Jennifer Wilson - Floating in the Air: The world that made Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment
Dostoyevsky, on the
other hand, could not abide this scientific dissection of desire, believing
that people were ultimately unaware of why they wanted the things they wanted.
He knew human beings to be irrational and profoundly self-destructive.. Dostoyevsky was
especially appalled by Chernyshevsky’s claim that actions taken in pursuit of a
better society were themselves necessarily good. He saw in this seemingly
innocent theory a potential justification for violence.
In September 1865, Fyodor Dostoyevsky was living in Wiesbaden, Germany, and couldn’t pay his rent. A string of gambling losses had left him near financial ruin, a familiar circumstance for Dostoyevsky (as dramatized in his novel The Gambler). Owing a considerable amount of money to his landlord, he hoped an advance for a new novel might shore his fortunes up. Writing to Mikhail Katkov, the editor of the Russian Herald, Dostoyevsky asked for 300 rubles, promising in return the manuscript that would become Crime and Punishment. To make his case, he explained its plot to Katkov:
In September 1865, Fyodor Dostoyevsky was living in Wiesbaden, Germany, and couldn’t pay his rent. A string of gambling losses had left him near financial ruin, a familiar circumstance for Dostoyevsky (as dramatized in his novel The Gambler). Owing a considerable amount of money to his landlord, he hoped an advance for a new novel might shore his fortunes up. Writing to Mikhail Katkov, the editor of the Russian Herald, Dostoyevsky asked for 300 rubles, promising in return the manuscript that would become Crime and Punishment. To make his case, he explained its plot to Katkov:
It is a
psychological account of a crime. The action is topical, set in the current
year. A young student of lower-middle-class origin, who has been expelled from
the university, and who lives in dire poverty, succumbs—through thoughtlessness
and lack of strong convictions—to certain strange, “incomplete” ideas that are
floating in the air, and decides to get out of his misery once and for all.
“Floating in the air”
were a set of ideas, imported from Western Europe, that would come to define
the tenets of Russian radical thought in the 1860s. Russian students like Crime
and Punishment’s antihero, the 23-year-old Raskolnikov, were bombarded with
somewhat distorted and jumbled versions of English utilitarianism, French
utopian socialism, and Darwinism. Taken together, they created an intellectual
climate that, in Dostoyevsky’s estimation, put too much stock in the ability of
science and scientific reasoning to explain human behavior.
These various theories
of social improvement became distilled for a Russian audience in the work of
Nikolai Chernyshevsky, whose novel of ideas What Is to Be Done? (1863)
modeled a philosophy that would later be described as “rational egoism.” Rational
egoism relied on the idea that human beings, guided by enlightened
self-interest, would ultimately choose to live in a fair and equal society. The
idea inspired a generation of young Russians coming of age in the wake of Czar
Alexander II’s “great reforms” (which included the abolition of serfdom and the
establishment of local forms of self-government), who wanted to push Russian
society along further and more quickly through a revolution that they believed
began with remaking themselves and interrogating their own desires.
Dostoyevsky, on the other hand, could not abide this scientific dissection of
desire, believing that people were ultimately unaware of why they wanted the
things they wanted. He knew human beings to be irrational and profoundly self-destructive.
He saw these tendencies in his own propensity for gambling, procrastination,
and daily forms of self-ruin... read more:
