So we were up to part two of Crime and Punishment, right? He, in this state of frenzy, right? Hardly know what he's doing.
He commits the murder. That's in a state of abstraction, right? So, you know, the act seems to be coming down by itself. You know, the agency is given to the acts but once he's committed the murder and there are the two murders and then there are people outside the door and they're pulling on the latch and he feels this incredible sense of intensity okay you know the very opposite of the abstraction the intensity of the presentness and the the intensity of the present moment and that anything can happen and maybe any other you know it's thrilling and terrifying at the same time so he wants to even has this i this urge to stick out his tongue at them by by taunting them and you know right and then he escapes you know by chance well you've got these two states of mind that are very different and they're going to They're both going to play a role in what's going to happen later.
The intense state of mind is going to be so compelling that it becomes addictive. Once you've had a certain kind of intensity, you want to experience it again. It's just astonishing, even if it's a bad intensity. makes you feel so present, so there, that you want more of it.
Well, when Skolnicka leaves, he comes home, and he's in this fever. Remember, his whole theory had been the criminal is accompanied by a disease, but he won't feel that because he doesn't think it's a crime, because he thinks there's no good in evil. But of course, the disease does strike him, just as his theory says. And he's been feeling this. Remember, he was going to, this was going to be the perfect rational crime.
And he runs home, and suddenly he realizes that his pockets are full of trinkets. And the line occurs. He hadn't reckoned on having trinkets to hide, just money, right?
He's going to rob a pawnbroker, and he doesn't think he's going to have trinkets. This is not exactly a rational crime. This is not super planning, right?
You know, quite the opposite. And so he goes back, and he also has this feeling that sort of, like, led him to the murder. of complete apathy and indifference and abstraction. And in that one, he doesn't care what happens to him.
Dostoevsky calls it the cynicism of misery, which is an interesting notion that misery can make you cynical in the sense that you don't care what happens. It's all one view. And then Dostoevsky arranges it so that... This is the moment when he gets summoned to the police station.
Now, he's summoned, remember, because it has nothing to do with the crime. It has to do with not paying his rent to the landlady. But naturally, he wonders why he's being summoned at this moment. And so he goes to the police station. And he determines early enough that he hasn't been summoned because of his own crime.
Once again, he goes from opposite poles. One is he has this intense desire for companionship, to relate to people, to join with them. And in that mood, he tells the police the most intimate details of his life, of his engagement.
to the landlady's daughter and her debt to the point where they they kind of you know nobody asked for such intimate details and then he swings to the opposite extreme. And this is on page 103 to 4, and it says, Raskolnikov fancied that the head clerk treated him more casually and contemptuously after his speech about his life, but strange to say, he suddenly felt complete indifference to anyone's opinion, and this revulsion took place in a flash. There's no in-between state. In one instant. if he had cared to think a little he would have been amazed indeed that he could have talked to them like that a minute before forcing his feelings upon them and now if the whole room had been filled not with police officers but with those nearest and dearest to him he would not have found one human word for them so empty was his heart a gloomy sensation of agonizing, everlasting solitude and remoteness took consciousness from his form in his soul.
It was not the meanness of a sentimental effusion before Ilya Petrovich, nor the meanness of the latter's triumphal with him that had caused this sudden revulsion in his heart. Something was happening, I'm abbreviating this, something was happening to him entirely new, sudden and unknown. It was not that he understood, but he felt.
But he felt clearly, with all the intensity of sensation, that he could never more appeal to these people in the police office with sentimental effusions or with anything whatever, and that if they had been his own brothers and sisters, it would have been utterly out of the question to appeal to them in any circumstance of life. He had never experienced such a strange and awful sensation. And what was most agonizing, It was more a sensation than a conception or idea, a direct sensation, the most agonizing of all the sensations he had known in his life. He feels this, you understand, because the murder has cut him off from everything human, in his own life.
The punishment suddenly appears to be that everybody else is in one world. And he is in another, morally speaking, in his own mind, right? So that he is a different sort of being from them.
And even if they were his closest relative, he could not appeal to them. And remember, he's going to be distant when his mother and sister show up, you know, partly for this reason. So here it is with that sense that he is completely cut off. this is not something he had expected right and yet remember that what led him to the murder is feelings of deep compassion and combined with powerlessness to do anything about those he was having compassion for right um well now in this state compassion is gone right so That sense of connection that compassion creates leads him to do something that destroys the possibility of compassion or any other related feeling.
And it doesn't have to be murder for that to happen, right? Sometimes you can, the intensity of feelings of compassion for others can... lead you, it can become too intense to bear and can lead you to the opposite state. In one of his essays, Dostoevsky, you know, is taunting the radicals for not understanding human psychology, thinking it's too simplistic. And he says, so do you know that if a mother has a child that is suffering terribly, and she feels utterly powerless to help the child and the suffering just grows worse, at some point she will begin to hate the child.
