A Siberian Rebirth

For this semester I’ll offer my reflections on an introductory, freshmen-level course on western core texts that I am teaching.

At the end of Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov confesses of his murder of Alyona Ivanova and her sister, Lizaveta, at the police station. Although he had believed himself to be one of the extraordinary persons who could shed blood as a matter of conscience, Raskolnikov instead discovers that he is just an ordinary “louse,” so ordinary in fact that he can’t even commit suicide like the debauched and depraved Svidrigailov.

Sentenced in prison in Siberia, Raskolnikov eventually accepts responsibility for his crime, acknowledges his love for Sonya, and begins his spiritual rebirth. It was only when Sonya had fallen ill that Raskolnikov recognizes the importance of her to his life and how much of his happiness resides in being with her. While he had seven years remaining in his sentence, Raskolnikov for the first time sees a future filled with hope.

In his claim that Christians had made what was formerly considered bad (weakness) into the highest good and what was formerly considered good (strength) into worst evil, Nietzsche argues that Christianity was not only a “slave revolt” but also nihilist in denying our life-affirming instincts for strength, power, and mastery. The Christians accomplished this transvaluation of values by positing a God above all other gods, to whom each of us owed a debt (original sin) so great that we were unable to discharge without His grace. According to Nietzsche, what is needed was a return to a morality where the strong ruthlessly triumphing over the weak.

By committing murder to see whether he is an extraordinary person, Raskolnikov is the epitome of Nietzsche’s philosophy. But, as Dostoevsky shows throughout the novel, Raskolnikov slowly accepts that he is not extraordinary and accepts the moral and legal punishment of his crime. In fact, there are no extraordinary people in Crime and Punishment – only ordinary people who pursue their interests, passions, and schemes. The consequences of Nietzsche’s philosophy are not mastery, freedom, and strength but rather sickness, suicide, and resignation to the fact that no one is extraordinary.

Thus, Dostoevsky illustrates what transpires when values are transvaluated as Nietzsche wishes: when the highest values are strength and power and the lowest value are weakness and moral goodness. Instead of being extraordinary, Raskolnikov is portrayed as ordinary with his conscience suffering throughout the novel from the crime he had committed. As ordinary people, we need one another not only to survive but to live as a moral community in the values that someone like Sonya represents: humility, patience, and faith.

Like all great works of literature, Crime and Punishment offers more than what we have learned this past semester. Nonetheless, the themes of reason and rationalism, money as a social contract, motivations and murder, class exploitation, and personal and societal morality have been the ones we have explored together with Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, and others helping us make sense of the novel. Besides being a great story, Crime and Punishment has helped us think about the modern condition and the key ideas that are foundational to it. By doing so, we can start to think about what it means to be human and what life we ultimately want to live.