Cracking into the first two parts of Dostoevsky’s 1866 classic Crime and Punishment.
The first surprising thing is that this is a conservative/reactionary book: it mocks the fancy new ideas of the youth, the spirit of revolution, naive utilitarianism, etc. Jordan Peterson laps this shit up. But did the moral panic over materialism hold up? Does modern society in any way compare with the turmoil of Dostoevsky’s Russia, or are we at the end of history? How relevant are Dostoevsky’s concerns today?
We argue quite a bit about that but we’re more aligned on the brilliance of Dostoevsky as psychologist, and especially the character of Rodya ‘mister schiz’ Raskolnikov: what causes his mind to fracture so spectacularly? What motivates him to do the deed? Why does Rich kinda relate to him?
Plus a masterclass on freestyle rap. And much more.
Opening rap
Bennyh: This is why we need some nice transition music. We’re just hearing Cam rap a little bit about Crime and Punishment.
Rich: How do you do it? What’s the trick?
Cam: Raskolnikov is hard to rhyme with.
Rich: I’m Raskolnikov. My name’s Raskolnikov…
Benny: You could do like “pop off” on something, right?
Cam: Oh, yeah. You could. You could do “of”. Got some inexact rhymes.
Benny: You could do any Russian name. It probably rhymes with Raskolnikov.
Cam: One of my takes is I’m too good at rhyming to be a good freestyler.
Benny: Is that some bizarre humble brag? What was going on there?
Cam: I’m too smart. There’s meant to be irony on it being silly, but I genuinely think it as well. But we might be getting distracted there.
Rich: Yeah, I’d hate to have to back up my outrageous claims.
Cam: No, no, no, seriously. It’s because of multi-syllabic rhyming. They’re like “crime and punishment”. So people go crime and punishment, and they’d want to rhyme with that last bit, punishment. My first thought is to rhyme with rhyme and punishment — the whole rhyme. So I’d want to get “lime” and something else. Punishment’s not a great example. And it’s that much harder then to freestyle. Because when you’re freestyling, you’re thinking of the next rhyme when you’re saying the old rhyme. And then now you’re thinking of two rhymes. And it’s earlier on as well. So like “Benny Chug” — instead of just, I’m chilling with Benny Chug, I want to give the guy a hug. That would be like a kind of normal freestyle. But when I say, I’m chilling with Benny Chug, he’s listened to Remy Logue, I’d want to get the Benny as well. Anyway, we’re getting too distracted here.
Rich: You’re trying to rhyme two different rhymes at once.
Cam: Yeah, it’s not too hard to explain.
Benny: I got you. I figured it out miraculously. Even without the second example, I think I was with you.
Cam: But good rhymers are worse freestylers. There are some freestylers that are very good rhymers as well. But it’s a hard habit to get out of when you’re freestyling. It’s better off just focusing on the last level.
Rich: Well, I can’t even do a simple one. It’s time for Raskolnikov. Raskolnikov’s kind of hard.
Benny: He’s been thinking about it the whole time.
Cam: What’s the complexity for that? What’s the formula for complexity?
Benny: Uh, two rhymes is harder than one?
Cam: In like computer science.
Benny: There is Kolmogorov complexity. There’s a rhyme for you.
Rich: Yeah, thanks. That’s really helpful.
Benny: Maybe we can build up a song over the course of this series.
Rich: I’m going to not listen to what you guys are saying, and I’m going to try and compose a rap.
Benny: Rich, what did you think of the book?
Rich: I’m still trying to work out how to rhyme with Raskolnikov.
Rich Oh, my name’s Raskolnikov. I’m about to pop off with my Kalashnikov. Boom. That’s how it’s done.
Benny: That was pretty good. Nice.
Rich: I mean, it did involve a Russian name, technically.
Benny: So welcome to our n-part series, with n yet to be determined, on Crime and Punishment.
Cam: No, three parts.
Benny: Have we decided that?
Cam: Where n equals three.
Benny: We forgot that Cam doesn’t like to read long books, so he’s already decided that you’re gonna try and do it as quickly as possible.
Benny: Well, today we’re doing parts one and two, right? I mean, there’s actually a lot to talk about, especially in part one. So we’ll see how far we get. I don’t think we want to turn this into a three hour marathon episode.
Rich: Yeah, we get the crime half. We didn’t get the punishment quite, but we’re halfway there.
Benny: So I don’t think we’re going to worry too much about spoilers. We’re kind of going to take it part by part. The core of the book is not in the actual plot elements. It’s more in exploring these characters’ psychology. So I think if you’re here trying to understand key takeaways in the book without getting any spoilers, then you’re out of luck.
Rich: Yeah, spoilers don’t really matter for this book.
Cam: Yeah, I think we’re just gonna — especially because — I mean, the relevant crime actually happens, it happens up early on.
Benny: Yeah, well, not quite up front. End of part one.
Rich: I love this — the spoiler warnings for the 160 year old. Well, just in case.
Cam: I know — doesn’t everyone know? Doesn’t it — doesn’t even know there’s a murder. I don’t know about this.
Benny: Oh, you just did it, dude. Jesus Christ.
History class with Professor Chugg
Benny: So, okay, I’m going to give a quick summary of part one. But before I set it up, I think it’s actually important to understand a bit of the historical context of where Russia was at the time the book was written, because I think it actually provides a nice perspective on the kind of ideas Dostoevsky was dealing with when he wrote the book. So this novel was written in 1866, I believe — which was roughly 10 years after Tsar Alexander the Second rose to power, and roughly 20 years after Marx and Engels published the Communist Manifesto.
Cam: Yeah, my fucking history lesson runner.
Benny: It’s relevant, I swear to God. I think this is relevant for me and Warren.
Rich: Benny — I got, I got more than a 12-second attention span. I’m still listening.
Benny: No, you’re focusing on your next rhyme. Let’s be real. You should come out halfway through the episode.
Benny: Why this is relevant. So serfdom had just been abolished. And obviously it was a time of social change on that front, but also ideological change — with the introduction of communism and some supporting ideas like materialism and especially nihilism. You know, the movement of the Russian nihilists sort of started taking off in like the 1850s, 60s, I believe. And so this is sort of right smack dab at the beginning of those sorts of movements. And so there’s sort of a young revolutionary class pushing back on Russia’s old school conservatism. And Dostoevsky had been among these young revolutionaries, but then, yeah, he was eventually sent to prison. The story is pretty interesting. But in prison, he met a lot of working class people who didn’t share his revolutionary politics. And he came out of prison much more conservative and much more skeptical of these new ideas of materialism and nihilism that had been gripping the country. And so I sort of view Crime and Punishment as commentary on these ideas, and exploration of what can happen to your psychology if you take some of these ideas really seriously.
Cam: I was going to say that’s probably true of a lot of his books, right? Brothers Karamazov is also dealing with his tension probably in his mind of atheism versus Christianity. And these books are kind of explorations of those — and not necessarily the logical kind of arguments of each side, but then sometimes instantiating these beliefs in characters and plots is one of the great things that fiction can do.
Rich: Yeah, they’re kind of like literary thought experiments or something, I think — where the plot is really secondary, and hence why we don’t have to worry too much about spoiling stuff or mysteries. It’s more, yeah, you experiment with what would happen if people take a certain set of ideas seriously, and what that might look like. Not at the level of society, which is the direction I think most people go in, but what would it look like at the level of one person’s interior psychological state — which is super interesting.
Cam: I suppose both are interesting, right? He’s very good at the psychology aspect.
Rich: Yeah, well, it’s harder, I think, to inhabit, put yourself in the mind of someone experiencing these things and create a really high resolution sense of what it would be like. So it’s a very skillful thing to pull off. And you have to guess that probably Dostoevsky has had some experiences in life — he had a tough life. I think he wrote this after he got out of the gulag, right? When he got released by the Tsar, after 10 years in exile. So yeah, I’m sure there’s a lot of personal experience going into this as well, where you can see it. And, you know, that main fucking painting of him — he just looks like, this guy has seen some shit, man. I capture that.
Cam: That’s true.
Benny: So Jordan Peterson — I think it was him who said this, but I actually couldn’t find the reference, sadly. I spent a little bit of time looking for it. But he said Dostoyevsky was sort of the great literary psychologist, and Tolstoy was the great literary sociologist. So Dostoyevsky was extremely good at zooming in on a single character’s personal psychology and looking at it and writing entire novels exploring it — which is something that really strikes me here, and also struck me in Brothers K, right? How he captures the complexity of thought of a single individual. And then I think Tolstoy is, you know, zooming out a little bit and looking more at the level of society. So it’ll be interesting at some point — I’m sure we’ll read Anna Karenina, I’ll fucking force you guys to do it. I’m sure Tolstoy captures psychology pretty well as well, just knowing bits about Anna Karenina.
Rich: Didn’t you say something like, Tolstoy is for girls and Dostoevsky is for boys?
Cam: Yeah, I saw someone say that online once and it just hit a chord with me.
Benny: It hit a chord with the person who hadn’t read at that point.
Rich: Yeah, it sounded like something a clever person would say, so I copied it and tweeted it out.