It's not a decision, right? It's just that it's precisely because she cares so much that the suffering is too great to bear. Okay, okay. This is the complexity of human emotion, right?
Well, That's why when he comes back, he has this incredible dream. You've seen wonderful dreams in this book. You're going to see some more wonderful ones.
He's lying there, and the police lieutenant has come and is mercilessly beating the landlady on the stairs, and not just beating her, but taking her head and slamming her. And she's groaning, and he thinks it's... really happens so that when Nastassia, the servant, comes in. By the way, Nastassia plays a wonderful role here.
She is a minor character, but she is the voice of unpretentious decency. Okay? Just kindness and taking care of people, right? The sort of thing he overlooks, but which the author doesn't. And he asks her, why would they beating the landlady?
Nobody was beating the landlady, she says, right? He can't really distinguish between... See, his own state of mind is so dreamlike, he can't really tell when he's in a dream. And then she says, it's the blood.
And of course, he's thinking there's blood around, blood on his socks, right? But of course, she means just the blood ringing in his ear, okay? Well, remember, it's at this point that his friend Razumikhin comes. Razumikhin is going to play a big role in the book. He was on his way to visit Razumikhin in part one on the way to the murder.
And he said to himself, can I have expected to solve this problem with Razumikhin alone? And he, because Razumikhin does actually represent a sort of solution. He said, he. His name comes from razum, which means reason.
Not rationality, but it's opposite, reason. Reason and rationality are completely different. I remember my old friend, the philosopher Stephen Toulmin, who died about 10 years ago, telling me that when he was a professor at the University of Chicago, he heard...
there was a lecture being given with the title, Is it Rational to be Reasonable? And he suddenly realized that the main question of his life, and it really was, was the opposite one. Is it reasonable to be rational?
Okay. And, you know. Reason, judgment, common sense, all go together.
You know, rationality can lead you to anything. And Razumikhin is clearly reason. He believes in, you know, hard work and practical, you know, solutions to things. And he has utter contempt for the rationalists, okay, which he keeps coming back to the intelligentsia, which, you know, the revolutionaries possessed by some theory or other.
Okay? And you know, this is kind of a Russian thing, you know, if you are an intellectual, you become a utilitarian, a communist. You have some solution, that's theory that's going to solve all problems, right? And he knows you can't, because history is too complex.
It doesn't fit a pattern. Everyone thinks they can have a theory of history to explain it. It's too complex, right?
And so are human beings. So that's why, remember, when they start talking about the murder, and of course, Rasmus goes, yes, yes, the murder, nothing, no, no, I'm not, you know, like that. And he hears Razumikhin saying, yes, they're going to accuse this painter of doing this, but for psychological reasons, the painters couldn't be guilty, because they They just were frolicking just before. You can't come in and murder and then come down and frolic. So it doesn't matter what the evidence.
He knows from human psychology. It just isn't possible. And of course it isn't.
Well, they speak about going to a cafe. And Raskolnikov is going to meet Zamyatov there. later, called in French, of course, the Palais de Crystal, the Crystal Palace. And, you know, I have to sort of fill it.
Anyone at the time would have known about the Crystal Palace exhibition in London in 1851. The First World's Fair, all the great inventions, all the wonderful things that science and rationality are going to do to cure human life. And it became the symbol of, you know, for the Russian radicals, it was the future is going to be a palace of crystal with everything solved, everything beautiful. if we only follow rationale.
So it has that sense to it, right? Everything that Raskolnikov doesn't like. But Raskolnikov has been possessed by one theory after another.
So you see how it kind of, why he's an answer, he's different. Well, this is when illusion comes in, okay? And illusion, you remember, is the... the person to whom Dunia has been, Raskolnikov's sister has been engaged, evidently because he's a rich man and she doesn't care about that, but because maybe he can help Raskolnikov.
And, you know, as he says, his mother and sister would sell themselves into slavery for him, and he doesn't want it, right? And in effect, that's what... doing when he sees this awful man, right? And, you know, and so the awful man, and he really is awful, right?
And he wants to show off how progressive and up-to-date he is by quoting the latest theories, right? And Razumikhin accuses him of just spouting the theories, right, to show off. And The theory, he quotes, is a version of the one that, one of the ones that led Raskolnikov to the murder.
Remember, it was about morality is the greatest good for the greatest number, right? Which is what, you know, he led to, therefore, he overheard those students saying in the cafe, you should kill the old lady. Well, Relewzian is saying, okay. You get the greatest good for the greatest number, and this is part of the theory, by every person pursuing his rational self-interest. And part of the theory is, nobody can do anything else, because everybody wants the best for themselves, right?
