More Than Money?

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

One of the more horrific scenes – and believe me, there are plenty from which to choose – in Crime and Punishment is the post-funeral banquet scene at Katherina Ivanova’s apartment. Her husband, Semyon Zakharovich, was an alcoholic who was unable to hold onto a job that not only devasted his life but also his family’s, ultimately forcing his daughter Sonya into prostitution to put food on the table. Semyon is struck mortally by a carriage in the street, after which Raskolnikov rushes to help him and takes him to his family’s apartment. Calling out to Sonya to forgive him, Semyon dies in his daughter’s arms. Before he leaves, Raskolnikov gives his last twenty five rubles to Katherine Ivanova, claiming it is repayment of a debt from her late husband.

Katherina Ivanova, educated in a provincial school for children of the nobility but made horrible choices for husbands, wanted to demonstrate to her neighbors that she knew how to behave properly by hosting a banquet after Semyon’s funeral. However, the atmosphere quickly deteriorates as guests become drunk and she gets into a verbal fight with her German landlady. The landlady kicks Katherina out of the apartment. Surrounded by people in the street, Katherina goes insane and forces her terrified children to perform for money. Raskolnikov and Sonya manage to get her back to Sonya’s room where she dies, raving and remembering when, as a young school girl, she was awarded a gold medal and certificate of merit.

One way to understand the downward spiral and destruction of Katherina Ivanova’s family is how the victims of economic modernization suffered in nineteenth-century Russia (as well as the consequences of alcoholism and poor choices in spouses). What happens to families that can’t adjust to a transformed Russia that is urban, modern, and monied? Where the local and organic ties are severed and one lives in an agglomeration of alienated individuals? Where the gulf between the rich and the poor is so vast that people are resorted to selling their bodies just to stay alive?

As Russia was beginning to industrialize, it was suffering from the same set of political, social, and economic problems that its western European predecessors had experienced. Not surprisingly, some people looked to Marxism as an antidote. While we don’t find that here in Crime and Punishment, it does appear later in Russia and eventually emerges triumphant as Marxist-Leninism in the 1917 October Revolution. While I have expressed earlier my reservations about Marxism, one can see why it would be attractive after following the fate of Katherina’s family in Dostoevsky’s novel.

However, Dostoevsky offers an alternative to dialectical materialism in Orthodox Christianity. For Dostoevsky, the material world is necessary for us to exist but it does not ultimately define us. Sonya, who is forced to resort to prostitution to survive and support her family, is the most sincere Christian in the novel, not letting her profession define her identity. Likewise, Raskolnikov who suffers from hunger and sickness throughout the novel murders not because he wants money (although it is clear he needs it) but because he wants to test whether he is an extraordinary person. In other words, the suffering of the poor – the losers of globalization, the “basket of deplorables” who “clings to guns or religion” – cannot be solved primarily by material answers for Dostoevsky. A spiritual solution must be sought instead. What that is and whether it would work today will be my final reflection on this novel.