Cam: Well, funny enough, the missus is reading Tolstoy at the moment and I’m reading — that’s why I tweeted that out. Also, girlfriend Dostoevsky, boyfriend — maybe it’s like, Anna Karenina is about a woman, like, I think Dosto’s mainly incisive literary — so the Anna in the title is actually a reference to someone of the female persuasion.
Benny: That’s media literacy, man.
Cam: That was minority represented, man. But I was thinking like, Dosto — a lot of male characters, but in this one some of the female characters are quite strong and good. We’ll get into that later.
Rich: To resume back to ground level for a minute. So Benny, do you want to do a gloss of the plot of part one?
Benny: Yeah. One more thing I’ll say is — yeah, one of you made a comment about Peterson. I think it is genuinely sad that he’s become so embroiled in all the culture war stuff. His early videos on a lot of Russian literature are exceptional. And it is sad that people now refuse to listen to him because he said a couple of crazy things. If you just forget the last five years of his and just go back to a lot of his early stuff on the foundations of psychology and exploring it by literature and stuff — it really is remarkable, and he’s an extremely good lecturer. So anyway, I’d like to defend that part of him.
Cam: Benzo addiction is a hell of a thing. He just wanted to look a little bit more like Dostoevsky. He wanted to get that haunted look in his eyes, so he figured —
Rich: Yeah, he kind of metaphorically went through Raskolnikov. He detoxed in Russia, I think he did.
Cam: I think so. Yeah, he went into exile in Russia. Remind you of anyone? I mean, I’m sure he was on benzos back even when he was, you know, the number one guy doing a song, but it must have got worse, right?
Benny: Yeah, I guess you get thrust to fame, and also everyone hates you and everyone loves you, and it’s just been nuts. All of us would go crazy.
Rich: I agree. I co-signed Benny. He had some really good shit back in the day. I never really plug him or say anything about him, and I don’t follow him whatsoever because he’s gone fully off the deep end.
Cam: He’s still all right. Like, he’s obviously still wise. Like, if you got him now — if we invited him now to talk about this, it’d be fucking amazing, right? Like, he’s just kind of obsessed with the culture wars, right?
Benny: I think he also is a very devout Christian in a way that doesn’t actually resonate with me that much. And I think this is also really why he loves Dostoevsky as well, right? Is that Dostoevsky’s theory of sociology is that if everyone was a Christian, then all problems would resolve themselves — if everyone was a devout practicing Christian. So I’m skeptical on that front.
Benny: Okay, so quick summary of part one. So the book opens — we’re introduced to Raskolnikov, or Rodya. It’s his diminutive nickname.
Cam: Kind of like Benny and Benjamin, you know?
Benny: It’s not actually like that, I think not.
Cam: It’s not like that?
Benny: I think it’s different. It’s completely different.
Rich: Like Alexander’s is always called Sasha, and Maria’s always called Masha and stuff. So it’s not —
Cam: Oh yeah, there’s slightly different rules. It’s not always your first — my ex’s is really weird. Because her name was Yelena, but her nickname was Betzer or something. But it’s usually — you can usually derive it from the name, right? Sometimes it’s from the middle of the name.
Rich: Rodion Rodya.
Part 1 summary and reactions
Benny: Yeah. Okay. So he’s a poor ex-law student. He’s described as extremely good looking, kind of haughty, kind of thinks he’s above everyone. And the book opens with him visiting the pawnbroker, Alyona Ivanovna. Oh, this is going to be a nightmare doing all these names.
Cam: Don’t worry about the last name.
Benny: He’s trying to pawn off some of his items so he can get money so he can continue to pay rent and live. While he’s there, we can kind of tell he’s planning something a little shady. We’re not entirely sure what, but it has something to do with the pawnbroker for sure. And already at that point, he’s sort of torn about whether or not to do it. And part one largely involves his internal psychological struggles as he decides whether to commit this crime. And so part one ends with him committing the murder, after learning that Alyona, the pawnbroker, is going to be on her own for the night with her daughter, Lizaveta, gone. And he takes an axe to her house.
Cam: Her sister, I think — not her daughter. Her sister.
Benny: Oh, sorry, her sister. Yeah. Takes an axe, kills her. Lizaveta comes home unexpectedly right after he murders the older sister, and he kills her as well. Maybe one thing also to say is, Alyona is described by the narrator as a pretty despicable person. So she’s the neighborhood pawnbroker. No one likes her. She takes a lot of money.
Cam: She’s kind of like an old hag, right? Demands, yeah, high interest.
Benny: And is described as basically abusing her little sister, Lizaveta.
Cam: Yeah, who is maybe intellectually disabled.
Rich: Yeah. She’s like that classic trope in Dostoevsky of the kind of — well, I think there’s a term for it, but the kind of pure idiot. Which, his other book, The Idiot, is about.
Benny: Yeah. So, okay. So there’s lots more to get into, but I guess, what are you guys thinking overall? Do you like it? Cam thinks it’s too long, obviously.
Cam: Well, this is — this is a short — I was just going to say on the names, it’s kind of funny. The names are hard. If you’re going to read this, write down the names, I think, and kind of try and attach them to who they are. What’s funny in this book is the main guy is Raskolnikov, and then his friend is Razumikhin or something. It’s kind of close to Raskolnikov. And then you’ve got the cop, who’s Zametov, and then you’ve got the doctor, who’s Zosimov. It’s very easy to — and then you’ve got Donya and Sonia, the two people. They’re all kind of close. I mean, it’s probably if it was English names, you know, like Mitch and Michael, it would be easy.
Benny: Do you think Zosimov was actually Zosima from Brothers K, but in a different life? I kept reading that and having that problem, getting excited that Zosima is back from the dead.
Rich: Yeah, when you read it, I think it’s actually easier — well, not easy, but it’s easier to keep the characters clear in your head when you’re reading them, because you could just pattern match, right? Like Razumikhin, you know, that has a Z in it. Somehow it’s easy, but then you start saying that out loud and you realize you’re confused.
Cam: I didn’t have a problem with this after a few chapters, I think. It was fine. Were you guys saying Marmalade? I will probably say Marmalade during the film.
Benny: And his wife, Lady Marmalade?
Cam: No, I was saying all the names with the flawless Russian accent.
Rich: To answer your question, Benny, I really am enjoying this. I’m liking it more than Brothers K, actually. I think partly it could be because I’m reading the modern translation by — what’s the guy’s name — Oliver Ready, from 2014. I don’t have anything to compare against, but it definitely feels very easy to read, and it has lots of nice modern slang and terminology in it that’s not incongruous. And yeah, it just sort of rockets along. I wouldn’t exactly say I’m enjoying it because it’s very grim, and you’re inside the head of someone who is an unpleasant person to spend time with. So “enjoyment’s” not quite the right word, but I’m definitely very engaged with the book. I have some reservations about where it’s going after this, because I feel like I know what this book is and what it’s about. And yeah, I hope he doesn’t drag it out for 400 more pages, but hopefully he subverts my expectations and continues to capture my attention. But yeah, that’s my take up top.
Cam: It’d be interesting if this could have been done more briefly. And he’s obviously not opposed — I mean, arguably his best book, or at least on equal footing with four others, was Notes from Underground, which is small.
Benny: Well, this was serialized and sold for money at a time when he was desperate for money because he himself was in hot water.
Cam: As broke as Raskolnikov, yeah. So possibly he was paid by the word? I don’t know. But I’ve got no complaints about that for now. I’m just sort of speculating since we’ve had one book of crime and one book of punishment. So I’m like, okay, what’s the other four books going to be? More punishment is my guess.
Benny: I think he was actually probably incentivized to keep this short, because he had actually signed a contract with his publisher, I believe, saying he would deliver a novel by 1866, which was the year this was published. And if he failed to do that, then he would forfeit the rights to everything else he’d ever written. And so basically his publisher would just be able to take that for himself and publish it. And this, like you said, was published serially and wasn’t actually supposed to be a novel, I don’t think. And so he had to finish a different book, which ended up being The Gambler, by 1866, in order to meet the demands of that contract. So I think if he could have gotten away with keeping this much shorter, he probably would have, because for whatever reason, this didn’t count. So he was under a lot of stress in those last few years, I think. And I assume — Rich, what are your thoughts? I mean, this is your second time reading it, right?
Rich: No.
Benny: I mean, it sort of goes back to what I was saying earlier, but just — I think reading Dostoevsky, he does capture being in someone’s head better than any other author I’ve ever read, in the sense that he doesn’t treat characters’ own internal experience like some sort of monolith where one character has a singular desire to act in a way or accomplish something in the world and then does that. I think a lot of other authors have, like, each character represents something and then they fully represent that thing. And Dostoevsky captures this internal strife that I think harangues everyone, right? Like no one has a singular desire to do stuff. We all have conflicting internal desires that are always competing with one another. And Raskolnikov has this to a pretty severe extent, right? Because he’s dealing with intense ideas about whether to kill someone, etc. But I think Dostoevsky really — and this is also why I enjoyed Brothers K — he really gets inside someone’s head unlike any other author.
Cam: I mean, it’s certainly true with the internal conflict — like Raskolnikov. I think Raskolnikov, by the way — the name etymology is “schism”. Like “raskol” means schism. So he’s kind of called Mr. Schism. Imagine if they translated it to English — Mr. Split Personality. But with Brothers K — I mean, you could argue that those characters did kind of represent a kind of even an ideology sometimes, or a single kind of outlook — less kind of internal conflict that did exist as well.