Which makes it kind of a contradictory, because if they inevitably do it, why do you have to urge them to do it? But for him, this leads to justifying... you know capitalist exploitation not to put too fine a point on it right i mean you know in the old days people said give charity but now science everyone's always appealing to science right um science tells us that charity is bad it's by everybody pursuing his own selfish interest that society gets better off so we should all be as selfish as possible you know It's a very convenient theory if you want to be as selfish as possible, right?
And, you know, Raskolnik recognizes this immediately. And then they start, Roswell Meekin comes in and says, you know, a lot of this crime that's going on is, you know, by people who have not been impoverished, right, and don't need it. How do you think all these rich people, people just committing murders or forging banknotes, right? Which, you know, if the theory of crime always comes from poverty with the case, that wouldn't be the case. And of course, it isn't the case, because we have that all the time, right?
I mean, it's not the case that, you know, my colleagues at the university and the students there never go up to, you know, work for Enron or something like this, right? And... Raskolnikov interrupts to say, well, what do you care whether they commit crimes?
He says, delusion, it's all in accord with your theory, right? And the same thing with the murder of the old lady. Why would you care?
It's all in accordance with your theory. If it's in rational self-interest, then you should be able to commit murder. And Luzhin goes, well, I didn't mean, I didn't mean draw us back from it, right?
Well, Raskolnikov doesn't draw back from the implications of the theory, right? And then Raskolnikov turns on him to say, And is it true that you said it's always better to marry an impoverished woman, because then she'll be, if you marry a beggar, she'll always be dependent and grateful? Well, I didn't mean it that way. And he'd been deeply insulted, of course, and that's what Raskolnikov wants to do.
He wants to insult him. He wants to prevent this from happening, right? Well. then raskolnikov's comes back with once again that sense of complete isolation but strangely enough this time something is added to the feeling feeling that no matter how awful life is no matter how isolated People might want to live just to live.
Does that make sense? The question he has is right on page 157 here. It is, where is it I've read that someone condemned to death says or thinks an hour before his death that if he had to live on some high rock? on such a narrow ledge that he'd only have room to stand and the ocean everlasting darkness everlasting solitude everlasting tempest around him if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life a thousand years eternity it were better to live so than to die at once how true it is good god how true man is a vile creature and vile is he who calls him vile for that you know Man is a scoundrel, and he's a scoundrel who calls him a scoundrel. That's what happened in part one.
It's the same sort of reversal here, right? And what he means, by the way, the place where he read it is Notre Dame de Paris, you know, the Victor Hugo novel. That's thought occurs, right? And what he means by how vile that is, is that existence should not be a goal in itself.
It should be an existence for something, an existence to do something, an existence with meaning, not brute animal existence, right? So it's vile. And yet, maybe to say it's vile is vile, okay?
Just like... He said in part one, man gets used to everything, the scoundrel. We shouldn't get used to some things, right?
They're too awful. And yet, you're a scoundrel for saying that. He keeps reversing himself in this way, right?
Well, the next key scene you've got is with, he goes, you know. into the tavern to sit down and read the papers. Now he's really trying to read the papers to find out if the murder he committed is being reported, what's being said. But there Zamyatov sees him. By the way, Zamyatov comes from the word to notice.
So he sits down and he says, what were you looking for in the papers? Were you there to read about the fires? Now, I need to explain this one to you. There were mysterious fires all over Petersburg at this point.
The cause was never definitively discovered, but everyone, both the police and the radicals, assumed it was being set as revolutionary acts. by the radicals. So again, this is how Dostoevsky sort of brings in kind of political themes here, as if, you know, Raskolnikov's murder, the same reasoning is going to justify mass murder in revolution, right? And accidentally killing Lise Vieta, well... You say in a revolution you're just going to kill the evil people, but it never works out that way.
There are always lisa pietas who get in the way. That's the allegory. He's working to extend it into a political, without quite saying it. But that's why the reference to the fire is there.
And then he knows that Semyonov is wondering. Remember that moment in the police station, right? Gee, did he do it? And they start talking about...
The psychology of people who commit crimes. For example, there were these counterfeiters, right? And they sent this guy to change the notes, and he was so nervous that he left some of the money behind, and that created suspicion, and they got it.
Well, says Raskolnikov, that just shows they're not rational. They're amateur. Now, if it were me, I would have spent a lot of time and exhaust.
No, I think I made a mistake in the third hundred of the fourth hour. I need to go back and count that again. And then you hold it up to the line.
No, I think this might be a counterfeit bill. Change it for me. To the point they couldn't wait to get rid of you.
Of course, he doesn't realize that that itself might, you know. excite suspicion if you overdo it. But Samyatov says, well, you couldn't possibly do that, actually.
