Dostoevsky by Frank Joseph

Author:Frank, Joseph
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2010-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

Crime and Punishment came to birth only when, in November 1865, Dostoevsky shifted from a first-person to a third-person narrator. This was the culmination of a long struggle whose vestiges can be traced all through the early stages of composition. Some of the problems of using the first person are already apparent from the earliest version, whose first chapter is supposedly written five days after the murder (committed on June 9). The narrator dates the beginning of his diary as June 14 because, as he explains, to have written anything earlier would have been impossible in view of his mental and emotional confusion. Indeed, Dostoevsky reminds himself that “in all these six chapters (the narrator) must write, speak, and appear to the reader in part as if not in possession of his senses” (7: 83).

Dostoevsky thus wished to convey the narrator’s partial derangement while, at the same time, using him as a focus on the external world and portraying the reactions induced by his crime as the action proceeds. All this posed serious difficulties, and the manuscript version shows Dostoevsky’s constant uncertainty about how to hold the balance between the narrator’s psychic disarray and the needs of his story. This problem of time perspective bothered Dostoevsky from the very start, and he moves the second chapter back several more days, to June 16, in order to give his narrator more time to come to his senses; but the distance between past and present was still not great enough, and this led to an inevitable clash between the situation in which the narrator was immersed and his function as narrator. As Edward Wasiolek has pointed out, “Raskolnikov is supposed to be . . . fixed wholly on his determination to elude his imaginary pursuers. But the ‘I’ point of view forces him to provide his own interpretations, and, even worse, his own stylistic refinements. Every stylistic refinement wars against the realism of the dramatic action.”2 Moreover, there would be serious doubts about the verisimilitude of a narrator who presumably is in a state of semihysteria and yet is able to remember and analyze, to report long scenes as well as lengthy dialogues, and in general to function as a reliable observer. This problem was only made more acute when the Marmeladovs entered the picture and fragments of the drunkard’s extensive monologues began to appear among the notes.

Dostoevsky was acutely aware of this issue, and the first expedient he thought of is indicated by a brief note: “The story ends and the diary begins” (7: 81). Since no trace of such a dual form can be found, this idea was probably abandoned very quickly; but one understands how Dostoevsky’s mind was working. He wished to separate a recital of events, set down by the narrator after they had been completed, from another account of the same events written by someone still caught in their flux. This would have eliminated the disturbing clash between one and the other so noticeable in the Wiesbaden version.

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