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The real event that inspired Dostoevsky to write the novel "Crime and Punishment"
2024-11-29 00:01:30 / MISTERE&KURIOZITETE
Jesus meets Dostoyevsky. He glances at him, and for a moment penetrates deep into the dark tunnels of those tormented eyes, and performs an instant exorcism. Quickly, boldly, without fuss, Jesus-style: The party is over, you little devil. Get out! A slight hum, and there it was.
And Dostoevsky, with the exorcism, is relieved of his hemorrhoids, gambling addiction, severe headaches, fever, depression, hypochondria, intuitions and his terrifying futuristic obsessions. He is released from the "cell" of his skull. And he doesn't write any more books, ever.
In his book "The Sinner and the Saint" Kevin Birmingham inspired by the history of the genesis - philosophical and neurological - of the novel "Crime and Punishment", will leave you wondering about the figure of Dostoevsky, especially since the Russian himself the celebrity had at least two thoughts about himself.
On the one hand, you'll be in awe of his stamina as a writer, his commitment to experience, his artistic fidelity, his fragility/constancy, his vulnerable imagination, etc. On the other hand, you'll wonder if a good portion of Crime and Punishment might not be pure pathology.
You can't even call it one: The entirety of this work describes only 1 minute of violence. Raskolnikov, an arrogant and poor student wandering around the slums of St. Petersburg, brutally murders an evil old woman-a moneylender and her sister who happens to be there.
But why does he commit that crime? Why do you pick up the axe? Not for money, and not for passion. Perhaps the motive lies behind the passion for ideas. Because besides being mad, Raskolnikov
it is a kind of philosophy: It abstracts over the value (or lack thereof) of a single human life; on the fallibility of criminals; and on the power of an act, of a decisive blow, to transform reality.
His disconnection from society and from the matrix of human goodness is complete. He is a lone wolf. So in other words, to quote the band Iggy Pop, he's just a modern guy. He is presented as abandoned by the boa, like a Samuel Beckett character; he behaves with the consciousness of Kafka's characters; and murmurs to himself like Travis Bickell, the protagonist of the famous movie "Taxi Driver" played by Robert De Niro.
"To see the cruel veil under which the Universe suffers, to know that even a single burst of human will is enough to destroy it and merge with eternity, to know yourself and be like the last creature... it is terrible!"-i wrote Dostoevsky to his brother Mikail before publishing Crime and Punishment.
Pora was he the last creature, or one of the first of a new era? His biography is a sequence of events for which only the adjective "Dostoevsky" can properly describe them. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was only 15 years old.
Two years later, his father also dies under mysterious circumstances, most likely killed by the serfs. With the intention of starting a literary career in St. Petersburg, the young Dostoevsky plunges into great debt. He became part of the reformist policies, for which Tsarist Russia was boiling at the time: secret meetings, fiery manifestos.
In 1849 he was arrested during a wave of purges by the Tsar's secret services and charged with sedition and conspiracy. Taken before a firing squad on Semenovsky Parade Square, in the presence of a large crowd, Dostojeksky and his comrades are saved from death by a last-minute gesture of mercy from Tsar Nicholas I himself.
Their sentence is reduced. Not death, but exile to Siberia. Dostoevsky spends 4 years at hard labor in the Omsk prison camp, and another 5 years as a soldier in the Siberian army.
Then, at the age of 38, he returned to St. Petersburg. Birmingham is excellent in describing the intellectual milieu awaiting the Russian writer there. Nihilism, egoism, materialism... The man who is being reconceptualized. A physiologist publishes an influential book entitled Brain Reflexes.
Based on his experiments with a number of unfortunate frogs, he claimed that mental activity is all reflex. "Animation, passion, mockery, sadness, joy, etc., are simply the results of a greater or lesser contraction of certain muscle groups," he wrote.
Dostoevsky immediately understood where all this was leading: the individual, trapped in his head, left at the mercy of his neurons. Meanwhile, his brain continues to cause him seizures - temporal lobe epilepsy, what Dostoevsky calls "falling disease".
And there is something else. He read one day about the trial of a murder that took place in France, committed by Pierre-François Lesnar. This was a seemingly quiet fellow, with perfect social behavior, read Rousseau; wrote poetry. But he was actually a crazy sociopath, a new kind of man.
When they put him to the guillotine, he turns his head up so that he can look at the sharp blade that came down on his neck. Dostoevsky published a 50-page essay, translated from French, about Lesnar with the title "An outstanding personality", in his literary magazine "Vremya".
The murder trials, he writes in an introductory note, are "more exciting than all possible novels, since they throw light on the dark sides of the human soul, which art does not like to approach." That event led to after writing the novel "Crime and Punishment", which Dostoevsky started in September 1865, while he was half-starved and sleepless in a hotel in Wiesbaden, Germany, after he had lost all his money in roulette.
It is a novel of dilapidated buildings as if they have come out of the war, with doors full of soot, and small rooms that smell of rats and leather. Hallucinations mix with reality and vice versa. Drunk people say very smart things.
It is above all a novel of subjectivism: of its oppression, of the screaming loneliness of the protagonist. "Completely unnecessary and unexpected details should be left aside at any moment in the middle of the story" - wrote Dostoyevsky in his diary. Raskolnikov's motives, redemption or lack thereof, plot twists.
"Crime and Punishment" is about your brain, your brain, which is the "seat" of modern consciousness. It is about how one really feels. "What is Hell?" asks Father Zosima in Dostoevsky's other novel "The Brothers Karamazov". "I affirm that it is suffering from the inability to love." Seeking freedom from yourself, from complete mental isolation, you can destroy him like Lesnar or let yourself fall in love like Raskolnikov does in the not very convincing epilogue of "Crime and Punishment".
The love of his wife, Sonja, manages to comfort him and his mind is transformed: “Now he was not deciding anything with his consciousness; he felt lonely. Instead of dialectics, life itself had arrived, and something completely different had to be processed in his consciousness". As is generally the case with Dostoyevsky, Jesus is somewhere nearby, smiling, hidden. Raskolnikov has the Gospels under his pillow, and he remembers how Sonya once read him the story of Lazarus. Fall in love and you will come out of the state of death. What if you don't?
In the same epilogue, Raskolnikov, lying in a prison hospital in Siberia, has a dream in the middle of a fever: He sees a great plague coming "from the depths of Asia". But wait – it's a mental wound. "People who were touched by it immediately became demon-possessed and insane. But never did these people consider themselves so intelligent and so infallible to the truth as when they were infected."
Individualism has reached its peak; atomization is total. "Everyone was worried, no one understood anyone else, everyone thought that the truth lay only in him and in relation to everyone else, he suffered, beat his chest, cried and wrung his hands." / "The Atlantic" - Bota.al
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