In Our Time - Crime and Punishment

Episode Date: November 14, 2019

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the novel written by Dostoevsky and published in 1866, in which Raskolnikov, a struggling student, justifies his murder of two women, as his future is more valuable than their lives. He thinks himself superior, above the moral laws that apply to others. The police have little evidence against him but trust him to confess, once he cannot bear the mental torture of his crime - a fate he cannot avoid, any more than he can escape from life in St Petersburg and his personal failures.The image above is from a portrait of Dostoevsky by Vasili Perov, 1872.WithSarah Hudspith Associate Professor in Russian at the University of LeedsOliver Ready Lecturer in Russian at the University of Oxford, Research Fellow at St Antony’s College and a translator of this novelAnd Sarah Young Associate Professor in Russian at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College LondonProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programs. Hello, crime and punishment by Fyodor Dossi FC was first published in 1866. It was a sensation. The principal crime is Raskolnikovs, a former student.

We know early on that he killed an old woman, a porn broker, and her sister with an axe. But we don't know why and we don't know how or if he'll be punished. The novels set in St. Petersburg, a city where Dostoevsky, too, had struggled and been punished for a crime and sentenced to prison eight years in Siberia, where he had lived alongside criminals and was now rebuilding his life as a writer. With me to discuss crime and punishment are Sarah Young, Associate Professor in Russian at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies University College, London. Oliver Reddy, lecturer in Russian at the University of Oxford, research fellow at St. Hattelisk College and translator of this night. novel. And Sarah Hudspith, Associate Professor in Russian at the University of Leeds. To Sarah Hudspeth, what was Dostoev's background? Dostoevsky was born in Moscow and his father was a doctor at

Moscow's hospital for the poor. So Dostoevsky grew up with an atmosphere of seeing poverty and deprivation all around him. And this was a condition that he saw firsthand the suffering of people, their poor conditions. And so this was obviously something that touched him from an early age. He was then sent to St. Petersburg. Did I mean something about being part of a minor aristocracy? So yes, his family was of technically of noble status. This is according to Tsarist Russia's very strictly regimented social ranking system.

So they were technically of noble status, but this didn't mean that they were well off. They did, however, have a small estate in the country and own their own serfs as well. So from that point of view, he could be considered one of the land-owning classes. What about his education? He went to St. Petersburg to study at the Military Engineering Academy, but this wasn't really his thing. It wasn't something that interested him, and he very quickly dropped out of that and began to get involved in the St. Petersburg literary scene.

St Petersburg, the capital at the time, was the flourishing cultural centre of Russia, the centre of literary activity as well. And this was much more what Dostoevsky wanted to get involved in. And so it was at this time that he published his first novel, Poor Folk, which was a great success and brought him very early success as a writer. How old did you know? He was, I think he must have been in his early. early 20s, I think, 24. So yes, quite an impressionable experience for quite a young man made a big

impression on him, this very early success. What do we know about his own crime and punishment? In his involvement in the literary activities of St. Petersburg, he became involved with a circle of intellectuals and writers and literary critics who were interested in the French utopian socialist thought that was current at the beginning of the 19th. century. And these people would get together to talk about Russia's future direction and how the society might be improved. And the circle that he was involved in was led by Mikhail Petrushchevsky. He was the sort of the organizer, the owner of the place where they would congregate to talk about these ideas. Now, it wasn't really what you would call a political group as such. It was just that

that was the only kind of venue that people had for talking about. socio-political change. But what Dostovsky said it was construed as a crime. And can you tell this as what he said and why it was conserved as a crime? Yes. One of the charges that was brought against him was reading a particular document written by a very prominent literary critic, Vissarion Bielinski. Bielinski had written an open letter to Dostoevsky's contemporary, the writer Nikolai Gorgul, criticizing him for his very reactionary views in his latest piece of work. And because

this letter was seen as a challenge to the status quo, it became an offence to read it in a public gathering. And this was one of the things that Dostoevsky had done in the Petrushchevsky circle. So it was arrested

and sentenced to death and there was quite a dramatic almost death scene watched by 3,000 people. His hands were tied, the guns were there, I was blind, and then what? Indeed, yes. then at the last minute there was a reprieve from the Tsar whether this was a genuine change of heart or whether this was a stunt designed to have the maximum kind of impact

on the convicted men because the death penalty was officially not allowed in Russia at the time. So there was this dramatic last minute arrival of a messenger with a commute of the sentence from death to hard labour and penal servitude in Siberia. And you went there, Oliver Adi, and he stayed there about eight or ten years. Can you tell us what he did in Siberia

and how it affected him? Certainly. So he spends the first four of the ten years that he will spend away from St. Petersburg in Omsk, city in southwest Siberia. He spends four years there in military prison with largely common criminals, not of noble status like himself, although there were some.

