And who made me the judge here? T.5 crime and punishment

A person will never cease to be concerned about two things: the starry sky above him and the moral law in him.
I. Kant

The philosophical content of the novel concerns the moral problem of the “right to blood,” which relates to “eternal” issues. Since ancient times, people have been concerned about the means to achieve either personal or high social goals. The extreme, immoral point of view on this problem is formulated in the form of a cynical aphorism: the end justifies the means. That is, for the sake of noble goals, a person can commit any crime, and atone for it with subsequent worthy actions.

The philosophical theme of the novel is expressed in Raskolnikov’s theory, set out in the article “On Crime.” According to the hero, all people are divided into two categories: some are given power over the “trembling anthill,” while others are destined to always obey the rulers. The novel is structured to test this theory with the help of life. Dostoevsky, through the plot and system of images, gives his answer to the “eternal” question: no high goals cannot justify a crime, in particular murder. Proving this in highest degree humanistic idea novel, the writer pits the main character, who committed a crime, against other characters who, wittingly or unwittingly, speak out about the “right to blood.” These minor characters in critical literature it is customary to divide into “doubles” and “opponents”.

The “doubles” (Svidrigailov and Luzhin) fully share the poor student’s idea of ​​the “right to blood,” although their own moral principles are vulgarized and reduced versions of Raskolnikov’s “theory.”

The main character meets several times with Svidrigailov, a wealthy landowner, sybarite and womanizer. Svidrigailov is similar to Raskolnikov, since he also “overstepped”: he has the murder of his wife Marfa Petrovna on his conscience. Raskolnikov is almost sure of this murder, but Arkady Ivanovich also has on his conscience the death of the footman Filka (4, II) and the death of a deaf-mute girl, whom the criminal remembers in a semi-delirious state the night before suicide (6, VI). At first it seems that Svidrigailov is “ special person": he has the "right to overstep" and at the same time live for his own pleasure, drowning out the voice of conscience. He even does good deeds, for example, he gives money to Sonya so that she can follow Raskolnikov to hard labor, gets him a decent job orphanage children of Katerina Ivanovna, gives money to his girl bride so that her parents will not trade her in the future. In other words, Svidrigailov “carries out” Raskolnikov’s program ( good deeds makes amends for the original crime), but Dostoevsky shows that these good deeds do not save Svidrigailov; he pays in full for his crimes with pangs of conscience. He is haunted by nightmares: the recently murdered Marfa Petrovna appears, and he remembers a girl who was killed long ago. In the end, he shoots himself, because, according to Dostoevsky’s idea, he does not have the moral strength to withstand the sin of murder. Svidrigailov’s life ending proves that the cynical theory of “everything is allowed” destroys human soul. Raskolnikov hears a message about Svidrigailov’s suicide at the police station, where he comes to confess his crime. Thus, confession saves Raskolnikov from another mortal sin - suicide.

Both Raskolnikov and Dostoevsky reject such “reasonable beneficence.” The image of Luzhin with his “economic theory” shows what can be achieved through logical reasoning when preaching the principle “everything is allowed.” Therefore, at the end of Luzhin’s visit main character very angry: after all, Raskolnikov’s “noble” theory of serving people in order to make amends for the initial crime is very similar to Luzhin’s cynical theory of personal success above all. Both theories ultimately state one thing - “you can kill people” (2, V). Indeed, soon Luzhin almost killed (“stabbed”) Sonya Marmeladova when he secretly put money in her pocket and then accused her of theft (5, I, III).

The ideological “opponents” of Raskolnikov’s theory are Sonya, investigator Porfiry Petrovich, Razumikhin, Dunya, painter Mikolka and other heroes of the novel. For various reasons they reject the “right to blood.”

Sonya Marmeladova expresses the Christian point of view on “blood according to conscience,” according to which the ban on murder is one of the main commandments and rules of life. For Sonya, it is absolutely clear that the murder of a person cannot be justified by anything, no good goals. Therefore, when Raskolnikov confesses to her the murder and tries to explain his motives (“... if suddenly all this was given to your decision: to live this way or that way in the world, that is, should Luzhin live and do abominations, or die to Katerina Ivanovna? ​​Then how would you decide: which of them should die?”), she does not understand these motives: “Why are you asking, what cannot be asked?.. And who made me the judge here: who should live and who should not live?” (5, IV). Thus, from Sonya’s point of view, God gives life to man and only He, and not man, can take it. A similar idea was already expressed at the beginning of the novel - in Marmeladov’s confession (1, II).

Razumikhin, together with Raskolnikov, composes the traditional fiction the antithesis of the hero is his friend, which is emphasized even by their surnames: the “split” of the soul (madness) for one – “reason” (common sense) for the other. Razumikhin rejects Raskolnikov’s entire far-fetched theory simply because the crime is contrary to common sense (3, V).

The most important philosophical idea in the novel is conveyed by the image of investigator Porfiry Petrovich. He certainly positive hero, Dostoevsky portrays him as an intelligent, insightful and humane person. Porfiry Petrovich acts as a stern denouncer of the views of the protagonist. At the same time, the investigator sympathizes with Raskolnikov and shows him the only possible, according to Dostoevsky, way out of the current situation: murder cannot be made up for by future good deeds, but can be atoned for by sincere repentance and punishment-suffering. If Sonya convinces Raskolnikov to repent according to his soul, then Porfiry Petrovich calls for repentance according to his reason.

So, in “Crime and Punishment” one of the most characteristic features of Dostoevsky’s novels appeared, which, following M.M. Bakhtin (“Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics”), is usually called “polyphony”. On the one hand, the novel describes the story of the crime and repentance of the protagonist, and the character, beliefs, and life circumstances of this hero are depicted against the background public life, in a clash with other heroes, as it should be in realistic novel. On the other hand, all the secondary characters - “doubles” and “opponents” - perform not only a service function in Dostoevsky (they help reveal the image of the main character), but also express different points of view regarding philosophical problem about the “right to blood.”

The philosophical problem of “blood according to conscience” cannot be revealed from one point of view; its serious consideration requires, so to speak, a “circular review.” In the novel, Dostoevsky presents in detail the philosophical positions of all the characters. Among the various opinions, not in the first place are philosophical views the author himself. The author does not rise above his heroes, but argues with them on equal terms. In other words, in Crime and Punishment, as in other novels by Dostoevsky, there is a “complete violation of the author’s will” (Bakhtin).

At first, Dostoevsky does not seem to give his assessment of the events described, although the reader can easily guess that the author evaluates the philosophical constructs of the heroes differently. He, as a scientist, considers all kinds of views on one problem, and only in the denouement of the novel it becomes clear which point of view the author himself considers correct - these are the beliefs of Sonya and Porfiry Petrovich, complementing each other.

Dostoevsky created a hopeless concept of the world in his novel, showing the tragic state of both society and the individual. According to the writer, resistance and violence cannot correct the world, the only way- humility. Dostoevsky, despite the fact that he sees all the difficult circumstances in Raskolnikov’s life and recognizes the injustice of the world around him, makes an unequivocal and decisive verdict on the “eternal” issue: “blood according to conscience” is unacceptable, because it contradicts the moral law.

Sonya Marmeladova becomes the embodiment of the author's ideal of compassion and love in the novel. The love and compassion of Sonya Marmeladova become both for the children of Katerina Ivanovna and for Raskolnikov the road to salvation; it is no coincidence that Dostoevsky emphasized “insatiable compassion” in his heroine as the leading quality of nature.

Life has undeservedly treated Sonya cruelly: she lost her mother early, her father becomes an alcoholic from the powerlessness to change his life, she is forced to live in shame and sin. But it’s surprising: these sins and shame don’t seem to concern her, they are unable to denigrate or belittle her. We first meet Sonya on the pages of the novel, when Raskolnikov brings the crushed Marmeladov; in a tastelessly bright robe, decorated in a street style, a creature appears completely devoid of any traits of depravity. Describing the portrait of Sonya, Dostoevsky will more than once note her blue eyes, which are most accurately defined by the epithet “clear.” There is so much clarity in Sonya that everything she touches and everything that is near her becomes clear.