You wouldn't have the presence of mind. And Raskolnikov is insulted as if to say, I not have the presence of mind, whereas of course he doesn't. And finally, he remembers the moment when he was standing at the door in the pawnbroker's apartment with the two men on the other side pulling on the latch, and he was staring at it in horror, lest the latch be pulled out of the world, that sense of intensity.
And he has the urge to repeat that sense of intensity by saying, bringing it up to an almost confession. They both suddenly find themselves whispering. Why are they whispering?
Because it's as if he's saying something so the police won't overhear. Except he's saying it at the moment. But that's the psychology, right?
And what if it was I who killed the old woman and Lisa Vienda with an axe? Is it? possible? You believed it!
You believed it! Okay, he leads himself up to actually confessing, but then takes it back. He's going to have this urge over and over again to confess, not out of guilt, you understand, but out of a peculiar sense that he wants to repeat the intensity of that moment.
Okay? And that's why after that scene, right, he goes... back to the apartment. The criminal returns to the scene of the crime, but not out of guilt.
No, no, no. That's old-fashioned, right? He returns, and he sees they're painting the old woman's apartment, and he kind of resents it, as if he expected the bodies to be there and the dirt to be there. Wait a minute, this is an important part of my life.
I mean, you can't change it, is sort of the implication, right? And, you know, what are you doing here? They say, oh, I'm thinking of renting it.
apartment and he starts pressing the bell and it rings the way it did when people on the other side of the door and it does reproduce in himself that sense of sheer intensity and terror it had in that moment and he does it again and again and then again he almost confesses you want to know why i'm here take me to the police station i'll tell you what you why I'm here, but nobody does, right? He seems to be drawn by this strange psychological state. Well, on the way out, okay, he's leaving, and there's some accident which has happened in the street, okay?
And he goes over to investigate it, and it turns out... It's his friend Marmalade, who, drunk, has walked under the wheels of a coach. Or maybe it's suicide. Probably it's drunk. and nobody knows where he is or you know where he's from but raskolnikov knows and he has he has in his pocket the money that his mother sent him the money that you know is so precious to her and can't be gotten back and when she sacrificed and he says i'll pay i'll pay take him over i know where to go right and he has marmalade brought home and there you He sees this, you know, apartment, right?
It's sort of, there's rooms, you know, there's rooms off one after another, but there's no real division. People can move back and forth, right? And he sees the woman he's heard of, Katharina Ivanovna, his wife, you know, and how there she is, both trying to maintain her dignity, speaking in high-flown language.
While she's been up all night, you know, washing, right? She can't stand dirt, so she's got to be up all night washing, right? And he sees this worn-out woman, and what is she talking about? Her wonderful times in the past when she, you know, the governor gave her some sort of award, right?
And she's not living in the present. And they bring Marmalado in, right? And...
It's just horrible, right? It's just horrible. And everybody is really interested in this, right? And all the other tenants gather around to watch. And here you can get one of the most remarkable passages in the book, I think, that only Dostoevsky could have written.
This is on page 178, okay? Meanwhile, the room had become so full of people that you couldn't have dropped a pin. The policeman left, all except one who remained for a while, trying to drive out the people who came in from the stairs. Almost all Madame Lipovecsel's lodgers had streamed in from the inner rooms of the flat. At first, they were squeezed together in a doorway, but afterwards, they overflowed into the room.
They want to see this, right? Why? Catherine Yvonne flew into a fury. You might let him die in peace, at least, she shouted at the crowd.
You have to ask, if he's overhearing this, what is he feeling, right? Meaning Marmalade, right? Is it a spectacle for you to gape at? And it precisely is, you understand, right?
With cigarettes. Cough, cough, cough. You might as well keep your hats on.
And there is one in his hat. Get away! You should respect the dead, at least. And again, you have to ask, but Marmaladev is not yet dead. And if he hears this, described as dead, is he sort of watching himself posthumously?
I mean, her cough choked her. But her reproaches were not without result. They evidently stood in some awe of Katerina Ivanovna. The lodgers, one after another, squeezed back into the doorway. Now here's the phrase.
With that strange inner feeling of satisfaction, which may be observed in the presence of a sudden accident, even in those nearest and dearest to the victim. from which no living person is exempt, even in spite of the sincerest sympathy and compassion. When you see gore, a tragedy, an accident, you become a voyeur. Oh, how fascinating! The gore, the suffering, right?
And you can't help it. You're drawn to it utterly. What is this show about human nature? Well, that's why we like horror films, right? you know the newspapers are filled with crime stories right and we we somehow love can't take our eyes away from human suffering as if we enjoy it and we do enjoy it okay and yet it's not because we're particularly cruel we might the next moment want to help that person in another one of his describes this scene.