Did that cause problems? That didn't just cause problems. It undoubtedly caused great suffering for Dostoevsky himself because he saw very directly the gulf, which he describes, by the way, in the epilogue to crime and punishment between the nobility, between the elite of Russian society and the common people, to use the phrase, the usual translation of the Russian word, the nared of the time.

and this, in a way, like so many things in Dostoevsky's life, is susceptible to both positive and negative interpretation that he was clearly alienated in the prison from other people. He was clearly very lonely, although paradoxically, he also lamented the fact that he didn't have any time on his own because they were all stuffed together like herrings in a barrel, as it was put, and the place was filthy in the barracks in this prison. On the other hand, the positive that he drew from it

was that he felt that he saw with his own eyes the naivety perhaps of those socialist utopian ideas that there could be some sort of merging of the elite and the common people. To him, the common people, as he saw them, were living according to very different rules, different codes. And this was a formative experience for what he would go on. He also drew other positive lessons, I suppose, from his time in the prison, in that he eventually, he convinced himself at least,

and perhaps he really did, he saw in the people he was sharing these barracks with signs of faith, of a very deep-rooted faith that moved him greatly. He also saw creativity, sort of artistic creativity in these criminals, some of whom had committed the most horrendous acts. And one way in which this creativity expressed itself was in language. And Dostoevsky there was not allowed books. He was only allowed the copy of the New Testament that he was given on the way to Siberia at a forwarding prison. But in this New Testament, which was, which he read from cover to cover all the time kept under his pillow and one can now study the finger marks in the side, which which, which,

which verses he read most closely. He also kept a little notebook in which he wrote down, squirled away some of these phrases. And he did, he did, he did, uh, four years of hard labor in this time. That's right. He said, this is making me stronger. Uh, did he, was he, did he, did he hate it? How did it basically affect him? When he came back from Siberia, four years hard labour. Four years in... Four years in compulsory military service. Compulsive military service. In semi-palatins scale.

How did it affect him? I would preface this all by saying that if we can just go back a tiny bit to the crucial moment after this mock execution, he goes back to the St Peter and Paul Fortress before he goes off to Siberia and he writes this extraordinary letter to his brother whom he loved very much, his elder brother, saying

it's an exultant letter saying life is a gift. If we only knew, every moment could be an eternity of happiness. seems to me that people talk about some kind of conversion that Dostoevsky undergoes in Siberia. Actually, something seems to happen before then, that there's some kind of revelation, something irrational perhaps, that makes him love life, that somehow pushes him through the very traumatic experiences he has in Siberia. Not being shot.

Not being shot, but also realizing that our consciousness can adapt to the most extraordinary circumstances. And even when he comes back from Siberia, his life in St. Petersburg, he's life in St. Petersburg, in the run-up to crime and punishment is in a way no easier. He's on the verge of poverty. He's suffering from epilepsy, a very severe degree, one massive attack every three weeks on average. He is addicted to gambling.

His wife, first wife, dies, and he has a great deal of relatives who he needs to feed. And yet something keeps him going. It seems to me that although he's a sort of artist of instability, he's always describing crises, he is in a way a sort of stable genius. And that stability seems to sort of set him. in right after that mock execution and somehow carry him through the sense that life is a gift as he writes.

There's a lot to cope with, isn't he? Very young. Let's go straight for the novel. What are the crimes that we're reading about? And who is committing them? The crimes are, well, Raskolnikov, this impoverished ex-student, he's had to give up his studies because he can't afford to pay for university. and he decides that he is going to kill an old money lender, a woman everybody considers evil. And he spends the first part of the novel thinking about whether he can actually do that. And eventually he does.

And it is described in the most graphic, horrific way, this murder with an axe. He splits her head open. And he then also ends up killing her younger sister. half-sister, Elisaveta, and he steals some of the old lady's money and gets away with it only just. So those are the two main crimes of the novel.

One of the, just the listeners are up to me, he goes for a lot of money, he's so flustered, or whatever the word is, it'll be in other words. He takes a poultry amount of money. He doesn't go for the big loot that's hidden somewhere or other. He just runs off with a person if you put... That's exactly.

That's exactly right. He ends up taking a few hundred roubles and some bits and pieces of jewelry that he finds some of the money lenders pledges that she had hidden away. But he misses the bulk of the money that she has hidden somewhere else. So he makes a mess of the crimes, the mess of the murders and of the robbery. But he gets away from the scene of the crime. And from then on there's a great deal of him trying to justify, explain, why he did it and what let's start up with one of the main ways in which he justifies killing this old woman. You started up

by anxious wicked or evil or so leading the list of thinking well maybe you go on from that. He comes up with a number of justifications for the crime and the first one is that this is an evil old woman who is no good to society. She's not only no good to society she's a parasite. She destroys people's lives

and therefore she deserves to die If she dies, then society will be improved by her absence. And he goes on from there to sort of develop other elements of this idea of doing good to society through this murder. By suggesting that by stealing her money, he will be able to also himself do good to society further, beyond just removing her from the scene, he will be able to sort of resolve people's poverty and bring great wealth into society. And also fulfill his destiny as a rather Napoleonic great man. Absolutely.