Sonya, without hesitation, steps over herself to help her closest and beloved people. Sonya carries her cross quietly, without complaining, she has no grudge against Katerina Ivanovna, she knows how to understand and forgive - and she does not need to make an effort on herself for this. Sonya does not lose faith in people; she knows how to see the good beginnings in a person. Sonya's faith is active good in relation to a specific person, and not to humanity as a whole.

Trying to prove to Sonya the correctness of his path, Raskolnikov says: “If suddenly all this was now left to your decision: to live this way or that way in the world, that is, should Luzhin live and do abominations, or should Katerina Ivanovna die? How would you decide: which of them should die?” For Sonya, there can be no such “arithmetic calculation”: who should live and who should die. “Why such empty questions? How can it happen that this depends on my decision? And who made me the judge here: who should live and who should not live?” For Sonya, the most important thing is clear: a person cannot and should not take upon himself the solution to an issue that only God has the right to decide.

Even in Marmeladov’s first story about Sonya, one is struck by the boundlessness of her compassion and non-judgment: “It’s not like this on earth, but there... they grieve for people, cry, but do not reproach, do not reproach.” “He doesn’t reproach,” this is precisely what determines Sonya’s attitude towards people, which is why in Raskolnikov she saw not a murderer, but an unhappy, tormented man: “There is no one more unhappy than you in the whole world! Why did you do this to yourself!” - these are Sonya’s first words after she learned about Raskolnikov’s crime. Sonya follows Raskolnikov without asking for anything, she is not even sure whether he loves her, and she does not need this confidence, it is enough that he needs her, needs her even when he pushes her away. Sonya sees with pain the depth of spiritual devastation he finds himself in. She felt that Raskolnikov was infinitely lonely, that he had lost faith in himself, in God, in life itself. “How can we live without a person?” - these words of Sonya contain special wisdom. “Together we will go to suffer, together we will bear the cross,” says Sonya, confident that only suffering and repentance can resurrect the soul.

- Fine; let be; but, however, how to decide?

– Why do you ask what is impossible to happen? – Sonya said with disgust.

“So it’s better for Luzhin to live and do abominations!” You didn’t dare to decide this either?

- But I can’t know God’s providence... And why are you asking what you shouldn’t ask? Why such empty questions? How can it happen that this depends on my decision? And who made me the judge here: who should live and who should not live?

“If God’s providence gets involved, there’s nothing you can do about it,” Raskolnikov grumbled gloomily.

- You better say directly what you want! - Sonya cried out with suffering, - again you are pointing to something... Have you really come just to torment!

She could not stand it and suddenly began to cry bitterly. He looked at her in gloomy anguish. Five minutes passed.

“But you’re right, Sonya,” he said quietly at last. He suddenly changed; his affectedly impudent and impotently defiant tone disappeared. Even his voice suddenly weakened. “I myself told you yesterday that I wasn’t coming to ask for forgiveness, but I almost started by asking for forgiveness... I was talking about Luzhin and the providence for myself... I asked for forgiveness, Sonya...”

He wanted to smile, but something powerless and unfinished was reflected in his pale smile. He bowed his head and covered his face with his hands.

And suddenly a strange, unexpected feeling of some caustic hatred for Sonya passed through his heart. As if surprised and frightened by this sensation, he suddenly raised his head and looked at her intently; but he met her restless and painfully caring gaze; there was love here; his hatred disappeared like a ghost. This was not it; he mistook one feeling for another. It only meant that that moment had come.

Again he covered his face with his hands and bowed his head down. Suddenly he turned pale, got up from the chair, looked at Sonya, and, without saying anything, mechanically moved to her bed.

This moment was terribly similar, in his feeling, to the one when he stood behind the old woman, having already freed the ax from the noose, and felt that “not a moment could be lost anymore.”

- What's wrong with you? – asked Sonya, terribly timid.

He couldn't say anything. This was not at all what he had intended to announce, and he himself did not understand what was now happening to him. She quietly approached him, sat down on the bed next to him and waited, not taking her eyes off him. Her heart pounded and sank. It became unbearable: he turned his deathly pale face towards her; his lips curled helplessly, trying to utter something. Horror passed through Sonya's heart.

- What's wrong with you? – she repeated, moving away from him slightly.

- Nothing, Sonya. Don't be scared... Nonsense! Really, if you think about it, it’s nonsense,” he muttered with the air of a delirious man who doesn’t remember himself. - Why did I come to torment you? – he added suddenly, looking at her. - Right. For what? I keep asking myself this question, Sonya...

He may have asked himself this question a quarter of an hour ago, but now he spoke in complete powerlessness, barely conscious of himself and feeling a continuous trembling throughout his whole body.

- Oh, how you are suffering! – she said with suffering, peering at him.

“It’s all nonsense!.. That’s what, Sonya” (he suddenly smiled, somehow palely and powerlessly, for about two seconds), “do you remember what I wanted to tell you yesterday?”

Sonya waited restlessly.

“I said as I was leaving that maybe I was saying goodbye to you forever, but that if I come today, I’ll tell you... who killed Lizaveta.”

She suddenly trembled all over.

- Well, that's what I came to say.

“So it was really yesterday…” she whispered with difficulty, “how do you know?” – she asked quickly, as if suddenly coming to her senses.

Sonya began to breathe with difficulty. The face became paler and paler.

She was silent for a minute.

- Did you find him? – she asked timidly.

- No, they didn’t find it.

- So how do you know about this? – she asked again, barely audibly, and again after almost a minute of silence.

He turned to her and looked at her intently.

“Guess,” he said with the same twisted and powerless smile.

Convulsions seemed to run through her entire body.

- Yes, you... me... why are you so... scaring me? – she said, smiling like a child.

“So I’m a great friend with him... since I know,” Raskolnikov continued, relentlessly continuing to look into her face, as if he was no longer able to take his eyes off, “he didn’t want to kill this Lizaveta... He killed her... accidentally... He was an old woman.” wanted to kill... when she was alone... and he came... And then Lizaveta came in... He was there... and he killed her.

Another terrible minute passed. Both kept looking at each other.

- So you can’t guess? - he asked suddenly, with that feeling as if he was throwing himself down from a bell tower.

“N-no,” Sonya whispered barely audibly.

- Take a good look.

And as soon as he said this, again the same old, familiar sensation suddenly froze his soul: he looked at her and suddenly in her face he seemed to see Lizaveta’s face. He vividly remembered the expression on Lizaveta’s face when he was approaching her with an ax, and she was moving away from him towards the wall, putting her hand forward, with a completely childish fear in her face, just like little children when they suddenly start doing something. to get scared, look motionless and restless at the object that frightens them, pull back and, holding out their little hand, prepare to cry. Almost the same thing now happened to Sonya; just as helplessly, with the same fear, she looked at him for some time and suddenly, thrusting forward left hand, lightly, just a little, rested her fingers on his chest and slowly began to rise from the bed, moving more and more away from him, and her gaze at him became more and more motionless. Her horror was suddenly communicated to him: exactly the same fear appeared in his face, and he began to look at her in exactly the same way, and almost even with the same childish smile.

- Did you guess it? – he finally whispered.

- God! - a terrible scream burst from her chest. She fell helplessly onto the bed, face down into the pillows. But after a moment she quickly stood up, quickly moved towards him, grabbed him by both hands and, squeezing them tightly, as if in a vice, with her thin fingers, began again motionless, as if glued, to look into his face. With this last, desperate look, she wanted to look out and catch at least some last hope for herself. But there was no hope; there was no doubt left; everything was like that! Even then, later, when she recalled this moment, she felt both strange and wonderful: why exactly did she see so immediately then that there was no longer any doubt? Surely she couldn’t say, for example, that she had a presentiment of something like that? And yet now, as soon as he told her this, it suddenly seemed to her that she really seemed to have had a presentiment of this very thing.

