I am Raskolnikov

The deranged rambling, the inability to utter complete sentences, the bizarre dreams. Raskolnikov is out there. Ground control to Major Tom, are you out there? Way out!

But then again, have you ever tried to keep track of your inner commentary? It is so far from being coherent. Well, at least, mine is. Who can say for you? But actually trying to write ’stream of consciousness’, and you end up with something not far from Raskolnikov.

But more than this, the thing that I think is the specter that haunts Ras is Voluntarism. It is also haunts modern western capitalism. It haunts me, and, perhaps, it haunts you. Voluntarism is a privileging of the will. Morality, good and evil, success and failure, all come down to our power to intend this or that. Do we not hear it everyday at school growing up? A primary school that I pass on the bus to Uni has a sign that reads, “As you think, so you are. As you imagine, so you become.” Now, of course this is just inane prattle about the potential of education, but they accord with some of what drifts through Raskolnikov’s deranged mind.

Ras’s dreams – the beating to death of the horse (there’s a parallel passage to this in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, also well worth the read), and the beating of the landlady, are both terrible injustices that Raskolnikov is utterly powerless to halt. But a child in the first, sick and weak in the second, he is able to do nothing. But for Ras, I think, at least in the first part of the novel, sees it as a failure of will. If only, through the strength of his own volition, he could stop it. His murder of the pawnbroker, and Lizaveta, were attempts to test the strength of his will. And if his will can hold steady, he will prove that he is a great one, who, in due course, will enable those great injustices to be righted.

But notice also how incapable such an attitude is of receiving help. The twenty copecks, the assistance of Razumikhin, these are utterly detestable to the man who gambles all on the strength of his own will. It is not unlike Pyotr Petrovich’s take on it all – though my own success, through my own selfishness, I will benefit others, through the rational pursuit of my own good.

Now, obviously in a more sophisticated form than the crude outline I’ve given here, but still, the economic principles that govern much of our country, and other similar countries, is based upon something similar. Welfare is, essentially, seen as something immoral.

When we hold up material success to such heights on the one hand, and on the other level off the playing field, so that everyone is expected to be capable of the same things. Why don’t I drive a car like that? Why don’t I own a house like theirs? To not succeed is a failure of will.

But Raskolnikov is manifestly not succeeding. Our minds, let alone our surrounds, are not a garden that our wills have sovereign power over. To realise our dependence on others, on anything, is intolerable. But it reveals that ultimately, such a voluntarism is a refusal to be a created thing. It is the dissolution of all ties, of all being in the thick of things, a web of relationships and interdependencies, rather than a bodiless mind that springs into being of its own will power.

Filed under: books, literature , Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky, voluntarism