So this is part of a sort of a wider image where he sees himself as a great man, a great man who can like Napoleon, who can overstep all the obstacles, who can wade through fields of blood in order to achieve his destiny. The normal rules of society do not apply to such, people and Raskolnikov thinks

he's testing whether he is such a person and whether the normal rules don't apply to him if he can do this and kill the old woman get away with it use her money for good then he can show that that is his destiny is this him or is this part of the philosophy that he has taken on from

let's say the West, is he guided by reading he's done or is he guided by his impoverishment and his wish to one bound who is free as it were. In a broader sense, this comes from, yes, from the reading he's done, from the ideas in the air, as Dostoevsky put it, in the 1860s,

amongst the young radicals, who were thinking about, there's this utilitarian calculus of doing the greatest, the greatest good for the greatest number, under which idea the individuals can be sacrificed. This is Dostoevsky's take on it,

looking at the sacrifice of the individuals to do that greater good. But these ideas were very much being under discussion amongst young radicals, students like Dostoev, students like Raskolnikov, who are sort of, you're thinking about the law, about social reorganisation,

about transforming the world. Is Dostoevsky's take on this, that this is a very bad thing to think this is a very bad way to behave, this is a bad philosophy? Absolutely. And this is the real change that overcame him as a result of his experience of the death sentence and the experience of prison. You're from being involved in this youthful radical circle where they were discussing utopian socialist ideas.

Once he has gone through that whole experience of imprisonment and he sees life in a completely different way, he sees these ideas as profoundly dangerous. I think it's one of the things that in some ways curiously that he took away from his experience in Siberia and his experience at hard labour is the absolute intrinsic value of every human life. Thank you. Sarah Hussbitt. Now, one of the main characters we could call it that

is the city of South St. Petersburg. What does it represent for him? Because we usually see it as a pristine place. Not a bit of it in this book. No, indeed. That's one of the things that's so fascinating about the novel is the backdrop and the atmosphere that the city creates. So it was the capital. It was designed as Peter the Great's window on the west on Europe, the portal through which Russia would westernize and modernize and become more cultured and civilized.

And we see nothing of that in the text. For a start, it's hot. And of course, many readers might initially associate the college. with Russia, but it's not a cold novel. It's a baking hot novel. It's the heat, the smell of the pollution in the canals, the cramps conditions, the squalor,

the degradation of the people living around forced into all kinds of desperate acts. These are descriptions of streets he knew as a boy. Well, he mainly grew up in Moscow, but he was familiar with the same kind of patterns of poverty. And of course, he saw them himself as a, as a struggling student and a struggling writer. And he himself lived near some of the areas.

He eventually settled near one of the main centres of action in the novel, The Haymarket. So this was where all kinds of common people would come together and meet and interact and trade and do all kinds of business legal and illegal. and when Raskolnikov sees this kind of climate and atmosphere and surroundings around him, he feels very keenly the problems of society. He sees them on his own doorstep and feels very much his own position in that. And it's worth adding, I think, that the conditions in St. Petersburg in the 1860s, particularly after the emancipation of the serfs,

this was a time of real crisis and growth in the city. The population of the city increased enormously and particularly in these central areas where the poor people were pouring into the city, former serfs who were coming to the city to look for work were creating this terrible atmosphere and overcrowding that were a real problem. Oliver Reddy, can we build our Raskolnikov up a little bit more?

His sister and mother live in the country. They have great hopes with him. This brilliant young son, a brother of theirs, and they come to visit him. And how does that meeting proceed? Again, if we could just take it back a tiny bit, because before they come to meet him, we get a letter that Tresconnikov receives from his mother early in the first part, which could be seen as one of the things that happened to him, they run up to the murder that somehow push him towards the murder,

because this letter, as you've just already indicated, is full of the sense of Raskolnikov, you're our great, Rodion, as his first name is Rodia, you're our great hope, you're our everything, we're prepared to sacrifice everything for you. He reads as nine pages of what could be read as a sort of pressure really on him, emotional pressure from his mother and his sister

because his mother's also telling him that his sister's about to enter into a marriage with somebody that clearly his sister doesn't love. And at the end of this, Raskolnikov's... In order to rescue the family finds. In order to have, because Raskolnikov's had to, to pull out of his studies as a law student at university because he can't pay his fees.

And we read at the end of this letter, the Raskolnikov's in tears, he can barely breathe. And so this motif of the stiflingness of St. Petersburg, which both Sarahs have just discussed, is also accentuated by the messages that are coming to him from the countryside, from where he grew up. The countryside is the place in the novel that has everything that St. Petersburg doesn't.

