoevsky's life. The irrationality of the sick psychology and the rationality of creation prompted him to create such a contradictory person as Raskolnikov.
Is poverty the original sin?
In the five-story bucket room of an apartment in the Petersburg slum is inhabited by a law student, Raskolnikov. At this moment, he is engaged in an unusually fierce and painful ideological struggle—he wants to determine whether he is an ordinary person or not.
He believed that according to the laws of nature, man could be roughly divided into two categories: one was the lowest class of people, that is, they were a kind of material that only multiplied the same kind; and the other was such a kind of person, that is, a person with talent and talent, who could express new insights in the society of the time.
On second thought, he felt that he should belong to the second category, and the landlady who, like a "demon", stopped providing him with food and repeatedly urged him to pay his rent belonged to the first category. So he killed the sinful usury she was tantamount to killing a lice, an undesirable, nasty, and harmful lice to humanity.
However, he did not expect that this scene was actually seen by the landlord's sister, so he simply did not stop and killed the innocent debtor's sister.
He fantasized that he was only "eliminating harm for the people" and killing only the "moths" of a society and the "capitalists" spurned by the people, thus alleviating the moral pressure in his heart. However, his panic and fear were growing day by day.
He never received the liberation of his desired soul, but became more and more empty and timid. Under the dual pressures of morality and law, he began to become sensitive and suspicious. But luck is at work, and he uses his clever tongue to constantly excuse himself, hoping to succeed in his sophistry in the face of moral law.
Born poor, Raskolnikov dropped out of school because he could not afford to pay his school fees, and could only survive on the little money his mother and sister had saved in their poor lives. Poverty made him hate "low-level things", especially the "capital" that ate human blood and steamed buns, and the landlady was one of the typical "low-level people".
He almost succeeded in achieving what he called a "Napoleonic" goal, during which a "scapegoat" appeared to help him escape. He completed the expected "forgivable" murder, but the ensuing mental anguish and torment announced the disillusionment of his theory.
On the one hand, he fell into deep self-blame and remorse, and on the other hand, he engaged in a genius-like sophistry with the police officer Polfiri. He didn't believe in God, but wanted Sonia to read the Bible for him. It can be seen that the mental torture after the killing made him almost have a tendency to split his personality.
Forced by various mental pressures, especially at the advice of the kind Sonia, he finally decided to turn himself in to prison and was sentenced to exile in Siberia for eight years.
Another line in the book is the Mameradov family, and Sonya is the daughter of this family.
Mameradov and Raskonikov met in a tavern. Similarly, Mameradov's family was destitute, and what was worse was that his wife Katerina was dying of tuberculosis. He was an alcoholic for many years, and the family of six had no way to survive, so he had to let his daughter Sonia become a prostitute.
Although Sonia is mired in the quagmire and doing the lowest and most despicable work in society, she is upright, kind, and dignified, and she successfully impresses the struggling Raskonikov with love.
The Bible says, "I'm going." Where I am going, you cannot reach; I tell you a path of redemption: love one another, and love others as you love yourself. What redeemed Raskonikov was not the Bible, nor his ideals, but Sonia's love, which was actually the human nature he had always denied.
True sin and punishment
In order to fulfill his ideals, the "extraordinary man" destroys the existing order to maintain the development of the future world, which sounds somewhat ridiculous. However, Rasconnikov did, and he remained an idealist, even if he was physically and mentally devastated. From murder to self-surrender, to final imprisonment, the long exile could not make him change his mind.
The text in the book rarely describes his confession and more on his struggles and pains. Therefore, his pain does not come from the regret after the killing, but from the fact that he is proved to be not first-class with Muhammad and Napoleon, that is, he is not a second kind of person.
In the month before the planned killing, he repeatedly asked himself whether he had the power to kill people. Are people lice or not? This was the beginning of his schizophrenia and collapse.
He was redeemed without repentance, which is not allowed in justice and reason, so Sonia, who suffered in silence, appeared. The greatest tragic aspect of Sonia's body is her sacrifice of family and the love of life. She did everything she could to provide material support for the family, even though it was a stepmother and an alcoholic father.
The Tao Te Ching says, "The way of heaven has more than enough to make up for, but the way of man is not the same— the damage is not enough to give more than enough." In a society where "there is nothing to lose but more than enough to give", how should the self-conscious and thoughtful youth, like Raskonikov, behave on their own?
Raskonikov was clearly an example of failure, otherwise Sonia's appearance as an angel would not have been arranged. As in Raskonikov's case, it is not feasible to solve problems with violence, and how to do it is not known, perhaps it requires the inspiration of love, which is also the real society that Dostoevsky touched at that time.
Raskonnikov's sin was to kill a guilty old lady, and his punishment was to learn that his true power was far from being consistent with the height of his thoughts.
"Love has brought him back to life." Raskolnikov knelt down and kissed Sonia's feet, saying, "I do not kneel before you, but to all the sufferings of all mankind." ”
Four dreams
The most moving thing about "Crime and Punishment" is not only Dostoevsky's brilliant psychological depiction, but also the foreshadowing of the four dreams. These dreams become a harbinger of reality, and they also open up the gap between irrational and rational reality.
The first dream was horse abuse, which occurred before Raskolnikov killed people. He dreamed that the farmer Mikolka was angry at a horse that could not pull a heavy cargo, and whipped it, but gradually, as if he began to take pleasure in it, he excitedly called on a group of drunks around him to punch and kick the poor horse, and finally they killed the red eye and hacked the horse to death with an axe.
Mikolka said to the people around him, "That's my horse." His proclamation of his power over the life and death of horses actually implies the gradual loss of human nature and the prevailing irrationality. Later in the story, Raskolnikov, like Mikolka, brutally hacked the landlady to death, kicking off the story.
The second dream was a beating, which occurred after the killing. He dreamed that the police officer Ilya beat the landlady, which was actually a psychological projection of reality. He has always adhered to the superhuman philosophical view, believing that killing her is like killing an ant, and he is only doing harm to the people, like a police officer in a dream who is the embodiment of justice.
The third dream was the revelation, which occurred when he began to be uneasy inside. He dreamed that he had returned to the landlady's house again, and that he could not kill her under any circumstances, and could only flee into the wilderness. People around him began to secretly pay attention to him, whispering.
By this time his convictions had begun to crumble, and the condemnation of conscience prevailed. But his idealism has not disappeared, and he is still fighting against what he sees as a filthy world.
The fourth dream is the final redemption, which takes place during his service after his surrender. He dreamed of terrible plagues spreading all over the world, wars, famines, fires. Many human beings have died in pain, and only those who are pure in heart can be saved.
At the end of the story, he begins to crave the ease of the heart, the desire for purification, the desire for pure love. This is a metaphor for his return to humanity, and it is also the author Dostoevsky's most unreserved belief, that is, the belief that the return of human nature means redemption.
The helplessness and disappointment of the real world can hardly find a rational way to transform, so Dostoevsky pins everything on irrational imagination. Religion can wash the soul, goodness can purify the coarse, and only human love and purity can save all the misery created by people in reality.