Daniel McNeill - Dostoevsky, Berdyaev, and Shestov. Three Russian Apostles of Freedom

An accident that brings him once again accidentally into the world of the madman Marmeladov. A carriage has run over him. Only Raskolnikov knows his identity and his address. Marmeladov is so extremely wounded that Raskolnikov urges the police to call for a doctor and help him carry the injured man who is near death to his residence that is nearby. He shouts that he will pay the expenses. At the room of his wife, Katerina Ivanova, it is revealed by the doctor who examines Marmeladov that there is no hope. Marmeladov dies ten minutes later. His wife has sent her daughter Polenka, a child of eleven, to run to her stepsister’s residence. Marmeladov’s daughter Sonya arrives. Her father is able to raise himself up a little and beg her forgiveness. He dies embracing her. Raskolnikov confesses to Katerina Ivanova that Marmeladov was his friend. He gives the impoverished widow all the money he has, twenty roubles, and leaves.

The appearance of Sonya, “a small thin girl of eighteen with fair hair, rather pretty, with wonderful blue eyes” is a miracle. Or rather, her accidental appearance in Raskolnikov’s life gives him the opportunity, as we will see, of perceiving later when he gets to know her that a miracle, a miraculous indescribable something lives within her that is a source to her of divine strength. For the present however she does communicate something to Raskolnikov by her unexpected action that touches him deeply, something that can be described truly, given the absurd rational intentionality of our axe murderer, as a miraculous influence. As Raskolnikov is leaving the building and on the last steps, Polenka, the eleven-year-old stepsister of Sonya, calls after him to wait. Sonya has sent her after him to find out his name and where he lives.“Who sent you?” asks Raskolnikov. “‘Sister Sonya sent me,’ answered the girl, smiling…brightly.” “I knew it was sister Sonya sent you,” says Raskolnikov. “Mamma sent me too…when sister Sonya was sending me, mamma came up too and said, ‘Run fast, Polenka’” “Do you love sister Sonya?” asks Raskolnikov. “ ‘I love her more than anyone,’ Polenka answered with a peculiar earnestness, and her smile became graver.” “And will you love me?”, asks Raskolnikov.

A series of accidents has led an axe murderer, the murderer of Lizaveta who raised only one hand up as he was about to slice his axe into her head, to ask a child to love him. He certainly does not deserve her love but he receives it anyway in spite of what he has done: that is what makes it miraculous.

“By way of answer he saw the little girl’s face approaching him, her full lips naively held out to kiss him. Suddenly her arms as thin as sticks held him tightly, her head rested on his shoulder and the little girl wept softly, pressing her face against him.”

Sonya has sent a little angel to Raskolnikov and we will see that, despite her foul profession, Sonya is a divine woman or at least a woman whose soul is permanently influenced by something divine. But we should be careful and not begin thinking that Dostoevsky is out to show us angels or divine women as symbols of a divine world beyond and above us. He is not after some divine world up in the clouds. He is after what is inside humans and only what is truly inside them, holy or unholy. He has no eyes to look into the souls of people like Raskolnikov’s sister’s fiance, Luzhin, or bourgeois rational people in general because they have covered themselves over with layer after layer of stuffed-shirt rationalism and intentional behavior. They don’t look ever into their own souls and have condemned themselves to being soulless. But people like Sonya, degraded and humiliated by her poverty, defenseless, have nothing at all coming from the outside world or coming from what is superficial in their own nature to help them construct some kind of strong practical ego. Everything around them insults their nature and makes them suffer. They can be looked into by Dostoevsky because they have nothing left to give themselves except their soul. He is not against angels and saints but he is not interested in them. He is passionate about trying to see if there is anything divine on earth and he knows for certain that if there is it can only be found in the human soul, a place that accidentally became visible to him when the Tsar of all the Russians cancelled at the last moment his execution and gave him a second pair of eyes.

During a scene at Raskolnikov’s room between his friend, Razumihin, his sister Dounia, and his mother, Pulcheria Alexandrovna, Sonya opens the door and walks in. She has come to invite Raskolnikov to her father’s funeral and also to the dinner her stepmother is preparing that will take place after the burial. She is extremely embarrassed and her child-like “kindliness and simplicity in her expression” touches Raskolnikov. Sonya is also touched by him. He asks her for her address and promises to come to see her. Her appearance in the room of the murderer is angelic and something passes between the two that comes into Raskolnikov’s soul from a world that for him does not exist. She in turn feels a mysterious connection with Raskolnikov. “Never, never had she felt anything like this. Dimly and unconsciously a whole new world was opening before her.” When Raskolnikov comes to her residence later the same day, he has a long talk with the angelic Sonya and has a chance to enter this “whole new world” that has opened before Sonya. Something during this their second meeting attaches him permanently to her but something else prevents him from entering her world.

