260). Raskolnikov’s internal dichotomy is set out through bells: Through them the murder is set in opposition to the saving faith he learned in his village as a child.

The idea of the belfry brings together these two sides of the bell motif in one image. Razumikhin, arguing with Porfiry against a rational, materialist interpretation of how environment determines human nature, parodies socialist logic: “I’ll prove to you that your white eyelashes may very well be ascribed to the Church of Ivan the Great’s being two hundred and fifty feet high, and I will prove it clearly, exactly, progressively, and even with a Liberal tendency!” (p. 245). The logic of socialists and those spreading the “new ideas” is mocked using the belfry, an emblem of irrational faith. Porfiry unites Raskolnikov’s association of bells and murder with the church and the belfry when he says, “I’ve studied all this morbid psychology in my practice. A man is sometimes tempted to jump out of a window or from a belfry. Just the same with bell-ringing” (p. 329). Porfiry understands the two sides of Raskolnikov’s crime: the potentially redemptive function of the belfry juxtaposed to the murdered woman’s doorbell.

The Russian word for bell is kolokol. The syllable kol can be found in Raskolnikov’s surname, as well as in the names of two opposed characters: The first, Mikolka, is the peasant who beats the mare in Raskolnikov’s dream; he is aligned with Raskolnikov’s murderous aspect, and with his going against God (Mikolka does not wear a cross). The second, Nikolai, is the painter who confesses to a crime he didn’t commit out of an excess of religious fervor, seeking redemption, as Raskolnikov himself eventually is on the brink of doing. The syllable kol thus contains opposed meanings for Raskolnikov. On the one hand, kolot’ (to chop, to split) is connected to his axe murders, as well as to the idea of the raskolnik, the schismatic who splits off from the church. On the other, kolokol (bell) relates both to the murders and to the potential redemptive force of the church.

Socialism and Christianity

After the publication of his first book, Poor Folk, in 1846, Dostoevsky was welcomed into a leading literary circle led by the critic Vissarion Belinsky, where the utopian socialist ideas of the Frenchmen Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) and Charles Fourier (1772-1837) were discussed. Fourier proposed reorganizing society into phalansteries, communities of 1,600 people, that he thought would reestablish the natural harmony in society and erase the lines between rich and poor. In the 1840s these ideas appeared to be continuous with the ideals of Christianity; Dostoevsky could find in Fourier’s phalansteries a Christian transfiguration of the world animated by a love of mankind. He even briefly accepted Belinsky’s atheistic materialism that won out over Christian utopianism in the circle’s discussions, saying of himself in a letter written from Omsk in the 1850s, “I am a child of the age, a child of unbelief and doubt” (quoted in Mochulsky, Dostoevsky: His Life and Work, p. 119-120). Within the circle, Dostoevsky read aloud Belinsky’s “Letter to Gogol,” which condemns Gogol’s Selected Extracts from a Correspondence with Friends and contains the thought that the Russian people are “profoundly atheistic.” In 1849, for being “freethinking” and for belonging to an associated circle led by Petrashevsky, Dostoevsky was arrested. He spent eight months of solitary incarceration in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg and was sentenced along with his fellow conspirators to be shot by firing squad. Three of Dostoevsky’s group were led out blindfolded and had already been tied to posts when at the last minute it was announced that the merciful Tsar Nicholas I had commuted the sentence to hard labor in Siberia; the whole mock execution had been planned by the Tsar himself.

Dostoevsky spent four years in penal servitude as a political criminal living in Omsk among convicts for whom he developed great respect, despite the hostility of the common people to gentry such as Dostoevsky. He describes his prison experience in fictional form in The House of the Dead (1862), written after his return to St. Petersburg in 1859. In prison, and during five subsequent years of Siberian exile in Semipalatinsk, Dostoevsky underwent a “regeneration of convictions.” Throughout his four years in the barracks, Dostoevsky kept under his pillow a copy of the Gospels that had been given to him by Natalia Dmitrievna Fonvizina, wife of one of the Decembrist rebels exiled to Siberia in 1825, during a stop in Tobolsk on his march to Siberia. As a result of a mental struggle during the years of his imprisonment, he replaced his former acceptance of Belinsky’s atheism with the “radiant personality of Christ.” Upon leaving prison he wrote to Fonvizina that “if someone were to prove to me that Christ is outside the truth, then I would prefer to remain with Christ than with the truth” (quoted in Mochulsky, p. 152). The struggle between faith and reason is fundamental to Dostoevsky’s philosophy.

Dostoevsky was allowed to return to St. Petersburg in December 1859, exactly ten years after he had left.