There's a fire burning up a house. And he pauses to say, people just love the sights of fires burning up houses and will stare at it and watch people, you know. people being burned up and they can't help it.
It's kind of, he says, it's kind of concussion of the brain. And yet it's, it, this will happen to the meekest clerk or to a person who will the next moment run in to save people at the cost of his own life. Right. There's something in human nature that makes us voyeurs.
Okay. Right. something that we don't like to admit in ourselves.
And you can almost say, by the way, that that's part of the attraction of Dostoevsky himself. I mean, he knows it because he's counting on it as interest for his novel, I understand. And if there's something immoral about it, well, he's using it. Okay, maybe for moral purposes. Our own fascination with him testifies to this.
Well, the scene doesn't end there. The scene, they call in, they send for Sonia, his daughter from his first marriage, who has become a prostitute because there's no other way to support. her stepmother and step siblings, right?
And she comes in dressed, you know, in a way that betrays her profession and yet with the meekest eyes, completely out of place, right, for what she is. And it's the first time Marmalade has seen her this way, so you can hardly believe. And so therefore he feels all the guiltier. And he's drinking out of guilt, which makes him drink more because it makes him more guilty.
And the guilt must be at a fever pitch for him before he dies. It's a horrible death. And as he dies, there's a priest.
there. Okay. And you get this wonderful exchange with the priest. This is on page 182. The priest is there, of course, because they're giving him last rites, right?
The service was over. Catherine Ivanovna went up to her husband again. The priest stepped back and turned to say a few words of admonition and consolation to Catherine Ivanovna on leaving. Well, it's a nice thing to do, but the words are obviously utterly conventional.
Right. What am I to do with these? She interrupted sharply and irritably, pointing to the little ones. She doesn't want the consolation. She doesn't believe it.
God is merciful. Look to the Most High for succor, the priest began. Ah, he is merciful, but not to us. Which is certainly true.
That's a sin, madam. A sin! Observe the priest that is saying God is not merciful, right?
Shaking his head. And isn't that a sin? Cried Catherine Hidana, pointing to the dying man.
That is, this is an indictment of God. You understand, right? The evil, this kind of suffering of these children that she has. How can God allow that?
If the priest has his easy answers, then they're wrong. They can't account for this. And that's what she's nailing at the moment, right? And the priest then says, well, maybe, you know, you can get some money out of people who involved her only random moment. You don't understand.
He said, we'd be worse off if we were, if we were alive, we'd just come home drunk today, right? And the priest said, well, you have to forgive him. He's dying.
Now she flew at him almost in a frenzy. Ah, father, that's words and only words. Forgive?
If he'd not been run over, he'd have come home today drunk and his only shirt dirty and in rags, and he'd have fallen asleep like a log, and I should have been sousing and rinsing till daybreak, and washing his rags and the children's, and then drying them by the window, and as soon as daylight, I should have been darning them. That's how I spend my nights. What's the use of talking of forgiveness? I've forgiven as it is.
A terrible hollow cough interrupted her words, which is part of her suffering. She put her handkerchief to her lips and showed it to the priest, pressing her other hand to her aching chest. The handkerchief was covered with blood. The priest bowed his head and said nothing. He's left speechless.
He has nothing to say. They can't be just... And as he's going out, he exchanges a glance with Raskolnikov, who is asking all the same questions, right? And doesn't have the answers, right?
You know, in some of Dostoevsky's novels, you know, you get people bending whole cases against God's injustice. But here is the same scene here, done by Katerina Ivanovna, right? You know, right to the priest, right? There's no easy way to understand human suffering in that one. Well, Raskolnikov leaves so moved, he leaves all the money he's gotten from his mother there, right, out of compassion.
And, you know, little Polyanka runs after him and pray for your servant, Rodion, he says. And then his reaction is, no, I have not died with the old. I will go on fighting.
That is, his compassion has given him strength, life for. But he misinterprets it, you understand, as not strength from. Compassion and to be compassionate, but strength to fight the police.
Okay. You know, he's going to leave. He feels this surge, right? And see what he can do after this, right? And.
Is he going to, well, it says here, the surge of life, he says, is like a man condemned to death who has suddenly been pardoned. And that happened to Dostoevsky, which everybody knew. It's like he has life again, but he's going to use it so far. In the wrong way, okay?
He doesn't realize, but he's done it what he should do. Okay, I'll leave it like that. Because we have to go to part three next. I wish I could have read you all those passages at length, but I keep looking at the clock, how much time we've got left.
It certainly, I think it's... To hear you read it out loud is helpful, but I think hearing the language, hearing it spoken, and then having you interject in this way, there's a certain cadence to this writing, right? And when we read it to ourselves, we don't necessarily get that. So I think reading the passages are incredibly helpful, not the least of which we can digest some of these names a little better.
