Not shame, however, but another feeling akin to terror had overtaken him (p. 7).

Raskolnikov fears that his conspicuous top hat will be remembered and somehow reveal him as the murderer. For Dostoevsky, the Zimmermann reveals Raskolnikov’s poverty of spirit; the German hat on Raskolnikov’s Russian head suggests that he has imbibed German materialism in St. Petersburg. It also suggests why his friend Razumikhin calls him “a translation”—that is, a Russian imitation of the kind of book, parodied by the title “Is Woman a Human Being?” (p. 111), that Razumikhin generously offers to let him translate from the German in order to earn enough to eat. Razumikhin calls Raskolnikov a “plagiarist” of foreign ideas instead of an “original” (p. 162).

Dostoevsky organizes the cast of characters of Crime and Punishment in relation to this conflict between rational materialism and the irra tionality of human nature. Raskolnikov builds his theory of the man who dares to transgress in keeping with Western materialist thinking, and the characters surrounding him act as his doubles, displaying aspects of his position.

Razumikhin is the counter-example to Raskolnikov: He lives in abject poverty in St. Petersburg like his friend and fellow student, yet shares none of Raskolnikov’s rage at his helplessness or his desire for power. His name comes from razum (reason), but in the sense of common sense, reasonableness. The argument that the environment leads Raskolnikov to crime is refuted by Razumikhin’s vibrant joy in existence, his generosity to his friend, and his natural compassion. Human nature differentiates the friends, despite their shared material circumstances.

This is all the more clear in the case of Marmeladov’s daughter, the prostitute Sonia Marmeladov. Raskolnikov tells her that her situation will drive her to suicide, yet despite everything that should destroy her, she chooses faith in Christ, which allows her not only to sustain her family but to become Raskolnikov’s savior as well. Her name is the diminutive form of Sophia, which denotes “divine wisdom” in Greek; her spiritual power is juxtaposed to physical and economic forces and to other forms of earthly power.

Raskolnikov’s sister’s former employer, Arkady (“Arcadia”) Svidrigailov, is Raskolnikov’s most complete double. When they meet it is at first unclear both to Raskolnikov and the reader whether Svidrigailov exists in reality or is a figment of Raskolnikov’s dream-imagination. Svidrigailov suggests that eternity may be “one little room, like a bathhouse in the country, black and grimy and spiders in every corner” (p. 277). Without a definition of eternity, his existence lacks any moral basis, so that he can commit both evil and benevolent acts with indifference; in this he is perhaps a parody of the concept of the “natural man” of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). Because his life can have no meaning, he elects to take it “to America” in the form of suicide—a journey from which Sonia can save Raskolnikov because, unlike Svidrigailov, he retains his conscience and compassion from his churchgoing village childhood.

Marmeladov doubles the aspect of Raskolnikov that is at once victim (of poverty) and victimizer (he commits murder). Dostoevsky had originally begun writing a novel called The Drunkards; when he abandoned it to write Crime and Punishment, he incorporated the tale of the drunkard Marmeladov into Raskolnikov’s tale. The identification of the two characters is signaled when Raskolnikov is almost run down by a carriage and whipped by the driver; he is taken for a drunkard when he staggers, delirious, in the street. Marmeladov is a victim of his alcoholism and attendant poverty, while simultaneously victimizing his family with his inability to keep a job.

Russia and France

Russian writers of the nineteenth century, like many others of the period, were consciously creating a new literary tradition, trying to free themselves from the imitation of French language and culture that had shaped the world of the Russian aristocracy from the time of Catherine the Great. Literate Russians, who themselves lived in an imitation of European culture, were painfully aware that Russia’s social and cultural level was far lower than that of Western Europe and saw themselves self-consciously through Western European eyes, at once admiring Europe and feeling inferior to it. Russian prose developed in dialogue with the literature of France, where Romantic works at the beginning of the century were followed by a burst of realist prose in the late 1820s.

With the growth of cities and a poor urban class, French literary prose took up the lives of the city poor and the peculiar role of Paris in relation to the provinces; the themes of criminality and the provincial in the city became important. Literary prose became democratized through the growth of a popular press that began publishing four-page weekly inserts (feuilletons) containing installments of popular novels by such writers as Eugène Sue, Jules Janin, and Honoré de Balzac. Two major themes were prostitution (the female crime) and murder or demonic ambition (the male crime); the goal in both cases was the redemption of the sinner-criminal. Russians readers and writers followed French literature closely, both in French and in Russian translation, and by the 1830s treatments of the St. Petersburg poor inspired by the French feuilletons began to replace Romantic poetry in Russia. Nikolai Gogol’s tales of poor St.