The idealist “men of the 40s” had been succeeded by the “men of the 1860s,” who endorsed Western positivist, materialist thought. In 1861 Dostoevsky and his brother Mikhail founded a journal, Vremia (Time), that attempted to reconcile the opposing camps of the Slavophils (the more conservative, nationalist group who valued the Russian tradition) and the Westernizers (relative liberals who wanted Russia to learn from European culture). In the first (January 1861) issue of Time, Dostoevsky described the problems of each position and advocated a “reconciliation of ideas” that would constitute “the Russian idea”: “With Westernism we are squeezing into a foreign caftan in spite of the fact that it has long been bursting at every seam, and with Slavophilism we are sharing the poetic illusion of reconstructing Russia according to an ideal view of its ancient manner of life, a view that has been set down in place of a genuine understanding of Russia, some kind of ballet set, pretty, but false and abstract” (quoted in Mochulsky, p. 220). But Russian youth was becoming radicalized. There were student rebellions, the university was closed, and students were imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress. The radical materialist literary critics were applying utilitarian principles to art; their efforts were designed to help men satisfy their wants more rationally, so that they deemed an actual apple more valuable than a painting of an apple because the actual apple can be eaten. Dostoevsky refuted this position, insisting on a focus on man’s spiritual nature, which finds sustenance in the aesthetic. As Prince Myshkin says in The Idiot, “Beauty will save the world.”

In 1862 Dostoevsky went to Europe for the first time. In two and a half months he visited six countries, and he recounted his perceptions in Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, which first appeared in Time in 1863. He was repelled by the smug well-being of the bourgeoisie, and described London, with its teeming poor and crowds of prostitutes, as Babylon. He saw the Crystal Palace, which had been built for the World’s Fair in London in 1851. A new kind of building, constructed of glass and steel, it was widely considered a model of modern technology that would allow the construction of housing for the masses and do away with poverty; as such it was an emblem of Fourier’s philosophy that would improve human nature by improving material conditions. However, Dostoevsky saw it as an emblem of the “ant heap,” his vision of what man becomes when materialist thought deprives him of free will. In Notes from the Underground (1864) he had rejected the idea that the environment determined human behavior, and he continued his argument with materialism in Crime and Punishment: Human nature—not the material world or the principle of enlightened self-interest—determines behavior. This is why Dostoevsky has Raskolnikov come perversely close to revealing his secret to the police clerk Zametov; he acts irrationally, against his own self-interest, by hinting at his crime to the police: “And what if it was I?” (p. 160).

Luzhin’s young progressive friend Lebeziatnikov—from lebezit’ (to fawn on someone)—is the purveyor of the so-called “new ideas” circulating in the capital among university students and intellectuals. Dostoevsky’s description of their discussions about a commune in the red light district parodies discussions then current among progressives and, in particular, the critic Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s book What Is to Be Done? (1863), in which a prostitute is rescued from her trade by joining a sewing cooperative.

Dostoevsky argues with German thinkers, too, in Crime and Punishment . He alludes to German popularizers of materialist social scientific thought—among them Adolph Wagner, Ludwig Büchner, and Karl Vogt—whose books were being read by the progressive youth of the 1850s and 1860s. Raskolnikov’s exposure to their views in St. Petersburg university circles contributes to the theory that leads him to murder. Heavily censored in Russia during the period 1840-1860 (some of them for their “scientific,” materialist approach to religion), the German texts are also part of the basis for the “new ideas” that Lebeziatnikov discusses with Luzhin. Dostoevsky further alludes to the German theme with Raskolnikov’s old top hat, which is referred to by the name of its German maker, Zimmermann:

... a drunken man who . . . was being taken somewhere in a huge cart dragged by a heavy cart-horse, suddenly shouted at him as he drove past, “Hey there, German hatter” . . .—the young man stopped suddenly and clutched trembling at his hat. It was a tall round one from Zimmermann’s, but completely worn out, rusty with age, all torn and bespattered, brimless and bent on one side in a most hideous fashion.