Yeah, and I read it the way... The way I hear it, the way I think Dostoevsky meant it. And sometimes when I don't like particular translations, it's because the tonality that I find in it, the levels of irony, the level of intensity, they don't capture that, they just capture words.
I've tried to read other translations a lot, and it just doesn't come off very well, right? So, Demir asks, I think Dostoevsky tells us that rationality convinces but does not explain human nature. Do I understand that correctly? Rationality convinces?
Well, If you put yourself in a certain frame of mind where what counts as a good explanation is the same sort of thinking that you learn in your geometry class, deducing from axioms, which is how economists still do it today, right? They give you these, you know, okay, let's assume that everybody always maximizes self-interest, and let's assume, you know, various assumptions, and then we draw the supply curve and the backwards sloping demand curve and all this kind of thing. And it really will follow, right? And you know, since people are to some extent rational, you can make certain predictions based on it, but it leaves out a great deal.
And so it convinces because of what it doesn't include. And Razumikhin is always coming in to say something like, They see two or three causes, but there are a thousand that operate. So it looks simple, but it isn't.
You'll see he's going to develop this later on. In part three, you're going to get a lot of speeches of Rosamund Meechan like this. Now, I'll just emphasize that looking forward, you've got one of the alternatives to Raskolnikov's way of thinking.
Well, Luzion is not a good alternative, obviously. Razumikhin is clearly one. Katerina Ivanova is not a good one.
You can't do that. But we get the first inkling of yet a different good alternative, but very different from Razumikhin's, when Sonia comes in. She is sheer compassion and meekness.
And you know the line in the New Testament, blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. She's the meek, okay? But I'll tell you, when the meek inherit the earth, Luzion will not be one of the property holders. So there's a difference.
It's completely different from Razumikhin. Raskolnikov is looking around, he's holding to what he had before, but there are these new alternatives sort of coming up before him. And there are going to be some bad alternatives that come up too, you're going to see.
He's looking for something, and all these possibilities of different ways of life are coming up. So Sheila and Michael point out that they felt much more sympathy for Raskolnikov after this, you know, he has this sort of surge in compassion. And Arlene's added in that alternation of rough violence and soft compassion echoes one of his dreams of the whipped mare. You bet.
Can you talk a little bit more about this sort of ebb and flow and how he uses that to such great effect? How he uses what? Sorry, I missed the word.
The moments of compassion and the contrasts. Yeah, I mean, it might seem paradoxical, but... He commits a brutal murder out of compassion. And not for the reasons that those students give, oh, use your money to help the poor.
If that's the case, you know, why does he bury the trinkets, almost forget where they are, and never use the money, right? I mean, you know, the compassion. is what drives him to the murder, you know, when he sees that girl being victimized on the street, when he thinks of, oh, they say a certain percentage must go that way in the social science idiom, but what if Dunia's part of the percentage, right? And, well, when he pities Marmalada, and then later Katerina Ivanovna, he wants to help.
He can't stand the sight of human suffering, right? Some people can, you know, Can. Okay. It's really bad, but now let's go to dinner. Okay.
You know, maybe that's the healthy thing to do. Probably is. But he can't. Okay.
And it's led him to abstract himself from the world. And then it led himself to a theoretical frame of mind, since he can't solve the problem in reality. He's powerless.
He can solve it in theory, okay? And... This is the theory leading to murder. I just mentioned that the detective who you're going to meet later on, who knows he's done it but can't prove it, says, listen, if you had thought of another theory, you might have done something a thousand times worse.
What's a thousand times worse than one murder? Well, it means, again, a revolution. Theoretical thinking can lead you to mass killing. not just to individual killing, right? But in that case, too, maybe some of the people who do it are driven to it by compassion.
You understand that possibility? And Dostoevsky, as a former revolutionary himself, would have known that's possible. Okay. He says in one of his essays, I could have easily been led to violence.
I know it. I mean, he wasn't, right? So that's why he has this sense of...
how good and decent people for good and decent feelings can wind up doing horrible things. You don't have to be a bad person to wind up doing it. It's one of the paradoxes you get. And Raskolnikov, you know, is driven by compassion, again, plus powerlessness, right? I don't know.
Does that help? I hope. So, John, I see you have your hand raised.
I'm going to ask one more question and then I'll come back to you quickly. Professor Morrison, Georgina asks, going back to the context, you talk about the violence. There's so much of it in this book.
Is that a characteristic of what's really going on in 19th century Russia? Well, I mean, was there a lot of a lot of murders? I mean, there were a lot more murders than there were in England, okay, I mean, you know, at the time. And, of course, among the peasants, there particularly were, right?