So the countryside is the place of family, of proper biological families. Countryside is of, I mean, in the sense that the Slibsk understood it, the countryside is the place of faith, of churches, which, and of course, in Petersburg at the time, was full of churches too, but they're really written out of the novel, because St. Petersburg is presented

as this very westernized, imitative, inauthentic place. And so, but curiously, one would have thought, given that St. Petersburg is treated so negatively in some ways in the novel, you would have thought perhaps the countryside would be there as a positive backdrop, but far from it, it's somehow making his situation even worse.

the countryside is associated with one of the darkest characters in the novels, Svidrigailov. Sarah Young, there's a connection with Sonia, a young woman who becomes a prostitute to salvage her family's fortunes. Can you tell us about her? Sonia is one of the novel's most important characters, because she, partly because of what she, what she what she represents. And that is in part because Raskolnikov sees a connection between her and his sister,

this terrible marriage that his sister might be about to undertake. Raskolnikov sees as being basically no better than prostitution. And therefore he sees his sisters starting down on the same road

that Sonia has taken. Sonia becomes really important indeed right from the start when Raskolnikov first meets her father and he talks about his daughter going down this road, becoming a prostitute in order to feed her family. Her father's an old drunk. He's a civil servant who's lost his job and has really destroyed the family. And Sonia has made the decision to become a prostitute and thereby you rescue in a very small way her family. What's the connection between Raskolnikov and Sonia? Some

Some people suggest that she's a very unconvincing prostitute. She is. I think that's very fair to say. She's a very, very problematic character. She's basically, she is not, she was criticised by Vladimir Naborka for being a sort of golden-hearted prostitute, a cliché. She's not that at all. That implies what used to be called a good time girl.

She isn't that. She's a child. She's an innocent. the fact that she is a prostitute just doesn't fit I mean in the most basic terms you cannot imagine her doing her job so why does that leave you?

It leaves you in with a real quandary because you have to be able to... She has to be convincing for the novel to work, I think. For me, what this means is that... But you've said she isn't convinced. She isn't on one level. I think you need to think about it in a slightly different way

in that she is both She is both an embodied character. She is a sort of a real character, but she's also a projection. She's what Raskolnikov needs. He needs the combination that she represents of sin and redemption. He needs that sort of sense of innocence that she represents

and the compassion that she brings, the fact that she will show him compassion regardless of his sin. And those are the things that she has in her character because of the road she has taken. So she's almost like a dream figure as well as being a real character. Sarah Hatsbeth.

Raskolnikov becomes tormented by what he's done. Meanwhile, we meet Spindra Geylov. We told he's done far worse things, but he seems under trouble. What part does he play? So Svidrigailov in the novel is almost like the counterpoint to Sonia. Raskolnikov is attracted and fascinated,

by both these characters in equal measure. And Svidrigailov represents another possibility for Raskolnikov. Svidrigailov is a man about whom in the novel we hear lots of rumors of problematic moral activity of possibility that he might have sexually abused a servant girl, that he might be responsible for his wife's death. None of these rumors are confirmed, but nevertheless there is this atmosphere that surrounds him of unpleasantness. What we do know about Svigailov is that any decision that he takes is motivated only by what pleasure it brings him. That's how he decides what he's going to do.

He is able to do both good things in that he rescues Sonia's orphan brothers and sisters and provides for them. and ultimately pays Sonia out of her position of prostitution, or he may do bad things in that we see towards the end of the novel that he is prepared to force himself to rape Raskolnikov's sister Dunya, although he holds himself back at the last moment. So we know that he is capable of both kinds of act. But to him, it seems that there is no distinction. It's about what gives him,

pleasure, whether it's a good act or a bad act. And essentially, this reduces the distinction between good and evil to a meaningless nothing. So ultimately, for Svidrigailov, life ends up holding no meaning at all. And this is one reason, I think, why he ends up committing suicide. Is there a sense, I've read it, that these not only characters, but they're embodying philosophies, different ways of thought, different ways of thinking about life and death and good and bad? certainly they do overall I would say that the novel seems to where the real dilemma is I read it in the novel

between notions of good and bad is on the one hand there is ideas of good and bad that come down from traditional morality that are traditional do you mean Christian morality in which which would promote ideas of humility of obedience and there is this more modern idea of the need to emancipate the individual

so that the individual can fulfil themselves, can fulfil their talents, something which Raskolnikov feels, young people of his time, gifted people like him, are unable to do. And to me, this is the fascinating collision in the novel where I don't think the author is taking either side because the author, in a way, wants both.

At the end of it, when people say Raskolnikov is redeemed, whatever, that's not true. There's no indication that he's redeemed at the end. There's no indication that after the last line of the novel, Raskolnikov won't go back to the same kind of of talking that we've had hitherto. And this is because that's why the novel is so beautifully poised,

I think, that on the one hand, Dostoevsky clearly is a person for whom the New Testament in particular was, and Christ, was an absolute model of selflessness which Sonia embodies. On the other hand, Dostoevsky thinks life is there to be lived and to be lived as fully as possible.

