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For Dostoevsky Raskolnikov, dressed carelessly, brooding alone day after day in his room barely bigger than a closet, eating little, avoiding human contact, despising the life going on around him, is a pastiche, carried to an absurd degree, of an eastern holy man. He wants to go beyond the life around him by using his mind so exclusively that he loses touch with regular life. He denies life to find life like some eastern holy man and this direction for Dostoevsky leads to nothing, to a transcendence of normal life that is empty and worthless and destructive. For Dostoevsky, all of Western European culture goes in this direction. The mind dictates in Europe how life should be lived. It is the source of truth and goodness. Even refined poetic and aesthetic experience is fashioned into cultural objects by the mind and all scientific and mathematical products are always the result of rational thinking. The Western European ideal of blessedness is the state of the perfectly indifferent mind thinking about itself. Thinkers like Aristotle and Plato and others in the ancient world along with medieval European scholastic thinkers of the Catholic Church as well as renaissance thinkers down to the rule in Dostoevsky’s time of European thinkers who exclude experience that does not fit within the boundaries of bourgeois rationalism have fallen all of them into the mind’s fatal trap. European thought has led Europeans to live in the categories where they think. Dostoevsky will have none of it. For him Raskolnikov is searching for a separate superior state of being that does not exist except as an illusion created by the power of his mind. Only Marmeladov’s madness can lead to real spirituality because it is profoundly human.

At this point in his novel Dostoevsky throws out to us bits of Christian religious truth as an example of truth totally beyond the vision and the soul of his main character, Raskolnikov. He knows that we as well as Raskolnikov will pay no attention to what Marmeladov says. We all live in the categories where we think and we are too fascinated, as we read along, with young Raskolnikov’s adventure inspired by his mind. It is where we ourselves look too for adventure and we pass quickly over what Marmeladov says. It is the raving of a madman. It has nothing to do with rational people like Raskolnikov and ourselves.

Marmeladov’s daughter Sonya has gone out to the streets to earn money to feed her stepmother and her stepbrothers and stepsister. She even is so humble and self-sacrificing that she gives some of the money so fouly earned to her father to continue his five-day drunk. “He will pity us Who has had pity on all men,” Marmeladov says with genuine human feeling to young Raskolnikov sitting across the table in the tavern listening. “He will come in that day and he will ask: ‘Where is the daughter who gave herself for her cross, consumptive stepmother, and for the little children of another? Where is the daughter who had pity on the filthy drunkard, her earthly father, undismayed by his beastliness?’ And He will say, ‘Come to me! I have already forgiven thee once…I have forgiven thee once… Thy sins which are many are forgiven thee for thou hast loved much…’ And he will forgive my Sonya, He will forgive, I know it…I felt it in my heart when I was with her just now!” But Dostoevsky does not end Marmeladov’s passionate words here. He does not let those who live by rationality and without compassion and have achieved “political economy” slip away without throwing them a punch. For as he continues his passionate outpouring of his feelings Marmeladov speaks of what will be said at the final judgment to “the wise ones and those of understanding” and he explains why the meek and the humble and weak will be accepted by Him. “This is why I receive them, o ye wise,” Marmeladov goes on with feeling, “this is why I receive them, o ye of understanding, that not one of them believed himself to be worthy of this.”

Two days later, Raskolnikov will hammer the blunt backside of an axe onto the head of a sixty-year-old woman, a pawnbroker, killing her. A few moments after the murder, while he searches in the dead woman’s bedroom for valuables, the pawnbroker’s half-sister, Lizaveta, comes in the main room of the apartment and discovers the dead body of her half-sister on the floor bloodied. Raskolnikov already knows about Lizaveta and she knows a little about him from the comings and goings of people in that area of the city. Dostoevsky describes her, “She was a single woman of about thirty-five, tall, clumsy, timid, submissive and almost idiotic. She was a complete slave and went in fear and trembling of her sister, who made her work day and night, and even beat her.” Lizaveta sees the dead body on the floor and then Raskolnikov comes out of the bedroom. “And this hapless Lizaveta was so simple and had been so thoroughly crushed and scared that she did not even raise a hand to guard her face, though that was the most necessary and natural action at the moment, for the axe was raised above her face. She only put up her empty left hand, but not to her face, slowly holding it out before her as though motioning him away. The axe fell with the sharp edge just on the skull and split at one blow all the top of the head.”