But it's that what Tostanzi's concerned with here is, does the ordinary kind of murder that you expect, you know, because of poverty or people, you know, not educated right or what. But then there's the kind of murder that is so far relatively rare, but could be much more destructive, which is the murder that results from an advanced theory. There's no such thing as good and evil, only stupid people leaving God and think there is, you know, crime. There's really no such thing as crime, because crime is just the inevitable result of poverty, and so there's no such thing as crime, and so we can't punish people.
That kind of thing, which is relatively rare. If that kind of thinking becomes more widespread, you can get rid of all the poverty in the world, and if people don't think that evil is evil, just a social convention, you'll have a lot more of it. That's fine.
And he sees that being, that's probably one of the reasons, you know, people, one of the things people cite from Dostoevsky is that, you know, where everybody else thought, okay, we, you know, so nobody's going to, in a world where nobody's hungry, and people generally have basic rights, you won't have any crime. Right? Well, you know, the US has long since passed that, right? Even in the Great Depression, nobody died of hunger, right? And yet, there is a lot of crime.
So there's got to be something else. And he predicted it would increase, actually, rather than decrease. Yes, poverty does cause crime, and greater wealth and rights will, in that sense, reduce crime.
But another factor will overtake that, which is the sense that there's no such thing as good and evil. It's just a social convention. And so crime will increase even though poverty is decreasing it. So, John, if you're still wanting to ask that question, I'm happy to have you on and do so.
Sorry, I can't hear you. I just sent you a note there, if that helps. I think he's trying.
He's fiddling with something. Okay, we'll see if you're able to do that. In the meantime... So, it comes back to this question of the ambulance a little bit.
Oh, yeah. The mayor, right. Do you have any insight into why Dostoevsky might have had the woman jumping into the river on the same day as the accident?
Why so close together? It seems almost overwhelming, right? You mean the woman who jumps into the river that he finds, right?
Yeah. Well, there's more than one reason. One reason is...
This novel is set at a point of a lot of despair. Remember that Lise Viette's profession, the reason Lise Viette is going to be away that day, is that, remember the narrator says, it was something perfectly ordinary that happens a thousand times over and over. He repeats it, right? So you'll see that. These people had come from the countryside to the capital and reduced the utter poverty and were selling their last possession, which is soon going to be on the street.
Period. It happens all the time, right? And now there's this woman who for whatever reason is also going, you know, you can always find people jumping into the canal, right, out of despair. The world of despair is all around him, right?
And that's one reason Dostoevsky, he's setting it in that, but also that what are the alternatives open to Raskolnikov? One of them is, I'm not strong enough to do that, to continue fighting, so I should kill myself. That doesn't mean, he's not saying, I'm consumed with guilt and I should kill myself.
He's saying, I do not have the strength to endure this state of mind I've been in. kill myself right and there's the example but when he sees her jump this woman jump into the it's just really kind of disgusting and i don't know i think i'll probably go on you know and somebody gives him charity right he's dressed so badly and he flings the coin away why because he feels completely that's as in the police station completely cut off from everything human, even his nearest and dearest, right? Because he'd never expected that committing a murder would, in his own mind, put him outside the human community, right? I think I might be unmuted at the present time.
Yes. Am I? Can you hear me? Good.
I have two questions, actually. The first question goes to the point of your saying when he... You. They were jiggling on the door, the latch was holding, and he had an impulse to un-release the latch. Right.
And you said that it wasn't out of guilt, but rather it was to induce a certain state of mind that he wished to induce again. And my question is, where is the evidence in the text for that idea? Oh.
Secondly... It seems to me that there's a lot of evidence in the text from the time that he committed the murder of his wanting to turn himself in, of seeing the stuff that he had as a terrible burden, wanted to give it back, give it away, and turn himself in. And he talks about it in terms of being a terrible burden.
And I would think that there's a lot of evidence for him to say that he felt terribly guilty. And giving the money away is another sign. The 30 rubles that he got from his mother, giving the money away, giving the Kopecks away, suggests that he wants to kind of undo the evidence, or not the evidence, but the crime itself in some kind of undoing idea. Let me answer both your questions.
I think the second one is more interesting, but let me answer the first. The scene where he goes back to the apartment and he rings the doorbell over and over. Dostoevsky describes that emotion of intense intensity and terror that he can't, he's addicted to and has to keep doing it again and again. There's one of the evidence.
But the other one, yes, I think he is constantly making, as you say, actions. which would, he wishes would undo the crime. Okay. But it's not out of guilt. It will be later on.
He's going to gradually develop a sense of guilt. There's no sense here that, oh, I should never commit murder. Murder is bad. I took somebody's life.
You know, he doesn't. And when he does think of it, he thinks of I murdered the old lady. And Nastasya says, you know, you murdered a second person too. He never even thinks of Lizaveta.
And it's that the murder is destroying himself. He thought he was strong enough to do it. And now he sees he isn't strong enough.