It is a main theme of Dostoevsky’s novels to bring characters struggling mightily with mental problems of various kinds to the point of belief. But most of them never make a magical leap of faith. What blocks them for the most part is an extreme reliance on the power of the mind although the influence of their mind does not completely explain their inability to reach the baptism that awaits them by a discovery of an independent, blessed power in their soul. Their isolation in their minds is strange, mysterious. An interesting way to understand the direction that Dostoevsky’s characters take is to compare them with the direction of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Hamlet at the beginning of the play is an emotional mystic who talks to a ghost, the supposed spirit of his dead father who urges him from somewhere beyond the grave to avenge his murder by his brother. Hamlet is unable to rely sufficiently on this mystical revelation to avenge his dead father by murdering his uncle. In fact, he does not know certainly, objectively that his uncle has murdered his father until the third act. Finally, at the end of the play, Hamlet’s development leads him to rely solely on his rationality to direct him. “Readiness is all”, he announces in act five. Raskolnikov on the other hand is ready for all at the beginning of his drama and he never gives up his reliance on his reason. Hamlet’s youthful madness at the beginning of the play when he talks to a spirit develops to a sane reliance on reason to keep him ready to face the world realistically. Raskolnikov develops from an extreme reliance on reason to an insane reliance on it. His development should be from the rational to the mystical, the very opposite of Hamlet’s development, but, in the main body of his story, Dostoevsky will not allow him to go in that direction and discover the relief waiting for him in his soul. Raskolnikov’s rational aberrations from the normal use of reason will be repeated often in other characters in other Dostoevsky novels taking other forms, but it is always the same theme and the same judgment on their author’s part: an extreme reliance on reason alone becomes an insane aberration and drives a human completely away from any solace that can come to him from the soul. Sonya offers Raskolnikov during their interview a way to reach down into his soul and drink the gentle waters of his soul’s salvation but he does not go in the direction she offers.

In a dark room lit only by a candle, Sonya and Raskolnikov sit and talk. It is eleven at night. She is frightened by his unexpected visit at a late hour but happy to see him. He says that her stepmother, Katerina Ivanovna, used to beat her insinuating that the two have a bad relationship but Sonya explains that she loves her stepmother and that they are a close family. She expresses compassion for the sick woman with feeling as she speaks of the hardships of her life. Raskolnikov asks if she knew Lizaveta, the girl he murdered, and she answers that she did. As the talk goes on, he asks himself how she can live with such suffering, her own and her family’s. He paces up and down the room thinking for five minutes in silence. “His eyes were hard, feverish and piercing, his lips were twitching. All at once he bent down quickly and dropping to the ground, kissed her foot.” He explains that he has not bowed down to her but to “all the suffering of humanity”. He says after a few moments that “your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing”. He is now “almost in a frenzy”. “Tell me how this shame and degradation can exist in you side by side with other, opposite, holy feelings?” It appears that he is going in the direction of the soul. He can not resist trying to know how she can be such a good person and live such a foul life. He cried to himself, “How can she sit on the edge of the abyss of loathsomeness into which she is slipping…? Does she expect a miracle?”

“‘So you pray to God a great deal, Sonya?’ he asked her.

Sonya did not speak; he stood beside her waiting for an answer.

‘What should I be without god?’ she whispered rapidly, forcibly, glancing at him with suddenly flashing eyes, and squeezing his hand.

‘Ah, so that is it!’ he thought.

‘And what does God do for you?’ he asked, probing her further.

Sonya was silent for a long while, as though she could not answer. Her weak chest kept heaving with emotion.

‘Be silent! Don’t ask! You don’t deserve!’ she cried suddenly looking sternly and wrathfully at him.

‘That’s it, that’s it,’ he repeated to himself.

‘He does everything,’ she whispered quickly, looking down again.”

The conflict is the same throughout most of Dostoevsky’s works. It fascinates him to put side by side the angelic opposite the unholy, the good opposite the loathsome, faith opposite unbelief, the mystical opposite the rational. Usually there is somewhere a hint of a divine and miraculous world that flashes light very dimly towards his characters, a light that never quite reaches most of them, that never becomes a bright flash into their soul that might save them. Sonya is clearly an angel despite her profession and Raskolnikov is clearly a devil supported by the unrelenting power of the mind. They meet in a dark room lit only by a candle. Sonya’s soul is bright with love. Raskolnikov’s soul is a dark abyss and his mind a solid bridge above it.

Then a miracle takes place. Raskolnikov understands with his mind, objectively, that a secret divine presence is within Sonia. He accepts with his mind that God is alive within her protecting her even though he is unable or unwilling to jump across the gap between his mind and his soul, influenced by Sonya, to repent and to be saved. He asks himself, “What held her up – surely not depravity? All that infamy had obviously only touched her mechanically, not one drop of real depravity had penetrated to her heart; he saw that.” He noticed a book on the top of a chest of drawers as he paced up and down the room. He picks it up and sees that it is a copy of the New Testament. She reveals that Lizaveta, the murdered young woman, brought it to her. He asks her to read the story of Lazarus whom Jesus raised from the dead. She hardly dares to read it to him because she says he does not believe but he insists and she reads. “Raskolnikov saw in part why Sonya could not bring herself to read to him and the more he saw this, the more roughly and irritably he insisted on her doing so. He understood only too well how painful it was for her to betray and unveil all that was her own. He understood that these feelings really were her secret treasure, which she had kept perhaps for years, perhaps from childhood, while she lived with an unhappy father and a distracted stepmother crazed by grief, in the midst of starving children and unseemly abuse and reproaches.” He sees with the eyes of his mind inside Sonya’s soul. He sees miraculously without feeling anything miraculous that a miracle is the source of her life, a hidden source.