Guay , Robert Dostoevsky's ‘Crime and Punishment’: Philosophical Perspectives (review)

Abstract

Slavonic and East European Review, 99, 1, 2021 Reviews Guay, Robert (ed.). Dostoevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’: Philosophical Perspectives. Oxford Studies in Philosophy and Literature. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2019. xv + 220 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £64.00; £16.99. The chief ‘effort’ of the series in which this volume appears is, in the words of general editor Richard Eldridge, ‘to track the work of open thinking in literary forms, as they lie both neighbor to and aslant from philosophy’ (p. xi). With this in mind, the choice of Crime and Punishment as the first text from the Russian canon to be featured in the series seems both obvious and ambitious. As Robert Guay comments in his Introduction, and as Raskol´nikov, Porfirii and Sonia (the three protagonists of these essays) are only too aware, the theoretical aspects of the novel are built around ‘poor arguments that are ineffectual in shaping beliefs and actions’ (p. 3). Crime and Punishment does not even make it clear ‘what the thought experiments are or when they begin or end, if they ever do’ (p. 3) — in contrast, say, to Notes from Underground and The Brothers Karamazov. Yet it is precisely this lack of beginnings and ends — the mysteries of motivation and agency at the heart of the novel, its overriding concern with mind and language — that compels the interest of the philosophers who have contributed five of the volume’s seven chapters. The arguments of these chapters defy brief summary, but the contours of their concerns may at least be sketched. In his account of Dostoevskii’s representation of mind, Garry L. Hagberg is especially interested in (and perceptive about) the ‘torrent of submerged meaning’ (p. 33) in Porfirii’s language, an aspect which Hagberg studies more broadly in terms of the novel’s repertoire of gestures, facial expressions, tone and implication, permitting himself the parenthetical provocation that ‘the philosophy of language forgets what Dostoevskii is showing about linguistic expressivity in this novel to its peril’ (p. 26). In his chapter, Guay explores related concerns, arguing that the novel ‘treat[s] agency as expressive’ and that Raskol´nikov’s agency, whether he wishes this or not, requires ‘the ability to make the deed his own’ (p. 72). However, several of Guay’s own categorical claims — for example, that ‘All the characters in the novel fail as agents’ (p. 88) or that agency is only available through transgression (Razumikhin, Dunia, Sonia, Porfirii?) — are hard to accept, and indeed are contradicted by other chapters in the volume that marshal textual evidence more persuasively. One such chapter is Rick Anthony Furtak’s decidedly sunny-side-up take on Dostoevskii’s treatment of ‘Love, Suffering, and Gratitude for Existence’, which convincingly (if not innovatively) traces Raskol´nikov’s evolution and self-recognition to his acceptance of Sonia’s love and his love for her. Furtak is especially strong on the distinctive psychological and spiritual REVIEWS 159 feature of Sonia, one that makes of her a rather more credible character than the conventional criticisms allow. After comparing her aptly to Alesha Karamazov, Furtak comments that ‘Her faith […] is a kind of existential trust that sustains her wholehearted participation in the finite realm of her cares and concerns’ (p. 63). Trust and care are also at the centre of the chapter on ‘The Family in Crime and Punishment’, supplied by the Slavist Susanne Fusso. Healthy family life, as the novel makes abundantly clear, is precisely what Dostoevskii’s St Petersburg cannot offer its denizens, but Fusso subtly illuminates the ways that ‘noncoercive ’, ‘voluntary familial care’ (p. 139) is extended by some of its characters, notably Raskol´nikov and Razumikhin, to those outside their biological families. With his imaginative ability ‘to explore family relations in all their multifariousness, transcending the “woman question”’ (p. 144), Dostoevskii thus manages to suggest, beneath the surface of the novel, his response to the critiques of traditional family relations prevalent in his time, whether in the writings of his chief intellectual antagonist Chernyshevskii or of his main amatory antagonist Apollinaria Suslova, whose stories, first published by Dostoevskii, are skilfully treated here. Thevolume’sthreemostarrestingcontributionsbringCrimeandPunishment into sustained dialogue with a major philosopher — in two...