- That's enough, Sonya, that's enough! Don't torture me! – he asked painfully.

This is not at all what he thought of opening up to her, but it turned out that way.

As if not remembering herself, she jumped up and, wringing her hands, reached the middle of the room; but she quickly returned and sat down next to him again, almost touching him shoulder to shoulder. Suddenly, as if pierced, she shuddered, screamed and threw herself, without knowing why, on her knees in front of him.

- What are you doing, that you did this to yourself! - she said desperately and, jumping up from her knees, threw herself on his neck, hugged him and squeezed him tightly with her hands.

Raskolnikov recoiled and looked at her with a sad smile:

“You’re so strange, Sonya,” you hug and kiss when I told you about it. You don't remember yourself.

- No, there is no one more unhappy than you in the whole world now! - she exclaimed, as if in a frenzy, not having heard his remark, and suddenly began to cry bitterly, as if in hysterics.

A feeling that had long been unfamiliar to him surged into his soul and immediately softened it. He did not resist him: two tears rolled out of his eyes and hung on his eyelashes.

- So you won’t leave me, Sonya? - he said, looking at her almost hopefully.

- No no; never and nowhere! – Sonya screamed, “I’ll follow you, I’ll follow you everywhere!” Oh my God!.. Oh, I’m miserable!.. And why, why didn’t I know you before! Why didn't you come before? Oh my God!

-Here he comes.

- Now! Oh, what to do now!.. Together, together! - she repeated as if in oblivion and hugged him again, “I’ll go to hard labor with you!” “He seemed to suddenly shudder, the old, hateful and almost arrogant smile squeezed out on his lips.

“I, Sonya, may not even want to go to hard labor,” he said.

Sonya looked at him quickly.

After the first, passionate and painful sympathy for the unfortunate man, the terrible idea of ​​murder again struck her. In the changed tone of his words she suddenly thought she heard the murderer. She looked at him in amazement. She didn’t know anything yet, neither why, nor how, nor what it was for. Now all these questions flashed into her mind at once. And again she didn’t believe it: “He, he’s a murderer! Is this really possible?

- What is this! Where am I standing? “- she said in deep bewilderment, as if she had not yet come to her senses, “how could you, you, such..., decide to do this?” What is this!

- Well, yes, to rob. Stop it, Sonya! – he answered somehow tiredly and even as if with annoyance.

Sonya stood as if stunned, but suddenly cried out:

-You were hungry! you... to help your mother? Yes?

“No, Sonya, no,” he muttered, turning away and hanging his head, “I wasn’t that hungry... I really wanted to help my mother, but... and this is not entirely true... don’t torture me, Sonya!”

Sonya clasped her hands.

- Really, really, is this all for real! Lord, how true this is! Who can believe this?.. And how, how come you yourself are giving away your last, but you killed to rob! Ah!.. - she suddenly screamed, - that money that they gave to Katerina Ivanovna... that money... Lord, is it really that money...

“No, Sonya,” he hastily interrupted, “this money was not the same, calm down!” My mother sent me this money through a merchant, and I received it sick, on the same day as I gave it... Razumikhin saw... he also received for me... this money is mine, my own, real mine.

Sonya listened to him in bewilderment and tried her best to figure something out.

“And that money... I don’t even know if there was any money there,” he added quietly and as if thoughtfully, “I then took the wallet from her neck, a suede one... a full, tight wallet like that...” Yes, I didn’t look at him; I probably didn’t have time... Well, and the things, some cufflinks and chains - I buried all these things and a wallet in someone else’s yard, on V-m Avenue under a stone, the next morning... Everything is still there ...

Sonya listened with all her might.

- Well, then why... how did you say: to rob, but you didn’t take anything? – she asked quickly, clutching at straws.

“I don’t know... I haven’t decided yet whether I will take this money or not,” he said, again as if in thought, and suddenly, coming to his senses, he quickly and briefly smiled. - Eh, what stupidity have I just said, huh?

Sonya had a thought: “Aren’t you crazy?” But she immediately left her: no, this is different. She didn’t understand anything, she didn’t understand anything!

Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, Dostoevsky - three luminaries of the Russian novel. Goncharov is no lower than them, but on the sidelines, and we should talk about him separately.

Turgenev is an artist par excellence; This is its strength and at the same time some one-sidedness. The enjoyment of beauty too easily reconciles him with life. Turgenev looked into the soul of nature with a deeper and more penetrating gaze than into the soul of people. He is less a psychologist than Leo Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. But what an understanding of the life of the whole world, in which people are only a small part, what purity of lines, what music his speech! When you admire this reconciling poetry for a long time, it seems that life itself exists only so that you can enjoy its beauty.

Leo Tolstoy is a huge elemental force. The harmony is broken; there is no contemplative, serene pleasure - this is life in all its grandeur, in primitive fullness, in a somewhat wild, but powerful freshness. He retired from our society:

I sprinkled ashes on my head,
I fled the cities as a beggar...

But mere mortals, not prophets, are just as cold from this inexorable denial of a culture created over centuries, as from Turgenev’s dispassionate contemplation of beauty... Both writers look at life from the outside: one from a quiet artistic workshop, the other from the heights of abstract morality.

Dostoevsky is dearer, closer to us. He lived among us, in our sad, cold city; he wasn't afraid of complexity modern life and its insoluble problems, did not run away from our torment, from the infection of the century. He loves us simply, as a friend, as an equal - not in a poetic distance, like Turgenev, and with the arrogance of a preacher, like Leo Tolstoy. He is ours, with all his thoughts, with all his sufferings. "He is with we drank from the common cup, as we do, it is poisoned and great.” Tolstoy despises the “rotten” intelligent society too much, feels too deep an aversion to the weaknesses of sinful people. He repels, frightens with his contempt, his rudeness in his judgment that everything will still remain dear and sacred to people, despite any attacks. Dostoevsky at some moments is closer to us than those with whom we live and whom we love - closer than family and friends. He is a comrade in illness, an accomplice not only in good, but also in evil, and nothing brings people closer together than common shortcomings. He knows our most secret thoughts, our most the criminal desires of our hearts. Often, when you read him, you feel fear from his omniscience, from this deep penetration into someone else's conscience. You come across secret thoughts in him that you wouldn’t dare express not only to a friend, but also to yourself. And when such a person, who has confessed our heart, nevertheless forgives us, when he says: “believe in goodness, in God, in yourself,” this is more than an aesthetic delight in beauty; more than the arrogant preaching of an alien prophet.

Dostoevsky does not have harmony, the ancient proportionality of parts - this legacy of Pushkin's beauty - everything that the author is so rich in Fathers and sons. He also does not have elemental power, a direct connection with nature, like Leo Tolstoy. This is a man who has just left life, who has just suffered and cried. The tears have not yet dried in his eyes, they are felt in his voice; my hand is still trembling with excitement. Dostoevsky’s books cannot be read: they must be experienced, suffered through, in order to understand. And then they are no longer forgotten.

___________________

If the reader, whoever he may be, happens to actually experience only one of these countless shades of mood, he will certainly remember the moment your personal life, him again will survive- and this is all the author needs: the next moment will again not be a depiction of the poet, but the reader’s own feeling, because it is only an inevitable psychological consequence of the first, etc. Dostoevsky captured the heart and will not let it go until he draws him into the very depths of the mood hero, will not draw the soul into his life, like a whirlpool draws a weak blade of grass into a pool. Little by little, the reader’s personality is transformed into the hero’s personality, consciousness merges with his consciousness, passions become his passions.