And we have the policeman, Porphyry, who is convinced from early on that Raskolnikov's done it. and examines him more psychological he can't use torture and so on the he is part of the psychological play Porfides

absolutely and it's really psychological torture as you just suggested and it's the scenes with the three main dialogues with Porfidi because as the book develops

we get three main chapters with each of these characters we've been talking about well three long dialogues with Sonia, three long dialogues with Poverry, and then also conversations with Svidri Gailov. And what's interesting here is that this is a novel that seems to be a novel about deeds, right? It seems to be a novel about bloody murders. It seems to be a novel about prostitution. Actually, it's a novel about words. The only things that change in this novel change as a result

of dialogue, of communication. And in those conversations with Porfiri, the language of the novel reaches a maximal level of ambivalence. The two characters constantly trying to understand what, as Porfidi says, every word you use seems to have another word hidden behind it. And all of the key words of the novel, one has to, and I felt this as a translator, trying to understand what these two characters were saying. I understood what the words were. But what tone were they said in? Was it a tone of mockery or was it a tone of sincerity? And that's what so befuddles Raskolnikov in these conversations with Porfili. Porfidi is a kind of actor. Raskolnikov's a very bad actor. And that's why Porfidi gets the better of him. And he's why he gets the better of him.

and he's unable to tell what Porfidi's intention are because he can't read Porfidi's speech. Sarah Young, he remains, there's an attempt by Dusky-Efts, he's mentioned by earlier, to make him likable. He is a likable-looking young man and he does likable things.

What do you make of that? This is another very important aspect of the novel, I think, that we always remain on his, side regardless of what he's done. And I think that's in part because we're seeing so much through his eyes that we see the dilemmas he goes through constantly. We see that he is actually going through torture, even if he won't admit it to himself. So that's part of the reason, I think. But he also, he doesn't want to admit to anybody else that he did it. this is very true.

So it's escaping punishment. But another part of it, I think, is that everybody else is drawn to him. And other people see him as an attractive figure in one way or another, even though they, you know, sort of, even if they do suspect that he's done something terrible, Paul Ferey sees him as an attractive figure in many ways, even though he doesn't, you know, he understands already what he's done. If I can just come and briefly on, well, two points actually, one that he doesn't want to admit, in a way he does really want to admit.

Again and again, after the first part, he keeps almost spilling the secret. But he doesn't spill. But on the question of likeability, I think here this is, this relates to actually a big change in the novel. In the first part, we're very much in Raskolnikov's mind, in his consciousness.

We see here how this novel began actually as a first-person narrative. It eventually changed to a third-person narrative. We're absolutely in his consciousness. and the various ploys that Dostoevsky uses, such as the dream, such as the letter from the mother, all make us feel more sympathetic towards Raskolnikov. After the crime, actually, the novel broadens out into something a bit more typically 19th century, in which we get a much better idea of other characters,

including, for example, Raskolnikov's best friend, Rasmichin. And by bringing in these other characters, in a subtle way Dostoevsky makes us look at Raskolnikov more critically, because Rasmuchin lives in exactly the same conditions as Raskolnikov, and it's emphasized their flats, their rooms, rather, are identically poor and their dress is identically bad. And yet Razumikan, who's also falling out of university, is somehow managing to make ends meet by teaching, by doing translations.

And so that is a way in which reflects badly on Raskolnikov, arguably. Sarah, what brings Raskolnikov to the point of confession? I think it's the complete isolation that his crime has forced him into. that's part of the torture that Sarah was alluding to, that he's going through throughout the course of the novel. It's the sense that the moment that the axe falls on his two victims, he destroys and cuts off not just their life, but his own ability to engage in human relations.

This is felt most probably, obviously, with his mother and his sister. He finds it very difficult to be in their presence, to talk to them, to touch them. He struggles as well with his friend Razumikan to be around him. And it's the sense that he can relate to no one anymore, apart from just about Sonia, really. There's an epilogue, which some people already find unsatisfactory. They have found you've already said, no, he isn't redeemed.

It's a sort of almost happy ever after epilogue. Some people see it, but you don't see it like that. It's actually quite a lot in this. Sonia's gone to Siberia there and together in Siberia. She's working with the... the prisoners, so she's activating herself in a way she hasn't done before. The novel proper ends with his actual

confession, we then move to Siberia all of a sudden. The epilogue, although it's quite short, it's quite rich, and the first it's in two chapters, the first chapter just takes us to Siberia. What we get is a sudden change of pace, totally. We suddenly move out of this stifling St Petersburg atmosphere, and that in itself

is a very effective artistic move. Reader takes a deep breath. Interestingly then, the narrator goes back and narrates what happened at the trial, etc. The crucial bit that people stumble on in the epilogue, it seems, in terms of their appreciation of the novel and often criticize, is the second part in which, yes, Raskolnikov falls at Sonia's feet,

yes, there's a love scene, to my mind, an extremely beautiful and affecting one, one that Dostoevsky has entirely earned through the conversations between the two that have led to this point, where speech gives way to silence. We read that they wanted to speak, but they could not. my point to in a way reiterated in a different way

why it's so poised is that we end on this moment of silence in a way and of connection finally Raskolnikov, this egoist essentially is finally now accepting another human being and therefore accepting himself but we suspect that Raskolnikov when this silence comes to an end his consciousness will go back to its familiar patterns

there was a famous quote in a Russian biography that said we know Raskolnikov too well to believe this pious lie about the aploc. To me that's a misreading. We know him too well to believe that he's going to remain humble and meek for the rest of his days.