What can be done with such people? Isn’t the logic directing Raskolnikov’s act reasonable? Does an old woman, a pawnbroker scratching out a living for herself on the poverty and misery of the poor, deserve to live? Of course everyone knows what is evil and what is good and she should absolutely not be murdered with a blow on her head from an axe, but isn’t it more or less necessary to murder her some way or another? What role can she play in society except to live a miserable life? Isn’t misery itself a kind of murder, a slow murder of the poor by those who possess riches and live a higher form of life enlightened by reason? And the hapless Lizaveta, simple and meek and crushed by the burden of living, what can society do with her except find some way to get rid of her, not murder her but at least keep her out of sight somewhere so that enlightened people don’t come in contact with her disgraceful poverty? Besides, it was an accident that caused her death. She happened to walk into the scene of her half-sister’s murder and confront by accident her killer. Raskolnikov was forced by circumstances to kill her too. Circumstances and chance kill the poor all the time. To be unlucky is disgraceful and all the poor are unlucky. They are incapable of living rationally, of making real progress. They don’t think in the proper manner about their actions before they take action. They deserve their fate. In fact, from a larger point of view, the poor are necessary in order to give higher meaning to the lives of the rich and successful. The enlightenment of the mind is a necessary development that superior people seek caused partly by their observation of the miserable lives of the poor. Raskolnikov is an instrument of bourgeois society. He took a drastic step upward to enlightenment by ridding society of two beings whom society in a civilized manner was getting rid of anyway.

The only thing Raskolnikov cares about after the double murder is himself. Two men come to the door of the pawnbroker’s apartment. When the bell of the apartment tinkles and then someone begins banging loudly on the door, he has no thought at all of the two dead women near him on the floor. A giddiness comes over him but when a voice on the other side of the door calls out loudly to the pawnbroker, he recovers himself. He thinks and thinks and thinks again of how to escape. He sneaks out to the street unobserved aided by his reason now alive and vital and dynamic. It has become a strange delight for him to now exist safely only by thinking and to be isolated now in a state of supreme detachment from any connection with people he now passes on the street. He is no longer like those around him. He alone counts. His safety, his defiance of all regular habits, his criminal state, this alone now makes Raskolnikov Raskolnikov.

At any moment society can reach out and grasp him like some scared chicken running around a farmyard unless he pretends successfully to be like everyone else. Only his mind is of any use in this new exhilarating drama. He must make himself as enlightened as possible. He is like an actor in a theater separated from the public before him and feeling strangely and magically alive even though his every word and his every act is counterfeited and false. He must be a light shining in the darkness of a society now totally alien to him but a light visible only to himself. Remorse? It does not exist and can not exist in him because his state of criminality must have no influence at all coming from the soul if he is to exist successfully and safely. The problem of the Russian soul no longer exists for Raskolnikov. He is not divided anymore by the influences that drive the soul inwardly or outwardly. He is condemned by his criminal act to live only where he thinks and it excites him to live there with a strange delight that grows more delightful as he escapes again and again from normal humans who are all now his enemies.

Raskolnikov has now reached, in a strange and unique fashion, the pinnacle of Western European religious and intellectual culture. His mind produced the thoughts that led to his crime but it observed his crime with perfect indifference just as it does all human actions. He can no longer live ever again as a normal human unless the unthinkable happens and he breaks the connection with his mind that his thinking produces. In order to experience remorse for what he has done, he would have to reach a place in his soul where a mysterious voice that has nothing to do with his mind and his thoughts cries out to him passionately that he should not have done it. This is impossible. Remorse is a form of compassion, a kind of compassion that a person feels for himself, a compassion of regret for a wrong he has committed. Modern European science, according to what a man has told Marmeladov, forbids compassion and successful enlightened modern Europeans have forbidden themselves not only compassion but remorse for the sufferings and injuries they inflict on the poor. Dostoevsky resists any attempt on his part to direct his hero towards remorse and instead directs him to imprison himself in his own mind more and more intensely even when influences caused by compassion for him by others should move him towards remorse. Dostoevsky is not out to convert Raskolnikov to the truths of the soul. He has driven Raskolnikov’s self so deeply into his mind that there is no place within him anymore for a soul. He does have moments when he is moved by compassion for the poor and he has other emotional moments, especially moments of fear, but these are fleeting moments.