While you are reading Dostoevsky's book, you cannot live separate life from the main characters story: it’s as if the border between fiction and reality disappears. This is more than sympathy for the hero, it is - merging with him. When Porfiry does not dare to shake hands with the criminal, you feel indignation at the investigator, as if personal hatred for his suspicions. When Raskolnikov runs up the stairs with a bloody ax and hides in an empty apartment where painters are working, you experience all his horror, and painfully want him to saved himself he quickly ran away from the fair punishment of the law, so that Koch and his comrade would somehow not notice him, so that the crime could not be discovered. The reader does it together with the hero criminal psychological experience, and then, when you leave the book, for a long time you still don’t have the strength to free yourself from its terrible charm. Harmony, beauty, pleasure in poetry - all this can pass, disappear from memory, be forgotten over time, but criminal experience of the soul never forgotten. Dostoevsky leaves marks on the heart as indelible as suffering.

Introduction to the hero's life through the depiction of the subtlest, elusive transitions in his mood is one of Dostoevsky's artistic techniques; the other is in comparisons, in sharp contrasts touching and terrible, mystical and real.

Before his death, Marmeladov, already in a semi-conscious state, looks at his poor children. His gaze settled on little Lidochka (his favorite), looking at him “with her surprised, childish gaze.” “Ah...ah...” he pointed at her with concern. He wanted to say something. - What else? - Katerina Ivanovna shouted. - Bosenka! Bosenka! - he muttered, pointing with a crazy look at the girl’s bare feet. “A priest came in with spare gifts, a gray-haired old man. Everyone retreated. The confession lasted very short.” Katerina Ivanovna knelt down with the children. They prayed. At that moment, “a girl pushed her way out of the crowd, silently and timidly, and it was strange for her sudden appearance in this room, among poverty, rags, death and despair. She was also in rags: her outfit was a penny, but decorated in a street style, according to the tastes and rules that had developed in their own special world with a brightly and shamefully prominent purpose "... Sonya, Marmeladov's daughter, was "in silk, indecent here, a colored dress with a long and funny tail, in light shoes, in a funny round straw hat with a bright, fiery-colored feather." After this description, the author immediately moves on to the dying man, talking about confession and communion.

Also common in Dostoevsky's novels comparison of the real and the mystical. Tight alleys near Sennaya; summer Petersburg, smelly and dusty; police station with quarters; poverty, debauchery, that same gray and vulgar atmosphere big city, which we are accustomed to seeing every day - all of this suddenly becomes ghostly, like a dream. The author is imbued with a sense of the dark, mysterious and fatal that lurks in the depths of life. He deliberately introduces a tragic element into the story Rock through constant coincidences of small accidents.

Before deciding to commit a crime, Raskolnikov hears in a tavern behind the billiard table a conversation between two unknown persons about an old money-lender, his future victim: the whole murder plan, all the moral motives to last detail suggested to him as if by fate. A minor fact, but it has a huge impact on Raskolnikov's determination; This - fatal accident. Around the same time, tired and exhausted, wanting to return home as quickly as possible, but, unknown why, making a long unnecessary detour, he unexpectedly ends up on Sennaya and hears a conversation between a tradesman and Lizaveta, the old woman’s live-in wife: the tradesman makes an appointment on business: “in seven o'clock tomorrow." Therefore, the old woman will be left alone. With his whole being, he felt “that he no longer had freedom of mind or will,” that the murder was finally decided. Another fatal accident. In his apartment, he makes the final preparations, hanging the ax in a loop sewn inside his coat. Just at that moment, “somewhere in the yard someone shouted: sem an hour ago!"- “It’s been a long time, my God!” - and he rushes into the street. The author directly notes: “Raskolnikov has recently become superstitious... And in this whole matter, he was always inclined to see some kind of strangeness, mystery, as if the presence of some special influences and coincidences.” Fatal accidents involve his crime, “It was as if he had gotten a piece of clothing into the wheel of a car and was being pulled into it.”

A great realist and at the same time a great mystic, Dostoevsky feels the illusory nature of the real: for him life is only a phenomenon, only a cover behind which lurks the incomprehensible and forever hidden from the human mind. It’s as if he’s deliberately destroying the boundary between sleep and reality. Some figures, later bright and lively, appear at first as if from fog, from a dream: for example, an unfamiliar tradesman who on the street says “murderer” to Raskolnikov. The next day, this tradesman seems to him like a ghost, a hallucination, and then again turns into a living person. The same thing happens when Svidrigailov first appears. This semi-fantastic figure seeming subsequently the most real type, arises from a dream, from the vague painful dreams of Raskolnikov, who believes in its reality as little as in the reality of the mysterious tradesman. He asks his friend, student Razumikhin, about Svidrigailov: “Did you really see him? Did you see him clearly? - Well, yes, I remember clearly; I know from a thousand, I remember faces... - Hm... that’s it... - muttered Raskolnikov. - And you know... I thought... it still seems to me... that this, maybe a fantasy... Maybe I really am crazy and only - I saw a ghost."

These creative features give Dostoevsky’s paintings, despite their everyday setting, a gloomy, heavy and at the same time charming flavor - like thunderstorm lighting. In the ordinary little things of life, such depths and secrets are revealed that we never suspected.

It is not only the presence of fate in events that gives Dostoevsky’s story tragic pathos in the ancient sense of the word - this impression is also facilitated by unity of time(also in the ancient sense). In the span of one day, sometimes several hours, events and disasters pile up in large numbers. Dostoevsky's novel is not a calm, smoothly developing epic, but a collection of the fifth acts of many tragedies. There is no slow development: everything is done almost instantly, striving uncontrollably and passionately towards one goal - the end.

The speed of action and the predominance of the dramatic element is the reason why Dostoevsky has much less cultural and everyday details than calmer, epic poets, such as Cervantes and Goncharov. External culture, the everyday side of life, the everyday moods of people - in Spain according to Don Quixote, in pre-reform Russia - according to Oblomov can be reproduced with much greater accuracy and completeness than our sixties based on Crimes and punishments.

It is impossible not to mention Dostoevsky’s city landscapes. He paints them very superficially, with light strokes, and does not give the picture itself, but only the mood of the picture. Sometimes it only takes two or three words, a hint of stuffiness, mortar, forests, brick, dust, that special summer smell known to every Petersburger, for the impression of a big city to arise in us with amazing clarity. Without any descriptions, St. Petersburg is felt behind every scene of the novel.

Only occasionally does the author sketch a few features when it is necessary to define and highlight the background: “the sky was without the slightest cloud, and the water was almost blue, which is so rare on the Neva. The dome of the cathedral... was shining, and through the clear air one could clearly see even his every decoration... An inexplicable coldness always blew over him from this magnificent panorama: for him this magnificent picture was full of a dumb and deaf spirit.” Here's another tune: "I love how they sing to a barrel organ in a cold, dark and damp autumn evening, certainly in the damp, when all passers-by have pale green and sick faces; or, even better, when the wet snow falls completely straight without the wind... and through it the gas lamps shine." Sometimes on a clear summer evening this prosaic, sad city has moments of tenderness, quiet and meek thoughtfulness; in just such a evening Raskolnikov looked “at the last pink glow of the sunset, at a row of houses darkening in the deepening twilight, at one distant window, somewhere in the attic, along the left embankment, shining, as if in a flame, from the last sunbeam, which struck him for a moment, onto the darkened water of the ditch." Often in Dostoevsky’s descriptions one comes across amazingly artistic details. So, for example, Raskolnikov enters the apartment where he committed the murder: “A huge, round, copper-red moon looked straight into the windows . "It's been so quiet for a month"- he thought."

Dostoevsky understands the poetry of the city. In the noise of the capital, he finds the same charm and mystery as other poets in the murmur of the ocean; they run away from people into the “wide, noisy oak forests” - he wanders, alone, through the streets of the big city; they look with a question at the starry sky - he looks thoughtfully at the autumn fogs of St. Petersburg, illuminated by countless lights. In the forests, on the ocean shore, under open air everyone saw the mystery, everyone felt the abysses of nature, but in our dull prosaic cities no one except Dostoevsky felt so deeply secrets of human life. He was the first to show that the poetry of cities is no less great and mysterious than the poetry of the forest, ocean and starry sky.

