Bakhtin’s Radiant Polyphonic Novel, Raskolnikov’s Perverse Dialogic World

When queried at the end of his life, Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) identified himself not as a literary scholar but as a philosopher—or more precisely, as a “thinker” (myslitel’). Bakhtin’s book on Dostoevsky (1929, rev. 1963) introduced the potent concepts of dialogism versus monologism, the “fully-weighted idea-hero,” double-voiced discourse, and novelistic polyphony. But even as these concepts began to leak into and then dominate our critical vocabulary, reservations were raised. Bakhtin’s philosophy of dialogue seemed to omit a great deal of Dostoevsky’s texture and wisdom. This essay discusses the virtues and drawbacks of a Bakhtinian reading of Crime and Punishment. It incorporates recent scholarship on Bakhtin’s notion of author–hero relations, and on the possibility of our real and fictive “outsideness” to one another, and on the corruptions to which word and image are prone. It ends with a hypothesis about polyphony, most relevant to Dostoevsky’s first and last great murder novels, which attaches the concept not to literature but to medieval philosophies of music. In so doing it reconciles the linear thrust of dialogue (melody) with two other virtues Bakhtin saw equally present in Dostoevsky’s art: simultaneity and coexistence.

Metaphysical Motivation

A defining characteristic of classical German philosophy is its preoccupation with the concept of freedom. One central moment in the post-Kantian debate concerning the metaphysical conditions of human freedom is Schelling’s assertion, in his 1809 essay, that these include the reality of evil. Human freedom is meaningful, Schelling argues, only if it comprises a choice between good and evil. On this basis Schelling rejects as inadequate the conception of autonomous agency found in Kant and Fichte, and restores human freedom to a theological setting. My aim in this chapter is to explore Schelling’s intriguing and provocative idea in the context of Crime and Punishment—in which, I suggest, Dostoevsky tries to show how and why autonomous agency, conceived in familiar late modern “Kantian” terms, discovers itself to have need of, and is forced to retrieve, a conception of evil that modern ethical thought takes itself to have surpassed.

Introduction: Crime and Punishment as a Philosophical Novel

This introductory chapter raises the questions of what the relationship of philosophy and literature might be and, in particular, what might make Crime and Punishment a distinctively philosophical novel. Rather than trying to provide a general answer, I argue that the individual essays of this collection implicitly address these questions by calling for philosophical attention to particular elements of human experience. I then review the diversity of approaches the essays take up in doing so: for example, looking to the workings of language to understand the character of the mind, finding an affective orientation to human existence as a whole, gaining access to a practical standpoint, and responding to a utopian criticism of the traditional family.

The Family in Crime and Punishment

It is well known that Dostoevsky was in part reacting to Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s theories, in particular his 1863 novel What Is to Be Done?, as he conceived Crime and Punishment. In her book Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism: A Study in the Semiotics of Behavior (1988), Irina Paperno has shown that Chernyshevsky’s experiments with family structure are rooted in Hegelian theory as mediated by Russian thinkers in the 1840s. I examine Chernyshevsky’s novel as well as writings on the family and gender in Russian journalism of the early 1860s, especially Mikhail Larionovich Mikhailov’s articles and Apollinaria Prokofievna Suslova’s short stories in Dostoevsky’s journals Time and Epoch, to deepen our understanding of the family structures that appear in Crime and Punishment.

Crime and Expression

In this chapter I argue that the narrative of Crime and Punishment somewhat inadvertently functions as an extended commentary on the nature of agency. My claim, that is, is that each of Dostoevsky’s characters, including Raskolnikov at various points in time, represents a plausible approach to understanding the ways in which an agent relates to his deeds. Dostoevsky dramatizes these relations as ending in sometimes spectacular failures, with the result that narrative events become difficult to characterize in intentional terms. Raskolnikov, oddly, switches among all these forms of relationship, but does not arrive at a satisfactory connection to his actions until he is able to recognize himself in his deeds. The drama of Crime and Punishment thus functions as an argument for treating agency as expressive, and so a matter of realizing in the world deeds that are rationally responsive and adequate to one’s own understanding of them.

Love, Suffering, and Gratitude for Existence

This essay examines the transformation of Raskolnikov’s characteristic emotions toward his crime and toward his entire life in the world. Specifically, I argue that it is through Raskolnikov’s capacity to feel guilt over a particular deed that he overcomes his ambivalent emotions toward the limits of finite human existence. His commission of a crime and the subsequent experience of guilt allow him to redefine his predominant attitude toward the world. For much of the novel, Raskolnikov seems to wish that he could hover tentatively above finite existence rather than be immersed in it, but through his experience of guilt Raskolnikov develops his potential to care for others. His eventual guilt and remorse for what he has done are thus not only about the murder: these emotions show Raskolnikov’s willingness to accept the intricate ways in which he is implicated in a finite, temporal, historically situated existence. Only thus can Raskolnikov wholeheartedly begin a morally accountable life among others. What is affectively at issue for Dostoevsky’s protagonist, as I will show, is the tension between his general antipathy for the world and his capacity to love.

Raskolnikov Beyond Good and Evil

Crime and Punishment is, among other things, a long meditation on the authority of the moral law. In insisting that his main character, Raskolnikov, is guilty of a heinous crime, however, Dostoevsky does not take that authority for granted. At the beginning of the story, Raskolnikov is portrayed as a kind of skeptic about morality, indeed about humanity, who thinks that moral imperatives are binding on us only as a matter of convention or of mere calculation and that the exceptional person is free to “step beyond” them altogether. As the novel progresses, however, it becomes clear that the authority of morality is, in Dostoevsky’s view, a function of a particular kind of human community. His skepticism, then, is a failure of a certain kind of desire, not simply an intellectual error; but it is a failure to which Dostoevsky thinks his reader is prone. Although Raskolnikov’s talk of stepping beyond morality may appear to resemble Nietzsche’s injunction to the “higher man” to live beyond good and evil, I will argue that Dostoevsky and Nietzsche actually agree on the necessity of an antecedent mutuality as a foundation for morality.

Portrayals of Mind

This essay offers readings of episodes from Crime and Punishment, in particular Raskolnikov’s receipt of the letter from his mother and his discussions with Zametov and with Porfiry Petrovich, with a view to identifying how Dostoevsky depicts the nature of the mind. In Dostoevsky’s picture, it is shown, mental privacy is itself socially grounded and contextual, and subject to destabilizing self-descriptions; mental contents are knowable only through our discursive connection to others; and the expressive potential of language far exceeds anyone’s intentional control. Dostoevsky’s presentation of the mind is compared to the philosophical views of Wollheim, Moran, and Murdoch.