No, there is a different life ahead. We just don't know what it is. And there is also, at that very point, there's a reference to his great Pordvig that lies ahead and this sort of extraordinary feat that he still faces. And that's very ambiguous.

That could still mean the sort of the great feat of a great man. Is Siberia presented as a superior to St. Petersburg? Absolutely. I mean, as Oliver said, you have this complete change of pace of atmosphere. We're out of the stifling, close, claustrophobic centre of Petersburg. We have a sort of vast vista across the landscape. There is air.

One thing that, Rusconiakov can never breathe in Petersburg. In Siberia, there is air, there is sky. He can breathe. and it's also important because this is the place where he finally comes into contact with the common people, the peasant convicts. And as Oliver said previously, these are the people who Dostoevsky himself was imprisoned alongside in Siberia. And they play only a small part in the epilogue.

They're very, as in Dostoevsky's own experience, they see a huge gulf between themselves and Raskolnikov as a member of the elite. They see him as somebody who is an atheist who doesn't believe in God, who shouldn't be there as a member of the elite, because he doesn't belong with them. And they reject him completely. And that sense of that gulf is at the same time as Sonia is working with the prisoners. She's supporting all the prisoners, not just Raskolnikov, and they love her.

So she has that connection. He doesn't. And that is the sort of the core of what he faces. Oliver, you want to come in, then I want to go to you. Just briefly that, indeed, the other convicts don't accept him. But they're also a bit baffled by him because they say, what is gentry, what is a nobleman like you doing with an axe, right? He commits the murders with an axe, which is, you know, a symbol of the, well, a necessary object in the peasant log house in Russian.

And there are other ways in the novel in which Dostoevsky seems to be suggesting that Raskolnikov has deep folk roots, right? So there's another character. So he's allowed to use an axe. So the character, right, the character who first confesses to his crime is a Raskolnik, which means a schismatic, going back to the schism in the Russian Orthodox Church in the 17th century, between the official church and the old believers. And so Raskolnikov, there's a suggestion that something,

if only Raskolnikov could get to know himself better, he would be connected to this old religious past of seeking God, I assume. Sarah Hutzpitt, it's a dark novel and there are an attempt to find humour in it. I don't see the point. It's a dark novel. I mean, there's not, there's a strain to find bits of humour in. It is a dark novel, but I think the whole of Dostoevsky's outlook on life is that the light, the tiny bits of light,

shine all the more brightly for the darkness. So the darkness is absolutely necessary to understanding the light. And he does provide moments of light relief. There is, this comes partly through Raskolnikov's friend Razumikin, who is extremely likable but also kind of bumpious and awkward and clumsy and makes a fool of himself over liking Raskolnikov's sister. There's also the kind of painful humour of the ridiculousness of the human condition. This was, I think, something where Dostoevsky,

liked to indulge in quite sort of dark black humour of people who painfully feel the ridiculousness of their situation, of their mediocrity and who are desperate to rise above it and make ridiculous fools of themselves in struggling to do so. You wanted to come in. Just to say, I think it is a very comic novel. I think it is a deeply comic basis, partly for the reasons Sarah Hotspitz has just given reasons which go back, by the way, Nikolai Gogol, who was mentioned before in connection with his punishment.

Where is the comedy? Where is the comedy? The comedy lies. It's everywhere and it's not there as an add-on. It's not there as something to fill in between the tragic scenes. It's actually there. It's the comedy of somebody who wants to commit a crime but doesn't believe he can and for a long time can't.

Can't persuade himself that he'll have to be able to. When he eventually does, it's thanks to a sort of chain of coincidence. then the comedy of somebody who wants to be punished. He does want to be punished. Clearly, Raskolnikov, he wants the letter of the law to come down on him. That's why he keeps tempting. But you have to use a word comedy for this? Don't you think that's...

I don't know. I mean, I'm asking you. You're the expert. No, I do think it's comic, and that's why the first, the first scene where Raskolnikov goes in to see the investigator, of course, is eventually going to be the reason that he gets punished. The first words that the investigator uses is a line from Nikolai Gogo, and Raskolnikov goes into that scene laughing. So there's something, maybe comedy, not in the sense of... That could be hysteria.

It is partly hysteria, but it's laughter. It's laughter. The element of laughter, let's put it that way, which covers so many different spheres of comedy. But there is also a very comic element, for example, in the funeral meal scene, after Marmalado dies, Sonia's father, and we have this dreadful scene in which

all this drunken, poor people in the household gather together for this funeral. funeral meal and everything descends into sort of abuse and hysteria and people are shouting at each other. The landlady gets punched in the face. Dostoevsky was an absolute master of the comedy of embarrassment. And these are scenes which are sort of horrific to read in some ways, but they are very, very funny. That puts me in my place also. I wasn't reading it at a time with that in mind.

being punched, yeah, a wedding, a breakup of wedding, okay, fine. I think that this is part of the same question of how Dostoevsky's been received in our culture, but also in Russian culture, as indeed the portraits of him attest from his lifetime, such as a portrait you can see on the BBC website for this programme, are of a very gloomy, dark man.