“Kill her and take her money, so that with their help you can then devote yourself to serving all of humanity and the common cause: what do you think - won’t one tiny crime be atone for with thousands of good deeds? In one life - thousands of lives saved from rotting and decomposition. One death - and a hundred lives in return: but this is arithmetic! And what does it mean to common scales the life of this consumptive, stupid and evil old woman? Nothing more than the life of a louse or a cockroach, and it’s not worth it, because the old woman is harmful. She’s eating up someone else’s life.” These are the words with which fate itself, in the person of an unfamiliar student, tempted Raskolnikov in his fatal moment of hesitation. “The old woman is nonsense,” he later thinks, “the old woman is perhaps a mistake... only an illness.. . I I wanted to cross as quickly as possible... I didn’t kill a person, I killed a principle!”

His crime is ideological, i.e. stems not from personal goals, not from selfishness, as is the more common type of violation of the law, but from some theoretical and disinterested idea, whatever its qualities.

The smart Porfiry, the forensic investigator, understands this very well: “here is a fantastic, gloomy case, a modern case, a case of our time, sir, when the human heart has become clouded... Here are bookish dreams, sir, here is a theoretically irritated heart; they killed according to theory."

In this theoreticality The crime is where all the horror, all the tragedy of Raskolnikov’s situation lies. For him, the final outcome of sinners is closed - repentance; for him there is no repentance, because even after the murder, when remorse burns him, he continues to believe in what justifies his murder. - “That’s one thing he admitted his crime, only that couldn't stand it and turned himself in." He killed the principle, and his crime is so much deeper, more complex and irreparable than an ordinary egoistic violation of the law, for example, robbery, that he dreams of the latter as happiness. “You know what I’ll tell you,” he confesses to Sonya , - if only I had killed because I was hungry, then I would now... happy was! Know this!"

The most abstract, insatiable and destructive of passions is fanaticism, the passion of an idea. It creates great ascetics, invulnerable to any temptations, it tempers the soul, gives it almost supernatural powers. The instant fire of other passions before the slow but invincible heat of fanaticism is like burning straw before red-hot metal. Reality is unable to give the fanatic a single minute of not only satiety, but even temporary satisfaction, because he pursues an unattainable goal - to realize theoretical ideal. The more aware he is of the impossibility of his goal, the insatiable nature of his passion, the more severe his passion becomes. There is something truly terrifying and almost inhuman in such fanatics of ideas as Robespierre and Calvin. Sending thousands of innocents to the stake for God or to the guillotine for freedom, shedding blood like a river, they sincerely consider themselves benefactors of the human race and great righteous people. The life and suffering of people is nothing to them; theory, logical formula - everything. They pave their bloody path through humanity as inexorably and dispassionately as a blade of clear steel cuts into a living body.

Raskolnikov also belongs to this type of idea fanatics, to the Robespierres, Calvins, Torquemadas, but not entirely, but only in one of the aspects of his being.

He would like to be one of the great fanatics - this is his ideal. He undoubtedly has common traits with them: the same arrogance and contempt for people, the same inexorable cruelty logical conclusions and the readiness to implement them at any cost, the same ascetic fervor and gloomy delight of fanaticism, the same willpower and faith. After the crime, exhausted, almost defeated, he still believes in his idea, he is intoxicated by its greatness and beauty: “I then had one thought for the first time in my life, which no one had ever thought up before me! No one! Me Suddenly, as clear as the sun, it seemed to me that how come no one had dared or dares, passing by all this absurdity, to simply take everything by the tail and shake it to hell! I... I wanted dare, and killed... I just wanted to dare... that's the whole reason!.." "And it wasn't the money, the main thing I needed. I needed to know something else, something else was pushing me under my arms: I needed to find out then, and quickly find out, whether I was a louse, like everyone else, or a human being. Will I be able to transgress or will I not be able to? Do I dare to bend down and take it, or not? Am I a trembling creature, or right have?.." Dostoevsky directly notes in Raskolnikov this ruthlessness and callousness of theory, characteristic of fanatics: “his casuistry,” says the author, “has been sharpened like a razor.” Even the mother, despite her love for her son, feels in Raskolnikov this all-destroying power of passion , which can only be ignited in him by an abstract idea: “I could never trust his character, even when he was only fifteen years old. I am sure that even now he can suddenly do something to himself that no person would ever think of doing." "Do you think that my tears, my requests, my illness, my death, maybe, would have stopped him? out of sadness, our poverty? I would calmly step over all obstacles. But really, really, doesn’t he love us?”

But the fanaticism of the idea only one side his character. It contains tenderness, love, pity for people, and tears of tenderness.

This is his weakness, this is what destroys him.

Razumikhin speaks the truth: in Raskolnikov, “as if two opposite characters alternately replace each other.” Two souls live and fight in it. He kills and cries, is moved over his victims; if not over the old woman, then over Lizaveta with “meek and quiet” eyes. But real heroes, great criminals of the law do not cry and are not moved. Calvin, Robespierre, Torquemada did not feel the suffering of others - this is their strength, their integrity; they seem to be carved from one block of granite, and in Dostoevsky’s hero there is already an eternal source of weakness - duality, split will. He himself is aware of this weakness that destroyed him: “no, those people are not made like that; the real lord, to whom everything is permitted, destroys Toulon, commits massacres in Paris, mines army in Egypt spends half a million people on the Moscow campaign and get away with a pun in Vilna, and after his death they put up idols for him, and therefore All allowed. No, on these people, it’s clear that it’s not a body, but bronze!”

After the crime, Raskolnikov shuddered, not because he had blood on his hands, that he was a criminal, but because he admitted doubt: “is he not a criminal?” This doubt is a sign of weakness, and those who have the right to break the law are incapable of it. “Because I... am a louse,” he added, gnashing his teeth, “because I myself, perhaps, are even nastier and nastier than a killed louse, and in advance had a presentiment I'll tell myself this already after how I’ll kill!.. But can anything compare with such horror? Oh, vulgarity! Oh, meanness! Oh, how I understand the “prophet”: with a saber, on a horse, Allah commands, and obey, “trembling creature”! The “prophet” is right, right, when he places a great battery somewhere across the street and blows at the right and the wrong, without even deigning to explain himself! Obey, trembling creature, and - don't wish because it’s none of your business!.. Oh, I will never, never forgive the old woman!”

Woe to the great criminals of the law, if in their souls, burned by the passion of an idea, at least something human remains! Woe to the people of bronze if even one corner of their heart remains alive! A weak cry of conscience is enough for them to wake up, understand and die.

Byron created a new man, a new heroic soul - in the Corsair, Childe Harold, Cain, Manfred. At that time, there were seeds in the air, the embryos of those moods that the poet was able to express.

Julien Sorel, the hero of the great, but, unfortunately, little known in Russia novel by Stendhal Le Rouge el le Noir["Red and Black" (French)] - in spirit brother Byron's heroes, although he was created completely independently, in addition to the influence of Byron.

Manfred and Julien Sorel are the founders of the heroes who filled literature of the 19th century century, - the distant offspring of their complex family tree extends to our time.

Here character traits these heroes: all of them are exiles from society, they live with it in irreconcilable discord, they despise people, because people are slaves. The crowd hates these exiles, but they are proud of the curse of the crowd. There's something about them predatory, unsociable and at the same time regal. Just as eagles build their nests on inaccessible rocks, so they live far from people, at a lonely height.

Starting from selfless participation towards the oppressed, they often end in the shedding of innocent blood. Julien Sorel kills the woman he loves. Human blood and crime weigh on the conscience of the Corsair, Manfred, and Cain. All of these are criminals, unrecognized heroes, “who allowed themselves to bleed out of conscience.”

I don't see any connection between Byron's creations and Dostoevsky's novel. There can be no talk of the most distant influence here. But just as Hamlet is a great prototype of types that are found in our time, in our society, so in Manfred and in Raskolnikov there is something worldly, eternal, connected with the fundamentals human nature and, as a result, repeated in a variety of settings.

