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out quickly, whether I was a louse like all the rest, or a man?… Would I dare to reach down and take, or not?
    A rapid shuttling of motives, one overtaking the other: family reasons, societal reasons, altruism, utilitarianism, socialism, nihilism, Napoleonic raw domination. Generations of readers have been mystified by this plethora of incitements and explanations. Why so many? One critic, the Russian Formalist Mikhail Bakhtin, analyzing Dostoyevsky’s frequent ellipses and the back-and-forth interior dialogue of characters disputing with themselves—each encompassing multiple points of view—concludes that Dostoyevsky was the inventor of a new “multi-voice” genre, which Bakhtin calls the “polyphonic novel.” Some simply assume that Dostoyevsky changed his mind as he went along, and since he was unable to revise what was already in print—the novel appeared in installments written against deadlines—he was compelled to stitch up the loose ends afterward as best he could. (This sounds plausible enough; if true, it would leave most serious Dostoyevsky scholars of the last century with egg on their faces.)
    A British academic, A. D. Nuttall, offers a psychiatric solution: Raskolnikov is in a state of self-hypnotic schizophrenia. Walter Kaufmann invokes existentialism, drawing Dostoyevsky into Nietzsche’s and Kierkegaard’s web. Freud speculates that Dostoyevsky expresses “sympathy by identification” with criminals as a result of an Oedipal revolt against his father. Harold Bloom, sailing over Raskolnikov’s inconsistencies, sees in him an apocalyptic figure, “a powerful representative of the will demonized by its own strength.” “The best of all murder stories,” says Bloom, “
Crime and Punishment
seems to me beyond praise and beyond affection.” For Vladimir Nabokov, on the other hand, the novel is beyond contempt; he knew even in his teens that it was“long-winded, terribly sentimental, and badly written.” Dostoyevsky is “mediocre,” and his “gallery of characters consists almost exclusively of neurotics and lunatics.” As for Dostoyevsky’s religion, it is a “special lurid brand of the Christian faith.” “I am very eager to debunk Dostoyevsky,” Nabokov assures us.
    Is this a case of the blind men and the elephant? Or the novel as Rorschach test? There is something indeterminate in all these tumbling alternatives—in Raskolnikov’s changing theories, in the critics’ clashing responses. Still, all of them taken together make plain what it is that Dostoyevsky’s novel turns out not to be. It is not, after all, a singlemindedly polemical tract fulminating against every nineteenth-century radical movement in sight—though parts may pass for that. It is not a detective thriller, despite its introduction of Porfiry, a crafty, nimble-tongued, penetratingly intuitive police investigator. It is not a social protest novel, even if it retains clear vestiges of an abandoned earlier work on alcoholism and poverty in the forlorn Marmeladovs, whom Raskolnikov befriends: drunken husband, unbalanced tubercular wife, daughter driven to prostitution.
    And it is not even much of what it has often been praised for being: a “psychological” novel—notwithstanding a startling stab, now and then, into the marrow of a mind. George Eliot is what we mean, in literature, by psychological; among the moderns, Proust, Joyce, James. Dostoyevsky is not psychological in the sense of understanding and portraying familiar human nature.
Crime and Punishment
is in exile from human nature—like the deeply eccentric
Notes from Underground
, which precedes it by a year. The underground man, Raskolnikov’s indispensable foreshadower, his very embryo, revels in the corrupt will to seek out extreme and horrible acts, which gladden him with their “shameful accursed sweetness.” But Raskolnikov will in time feel suffocated by the mental anguish that dogshis crime. Suspicions close in on him; a room in a police