Dostoevsky, Berdyaev, and Shestov. Three Russian Apostles of Freedom

McNeill Daniel

4

A series of accidents happen to Raskolnikov but his behavior is so intentional, intentional to the extreme, that when he sees evidence that a young girl, Sonya, the daughter of Marmeladov, possesses something infinitely gentle and unworldly in her soul, some hidden spiritual power that protects her from the world around her – – even when Raskolnikov sees clearly that such a spirit lives within her and he also understands that because of what is in her soul he himself is permanently joined to the young woman forever, even at such a moment that has all the appearance of a miracle, it does not affect his feelings because his rational madness, even in the face of a miracle, will not let him set his soul free.

Raskolnikov’s meeting with Marmeladov in a tavern after his visit to the old pawnbroker was the first accident. They do not know each other, yet Marmeladov is moved somehow to talk to young Raskolnikov and pour out his remorseful feelings to him without any restraint. We accept it as a reasonably possible occurrence because Raskolnikov is a completely believable character, an intelligent young student pursuing some odd adventure. Marmeladov’s ravings present us with a nice contrast to Raskolnikov’s rationality to such an extent that we do not hear with any feeling the odd things the father says about his daughter Sonya who has been driven to prostitution by her miserable poverty. Yet what a superb accident it is to set a young man soon to become an axe murderer of two women at the same table in a dismal tavern with a madman! The religious language Marmeladov uses appears to us to be nonsense. The concrete belief he expresses, that his daughter Sonya’s sins will be forgiven, is nonsense and the absurd reasoning he uses to explain why Sonya will be saved is nonsense carried to the extreme. Sonya will be saved because she has “loved much”. It is such nonsense that our minds do not allow us to see that something has already slipped secretly into Raskolnikov’s soul and our souls. Love! But we do not feel this love and our minds automatically reject it as nonsense. Marmeladov does feel it but he is nothing but a madman. His dear daughter is on the streets prostituting herself and he dares to say that she will be forgiven because she has loved! “Thy sins which are many,” Marmeladov raves, “are forgiven thee for thou hast loved much.” We are happy when the scene moves on and we are past such nonsense about the power of “love”. We must soon also hear mad talk from Marmeladov of people, drunkards, “made in the image of the beast”, who will be received into Christ’s kingdom, not because they love but because “not one of them believed himself to be worthy of this”. It is all nonsense that serves only as a nice contrast to the refined rational madness of Raskolnikov. We do not look for any new development of “love” in our story because it is about murder.

The next accident is that Marmeladov is so weakened and so drunk that he can not walk home unassisted. Raskolnikov is thus diverted from his extreme adventure of the mind by the practical job of helping his new acquaintance home. Because of his help, he finds out accidentally the address of Marmeladov’s family and even enters the room where his wife and three stepchildren live. Sonya, Marmeladov’s daughter, is not there and there seems little chance that Raskolnikov will ever meet her since she lives in another residence. He leaves on a window unnoticed the last few kopecks he has in his pockets for the starving family. On the stairs as he leaves the building, he regrets leaving the money thinking of the absent Sonya and her profession. He thinks not of how she will be saved by love but instead that money earned by her profession will provide food for her family and that leaving her family his last kopecks was stupid.

Later, after his five days spent in his room sleeping and in a delirium, when Raskolnikov puts on his new set of clothes and goes out walking through Petersburg at night, he is no longer acting as intentionally as a murderer should. His talk with people in the street is loose and unordinary. When he blurts out to the police clerk Zametov in the restaurant, “And what if it was I who murdered the old woman and Lizaveta?” he reveals that he is not fully in control of himself. He is now accident prone. As he leaves the restaurant, he “stumbled against Razumihin on the steps. They did not see each other till they almost knocked against one another.” He does not want to be with his friend. They talk back and forth and he breaks free from his company. He stops on a bridge and while looking at the setting sun and the dark water of the river, he accidentally views an intentional act of a woman in despair. She jumps off the bridge. She is pulled out of the water but Raskolnikov looks on “with a strange sense of indifference and apathy. He felt disgusted.” He leaves the river and walks towards the police station to “make an end” but on his way, he “turned into a side street and went two streets out of his way, possibly without any object, or possibly to delay a minute and gain time.” This accidental or intentional change of direction takes him to “the very gate of the house”. He goes in and up to the fourth floor and enters again the apartment, the scene of the crime. Does he return accidentally or intentionally? It is difficult to say but in any case it is a nice play between the accidental and the intentional if he returns by accident to the place of the murder that he committed intentionally. However when he leaves the house, he does have a very clear intention “for he had fully made up his mind to go to the police station and knew that it would all soon be over”. But on his way, he sees a crowd forming and went up to it. There has been an accident!

An accident that brings him once again accidentally into the world of the madman Marmeladov. A carriage has run over him. Only Raskolnikov knows his identity and his address. Marmeladov is so extremely wounded that Raskolnikov urges the police to call for a doctor and help him carry the injured man who is near death to his residence that is nearby. He shouts that he will pay the expenses. At the room of his wife, Katerina Ivanova, it is revealed by the doctor who examines Marmeladov that there is no hope. Marmeladov dies ten minutes later. His wife has sent her daughter Polenka, a child of eleven, to run to her stepsister’s residence. Marmeladov’s daughter Sonya arrives. Her father is able to raise himself up a little and beg her forgiveness. He dies embracing her. Raskolnikov confesses to Katerina Ivanova that Marmeladov was his friend. He gives the impoverished widow all the money he has, twenty roubles, and leaves.