In Dostoevsky's hero there is the same hatred of the crowd, the same passionate protest against society, as in Byron's types. He also despises people, sees them as insects that the “lord” has the right to crush. Having shed blood, he also considers himself not guilty, but only misunderstood. When Sonya convinces him to repent, “accept suffering” and confess everything, he answers her arrogantly: “Don’t be a child, Sonya... What am I guilty of before them? Why will I go? What will I tell them? All this is just a ghost... . They themselves harass millions of people, and even consider them to be virtues. They are cheats and scoundrels, Sonya!.. I won’t go. And what can I say? - that I killed, but didn’t dare take the money? But they themselves will laugh at me ", they will say: you are a fool for not taking it. A coward and a fool! They will not understand anything, Sonya, and they are not worthy to understand. Why am I going?.., I won’t go" What is conventional morality for heroes, when people’s whole life is pure cruelty and untruth?

“A crime?.. What crime?.. The fact that I killed a nasty, harmful louse, an old pawnbroker, who killed forty sins to forgive, who sucked the juice out of the poor - and this is a crime? I don’t think about it and wash it away I don’t think so..." - “Brother, brother, why are you saying this? But you shed blood!.." Dunya (Raskolnikov’s sister) cried out in despair. - “Which everyone pours!” he picked up almost in a frenzy, “which flows and has always flowed in the world like a waterfall; which is poured like champagne, and for which they are crowned in the Capitol and called the benefactor of humanity... I absolutely do not understand, Why is hitting people with bombs, a proper siege is a more respectable form? Fear of aesthetics is the first sign of powerlessness." His murder is not as beautiful, but also not as criminal as those legal murders that society allows itself. And this dirty crowd, this vile mob dares to judge the hero who could crush them all if luck were on his side. “Is it really,” he exclaims in rage, “in these next fifteen to twenty years, my soul will be so humbled that I will whine with reverence before people, calling myself, to every word, a robber? Yes, exactly, exactly! They are exiling me now, this is what they need... So they are all scurrying up and down the street, because every one of them is a scoundrel and a robber by nature, worse than that - an idiot! And try to bypass me with an exile, and they will all go berserk with noble indignation! Oh, how I hate them!"

The predatory and proud element of his nature is indignant. In concentrated hatred of people, he surpassed even Byron's heroes.

And yet, like them, Raskolnikov also sometimes imagines that he loves people, that his tenderness is rejected and misunderstood. His love is bookish, abstract, cold - the same love as that of Manfred and Julien Sorel. He “he only wants freedom for himself.” Like Byron's heroes, he is an aristocrat to the core, despite his poverty and humiliation. His striking beauty also has a sign of “power”.

This thin and slender young man, with fiery black eyes and a pale face, inspires them with respect or even superstitious fear. Simple people see something in him "demonic". Sonya directly says that “God handed him over to the devil.” A man from the crowd, Razumikhin, realizing that he was wrong, bows and almost trembles before him. Like Byron's heroes, he has enormous power, but spends it uselessly, because he is also too much of a dreamer, there is nothing practical in him either, he despises reality.

He loves loneliness: “I then, like a spider, huddled in my corner... Oh, how I hated that kennel! But still I didn’t want to leave it. I didn’t want to on purpose!”

Even after defeat he does not consider himself defeated. When everything is against him, when there is no salvation and he is ready to go to the police to turn himself in, his old proud faith awakens in him, and he exclaims with terrible force convictions: “More than ever, I don’t understand my crime! Never, never have I been stronger and more convinced than now!” He responds arrogantly to his sister’s consolations and her tears: “Don’t cry for me - I will try to be both courageous and honest all my life, even though I am a murderer. Maybe someday you will hear my name. I will not disgrace you.. .you'll see; I more I'll prove..."

But there is nothing romantic in Raskolnikov anymore: his soul is illuminated to the depths by an inexorable psychological analysis. There can be no talk of idealization here. Instead of a winged spirit, a corsair, or at least a lord, we have before us a poor student who left the university due to lack of funds, almost a beggar.

The author does not think to hide or embellish his weaknesses. He shows that Raskolnikov’s pride, loneliness, and crime do not come from his strength and superiority over people, but rather from a lack of love and knowledge of life. The former grandiose and gloomy hero has been brought down from his pedestal and debunked. Corsair and Julien are constantly portrayed as if they were playing a role, naively believing in their rightness and strength. And Dostoevsky’s hero already doubts whether he is right. They die irreconcilable, but for him this state of proud loneliness and break with people is only a temporary crisis, transition to a different worldview.

He laughs at religious feelings and, however, with tears of tenderness, asks Polichka to pray for him, and to remember “slave Rodion.” With what tenderness he remembers his former bride, whom he fell in love with, as only very selfless people are capable of loving - out of compassion. “The ugly girl is so... herself. Really, I don’t know why I became attached to her then, it seems, because she was always sick... If she were still lame or hunchbacked, I think I would have loved her even more. .. So... there was some kind of spring delirium..." In Raskolnikov's dream, which reflects childhood memories, there is the same compassion for an unfortunate and oppressed creature: drunken men flog a poor nag harnessed to a huge, heavy cart. The boy “runs next to the horse, he runs ahead, he sees her being whipped in the eyes, right in the eyes! He cries; his heart rises in him, tears flow. One of the whippers hits him in the face; he doesn’t feel it, he breaks his hands , screams, rushes to the gray-haired old man, who shakes his head and condemns all this." Finally, the little horse was pinched to death. She falls. “The poor boy no longer remembers himself. With screams, he makes his way through the crowd to Savraska, grabs her dead, bloody muzzle and kisses her on the eyes, on the lips”...

Embittered and proud, Raskolnikov is sometimes capable of the greatest humility. He goes to the police to make a confession. He has no remorse in his soul; There is only horror and a feeling of loneliness in it. He suddenly remembers Sonya’s words: “Go to the crossroads, bow to the people, kiss the ground, because you have sinned against it, too, and tell the whole world out loud: “I am a murderer!” He trembled all over, remembering all this... He knelt down in the middle of the square, bowed to the ground and kissed this dirty earth with pleasure and happiness."

In Raskolnikov, the extreme development of the individual, lonely, rebellious and rebelling against society, reached the final limit - the line beyond which either death or a transition to a different worldview. Through fierce protest, he reached the point of denying moral laws, to the point where he finally cast off all the obligations of duty as an unnecessary burden, as a prejudice. He's on conscience allowed himself to bleed." He looks at people not even as slaves, but as disgusting insects that should be crushed if they interfere with the hero. At this icy theoretical height, in this loneliness, all life ends. And Raskolnikov would inevitably die, if another principle had not been hidden in his soul. Dostoevsky brought him to the moment when a suppressed, but not killed, religious feeling awakens in him.

Dostoevsky connects Raskolnikov’s crime with the contemporary mood of society and with the prevailing ideas of that era. Regarding the dispute about whether the murder of an old pawnbroker should be justified from a moral point of view in view of the benefits that can be brought through her money, the author notes: “all of these were the most ordinary and most frequent, he had already heard more than once, in only other forms and on other topics, young conversations and thoughts." Raskolnikov participates in literary movement the era in which the novel takes place, i.e. sixties. He expresses his cherished thoughts in the article About the crime printed in Periodic speech.

“In my opinion, if Keplerian and Newtonian discoveries, as a result of some combinations, could in no way become famous people Otherwise, as with the sacrifice of the lives of one, ten, a hundred, and so on, people who interfered with this discovery or stood in the way as an obstacle, then Newton would have the right and even be obliged... to eliminate these ten or one hundred people in order to make his discoveries to all humanity." These are Raskolnikov's convictions in all their harsh, theoretical nakedness.