Benny: Yeah, I don’t know — think of like Ivan, torn between religion and morality and getting rid of all religion.
Cam: Or think of even like Fyodor’s sort of shtick where he’d be acting like the fool, realizing that he was acting like the fool, not wanting to do that, but sort of unable to stop himself. And I think everyone has a bit of that inside them, right? When they’re displaying themselves in various ways. I imagine most of it. Yeah, I suppose he does it well. And you’ve got to kind of read history backwards a little bit as well. And, you know, this is a guy kind of pre-subconscious-motives being a big thing. But I mean, that’s in Hamlet. I mean, there’s a lot of parallels between Raskolnikov and Hamlet with this kind of indecision, internal conflict, right — about, well, in Hamlet’s case, a planned murder; in this case, planned and post-murder.
Benny: Yeah, you’re right. I mean, so just to lay out Raskolnikov, even right from the get-go, before we get into the murder, he’s this kind of man of conflict and contradictions. As you see it, he’s described as handsome, but then he dresses really badly. Like so badly, I think at one point someone, it’s described as like a friend — you wouldn’t want to be seen with him. And he’s got this awkward hat. Some lady gives him some change because she thinks he’s a bum.
Rich: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he takes it.
Cam: Yeah, he’s mad, but he takes the money. And he’s obviously very smart and intelligent, but he’s borderline — he’s dropped out of university.
Rich: Do we know why he’s dropped out of school?
Cam: Well, it’s either because he’s poor or, yeah, maybe he just doesn’t want to be there or something. Yeah, I don’t think we know.
Benny: Yeah, I don’t think we know. I think it’s sort of insinuated that he’s poor, right? Because part of the motivation of the murder, which we’ll get there — is, he convinces himself that if he does it, he can use all her money to go back to school and do some good in the world, etc. And so I think he would go back to school if he could.
Cam: And he kind of thinks he’s better than everyone else, right? But then he kind of hates everyone as well. And he’s kind of got that — I mean, the underground man had that as well — this kind of arrogance mixed with this disgust with yourself.
Benny: Yeah. So he thinks he has the potential to do great important things in the world, even though he lives in squalor and is not like a — he lives in like a cupboard, right?
Rich: There’s a really funny line that I wrote down. “The room of his apartment had a ceiling low enough to terrify even the modestly tall.” So I assume it’s like, you know — and Tinder’s like 6’2”, it’s modestly tall.
What motivates Rodya ‘mister schizo’ Raskolnikov?
Benny: Yeah. So why do you guys think he did this thing? And why do you think he was so torn about it?
Rich: My best theory is that it has something to do with what you said right up top about this wave of Western materialism and atheism and Enlightenment ideals washing through the land. And it seems to be not having a great effect, at least in terms of the godless behaviour he’s participating in. So there’s multiple people in the story who are at least some who are selling their relatives into prostitution or taking advantage of their relatives. There’s beatings, there’s violence, there’s robberies. And I think my model of Raskolnikov — and why I actually love him as a character — is that he’s very sensitive, I think. And he’s very sensitive to the suffering in the world. He’s very compassionate. And I’m probably projecting a lot here, but I think he has this fantasy that — why would you murder someone? Well, this is it, right? Like, I don’t have it in my disposition to do anything like that, but on some weird level I kind of admire people who do. I think I’m very slightly envious of the type of person who could mete out rough justice, or, you know, be the badass gunslinger or even a straight-up villain, because they have a kind of freedom that I don’t have and could never have. And I know that if I did something bad, actually bad, I would feel bad about it beforehand, during, and after — which is exactly what happens to Raskolnikov. And I think he wants to be like a badass. And he’s like — I don’t know, this is my rough theory — he sees how other people are in the world and he thinks, I wish that I could be like that too. And he spurs himself into action to actually do that. And then it doesn’t go the way that he thinks it will go, and he seems to be completely consumed by guilt. He’s — it’s like, you guys know that viral video, and it’s like “you’re not that guy” or something — “like nah, but yeah sure I go get him”.
Cam: I tried to do a Cam and introduce a meme that I thought would be a common cultural touchstone. Need the show notes — and we need Jamie to pull that up.
Rich: It’s like, yeah, basically, like, you’re not that guy. You’re not, like, a tough guy. I’m not a tough guy. And on some level I maybe wish I was. It’s a nice fantasy to have. I don’t want to kill anyone, and I’m glad I’m not wired up that way. But if I did kill someone, this is exactly how it would go down. It would be a fucking disaster, and I would learn — and I would confirm — that I am not in fact that guy.
Cam: Yeah, you’re right. And I mean, that’s what he’s — and one of the things he’s in conflict about, right — that, like, he has — and I think actually more of this pops up later around his ideas of like a justified murder. So like, maybe we’ll probably get into that in the next session more. And it’s kind of this Nietzschean sense mixed with utilitarianism. But he’s in this conflict of like — he’s kind of too pussy to do anything about it. He’s getting shoved around by society. And you’re right, like in some sense it’s kind of respectable of like — given you kind of think this is something that’s worth doing, or like, you know, just having a go up for someone — if let’s say it’s not murder or something — but, you know, to do the thing that’s hard to do, actually doing it, like, there’s this impressiveness there.
Rich: Yeah, I think you’re right to invoke Nietzsche. I wish I knew more about Nietzsche to be able to have the right terminology, but it’s something to do with that master and slave morality and the vitalism and being an active agent in the world rather than being willing to let other people do things to you.
Cam: And kind of like post-Christian morality, right? Of like what was kind of in the water at this time. And like, where does that actually lead to? Like, actually doing that — like, actually departing Christian morality, rather than saying like, like us — like, you know, we don’t believe in God, but, you know, Tom Holland voice — not the Spider-Man, the historian — like, a lot of our morality is still very Christian in terms of like exalting the victim and stuff. But actually departing that — yeah, if God is dead, like, yeah, what does it matter if I kill this person who no one likes? Have I done anything wrong?
Benny: I mean, there’s also practical elements of — well, just some more context around — he overhears these guys talking at a bar around the pawnbroker just being kind of an old evil bitch, really. And like, “be better off if she’s dead”. Like, she hoards all this money and she doesn’t pay a fair price for everyone, she beats her sister. Like in some sense, it is kind of as justified a murder as you can get.
Cam: They describe it as justice, I think. They say it would be justice. And then they say you have to do it yourself if it was to be justice — or one of them says that as well. Which I find interesting, because kind of that cowardice — what you’re talking about, Rich, of like, let’s say you kind of thought it was fair, say — yeah, I don’t want to be the one that actually does it. You know, it’s kind of like killing the old dog or horse that needs to be shot. It’s like, “someone else do it.”
Rich: Yeah, exactly.
Cam: Given you truly thought it was justice, there is this kind of respectability of actually getting your hands dirty. And that’s why I thought actually doing it with the axe was quite significant — because you’re really up close and personal with an axe. It’s not just like, you know, pressing a button and doing a drone strike or something.
Dosto subtweets Bentham and SBF
Benny: Yeah, that conversation in the bar was fascinating, because he basically satirises naive utilitarianism. Well, I don’t actually know when utilitarianism was fully fleshed out as a philosophy. I don’t know if utilitarianism was around as a label, the moral philosophy, at this point or not.
Rich: Yeah. Bentham died in 1830.
Benny: Okay. So it definitely was.
Rich: Yeah, I’d say that’s pretty well fleshed out.
Benny: Yeah. So I think this is basically him subtweeting Bentham and being like, look what can go wrong if all you’re doing is calculating utils. So yeah, Raskolnikov hears these guys talking at the bar about how this would be the most justified murder ever, because for one, she’s a terrible person, and secondly, she’s very wealthy. So you could use all this wealth to help many people, lift them out of poverty, send people to school, give them things to eat, etc. And these people are basically saying, you know, what is the death of one against the life of thousands that could be improved if you were to kill her?
Cam: And even if it’s not thousands, right? It’s like — you’re helping the old pawnbroker sister who’s getting beaten, you’re helping your sister who’s in trouble financially and trying to help you, and you’re helping yourself. Like, even if you kind of just cared more locally — but potentially you can justify it in that sense.
Benny: So Dosto is sort of setting up a situation in which murder is as justified here as it could ever be, right? He’s sort of got all the winds at his back.
Rich: To be honest, he didn’t sell me enough on that. Like, he kind of did somewhat, but I didn’t feel that super viscerally — like, “this old girl’s got to go”. How about you guys? Did you feel like you could really understand, like you kind of wanted her to, and you don’t feel bad that she’s dead?
Cam: Yeah, I feel the same way. I mean, she seemed to be just charging a lot of interest, and it wasn’t clear that she’d done anything horrendously bad — and maybe she’s abusing her sister. Yeah, an unpleasant kind of a person, you wouldn’t want to be friends with her. But falling massively short of, “you should kill her and it would be a just act”.
Rich: I mean, one meta-criticism I have here is that conversation in the bar, combined with other fortuitous conversations that he just so happens to overhear, kind of are a little bit cute and like deus ex machina or something. Like, he overhears a conversation that details the exact plan that he was formulating and gives him the exact rationale for doing it. And it’s like — one coincidence like that is fine. Like, you know, you’re allowed one of those per book. And then there’s like two — or there’s three.