Why did I do that? And you remember when he goes in to commit the murder. One of the things he sees is that the old woman is looking at him as if she had already guessed everything the text says, right?
Which means that he is going to experience the murder later on as if she had done it to him to pay him back. He's even going to have a dream later on where that becomes explicit. But it's like a...
Crap was laid for him. That's not about feeling guilty for the old woman. It feels to him as if fled him into something that he wasn't equal to.
But I think he gradually will start feeling guilty. Particularly when he meets Stotson O'Sonia. Could I say something in response? Yeah, absolutely.
It seems that where we diverge is that you seem to feel that in order to say that it's guilty, there must be a conscious feeling of guilt or a conscious feeling of remorse. And I feel that one can infer guilt by a person's behavior. Yeah, I think you can. Thank you. But I think they'll see where in the text you have a basis for your theory that he wants to, you know, recreate a certain mental state.
I think because certainly he wasn't doing that consciously. He goes to the doorbell and he rings it and he rings it and he rings it and it says he couldn't. what the intensity is. And he couldn't stop doing it. He wanted more of it and more of it.
Okay. But he was, his brain was addled at that point. He was like ADHD.
He was having all kinds of crazy thoughts. And he was thinking about public gardens when he was on the way to kill the woman. I mean, he was in a delirious state of mind. I don't think we can say other than that, as a psychiatrist, I can't even diagnose what kind of state of mind he was in. It was certainly deranged, but beyond that, I can't say.
And John, I don't want to cut you off. I know you have a lot of professional experience here. Absolutely.
Over time, and I know Grace has a question. Oh, yeah. So, Professor, if we can bring in Grace's question quickly before we run off.
Hi, this is Grace. Sorry, I'm not showing my face. Oh, I don't see.
Okay, good. I think, I think. What you're saying is that the moments when he is completely present, like when he's murdering the old lady, like when he's a little boy and tries to keep the little mare from being beaten to death, but is totally powerless to do anything about it. He's also in that state of being. totally present when he feels compassion.
And it's these states of being totally present that leads him to action. And because he's essentially a moral being, he has to justify the action of killing the old lady by these theoretical constructs. Is that somewhat a fair summary? Almost. I mean, very close.
He's not in, remember, when he actually kills the old lady, he's not in that state of intensity. He's completely abstract, right? But I mean, when the people are knocking on the door, you use that as an example. Right. Yes, I mean, the intensity, when he's in that intensity, he does feel he can act, right?
And that's, you know, and the compassion, I really like you mentioning that, that also makes him feel he can act. right and then he justifies it by he doesn't understand it by a theory right and he thinks the theories are what are guiding him because but they are really means exactly as you say of justifying what he has done after the fact but aren't the real reason he's done it right right got it yes there are it gives him power to do something about it which he didn't have is a little bit that's right and um you know and then you know that dream of, you know, the police lieutenant beating the landlady. I mean, it recalls the beating of the mayor, right?
It's, you know, right, right. It's the same thing. And once again, you know, I mean, which role is he in? Well, he's in both, right? But he, you know, he's also, he's horrified by the beating himself, even though he's the one who had done something very, very similar, right?
Yeah, I really like your point about, you know, the theories are, he thinks these theories explain what he did, right? But we can tell immediately that that isn't true because the theories contradict each other, right? Right. The theory that you can do it because there's no such thing as good and evil is directly contradictory to the theory of you should do it because... The greatest good for the greatest lover is the only good, and that's real.
In one case, there is no good and evil. The other, you know what it is. But they both lead to murder. Right.
But one is amoral and the other is moralistic, right? And so immediately that should be a clue that although he may feel these theories are leading him to murder, there is kind of justifications after the fact. But then what is it?
Well, that becomes a question. and he's later on, if I don't get too much away, he is going to ask himself, why did I commit the murder and when did I actually decide to commit the murder? And he's going to go through these theories and he's going to formulate new ones. But are they the theories at all?
And some of them are better than the others, but none of them are right. Does that help? Yeah, yeah.
Because essentially, he said he doesn't do things because he feels guilty. But I would argue he feels terribly guilty. He tries to assuage his guilt through these theories.
But he acts, his intense suffering and anguish seems to me that he does feel guilty. Oh, I just meant he doesn't feel guilty for the murder. He does feel guilty for all the suffering of the world and for his mother and sister's suffering. For that, he does. I just meant, you know, he isn't doing what he does in response to the murder because he's telling himself he feels guilty for the murder.
But he feels guilty for a whole lot of things. Right. Right.
That's all I meant. But I think you're right. I mean, no, I mean, you know, that his sister has to marry this asshole, if you'll pardon the expression.
He certainly feels guilty for that. Right. Right. Right.
And with that, I will cut us off.