This question comes down to another, deeper and more important: what exactly is the criterion of good and evil - is it science, which, through the discovery of unchangeable laws, determines common benefit and through it gives an assessment of our actions, or inner voice conscience, a sense of duty invested in us by the Creator, divine instinct, infallible, not needing the help of reason? Science or religion?

What is higher - the happiness of people or the fulfillment of the laws prescribed by our conscience? Is it possible in private cases to violate moral rules to achieve the common good? How to fight evil and violence - only ideas, or ideas and too violence?- in these questions there is pain and melancholy of our time, and they form the main axis of Dostoevsky’s novel. Thus, this work becomes the embodiment of one of the great diseases of modern life: it is a Gordian knot, which only the heroes of future times are destined to cut.

Sonya is outraged when Raskolnikov asks her an abstract logical question about comparative value two lives, the scoundrel Luzhin and the poor, honest woman Katerina Ivanovna Marmeladova.

“Why ask what is impossible?” Sonya said with disgust.

So, it’s better for Luzhin to live and do abominations? You didn’t dare to decide this either?

But I can’t know God’s Providence... And why are you asking what you shouldn’t ask? Why such empty questions? How can it happen that this depends on my decision? And who made me the judge here: who should live and who should not live?”

Sonya feels the endless difficulty and complexity of life; she knows that such issues cannot be resolved solely on theoretical grounds, drowning out the voice of conscience, because one corner of reality can present millions of the most unexpected concrete cases that will confuse, confuse the abstract solution, turn it into absurdity: “with only logic, - exclaims Razumikhin, “You can’t jump over nature! Logic predicts three cases, and there are a million of them!”

But the infidelity and absurdity of Raskolnikov’s moral “arithmetic” is especially clearly revealed in the unforeseen consequences of the crime for the people around him. Could Raskolnikov really think that, together with the old woman, he would have to kill the innocent Lizaveta, who was, in Sonya’s words, “just and will see God.” He “rushed at her with an ax”... Poor Lizaveta dies because the hero made a small mistake in his arithmetic calculation.

Morally, he will have to destroy Sonya in exactly the same way the minute he confesses everything to her. The same unexpected consequence of the crime is the attempted suicide of a man who was accidentally suspected of murder. Dunya, whom he hoped to save from Svidrigailov with the old woman’s money, finds herself precisely thanks to the crime in the hands of Svidrigailov: the latter found out that Raskolnikov is a murderer, and the discovery of the secret gave him terrible power over Dunya. Finally, could he have foreseen that his mother would die from the unbearable consciousness that her son was a murderer?

In theory, the existence of the old woman is useless and even harmful - it was possible, apparently, to cross it out just as easily and calmly as they cross out unnecessary words in a written sentence. But in reality, the life of a creature that no one needed was connected with thousands of invisible and inaccessible threads to the lives of people completely alien to it, starting from the painter Nikolka and ending with Raskolnikov’s mother. This means that the voice of conscience that told him: “Thou shalt not kill!” was not entirely wrong. - the voice of the heart, which he despised from the heights of his abstract theories; This means that one cannot completely surrender to reason and logic when solving a moral question. Justification of the divine instinct of the heart, which is denied by a proud and darkened reason, and not by true knowledge, is one of the great ideas of the novel.

_________________________

The most terrible thing in life is not evil, not even the victory of evil over good, because one can hope that this victory is temporary, but that fatal law according to which evil and good are sometimes so mixed in the same act, in the same soul , merged, tangled and intertwined that it is almost impossible to distinguish them from each other. Evil and vice possess not only the enormous power of temptation in our sensual nature, but also the enormous power of sophistry in our mind. The primitive spirits of evil, despite their monstrous attributes, are not as terrible as Mephistopheles, who takes from humanity the most dangerous and subtle weapon - laughter, like Lufitzer, who takes from the sky the purest and brightest ray - beauty.

The eternal dispute between Angel and Demon occurs in our own conscience, and the worst thing is that sometimes we don’t know which of them we love more, who we want to win more. Not only does the Demon attract with pleasures, but also the temptation of being right: we doubt whether it is not a misunderstood part, an unrecognized side of the truth. A weak, proud heart cannot help but respond to the indignation, disobedience and freedom of Lucifer.

All three main, parallel developing plots of the novel - the drama of Raskolnikov, Sonya and Dunya, essentially strive for the same goal - to show the mysterious, fatal mixture of good and evil in life.

Raskolnikov strives for good through evil, transgresses the moral law in the name of the common good. But isn’t his sister Dunya doing the same thing? She sells herself to Luzhin to save her brother. Just as Raskolnikov sacrifices someone else’s life in the name of love for people, so she sacrifices her conscience in the name of love for him. “The point is clear,” Raskolnikov exclaims indignantly, “he won’t sell it for himself, for his comfort, even to save himself from death, but he will sell it for someone else! For a dear, for an adored person, he will sell it! That’s what our whole joke is.” and it consists: for a brother, for a mother, he will sell! He will sell everything! Oh, here, on occasion, we will crush our moral sense: freedom, tranquility, even conscience - everything, we will take everything to the Tolkuchy Market. Lose your life!.. Moreover, your own We’ll invent casuistry, we’ll learn from the Jesuits and for a while, perhaps, we’ll calm ourselves down, we’ll convince ourselves that this is how it should be, really, it’s necessary for a good purpose." Raskolnikov clearly sees Dunya's mistake, but he does not notice that it is and his own mistake, that he too for a good purpose decided to do something bad. “This marriage is meanness,” he says to Dunya. “Even if I’m a scoundrel, but you shouldn’t... one person... and even though I’m a scoundrel, I won’t consider such a sister a sister. Either me or Luzhin! .."

He calls himself a scoundrel, and Porfiry sees in him a martyr who has not yet found God for whom to die. Raskolnikov also reproaches Dunya for meanness. Maybe he is right, but high heroism is mixed with this meanness: she, like a brother, is half criminal, half saint.“You know,” says Svidrigailov, who is not at all prone to idealism, “I was always sorry from the very beginning that fate did not allow your sister to be born in the second or third century AD, somewhere the daughter of a sovereign prince or some ruler or proconsul in Asia Minor. She, no doubt, would have been one of those who suffered martyrdom and, of course, she would smile when they burned her chest with red-hot tongs. She would have done this on purpose herself, and in the fourth and fifth centuries she would have gone to the Egyptian desert and lived there for thirty years, feeding on roots, delights and visions. She herself only yearns for this, and demands that she quickly accept torment for someone, and if you don’t give her this torment, she’ll probably jump out the window.”

Sonya Marmeladova is also a martyr. She sells herself to save her family. Like Raskolnikov and Dunya, she “broke the law”, sinned in the name of love, she also wants evil to achieve good.“You are a great sinner,” Raskolnikov tells her, “most of all you are a sinner because you killed and betrayed yourself in vain. If only it weren’t a horror! It wouldn’t be a horror that you live in this filth, which you hate so much, and at the same time time you know yourself (you just have to open your eyes) that you are not helping anyone with this and are not saving anyone from anything! But tell me, finally,” he said almost in a frenzy, “how such a shame and such baseness is in you next to others opposite and holy feelings are combined?"

And again, in this verdict over Sonya, he pronounces a verdict on himself - and it’s also in vain killed his conscience and he lives in the filth and meanness of crime, and in him “shame” is combined with “holy feelings.”

Raskolnikov realizes that he and Sonya essentially have a common guilt: “let’s go together,” he tells her enthusiastically, “we are cursed together, we’ll go together!”... “Where to go?” she asked in fear and involuntarily stepped back ". - “Why do I know? I only know that one road I probably know, and that’s all. One goal!" - that is, to atone for the crime. "Didn't you do the same thing?- he continued, - you also transgressed... were able to transgress. You committed suicide, you ruined your life... my(it does not matter!). You could live in spirit and mind, but you will end up on the Sennaya... But you can’t stand it, and if you stay one, you'll go crazy like me. You are already like crazy; Therefore, we must walk together along the same road! Let's go to!"