Cam: There’s three, because — yeah.
Rich: Label those out again.
Cam: Lizaveta will be out of the house at a certain hour, at a certain time. Maybe that’s sorry — maybe there’s just two.
Benny: But another coincidence was, he kind of walked that way, I think. He kind of — why did he walk the shore?
Rich: Yes, that’s right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Cam: So we could talk about each of those more later. But basically, a lot of things have to very perfectly line up for this to happen.
Benny: But doesn’t he ponder about that? And doesn’t he say, like, “man, what are the chances I overhear these guys at the bar saying the exact things I’m thinking?”
Rich: Yes, but I don’t think that lets you off the hook.
Cam: No, it doesn’t. But I suppose it kind of — “look at my shoddy writing, and as long as I call it out in a meta-textual way, then it’s cute and fine.”
Benny: Yeah, it’s interesting, because Dostoevsky could have just had this as his own internal monologue. I’m not entirely sure what the point was of him overhearing the guys at the bar talk about it, right? He could have just been thinking this to himself, like — “oh, the murder is justified because it will help many people at the expense of only one person.” Maybe it was just to reinforce that no one in the community liked her either, and so there’s not going to be this issue that a bunch of people are going to miss her — most people dislike her.
Cam: I also thought the coincidences helped justify it in Raskolnikov’s head. Like, he’s just oscillating back and forth whether he does it, and he’s probably been doing that for months or something — and he’s thinking about how to do it, and then this coincidence happens and it’s like this perfect time. And he just feels like, “well, why did I take the short way back in the Haymarket?” Like, it’s fate. Like it’s kind of divine or something, like someone’s asking me to do this. And like, it’s justifying it. And then he overhears these guys, and he’s like, yeah, well — yeah, why not?
Rich: But it’s also very funny and revealing that each time fate shows its hand to help him along in this path, he’s not like, “oh yes, perfect, I finally got an opportunity”. It actually fills him with dread and foreboding.
Cam: Yeah, he’s like, “oh fuck, now I really have to actually go through with this”.
Rich: But I related to that, man. Like, you know when something you’re not sure about, and then it’s like — fuck — and then you actually — and then there’s that realisation: now there’s no excuse.
Benny: Yeah. And I think Dostoevsky talks about that at some point, right? He’s just saying that Raskolnikov always had doubt, and I think Dostoevsky said if he didn’t have doubt, he probably wouldn’t have done it. He probably would have backed out. Like, if he just knew this was going to happen — but it just never really felt like it was going to happen, it was always somewhat abstract, and that allowed him to keep planning, to keep doing it.
Rich: You know what, I retract my criticism. I think that’s fine. That makes it actually more coherent, because it sort of explains why he nutted up and finally did it. If there’s a fourth one, maybe not.
Rich: But just coming back to the utilitarian thing — yeah, I think it’s definitely a naive utilitarianism critique. And it’s crazy to think that people are still making this mistake big time today. Like, I wrote the post talking about why we’re reading fiction, and, you know, mentioning this book podcast we’re doing, and I’ve quoted Sam Bankman-Fried in it where he says that he doesn’t read books, and if you read a book, you fucked up — because you should have read a six paragraph blog post. And it’s so juicy because, what if he read this book?
Benny: Yeah, like, come on. This is exactly it, right? He’s just like, “okay, we can justify stealing money from a bunch of people in order to help thousands of more people.” That was his exact calculus. And that was the exact calculus that Raskolnikov was struggling with. But whereas SBF seemed to be like a willing participant in this calculus, Raskolnikov seems to be like he’s sort of brought along by the collar with it. And so I think for Dostoevsky, it’s somewhat of a conflict between maybe something like human nature and his natural unwillingness to kill someone, or his natural hesitation to kill someone — or perhaps more just traditional values of “murder is bad, stop there” — versus the new ideas in the water that he views as very harmful, right? This nihilism — you’re just only out for yourself, and so you just go out in the world, get what you want, and that’s fine. And then maybe you’re trying to justify some of this nihilism with appeals to this naive utilitarianism and stuff.
Cam: I don’t know to what extent SBF had internal conflict about what he was doing, judging by some of his interviews, etc.
Benny: Not that much. I mean, I don’t think it’s the same as this. He had a different —
Rich: I think he has a rich internal experience and character that totally can’t be reduced to a cartoon villain or whatever, but I think his sins are different, you know? They’re more along the lines of like willful blindness and arrogance and hubris, rather than this kind of actual moral conflict. I’m sure that Sam Bankman-Fried actually thought that he was — I believe that he was a committed effective altruist and was on some level trying to do good. And I could even believe that he didn’t necessarily think he was doing fraud, because he could compartmentalise it or rationalise it.
Cam: I bet you the inside of his head was a pretty fucking crazy place to be in as well. We just don’t have access to it. And I bet it would be now, like, sitting in jail. I mean, that’s what this book’s about, though. You can kind of compartmentalise it and delude yourself. I just — I mean, otherwise you’re a psychopath, I suppose, which is hard to model. But yeah, maybe there are some people that truly can go and do the kill. And I mean, I actually had this thought, though, as well, around this — it does feel like a very kind of high IQ projection as well. I mean, Benny’s probably going to talk about how infantilising this is, but — if Dostoevsky was to commit a murder like this, or Raskolnikov, who’s this intelligent person — it just totally breaks his mind. I mean, that’s kind of what happens in part two. He’s a different person after this murder. And I just sort of wondered — I imagine there are some men out there that are lower IQ, and they’re kind of psychopaths, but they’re just low IQ, I don’t know, and they just murder. And it’s kind of like — I mean, sometimes you see interviews of these people, and they’re just like, yeah — you read transcripts of them and they’re like, “I raped that bitch, and I killed her”, or whatever it is, and like — quotable, not — not as much turmoil.
Benny: Yeah. Maybe one thing to point out here is that he, I think before the murder, was sort of convinced — or at least talking himself up — that he wouldn’t lose his head during the murder, or afterwards. So he says, you know, many murderers get caught because they start making stupid mistakes while they’re murdering. They stop thinking logically, coherently about what they’re doing. And then afterwards, they basically give themselves away because they fail to adequately cover up their tracks or whatever. And he calls this “the disease”, right? And he convinces himself like, I’m this smart guy. I’ll just commit this thing. You know, if I were to do it, I would do it right. And then I’ll use the money for good, basically. So it’ll all be fine. And then the rest of the book — or at least the second part — is basically him realising that, yeah, he wasn’t this uber rational person who could commit this murder flawlessly and then forget about it. Because one, things go wrong during the murder. Namely, Lizaveta comes back and he also has to murder her. And then he almost gets caught. Like, it’s a miracle he doesn’t get caught, because he makes many mistakes. He gets blood all over himself, leaves like fingerprints everywhere, and then has to wash things up. Gets caught in the house for a while while there’s a couple of people outside the door — fingerprints for a diamond — wondering if someone’s in there. And then after the murder, yeah, his brain breaks, basically. He’s unable to make any coherent decisions.
Cam: I did have a thought of, like, how much easier it is to get away with murder 150 years ago. I mean, because the main thing he’s worried about after he commits it — and he’s getting super paranoid, and he’s getting physically sick as well — but he’s really worried that someone’s going to see the blood. Either they see you at the place, or you’ve got blood on your clothes. And it’s not like — there’s blood that, even if you wash it or something, there’s going to be a DNA test and find the blood. It’s like, no, they literally see it. What’s that big-ass blood stain on you? Where were you last night? It’s so much harder these days. And so he’s got this sock, because he’s so poor — he’s got this blood-soaked sock, blood-stained sock — and he’s like off to the police. Like, he gets called in to the police officer, to the police headquarters, in part two. And he’s like, “oh shit”. And it turns out he’s just not paying his landlord. But he’s like, “man, I can’t with a sock” — like, he’s got no other socks, he puts the blood-soaked sock on and goes in to the police station.
Part 2 summary
Benny: Okay, on that note, maybe let me just summarise part two so we can bring all these elements into play, and then talk about some of the characters and whatnot. I especially want to talk about Mr. Marmalade, as Cam has called him — I think he’s an important element to the story. So part two — you know, he’s committed this murder, he’s delirious and feverish in his own apartment. He’s very scatterbrained. At one point, he tried — so he’s taken all the jewelry — or as much of the jewelry as he can find — from the woman he murdered, from Alyona, and gets to his apartment, doesn’t know what to do with it, shoves it in his wall for a bit, and then is like, “no, that’s not a good spot”. So he puts it all in his pockets. He passes out for several hours. He ends up being looked after by his friend Razumikhin, who turns out to just be this nice guy who’s concerned about his welfare, basically, and his servant Natasha, and a doctor called Zosimov.
Cam: It’s kind of funny — he has a servant — he is so broke.