And I think a lot of the things we've said show that Dostoevsky's far from being that, and in fact people find great sustenance in his writing, as well as comedy, and it's time for that to be. Sorry, we're near the end now. Sarah, it was published about the same time, almost recited at the same time, as Tolstores War and Peace.

Did they, do you think the two race together? Certainly they were Litteru rivals, rivals who held a great amount of respect for each other, but also disagreed on a number of things, but who never met in person in order to talk through those disagreements. their disagreements were played out through their own writings, their own commentaries on their writings, their letters to mutual acquaintances and editors

and reviews of each other's works in sort of literary magazines. So they were competitors, but at the same time, recognized in each other, similar kind of values. And in fact, when Dostoevsky passed away and Talsoy learned of it, he acknowledged that in actual fact he hadn't realized quite how much Dostoevsky meant to him and was deeply affected by it. Well, thank you very much. Thank you, Sarah Hutzpeth, Sarah Young, Oliver Reddy.

Next week we turn to the Crusader Estates at their height in the 12th century in the Queen of Jerusalem, many so on. Thank you very much for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melbourne. and his guests. Yeah. I'd like to talk about Luzin,

who is the character that Raskolnikov's sister Duna is projected to marry. And I think he plays quite an important role in the novel because he provides us with a template of a down-and-out bad character. He's an absolute villain. So we have Svidrigailov, who is this very kind of ambiguous and mysterious character. But Lujin, it's impossible to like him. there is nothing at all to like about him. And I think this is really important

because it adds to that idea of the nuances, the poised nature of this debate about good and evil that Oliver referred to. Because I think the natural human temptation is to want to see bad guys as all out bad guys as something different from us. But when we see Luijian contrasted with Svigyagylov and with Raskolnikov, who we have to admit is, you know,

is a bloody, violent murderer. We realise that it just isn't as simple as that. We can't just say that evil is something that is over there and that is different and separate from us. It is something much more complicated. And it's one reason why I find Svigailov a much more terrifying character is because he has those ambiguities

and the aspects about him that are appealing and are attractive and... Curiously, I found, just on that point about Svidrigal, I found, going back to the... My reactions as I was translating it, I found Svidrigailov also a terrifying character in the sense that his language is somehow neutral.

It's somehow emotionless when he speaks. It's speech and it's very fluent speech and yet there's sort of no human content that one can derive from it very clearly. He is indeed, in a way. But he dominates the second. half of the novel and people often forget this. He appears in what seems to Raskolnik of a dream at the end of part three, but from

part four onwards, he's right there. And curiously, in Russia at the moment, where, for example, in the theatre, there's a play that's been going on in Moscow for the last couple of years by a brilliant director from Lithuania who's done eight different versions or something like that of crime and punishment. And this last one takes Svidrigailov as the main character, which tells us that crime and punishment is not just about Raskolnikov. Similarly, Boris Akoun and the detective novelist did a novel where Porfiri is the main character.

It's not true that we're always in Raskolnikov's mind, for example. There's a great scope of other human experience that's covered in this novel. And certainly since Svidrigailov, it really takes over from Raskolnikov, indeed, in the final part of the novel. We spend several chapters following Svigailov around before he commits suicide. So we really do sort of, this is the really the only time in the novel where the focus is taken completely away from Rusko. Ruskolyakov is generally present even if there are other characters

around him. And this, I think this question of the house, Fidelav and Luzin in particular and how we compare them to Ruskolykov in this question of good and evil, it is, I think, absolutely central to how we look at the novel. Can we just go back briefly to another character, Sonia, who you were talking about, almost wanted to come in before, but when you were talking about how, in a way, she seems not fully palpable character in some way, at least one, we can't imagine her doing the deeds that her profession demands that she does.

I have to say, I didn't necessarily feel that as a reader in that Dostoevc sort of, in a way, goes out of his way, yes, not to show the actual profession, but he does show her in the clothes that she wears. We get the, when she goes out on the street, we get the account of her father talking about the hygiene checks, the prostitutes have to go through at the time. It seems in a way that for somebody like Sonia, for whom she would see this job as her cross to bear, her suffering to bear, justified by the fact that she's helping her family. And clearly Sonia is a problematic character, as we've all said, and readers do come to the novel and feel that there's something that is if Toslovsky's using her as a cipher. But then we also forget that in the same novel there's another woman character we haven't mentioned yet, Marmaladov's wife, who's there as a very defiant character who when Marmado, the alcoholic,