Sonya is a criminal, but she also has holy, as in Duna there is a martyr, in Raskolnikov - ascetic. No wonder the convicts in Siberia looked at Sonya as a mother, as a savior; she appears to him in a halo of almost supernatural beauty, pale, weak, meek, with blue, quiet eyes.

There is one more person in the novel, adjacent to the main idea, the most artistic and profound person of all, not excluding Raskolnikov, this is Svidrigailov. His character is created from striking contrasts, from the sharpest contradictions, and, despite this, or perhaps because of this, he is so alive that one cannot escape the strange impression that Svidrigailov is more than the face of the novel, that once knew him, saw him, heard the sound of his voice.

He is a cynic to the core.

When Raskolnikov shouts, unconscious with indignation, feeling that Svidrigailov will now insult his sister: “Leave, leave your vile, low jokes, you depraved, low, voluptuous man!” - Svidrigailov exclaims joyfully: “Schiller, Schiller- then ours, Schiller! La vertu, ouva-t-elle se nicher? [Where does virtue not nest? (French)] And you know, I will tell you these things on purpose so that I can hear your screams. Pleasure." He admits to Raskolnikov that in the village he was “tormented to death by memories of all these mysterious places and towns in which, who knows, he can find a lot, damn it!” Svidrigailov’s past turns out to be “a criminal case with an admixture of brutal and, so to speak, fantastic murder, for which he could very well go to Siberia.”

And the same Svidrigailov capable of knightly generosity. For a vile purpose, he lured Dunya into his room, whom he loved with a strange, boundless love, where there was so much rude and sensual and, perhaps, even more lofty and selfless. The doors are locked; the key is in Svidrigailov's pocket. She is in his complete power. Then Dunya takes out a revolver. "He took a step and the shot rang out. But the bullet only grazed him."

“Well, well, a miss! Shoot again, I’m waiting,” Svidrigailov said quietly, still grinning, but somehow gloomily, “this way I’ll have time to grab you before you cock the trigger!”

Leave me! - she said in despair, - I swear, I’ll shoot again... I’ll kill...

Well... in three steps you can't help but kill. Well, if you don’t kill me... then...

His eyes sparkled and he took two more steps. Dunechka fired - it misfired!

Charged sloppily! Nothing! You still have a capsule there. Correct me, I'll wait. But she suddenly dropped the revolver.

Let me go! - Dunya said begging. Svidrigailov shuddered...

Don't you like it? - he asked quietly. Dunya shook her head negatively. “And... you can’t?.. Never?..” he whispered with despair.

Never!..

A moment of terrible silent struggle passed in Svidrigailov's soul... Suddenly he quickly walked to the window and stood in front of it. Another moment passed.

Here is the key!.. Take it; leave quickly! - He stubbornly looked out the window. Dunya went to the table and took the key. - Hurry! Hurry! - Svidrigailov repeated, still not moving or turning around.

But in this “quickly” there apparently sounded some kind of terrible note. Dunya understood her, grabbed the key, rushed to the doors, quickly unlocked them and burst out of the room... When she left, a strange smile twisted his face, a pitiful, sad, weak smile, a smile of despair.”

The next day, at dawn, he killed himself.

Raskolnikov deliberately broke the law in the name of an idea. Svidrigailov also deliberately breaks the law, but not for an idea, but for pleasure. Raskolnikov is carried away by the sophistry of evil, Svidrigailov by its temptations. “In this debauchery,” he says, “there is something permanent, based even on nature and not subject to fantasy, something that always remains like a kindled coal in the blood, eternally igniting, which may not be quenched so quickly with age.” .

“It still seems to me,” he assures Raskolnikov, “that there is something in you that suits mine.” Svidrigailov even directly sympathizes with his theory that one can break the law in the name of the common good. After a long conversation with Raskolnikov, he joyfully exclaims: “Well, it wasn’t true when I said that we are birds of a feather!” Both of them are criminals, both have enormous willpower, courage and the consciousness that they were born for something better, and not for crime; both are alone in the crowd, both are dreamers, both are thrown out of ordinary living conditions - one by an insane passion, the other by an insane idea.

In the pure and holy girl - Duna, the possibility of evil and crime opens up: she is ready to sell herself, like Sonya. In a depraved dead person- in Svidrigailovo, the possibility of goodness and achievement opens up. The main motive of the novel is the same here: the eternal mystery of life, the mixture of good and evil.

Retired official Marmeladov is a bitter drunkard. His daughter Sonya goes out into the street and gives herself to the first person she meets in order to receive several tens of rubles to feed her family, which would otherwise be in danger of starvation. “Yes, sir... and I... was lying drunk, sir...” says Marmeladov. He drinks away the last pennies that his daughter earned through debauchery, and with some terrible inspiration of cynicism he tells in a tavern among drunken revelers mocking him almost to a stranger about Soniche's "yellow ticket". “He will take pity on us,” says Marmeladov, “Who took pity on everyone and Who understood everyone and everything, He is the only One, He is the Judge. He will come on that day and ask: “Where is the daughter, that the stepmother is evil and consumptive, that the children of strangers and minors betrayed yourself? Where is the daughter who took pity on her earthly father, an obscene drunkard, without being horrified by his atrocities?” And she will say: “When I come...” and will forgive my Sonya, she will forgive, I already know that she will forgive... And she will judge and forgive everyone: and good, and evil, and wise, and meek... And when he has finished with everyone, then he will say to us: “Come out,” he will say, “you too!” Come out, you drunkards, come out, you weaklings, come out, you drunkards!" And we will all come out, not ashamed, and stand. And he will say: "You are pigs. The image of the beast and its seal, but come too!" And the wise will exclaim, the wise will say: “Lord! Why did you accept them?” And he will say: “That is why I accept them, the wise ones, because I accept them, the wise ones, because not one of these himself considered himself worthy of this.” And He will stretch out His hands to us, and we will fall... and weep... and we will understand everything! Then we will understand everything... and everyone will understand... Lord, Thy kingdom come!”

If so much faith and love is hidden in a person who has fallen so low, who would dare to say about his neighbor: “he is a criminal.”

Dunya, Raskolnikov, Sonya, Marmeladov, Svidrigailov - how to decide who they are: good or evil? What follows from this fatal law of life, from the necessary mixing good and evil? When you know people like the author of Crime and Punishment, is it possible to judge them, is it possible to say: “This one is sinful, and this one is righteous”? Are not crime and holiness merged in the living soul of man into one living soul? unsolvable mystery? You cannot love people because they are righteous, because no one is righteous except God: both in a pure soul, like Dunya’s, and in great self-sacrifice, like Sonya’s, there is a grain of crime hidden. You cannot hate people because they are vicious, because there is no such fall in which the human soul would not retain a reflection divine beauty. Not “measure for measure”, not justice is the basis of our life, but love of God and mercy.

Dostoevsky - this one greatest realist, who measured the abyss of human suffering, madness and vice, at the same time the greatest poet of gospel love. His entire book breathes with love, love is its fire, its soul and poetry.

He understood that our justification before the Supreme Being is not in deeds, not in deeds, but in faith and love. Are there many people whose life would not be crime, worthy punishments? The righteous is not the one who is proud of his strength, intelligence, knowledge, exploits, purity, because all this can be combined with contempt and hatred of people, but the righteous is the one who is most aware of his human weakness and depravity, and therefore pities and loves people most of all. For each of us - equally for the good and the evil, for the stupid painter Mikolka, looking for something to “suffer” for, and for the depraved Svidrigailov, for the nihilist Raskolnikov and for the harlot Sonya - for everyone, somewhere out there, sometimes far from life , in the very depths of the soul, lurks one impulse, one prayer that will justify humanity before God.

This is the prayer of the drunkard Marmeladov: “Thy kingdom come!”

Dmitry Sergeevich Merezhkovsky (1865 - 1941) Russian writer, poet, critic, translator, historian, religious philosopher, public figure. Husband of the poetess Zinaida Gippius.