Benny: Well, she’s the landlady’s servant technically, but she ups in and out, right? He’s both inwardly and outwardly obsessed with the murder. So when he’s talking with these three people in his apartment, you know, he’s asking for details. The murder’s obviously piqued his interest to such an extent that they’re a little confused why he’s so interested in it. And then his inward world at this point is also all just thinking about — wondering what he should do, concerned about where he should hide this jewelry, etc. He gets summoned to the police station for some unknown reason. He obviously thinks, “oh no, the jig might be up.” And he’s sometimes seized with this desire to just confess everything. But it turns out when he gets to the police station, it’s just because he hasn’t been paying his landlady rent. And so it has nothing to do with the murder. But even there, he has this maniacal desire to just tell everyone in sight what he’s done, and almost does it, actually. But then he gets back to his apartment. Luzhin, I think — Luzhin maybe — who’s his daughter’s fiancé, shows up to the apartment. He wants to make a good impression on Raskolnikov because he’s newly — no, sorry, not his daughter’s fiancé, his sister’s fiancé. He wants to make a good impression on Raskolnikov, you know, because he’s his sister’s new fiancé. Raskolnikov is basically belligerent.
Cam: And he’s kind of unlikable, right?
Rich: Yeah, he comes across as a bit unlikable. I couldn’t do it, but I’d be interested in someone, like, yeah — the case for Luzhin. Is he even that bad? I kind of want someone else to make that case.
Cam: Well, we don’t know that much about him.
Rich: Yeah.
Benny: And then he also — there was a character we should chat more about that he met in part one in a bar, called Marmeladov. And he’s sort of become a friend to Raskolnikov. And in part two, he gets hit by a carriage and dies. And everyone’s sort of gathered at his house while he’s dying, and Raskolnikov is there. And that’s how Raskolnikov meets his daughter, Donya or Sonia. I always forget. I should have written this down. So, right — he meets Sonia, and then he goes home and his mother and sister are there waiting for him. And that’s the end of part two. So maybe we should just talk about two characters I just introduced there — Luzhin and Marmeladov — because they seem to be important thematically for the story.
Cam: Yeah. Maybe just because you missed one thing out, so I’ll just cross that off, and then maybe we talk about it as well. He goes to the police station, and then he comes back. Later on, he goes and sees the police officer, Zametov, and he kind of has this face-off with him, and he’s kind of toying with him. Yeah, he’s been obsessed with this murder, and his friends are kind of noticing he’s obsessed with it. And he sees the police, and he’s kind of acting a bit crazy, and he essentially almost confesses, right? Like, the irony of it is, the police officer thinks like, this shit is so crazy and so brazen, he can’t have done it, because no one in their right mind would come and essentially say, like, what if I did it? But what if? Yeah, this is all the things I do — it’s kind of like that OJ book where he wrote the book after, like “What If I Did It”, and the family only agreed to do it if the “what if” was like blacked out. But yeah, so it’s highlighting this tension within Raskolnikov where it seems like he wants to get caught. Like, he’s tossing up whether he confesses, but then with this sort of stuff he’s just toying with it, or he’s just kind of being a psycho and playing with it.
Cam: But there’s another moment left out — where he literally goes back to the apartment and checks it out. Which — there’s a scene in Crimes and Misdemeanors and Woody Allen’s, which is an homage to that. And then he sees the people there and he talks to them, and he’s like, “oh yeah”, and he gives them his name, and “if that is where I’m from”, and he’s just leaving out all these clues, really.
Rich: Don’t they say killers return to the scene of the crime?
Cam: Yeah, it’s like an old trope. But this presumably predates that. And, yeah —
Benny: Scooby-Doo.
Cam: And he’s kind of giving it away to his friends a bit, the way he talks and argues about it. But he’s also — he’s not fully confessing. He’s got this self-preservation instinct as well, where there’s two senses of the self-preservation. There’s one of not wanting to get caught, but also there’s another side where you want to preserve the thoughts of yourself. He’s kind of going crazy and thinks of himself as an evil person, but there’s kind of this self-preservation that takes over there as well.
Benny: Yeah. So part two, we should say, is basically a deep dive into almost a maniac’s psychology, in terms of every minute he’s seized with a desire to either confess or the desire for ultimate self-preservation. And he’s just chaotically swinging back and forth between these two modes, to such an extent where, yeah, he’s on the line to confessing, but then at the last minute he backs off, turns it into a joke, runs the other way — and just totally chaotic and torn about what to do, both inwardly and outwardly.
Cam: He literally does the playground thing where you’re like, “I was joking, and you fell for it”.
Benny: Yeah, exactly. “You took me seriously, you idiot.” Which totally works.
Cam: And then it works. I kind of had a disbelief there, though, because it did work in the book. But I was kind of like, that wouldn’t work. I was like, this guy’s acting suspicious as fuck. He would become suspect number one. And sometimes you do. I remember hearing a story in Miami in the cocaine rush in the 1980s — there was this guy in a boat taking heaps of cocaine over, and on his way over, there’s this one cop boat that was broken down or something. And he pulls over and he talks to them and he helps them, kind of throws them back in or something. And his gang members are kind of looking through with binoculars going, “what the fuck is this guy doing?” And he gets all the way back onto the shore, and no one checks him. He’s just like — they would have thought, “why would someone who’s a drug dealer help the cops out?” You know — work on charm.
Rich: Isn’t there a reference to that in here? There’s some dynamic like that going on in here. It’s kind of jogged my memory. He talks about how, if he was committing a crime, he would be sure to —
Benny: Yeah, I think he says that’s one of his theories. And he tells someone basically where he hid the jewelry, right? Someone asks him, “what would you do with all the jewelry you stole if you would kill this pawnbroker?” And he says, “oh, I would go somewhere alone and I’d bury it under a rock” etc. And that’s exactly what he did.
Rich: Doesn’t he say, like, “I would go two streets down this avenue, and I’d look for an old abandoned muddied lot, and I’d find a large boulder in its back right hand most corner, and I’d lift it up, and there’d be a small depression underneath which is the perfect size to stash the loot”? And no red flags are going up. Like, he must be a very sarcastic, kooky guy at the best of times, because otherwise you’d be like, “okay, I’m starting to — my suspicions are beginning to be aroused”.
Cam: Did you guys relate to the need to almost confess? I didn’t fully — I mean, maybe it’s just because we haven’t murdered anyone — right? But I could see it as well. It’s just this feeling of isolation, I suppose. And you kind of want others to know. But then there’s also this arrogance to it as well — of like, “I’m just kind of laying little clues out that no one catches” or something, I don’t know.
Rich: I totally resonated with wanting to tell someone. I hate the feeling of guilt with respect to anything. And, like, yeah, even tiny little things — if I feel guilty about it, I basically need someone else to know. I hate carrying that around in my head.
Cam: I didn’t so much mean that. I sort of mean how he actually did it, in this way of like, “what if I did this?” — and it’s because he actually did it.
Benny: Well, he’s doing that because he’s losing his mind, right? This is not to get his jollies.
Cam: Well, it kind of is a little bit in the case of that guy.
Benny: But for the most part, he’s not thinking clearly and rationally about some strategy. He’s just vacillating wildly from one pole to the other.
Cam: Yeah, true.
Rich: Yeah. This is where I enjoyed book two — it was good. And I’m slightly worried about how much more of this I will find interesting. And this is the problem I had with Brothers K as well — that for all the rich psychological tapestries that Dostoyevsky weaves, I have a limited tolerance for just neurotic vacillation, I guess.
Cam: You got enough of that in your own head already, you know?
Rich: God damn it. Yeah, that’s probably what it is. Do I read this book or don’t I? I really like Raskolnikov, but there’s no one quite to root for yet. So hopefully we’ll get someone to root for. And Brothers K, we had Zosima, who I loved and really felt sad about. And we had Alyosha, of course. And I don’t think we have someone like that in this book.
Cam: I think potentially — it’s kind of what I noticed about — I mean, with the big exception of the pawnbroker — the female characters seem to be good. And maybe the friend as well seems kind of good. So he’s got his sister.
Benny: So he talks about his sister.
Rich: Well, not so much good, but they’re the ones sorting shit out. Like Raskolnikov — he’s a fucking mess, even before the murder. And the sister is going to help him with finances. So she’s going to marry this guy, Luzhin — which Raskolnikov doesn’t like because, you know, there’s this letter that he gets from his mom. He’s like, “don’t worry about it, they love each other and stuff.” But he kind of reads between the lines.
Benny: No, she says love is out of the question. She says they don’t love each other.
Cam: Did I misread that?
Rich: Yeah, it’s a matter of like financial prudence.
Cam: Yeah, but okay. But she is trying to reassure him.
Benny: She’s trying to reassure him. Yeah, yeah. And he’s not reassured at all. And he even just wonders — like, he kind of views that as like prostitution.
Cam: Marmeladov — Marmalade — who he runs into at the bar — he’s an alcoholic, and he’s a mess as well. He’s even worse than Raskolnikov. And he’s got a daughter who is a street whore.
Benny: In order to support the family, we should say, because he drinks away all of the money.
Cam: In order to support the family, yeah. So there’s some parallels there. In both cases, it’s like the kind of woman — Sonia, the daughter, and then Donya, Raskolnikov’s sister — who are helping people out.
Rich: Well, crucially, they’re sort of whoring themselves out. That’s what he’s mad about. He thinks that in some sense her marriage is something tantamount to prostitution, because it is a marriage of convenience.
Cam: There’s a point there.
