Crime and Punishment

Psychological and philosophical at its root, the story descries Rodion Raskolnikov’s crime in murdering a pawnbroker and his subsequent punishment of psychological deterioration and existential crisis. C&P is existentialist, in content but not in name (just like Kierkegaard - Dostoevsky was a hundred years too early to the existentialism bandwagon that Sartre popularized); the late Raskolnikov realizes his motive for the murder was solely out of a desperate attempt to demonstrate his existence. Having read Nausea right before, both Raskolnikov and Sartre’s antihero Roquentin have their share of psychedelic deliria on their doomed quests to justify their existence. It is also at once a detective story where the most threatening investigator is Raskolnikov himself. The myriad of contradictions in him made him real and tangible as a character: he’s a man both intellectual and mad, both charitable and impoverished. These contradictions are rooted in his very name, Raskolnikov, which has its Russian root in “schism” for division, and all of these details come together to effect an angst-filled pleasure for the reader.

Midway through the story we learn that Raskolnikov had written an article while he was in school called “On Crime”. In here I found one of the most accurate and salient descriptions of psychopathic ideology (just as Raskolnikov is a paragon of psychopathy). I don’t use psychopathy as a pejorative, but rather a neutral term describing the characteristics to be detached, emotionless, and having liberal morals, all of which inevitably make it easier to hurt others and hence psychopathy’s connection to crime. Raskolnikov writes that there are two types of people: the ordinary (non-psychopathic), and the extraordinary, who are the psychopathic people who aren’t afraid to kill, conquer, break rules, and often lead the meek, ordinary people in the world. Indeed, cruelty and prioritizing cold rationality over fiery whims of passion often result in some action contradicting societal expectations, a gap which is called crime. I view psychopathy as a double-edged sword: it is simply a power to ignore certain norms, which seems hardly sufficient to be morally charged on its own. In Raskolnikov’s case, he committed a pointless murder and tripped over his guilt, and so he only used his ability to cause meaningless harm instead of doing anything more notable like his role model of Napoleon. Such a waste of ability is one of the tragedies in the story.