dies and a priest comes and says, you know, we should forgive, we should accept at the hour of death, says, you know, why should I forgive? Why should I accept? God has given me this awful life of looking after all these children. My husband's an alcoholic, not looking after us. So if the criticism about the novel is one of how women are represented, I think, there are arguments definitely on both sides. What do you think? I would agree on Katarina Ravanovna, Mamalado's wife, is a sort of a really sort of interesting example of somebody who does. rebel in a very different way to other rebellions we see in the novel

in Dostoevsky in general and I don't necessarily have a problem with the depiction of women as a whole I do find Sonia difficult I mean in a way I think Svidrigailov also has this sort of element of being sort of disembodied and embodied at the same time

the fact that he, as one of you said he comes out of a dream But perhaps this is part of the genre of fantastic realism that Dostoevsky thought he was writing This is not a sort of standard realist novel so we can accept these sorts of ideas that the dream world, there's a world of projection in psychology

is as important as the concrete. Can I just turn for a while, which we didn't talk about, we scarcely touched on in the discussion, but I think our listeners will be interested. Just to say some things about Dostoevsky himself, I mean, when he came back from him, he quickly got into enormous debt,

partly he took on his brother's debt, he took on looking at, dead brother's death. He was oppressed by that. He lost children. He had his epilepsy every three weeks. Goodness knows what that. What sort of state was here when he was writing this?

Can we like to talk about him a little? He was under, if I may, he was under immense pressure because one of the things he'd done in his desperation as a struggling writer was to enter into a really punitive publishing contract with an unscrupulous editor called Stelowski who would demarc. his next work from him in an unrealizable time scale, which if he wasn't able to meet that deadline,

then Dostoevsky would be signing over his royalty rights in perpetuity thereafter to this Stelovsky. So he was writing under tremendous pressure, but in actual fact he managed to get himself out of that. You're talking about the gambler, is right. Yes, that's right. So this is how he ended up meeting his second wife. He hired a young stenographer to whom he wanted to be able to

dictate his works in order to produce them more quickly. What he did was to dictate the shorter novel, The Gambler, in order to meet this publishing deadline and then give him more space to actually work on crime and punishment. But this sense of pressure he was under which was very, very genuine and I think was also sort of compounded by the fact of living in Petersburg in this very tense, crowded atmosphere overcrowding that we've talked about earlier. he also I think took on the pressure voluntarily in fact he sought it out

partly through the gambling which at some point he was described as a problem gambler but at some point he in the 1870s he just gave up gambling altogether without apparent problem so whether he was actually a problem gambler is a question and then he took on all these debts which he didn't necessarily need to do you might say that he's he's felt responsible for his family but the same time, it wasn't an absolute obligation. I do see a sense of... Like his stepson, for example.

And looking after his... Continuing to look after this reprobate stepson, who he had no real responsibility for. And I think there was a sense of him taking on those pressures and actually in a way thriving under those pressures. At the same time, I'm sure none of us would want to contribute to the myth that surrounds Stavsky's writing that he wrote too quickly, that he rushed. Because clearly what we see with crime and punishment, certainly,

is, and we have it in the notebooks, people have studied all of this, that if he wrote a draft which he wasn't happy with, he would promptly start again, and he did so several times. That's why he ended up building up this incredible pressure, partly because he was so late finishing crime and punishment, that the window he had to write the gambler

became shorter and shorter. As a translator, again, of the novel, I felt that the criticisms of the Stetska and Stylistic grounds are greatly exaggerated, indeed false, simply false. He simply works with different aesthetic means in this novel, but the artistry of it is extraordinary, as good as anything. Why do you think Sir the right of Nabokov took so strongly against him?

And now, has he had great supporters, as we must have. He has had great supporters. Of course he's had great supporters. But why did those two take against him so much? Nabokov shares many themes with Dostoevsky. So in the Russian saying, only neighbours argue. And the anxiety of influence. Yes.

But there's also just a general approach to cliche in a way, because Osevsky is always writing about crises in people's lives. The fact is crises in people's lives tend to be quite similar to each other at certain points. And one is inevitably dealing with, you know, it's not like leopardoptery, it's not like butterflies, Nabokos. Every butterfly is different or whatever. They are interested in different, they're both wonderful writers, they're both interested in different aspects of existence. But from Nabokov's point of view, his writing is all about the war against cliche, as Martin Amos puts it, right? that at the end of every sentence in a way,

the reader should step back and think, this is something entirely fresh and new has happened in this sentence. So Steyevsky is using language to a certain extent to move us, to change us, to affect us emotionally much more. So these are writers who are simply doing different things, but their themes were quite similar. So in Abokov's interested in the double.

He's interested in murder, crime. And here comes a producer, Simon. Anyone want to your coffee? I'd like a cup of tea, please. Tea, please. Likewise, thank you. Four cheese, great, thank you. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson.

Hi everybody, I'm Caitlin Jenner, and I am a guest on Simon Mondays Don't Tell Me the Score Podcast. We talked about everything, the Olympics, trans issues, and all the lessons that I have learned along the way. I really enjoyed recording the podcast, and I hope you enjoy listening to it. You can hear it on BBC Sounds. Just search for Don't Tell Me the Score.