Rich: And maybe he feels particularly bad about it because he’s going to be the beneficiary. His mother and his sister have this slavish devotion to him, where they absolutely love him and they festoon him with gifts and money, and they really want him to be successful and become a great lawyer and so on. Which is also strange when you — given the Raskolnikov that we know — it’s hard to see how he became so important in their eyes. But he’s the first son of the family, which I guess means something important in Russian culture at that time.
Parallels between Raskolnikov and Marmeladov
Benny: So we should talk about the difference between Marmeladov and Raskolnikov.
Rich: My reading is that he sees Marmeladov’s fate as like a cautionary tale for himself, and it precipitates his decision to go through with the murder as well. So just to lay it out a bit more clearly — Marmeladov he meets in a bar, he’s getting drunk, as is his habit, and he lays out basically his whole life story, or at least the latter part of his life story. And what it amounts to is that he is a hopeless drunk. He managed to get back into the civil service at one point and then completely squandered the opportunity, went and wasted all of the money and lost his job. And that his daughter is now prostituting herself to support the family. And he is perfectly self-aware about all of this, which is really interesting. Marmeladov knows exactly what’s happening. He’s under no illusions about it. And he just doesn’t do anything about it.
Cam: Grabs the next drink.
Rich: Yeah, he just accepts it — “this is how life is”. And he enjoys being castigated by his wife, who sounds like a real battle axe, who — I think she literally beats him, or something. Or maybe she just —
Cam: Yeah, she does. Old Russian woman.
Rich: And he loves it, I think, because it gives him the absolution he needs to just keep being a total piece of shit, basically.
Cam: He has three kids as well. I think three kids he’s got. Some of them are stepkids and some of them are his kids.
Rich: Yeah. Well, the point is he’s got people who are depending on him, and they’re incredibly poor. Raskolnikov meets him and he actually pities him. And Marmeladov is not a totally — he’s certainly not an evil character. He’s just a very desperately sad tragic character. And his defect is, like, passivity. And so I’m thinking Raskolnikov sees this guy and it’s like — similar situation with the sister and the daughter — and it’s like, “not me. Like, I’m gonna actually take a hold of my situation and try and change it for the better, and take action in the world.” And I think that’s what leads him to do the murder — which turns out to be like a terrible way of expressing it, even if the sentiment is kind of right.
Cam: That’s what I’m gonna say, because I think that’s right. But what frustrates me with Raskolnikov is, he’s kind of — he’s aware of — he’s such a shitstain, just like Marmaladov. And like his mother and his sister is going to bail him out, and he feels disgusting around that. And it’s like, come on, man — skill issue. Like, just go sort your fucking shit out. Don’t — if you’re that troubled about whoring yourself out, like, just go sort it out. Like, kind of the only thing I could do is, like — I mean, maybe that’s Jordan B. Peterson, but he hadn’t been invented yet. He needs to clean his room.
Benny: He needs to clean his room, like, big time.
Cam: Yeah, there’s a hole in the wall. Yeah. “I will not live in the pod, I will not eat the —“
Rodya’s amorality
Benny: But also related to this — what is fascinating about his internal struggles in part two is they don’t seem related in any way to the actual moral problems he was solving, trying to solve, with the murder in part one, right? So he justifies it — I think partly there’s this implicit motivation to commit the murder in order to get more money so he can help his family. And yeah, his sister doesn’t have to marry this fraudster. So that’s part of the motivation for sure. Then there’s also just this utilitarian motivation that we’ve talked about, in terms of he could do better things with the money — send himself to law school, help some other people out of poverty. And this Alyona is a terrible person and she deserves to die. But then he commits the murder, and then part two, he’s not thinking about any of that, right? So he doesn’t immediately try and do something with the jewelry in order to put the money to good use, right? He doesn’t start thinking about his family and how he can help them now. And so he’s not torn about the morality of what he’s done. He’s just torn about — it’s like his just his personality broke somehow. And he’s just torn between a desire to confess or not. His internal struggles are totally amoral. He’s not actually wrestling with the morality of what he’s done. He doesn’t all of a sudden feel really bad that she died, right?
Cam: I’d slightly push back at that characterisation. I think it’s largely right. But just calling it amoral — because I think this break is coming from the fact that — I mean, as Jordan Peterson would say — that you’re not viewing life as divine. You’re justifying it with all these things, but when you actually do it — when you actually kill someone like that — the reason he’s broken is because he’s just done this wretched, immoral act. And he can kind of feel that in his nerve endings. And it’s totally broken him, and he’s a different person. So I think you’re right, though — he’s not even concerned about that. The act has corrupted him so strongly that he’s probably not going to touch — or he hasn’t touched — the jewelry, apart from hiding it. But he doesn’t want to. But I think it’s the morality of the act that breaks him. It’s not just like, “oh, that was yuck”. Imagine doing it — imagine you get to a place where you’ve killed someone. And even if it was self-defence or something, or it was blurry self-defence, you’d just be like, “holy shit”.
Benny: But I think you’d be focused more on the act of murder itself, right? “Wow, I can’t believe I had to do that. Wow, now I’ve killed Lizaveta as well.” He doesn’t meditate on the fact at all in part two that he’s also had to kill this totally innocent person, Lizaveta, as well, right? Yeah, I don’t view it as a moral shock about what he’s done. I just view it as a psychological break.
Cam: Yeah, that’s fair. And now I view it — actually, yeah, I find it a little bit hard to relate to. Because if I got myself in not a premeditated murder, but just in this kind of act like that — whether it’s neglect or something, you know, drunk driving and you kill something — like, I’d be constantly ruminating on the right and wrongness of it, or how bad you were, rather than just being physically ill.
Benny: And you’d be thinking about Lizaveta in particular, right? Yes. Picturing her face as your fricking axe leaves her head. It’s a really good point, Benny. I hadn’t noticed it, but it is surprising that he never actually thinks about the people that he killed at all. He thinks about his own guilt and his own wanting to relieve the pressure of hiding his secret, and he’s obsessed with the murders, but we never get any glimpse of him feeling regretful or picturing their faces or anything — at least not that I can remember. I might have missed something.
Cam: I do wonder how much different it would have been if he hadn’t killed the sister, right? So, he’s planned to kill this evil pawnbroker, and he kills her with the blunt side of the axe — which I thought was interesting. It kind of further showed that conflict in him. Like, he didn’t really want to do it. And then the sister comes home, and he gets shocked, and she’s totally good and pure, and then he kills her with the sharp side of the axe, because he’s kind of flustered, and he’s acting on impulse, and it’s non-planned. But, like, I mean, that would break you a hell of a lot more. Like, even if you’re convinced of the first one, and then you’ve killed this innocent person, right? So even though he’s not explicitly thinking about it, I do think that probably would have instigated the break somewhat.
Rich: Yeah, I agree with both of you. I don’t know where to land on that. Maybe it’s the same thing, really, but it’s just that it shifts him into this second state where he’s not being reflective — but it is because of that first action.
Benny: Yeah, we’ll see where it goes in the next part. It’s possible he’s just still — it’s too soon after the murders, and he’s sort of in shock and not sure how to process it. And we’ll see if he deals more fully with the actual moral consequences of what he’s done later. But I don’t find him that sympathetic of a character. I’m somewhat surprised, Rich, that you like him or sympathise with him at all. I find him quite loathsome.
Cam: Utilitarian.
Benny: Yeah, I don’t have much sympathy with him. I just feel like — my sense is he knows what’s right in the first part, but is swimming in the water of some bad ideas and is unable to stop himself from acting on them. And then in the second part, he’s just totally self-absorbed and just trying to relieve the pressure of “will I be caught? Will I be caught?” — not, “is what I’ve done right or wrong?” He’s not wrestling with that at all. So yeah, I’m not a huge Roski fan.
Rich: I have to say, I quite like the fact he’s a student, you know — just as a sort of ideological delusions-of-grandeur sort of — totally — quite good student, and just like the like — I catch it, like — I related to that to some extent. Just like, “society is stupid”, and you’ve got all these ideas, and then you actually fucking live some of them and you’re like, “holy shit, I was so wrong.”
Cam: Yeah, yeah. 20 years old.
Benny: But he also — he doesn’t explicitly engage with any of the ideas, right? He mentions in passing, you know, the kind of ideological things you hear bandied about all the time. But he doesn’t explicitly draw upon any named person or text. It’s just things that are floating around in the general cultural milieu at that time. Just on that point — Dostoevsky wrote a letter to a friend, and in it his quote is the following about the book when he’s describing the plot. He says: “A young man, excluded from student status at university, of trading class, living in extreme poverty, succumbs through frivolity and a rickety-ness of thought to certain strange half-baked ideas in the air, and makes up his mind to get out of his foul situation in a single bound.” So I think that’s right. There’s sort of these ideas floating around. Some of them are even maybe somewhat self-contradictory, right? Like nihilism is an amoral ideology, or perhaps immoral to the extent that it’s just all about you, and it doesn’t — you know, you shouldn’t think about consequences for anyone else, live how you want to live. And then — but there’s also obviously all these comments about utilitarianism and how it can be taken too far and stuff. And so there’s sort of this weird, ideologically intoxicating soup that he’s swimming in. And I agree that it’s not one particular reason that he’s committing the murder. But I sort of think it’s like maybe there’s an element of Dostoevsky’s commenting on what he sees as some sort of just cultural degradation of ideas and traditional values, and some of the conservatism that he’s come to be a proponent of. And just views like, yeah, there’s all these different directions in which society is going downhill. And it’s just this melange of weird ideas that he gets trapped in and then acts upon. Maybe it gets fleshed out more in the next 300 pages. But I think it isn’t super clear on what are these ideas that are driving him.