But not all Western Europeans of Dostoevsky’s time were without compassion for the poor. The best of the Europeans were against modern bourgeois capitalist culture, as was Dostoevsky, but Dostoevsky by the time he wrote of Raskolnikov had abandoned the solution Europeans had found for the problem, socialism. They had really no answer for the sufferings of “the people” driven to poverty and despair by the bourgeoisie except some new form of society that would force all to become brotherly by working together collectively for common economic benefits. Dostoevsky grew to despise modern Europeans and their modern culture based exclusively on rationality and selfishness. He never ceases throughout his works to invent odd characters like Raskolnikov who have evolved into strange aberrations from everything normal in life except that they usually do not abandon rationality but instead transform it to new, strange expressions. Many of the European socialists saw clearly as did Dostoevsky the decadence of late-nineteenth-century capitalism, but Dostoevsky had given up the socialistic views of his youth and grew to hate all liberal and socialist based thoughts designed to solve Russia’s suffering.

Dostoevsky had been a member of a radical group when he was twenty-seven that was inspired by liberal and socialist ideas. Some members of the group met secretly, obtained a printing press, and planned to publish their radical notions for changing society for the better. Dostoevsky was arrested along with others and condemned by the government to be shot by a firing squad. The young writer stood on a platform on a cold December morning waiting for the bullets that would end all his radical thoughts and along with them all his regular human thoughts of whatever kind forever. In those seconds before his death Dostoevsky, to borrow Lev Shestov’s expression, received “a new pair of eyes”. Never again after he received his new eyes, both during the few seconds that remained to him before his death and in the millions of seconds that remained to him because the Tsar unexpectedly stopped his execution – – never again did he look at anything only with regular, normal eyes. But what changed the sight that came forth from his eyes was what the nearness of death had done to his soul. He would never again look at anything except with the new vision that the eyes of the soul gave him. We can not know ourselves what he experienced in those deadly seconds when his death was certain and about to arrive instantly and certainly. We see it with our normal eyes but our eyes are guided by our minds and not by our soul so we do not see what Dostoevsky suddenly saw and continued to see. We think he gained his new eyes because of some kind of religious experience and since we think of religion as being something above and beyond our normal life, we think that Dostoevsky must have begun looking beyond his merely human life to something divine and spiritual in some hidden world above and beyond the human world. Dostoevsky was a Christian but his Christianity did not change his purely human actions and instead taught him he should not change, that his human nature itself, insulted, injured and suffering, was the only temple in which the true God could be met truly. All types of religious experience that were based on seeking some divine experience achieved through some type of mental discipline became alien to him. He grew to hate all doctrines that tried to separate a human being from his authentic self. Liberal ideas, socialist ideas, even some Christian ideas – – he threw them all away onto the same garbage heap where the experience of facing death had thrown away his old eyes. He despised all Western European thought because it was all based on elevated forms of reasoning that did little more than alienate a human being from his own being. European critics experienced his despite and contempt for them and lashed back at him. The German bourgeois novelist Thomas Mann said that Dostoevsky’s works were full of “religious prating”. A Russian critic despised him as someone always “looking for buried treasure”. In his greatest novel, The Possessed, he creates a character, based on the Russian writer Turgenev, and makes him the butt of his satire almost maliciously. Turgenev in turn despised Dostoevsky’s Christianity and gave an example of the cruel beating he observed him once giving his servant as illustrating the effect on Dostoevsky of his Christianity. Turgenev believed Dostoevsky was a writer who knew nothing of real freedom, which for Turgenev was based, as among all Western European intellectuals, on the elevating power of the mind. What interested Dostoevsky most was not religion itself, or doctrines of any kind including even Christian doctrine, but humans driven to the point where they might change radically and discover not some divine world off somewhere in the clouds but the new self within them, rooted in their very humanity, that they themselves had been themselves hiding from themselves. The mind made men and women selfish and cruel humans yet Dostoevsky sought God paradoxically only in humans and nowhere else.

Raskolnikov is a holy man in reverse, that is, for Dostoevsky he is not a holy man at all and until he has himself discovered that his human nature when ruled only by the mind is foul, he will never be anything, nothing but a human nothing living in the categories where he thinks. He goes out of his little room a short time after his crime thinking not of the murders but only of walking about and finding some place to get rid of the objects he possesses taken from the pawnbroker that might be evidence of his involvement. He buries them under a huge stone. Then he walks on without resting. “He had a terrible longing for some distraction, but he did not know what to do, what to attempt. A new overwhelming sensation was gaining more and more mastery over him every moment; this was an immeasurable, almost physical, repulsion for everything surrounding him, an obstinate, malignant feeling of hatred. All who met him were loathsome to him – he loathed their faces, their movements, their gestures. If anyone had addressed him, he felt that he might have spat at him or bitten him…”