The appearance of Sonya, “a small thin girl of eighteen with fair hair, rather pretty, with wonderful blue eyes” is a miracle. Or rather, her accidental appearance in Raskolnikov’s life gives him the opportunity, as we will see, of perceiving later when he gets to know her that a miracle, a miraculous indescribable something lives within her that is a source to her of divine strength. For the present however she does communicate something to Raskolnikov by her unexpected action that touches him deeply, something that can be described truly, given the absurd rational intentionality of our axe murderer, as a miraculous influence. As Raskolnikov is leaving the building and on the last steps, Polenka, the eleven-year-old stepsister of Sonya, calls after him to wait. Sonya has sent her after him to find out his name and where he lives.“Who sent you?” asks Raskolnikov. “‘Sister Sonya sent me,’ answered the girl, smiling…brightly.” “I knew it was sister Sonya sent you,” says Raskolnikov. “Mamma sent me too…when sister Sonya was sending me, mamma came up too and said, ‘Run fast, Polenka’” “Do you love sister Sonya?” asks Raskolnikov. “ ‘I love her more than anyone,’ Polenka answered with a peculiar earnestness, and her smile became graver.” “And will you love me?”, asks Raskolnikov.

A series of accidents has led an axe murderer, the murderer of Lizaveta who raised only one hand up as he was about to slice his axe into her head, to ask a child to love him. He certainly does not deserve her love but he receives it anyway in spite of what he has done: that is what makes it miraculous.

“By way of answer he saw the little girl’s face approaching him, her full lips naively held out to kiss him. Suddenly her arms as thin as sticks held him tightly, her head rested on his shoulder and the little girl wept softly, pressing her face against him.”

Sonya has sent a little angel to Raskolnikov and we will see that, despite her foul profession, Sonya is a divine woman or at least a woman whose soul is permanently influenced by something divine. But we should be careful and not begin thinking that Dostoevsky is out to show us angels or divine women as symbols of a divine world beyond and above us. He is not after some divine world up in the clouds. He is after what is inside humans and only what is truly inside them, holy or unholy. He has no eyes to look into the souls of people like Raskolnikov’s sister’s fiance, Luzhin, or bourgeois rational people in general because they have covered themselves over with layer after layer of stuffed-shirt rationalism and intentional behavior. They don’t look ever into their own souls and have condemned themselves to being soulless. But people like Sonya, degraded and humiliated by her poverty, defenseless, have nothing at all coming from the outside world or coming from what is superficial in their own nature to help them construct some kind of strong practical ego. Everything around them insults their nature and makes them suffer. They can be looked into by Dostoevsky because they have nothing left to give themselves except their soul. He is not against angels and saints but he is not interested in them. He is passionate about trying to see if there is anything divine on earth and he knows for certain that if there is it can only be found in the human soul, a place that accidentally became visible to him when the Tsar of all the Russians cancelled at the last moment his execution and gave him a second pair of eyes.

5

During a scene at Raskolnikov’s room between his friend, Razumihin, his sister Dounia, and his mother, Pulcheria Alexandrovna, Sonya opens the door and walks in. She has come to invite Raskolnikov to her father’s funeral and also to the dinner her stepmother is preparing that will take place after the burial. She is extremely embarrassed and her child-like “kindliness and simplicity in her expression” touches Raskolnikov. Sonya is also touched by him. He asks her for her address and promises to come to see her. Her appearance in the room of the murderer is angelic and something passes between the two that comes into Raskolnikov’s soul from a world that for him does not exist. She in turn feels a mysterious connection with Raskolnikov. “Never, never had she felt anything like this. Dimly and unconsciously a whole new world was opening before her.” When Raskolnikov comes to her residence later the same day, he has a long talk with the angelic Sonya and has a chance to enter this “whole new world” that has opened before Sonya. Something during this their second meeting attaches him permanently to her but something else prevents him from entering her world.

It is a main theme of Dostoevsky’s novels to bring characters struggling mightily with mental problems of various kinds to the point of belief. But most of them never make a magical leap of faith. What blocks them for the most part is an extreme reliance on the power of the mind although the influence of their mind does not completely explain their inability to reach the baptism that awaits them by a discovery of an independent, blessed power in their soul. Their isolation in their minds is strange, mysterious. An interesting way to understand the direction that Dostoevsky’s characters take is to compare them with the direction of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Hamlet at the beginning of the play is an emotional mystic who talks to a ghost, the supposed spirit of his dead father who urges him from somewhere beyond the grave to avenge his murder by his brother. Hamlet is unable to rely sufficiently on this mystical revelation to avenge his dead father by murdering his uncle. In fact, he does not know certainly, objectively that his uncle has murdered his father until the third act. Finally, at the end of the play, Hamlet’s development leads him to rely solely on his rationality to direct him. “Readiness is all”, he announces in act five. Raskolnikov on the other hand is ready for all at the beginning of his drama and he never gives up his reliance on his reason. Hamlet’s youthful madness at the beginning of the play when he talks to a spirit develops to a sane reliance on reason to keep him ready to face the world realistically. Raskolnikov develops from an extreme reliance on reason to an insane reliance on it. His development should be from the rational to the mystical, the very opposite of Hamlet’s development, but, in the main body of his story, Dostoevsky will not allow him to go in that direction and discover the relief waiting for him in his soul. Raskolnikov’s rational aberrations from the normal use of reason will be repeated often in other characters in other Dostoevsky novels taking other forms, but it is always the same theme and the same judgment on their author’s part: an extreme reliance on reason alone becomes an insane aberration and drives a human completely away from any solace that can come to him from the soul. Sonya offers Raskolnikov during their interview a way to reach down into his soul and drink the gentle waters of his soul’s salvation but he does not go in the direction she offers.