Cam: I think we know a bit of the context around the Russian history. And I suppose people reading at the time. And we know Nietzsche parallels — who Dostoevsky didn’t read, as Nietzsche wrote after Dostoevsky died. And Nietzsche didn’t read Dostoevsky. So there’s kind of —
Benny: Wait, yes, he did. He was one of his favourite guys.
Cam: Yeah, but not until after he published most of his shit.
Benny: Oh, okay, right.
Cam: Yeah, which is kind of — I mean, maybe he kind of lied about that. But it’s funny — yeah, Dostoevsky often writes around about his books and how to interpret them.
Rich: It’s just with the whole death of the author thing —
Cam: Yeah, I guess that was inappropriate of me to bring up. No, no, no, I don’t know. But he’s kind of the anti-death-of-the-author. He writes tracts around his books and stuff — how to interpret them.
Benny: But I think in this instance, it’s fair to try and analyse them by means of what was going on culturally, right? I mean, no author is writing with the view that the book’s going to be popular in 200 years. I think we have to really look at what was going on culturally.
Rich: That’s what you should be thinking about with your essays, man.
Benny: Yeah.
Cam: Solitude or serendipity. 200 years. Fuck me, though — imagine actually being read in 500 years, like — Dostoevsky. What a man.
Benny: Yeah, no, I think we have to interpret it through that context, because he probably wouldn’t have thought that it was even going to get translated, let alone be read centuries later.
Arguing whether we live in tumultuous times comparable to Dosto’s era
Rich: So maybe one way of thinking about it is that — it’s a criticism of the work — is that it’s hard for me to imagine how hard this sort of stuff would have hit at the time, when the ideas were first making their way into the public sphere. Because we don’t have anything like that nowadays, in part because everything diffuses almost instantly. There’s no incoming wave of things that reach your shores and get disseminated like there is, but it all happens so much faster, and there’s no geographical boundaries or anything like that really.
Cam: So it’s hard to — yeah, that’s an interesting point. If you put yourself in the shoes of people who’ve had like highly nationalistic culture, much more so than we do — like what we conceive of nationalism today — and, you know, like god emperors or kings or tsars who are more than just figureheads that people make fun of, they’re considered like demigods, in some sense — or similar to like, you know, long-standing political leaders — and then having that wash away, having your deeply-held deeply wash away, or at least not wash away but come under direct challenge — that must have been a crazy thing.
Rich: But I just find that it doesn’t resonate that much with me, because it’s not relatable to me really. Like, I don’t know. I mean, I think we swim since we were born and it has been since Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky. Yeah, I’ve — I’m not as huge a Dostoyevsky fan as some people are, perhaps. And I think you do need the cultural context to enrich your reading of it and try and get a better sense of what he’s getting at.
Cam: Yeah, I mean I take your point that things would proliferate more quickly now and that we’ve kind of had this post-liberal order since like World War II that hasn’t changed too much. But the idea of this kind of vaguely different thing of, like, wokeism — and that I can imagine being in, you know, Eastern Europe or something, and that touching things, and you can imagine a modern day Dostoevsky, like, in his basement. Like, well, Houellebecq kind of does that to some extent as well — of just this view of this atomised society just taking away tradition and taking away the soul. I could imagine a modern-day —
Rich: Yeah, no, I’m not saying that it couldn’t happen. It definitely could, and it is happening for some people at some times. It’s not happening for us at this time, and hasn’t for a couple hundred years. That’s all. Like, one interesting thing would be — if let’s say we did have a huge resurgence in populism and fascism and some swing. Like, basically we live in the Francis Fukuyama end of history, right? In these select countries in the West where we have market-based economies and democratic governance, and we haven’t had any major wars between world powers for 70 years. So that could change — that absolutely could change. But it’s just, it’s been a while, you know? And those are the kinds of changes of that magnitude that would really feel crazy to be a part of. And as crazy as modern life is, it’s not actually crazy on the level of these types of societal rapid —
Cam: I think I do view the like tide of wokeism — and maybe it’s just more of an extent of liberalism continuing — but I think it was pretty rapid and strong changing, like pre 2010 to 2015 to post. And especially, like, you kind of sometimes you watch things from the early 2000s, felt like a different country.
Rich: I mean, felt somewhat analogous compared against people getting dragged to the gulag, though, man. Like, it’s not — I get it, but it’s not the same.
Cam: But it’s not the same thing. They’ll see if you don’t —
Rich: It’s just, like, he’s worried around these kind of ideas of like lack of religion or tradition, and what would that mean — and yeah, potentially it is the gulag, or potentially it’s other unthinkable things, or, you know, murder. And I certainly take your point that the Fukuyama end of history has kind of been the case since like World War II, and that’s just like the water we live in. Like, yeah, I think I resonate with it to some extent, in the sense that there are certain ideas and certain cultural waters I’ve found myself swimming in at various times that I’ve later been disabused of, right? And then realised, like, “oh, that was leading me down some somewhat crazy paths” — in terms of the kinds of behaviours I might have been tempted to justify. So something like longtermism and stuff — I was pretty on board with a lot of that logic. And I think, you know, that’s a very specific set of ideas, and I’m not saying I would have started justifying murder based on it. But I can see how a culture — those sort of cultural ideas — can really start impacting your behaviour. And like, you know, there are some — we don’t have to litigate this whole thing now — but there are some, I think, just very disturbing conclusions that come out of thinking that way. And so, you know, funnily enough, that sort of thinking is sort of directly relevant to this book in terms of the utilitarianism stuff. But I just mean more generally in terms of getting sucked into a set of cultural ideas and then having that really impact your behaviour in ways that later on you come to regret.
Benny: I can definitely identify with that. Just on the “how much has cultural change” point — I mean, I think it’s a good point that we’re not living through times where society is changing so rapidly that, you know, yeah, everyone’s imprisoning their, especially in the West, their political rivals, and people aren’t being dragged off to the gulag and stuff. But I think there’s still this element of — you rarely realise how fast the water’s heating up while you’re in it.
Cam: Oh, we’re getting fired. Yeah.
Benny: I mean, there’s still this element, I think. And even just in terms of the decline of some of the influence of the West, the bizarre politics that’s taken a hold, especially in the US — wokeism is obviously a huge one. I think we’ll probably look back in 10 or 20 years and realise this was a pretty big era of cultural shift. I think it remains to be seen how it’s going to turn out — whether it was for the good or the bad. But I think things are changing faster, both locally and on the global stage in terms of various invasions and certain wars, etc., than maybe you’re giving credit for, Rich. In the moment, day to day, things rarely feel like they’re changing fast. But yeah, I think we’re in a moment of more political turmoil and stuff now than, for instance, like the early aughts, when something like Fukuyama’s thesis did seem like it was going to hold more water.
Rich: I agree with that. I suppose from my point of view, one way of saying it would be: right now, it’s difficult to say whether we’re seeing small oscillations that are going to ramp up into something big, or we’re seeing small oscillations that are going to peter out and mean revert to the last 70 years again. And I guess I’m mostly just hoping that it’s the latter. But yeah, obviously, I might be wrong about that. I do want to boldly prophesise that we will mean revert rather than slide into, you know, a new wave of totalitarianism or erosion of Western liberal values — or whatever — not erosion, but whatever you want to call it. Like, full-fledged destruction or trampling of those values. I think we’re already course correcting, perhaps.
Cam: Maybe what’s kind of interesting is, I think you could argue that liberalism is a part of this kind of swashbuckle group of ideas that Dostoevsky was worried about and writing about. It’s kind of interesting. You know, you get kind of neo-trads these days saying like, “I want to return — I want to return to the 2000s, I want to return to the 90s, I want to return to the 50s” — but it’s always kind of like, “I want to return to this point where we’d have made some progress and then not any further.” But Dostoevsky was kind of the first trad in a way. I mean, maybe that’s ahistorical, but as Rich was kind of pointing out, this is when the big kind of Western ideas were taking over the world for the first time. And Dostoevsky was saying like, “well, I flirted with that as a uni student, but no” — and it’s interesting like 200 years later people still kind of get worried about that, and you can still go back and cite Dostoevsky. And there’s kind of this Lindyness — like Dostoevsky was kind of resting on religion as being like this crux for the alternative. And it’s so Lindy that, whether you’re worried about, you know, rainbow hairs now, or you’re worried about women working in the 70s, or whatever — the point is the tradness is still kind of that Lindy kind of Christianity. And in Russia’s case —
Moral panic over materialism
Rich: I think a sharper way of putting my criticism is that Dostoyevsky was just straightforwardly wrong, to the extent that he thought that Western materialism was going to ruin society. It was not only wrong, but exactly backwards. And we’ve had like the most peaceful, prosperous period in literally the entire history of our species. And we’ve got, like, coming up on 200 years since he laid out his concerns. Religion has massively reduced, at least in terms of Christianity. But crime is far lower than it ever has been. There’s less war than there has been. Things have gotten better on basically any dimension you care to measure. And I also think that the existentialist fears are — obviously they’re forever valid and interesting — but I also just don’t think they are as much of an issue as people like Dostoyevsky or Nietzsche or the existentialists made them out to be. And people just get along basically, and I don’t think most people are experiencing deep existential terror or turmoil throughout most of their lives at all. I think it’s something that you succumb to now and then, and especially highly self-reflective or neurotic people tend to succumb to it. But yeah, I’m not sure if it’s the biggest problem — anywhere near the biggest problems that we actually have to face. Like, it’s not a solved problem, but it feels more like a solved problem.
Cam: It’s interesting — you think he’s wrong? Because maybe one difference is, I am slightly more sympathetic to the Dostoevsky critique of liberalism or whatnot, and lack of meaning and where that goes — and yeah, GDP goes brr, but like, I’m more sympathetic to that. But anyway, my question was going to be: it’s interesting thinking he’s wrong, so would you then think, like, the instantiation of Dostoevsky being wrong being like, “well, you’re going to end up like Raskolnikov, or you’re going to end up like Ivan in Brothers Karamazov” — do you think that’s maybe a straw man of like what the alternative is? Like, it won’t be this kind of horrific atheistic amoral or justified kind of regime. It will just be kind of like Western liberalism post-World War II, which is pretty good — like, kind of in a Steven Pinker sense.
Rich: Yeah, I mean, you could like cherry pick whatever, right? In some sense he was right with communism and Stalin and so on.
Cam: But there’s this middle ground, maybe, that he was wrong about.
Rich: I mean, we could re-litigate all the new atheist talking points, basically, but I can’t be bothered doing that. I don’t believe that atheists are less moral people, and I don’t trust people who would only be moral because they’re worried about getting in trouble with God and all this kind of thing, right? I feel like I’m a moral person, maybe more moral than a lot of religious people, even though I don’t believe in any supernatural being. So I have direct conscious firsthand experience of it. I mean, I also want to slightly water down my argument — that I don’t really know. This is the third Dostoevsky book I’ve read, and I’m only partway through it. I don’t really know what his exact predictions or critiques were. I’m just basing it on the fact that he started out as a revolutionary and then he circled back to being a fairly conservative, orthodox, Christian, nationalist. I don’t know if you’d call him a conservative, but that was the stance he ended up in. So that’s what I’m basing it on. I’m sure his actual opinions are way more nuanced than that. But basically, he was wrong, I think.
Benny: I think I’d want to take the middle line between both of you, and argue that yeah, he perhaps wasn’t a good — not historian, but maybe social analyst — for the next 100 years. In that, if his prediction — and I agree with Rich that it’s kind of unclear what his prediction was, or his precise warning was — but insofar as it was “beware of the new modern world with all its temptations”, I agree that he was sort of just objectively wrong about that. The world is much better now than when he was writing. And I don’t doubt that he might have been scared of some of the ideas that have actually turned out to be fantastic ideas about how to make society a lot better. On the other hand, I think he’s speaking perhaps more fundamentally about the allure of new, exciting, revolutionary ideas that promise to change the world — and in particular, promise some sort of liberation for you, and speak to someone who is smart and who is convinced of their own sort of grandiosity in the world, and willingness to change it pretty drastically in order to achieve certain political ends. And you can agree — or rather, I suppose that message holds more broadly than in the specific social context he was writing, right? And I think we’re still dealing with this because part of being young is being excited by the world and excited by all the ways in which you can potentially impact it — and being slightly naive about your ability to predict all these future consequences of your actions, and think you know exactly how to reorganise the world in such a way. And I view this book, or at least the beginning of this book, as basically some sort of warning against hubris of that kind. And if you don’t have some sort of guiding moral framework in which to live your life and to sort of hold back your actions a bit, then it’s really easy to get swept along in the tide of radical revolutionary ideas. Even if some of them have merit, right? There are certain aspects of utilitarianism that certainly have merit, right? And push back on, for instance, old religious ideas that tell you just how to live and how not to live. But if you get too swept up in them and are too convinced of your own ability to be agentic in the world, then these things can go off the rails. And that’s a problem that I think is perennially with us and holds water, regardless of whatever the precise social context of 1866 Russia was.
Rich: Yeah, I mean, we’ll see what happens to the West as well in the next hundred years. But anyway —
Cam: Damn, it’s like it’s all going downhill.
Rich: No, no, no. I mean, but we will see what happens, right?
Rodya’s altruism
Cam: I wanted to actually change the topic slightly. So one thing we actually didn’t mention about Raskolnikov’s conflict and the conflicts is — he does a lot of, and somewhat in defence of him, as Benny was saying, there’s no redeeming qualities — he does a lot of altruistic, nice things to people. So early on, he sees a drunk woman stumbling home and he sees a man stalking her, and he goes and helps her and gets her in a cab. But then after he does that, he kind of scorns himself, and he’s like, “oh, I shouldn’t be meddling with other people. Let him do what he wants.” And then with Marmalade at the bar, the alcoholic — he’s so broke, Raskolnikov is so broke — when he takes him home, he gives him a small bit of money he has. And then later on, he saves Marmaladov and takes him back, and then Marmaladov dies in Marmaladov’s daughter’s arms. But then he gives money and he helps. And he actually feels better about himself. And this is the first time post-murder he’s having a clean thought to himself. So he is good in that sense. But I did kind of wonder, in that latter altruistic instance — when Marmaladov died and he gave his money and he felt better — like, just in terms of, who’s he doing that for? In some sense, I thought it was kind of self-preservation. You know, when you’ve done something wrong, and, like, “I’ll make up for this and I’ll help out”, and you kind of feel good about yourself — and you kind of, it’s this kind of self-denial aspect to it — of that being the real reason why he’s been altruistic.
Rich: Yeah, I mean, I’d like to think that it was genuine, and because we’ve got the pattern of behaviour from prior to the murder where he does go out of his way to help people. When he is generous, albeit like he’s generous with other people’s money — but still it’s money that he could have kept in his own pocket.
Cam: Was it his mum’s, was it?
Rich: Yeah. And she’s borrowed it from her moneylender, getting an advance on her pension, and so on and so on.
Cam: I did notice one thing. I think it was like 30 rubles or whatever it was called. I think that was the same amount that Marmaladov’s daughter Sonia got paid for prostitution. I just thought that there may have been a kind of symmetry there of like, that’s the money he probably got via his mum, via his sister — who he kind of thinks is prostituting — and just like, kind of set him off. He’s like — because he got really annoyed, I think, like 30 cubics or whatever they’re called. And just like, “oh, right”. Yeah, and I just thought that’s interesting. They would kind of set you off. Like, yeah, definitely. 30? The pawnbroker.
Benny: Nice. Well, yeah, I’m really liking it. I don’t remember the first read as much as I would like to, but it’s also kind of refreshing to read the book and not remember every detail of it. So I hope, for Rich’s sake, he continues to be impressed by it and it’s not 400 more pages of part two.
Rich: Can you allay my concerns? You must know, is it?
Benny: I think I just find this whole psychological experiment that Dostoevsky is engaging in to be more interesting than you. Maybe I’m just less neurotic than you in general.
Cam: Benny was licking his lips when you were saying that’s what you’re worried about, Rich.
Benny: No, I mean, there’s definitely some bigger plot elements that come into play. I honestly can’t say if it’ll allay your fears. I mean, I think these are the waters we’re going to be swimming in for the rest of the novel. And so it’s not as if, you know, it’s going to become a sci-fi book on page 300 and we’re going to go to space or something. So there’s no big changes of that sort. I mean, if it’s getting tedious for you guys, or we find that we’re just re-litigating a lot of the same themes, then we can just make bigger jumps for each episode, right? Maybe just do two more episodes — or even one more episode — on the rest of the book if we’re finding it a little dry.
Rich: Yeah. Do you think we used up all our — did we blow our load too early with this one?
Cam: Is it always around two, baby?
Benny: No, I don’t think so. There’s some other stuff that happens that I think will be fruitful to talk about. I don’t know if we’ll fill up one or two more episodes. It might be a natural break of like — early on is the murder, and that’s kind of quite a well packaged thing — and then post-murder is essentially the psychological impacts of it.
Rich: I think if we can do three episodes on Map and Territory and on Brief Interviews, then we can do three episodes on Crime and Punishment.
Cam: You’ve got a third-part murder mystery now.
Rich: I mean, it could be.
Cam: That’s true. That’s exciting. I get to enact more of my murder, violent fantasies — transgressing moral codes. Crime and Punishment, like, par four. It’s hunting season. Fucking everyone, eh? Justified, man.
Benny: You’re probably ready for bed, eh, Rich?
Rich: Yeah, yeah, I’m just losing energy, but this is good. Thanks, fellas. Time to dream about beating up a horse.
Cam: Oh, we didn’t talk about the horse dream.
Benny: Yeah, we didn’t talk about the horse. Maybe you’re dreaming about it. I don’t know. We’ll do the whole second episode on the horse dream.
Cam: Yeah, yeah, if nothing else, we’ll talk about the horse.
Rich: Nice. All right, fellas. Cool.
Benny: Well, next time, catch you later, guys. Good to see you, guys.
