Rabu, 09 April 2008


Dostoyevsky Schism through Raskolnikov in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment



Guilt is a universal throughout humankind, and merely completes the psychological equation originating with excessive pride: if one dares to assume that he can transcend his humanity and enter the divine sphere, and commits a crime accordingly, guilt, emerging unconsciously in dreams, will eventually remind him of his human roots. Freud states that feelings of guilt repressed from consciousness it can provide unconscious symptoms, such as nightmares or madness. Although a person may repress his conscience, the guilt is merely displaced to another part of the mind, and eventually, this repressed matter must return. It is important when discussing a dream in a novel to distinguish between the literary and psychological implications of the dream. The dream is obviously the functional product of the author's imagination, and hence, must serve a definite purpose in the work. If examined legitimately, however, as a dream of an actual, non-fictional person, the dream bears psychological importance and reveals something about the dreamer's unconscious. Besides dream, guilt may appear trough someone attitude also. Nervous, anxious, depressed, curious are the examples of guilt.

Feeling guilty is also reveal in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment through its main character, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov. Raskolnikov is a former student, lives in a tiny garret on the top floor of a run-down apartment building in St. Petersburg. He is sickly, dressed in rags, short on money, and talks to himself, but he is also handsome, proud, and intelligent. He is contemplating committing an awful crime, but the nature of the crime is not yet clear. He kills a pawnbroker to get her money and He sleeps fitfully and wakes up the next day, finds an ax, and fashions a fake item to pawn to distract the pawnbroker. That night, he goes to her apartment and kills her. While he is rummaging through her bedroom, looking for money, her sister, Lizaveta, walks in, and Raskolnikov kills her as well. He barely escapes from the apartment without being seen, then returns to his apartment and collapses on the sofa.
After Raskolnikov returns to his room, he collects the goods that he stole from the pawnbroker, and buries them under a rock in an out-of-the-way courtyard. Returning to his apartment, Raskolnikov falls into a fitful, nightmare-ridden sleep. After four days of fever and delirium, he wakes up to find out that his housekeeper,
Nastasya, and Razumikhin have been taking care of him. Under the pretense of trying to recover a watch he pawned, Raskolnikov visits the magistrate in charge of the murder investigation, Porfiry Petrovich. Raskolnikov starts to believe that Porfiry suspects him and is trying to lead him into a trap. Afterward, Raskolnikov and Razumikhin discuss the conversation, trying to figure out if Porfiry suspects him. When Raskolnikov returns to his apartment, he learns that a man had come there looking for him. When he catches up to the man in the street, the man calls him a murderer. That night Raskolnikov dreams about the pawnbroker’s murder. Later on, Raskolnikov goes to the apartment of Sonya Marmeladov. During their conversation, he learns that Sonya was a friend of one of his victims, Lizaveta. He forces Sonya to read to him the biblical story of Lazarus, who was resurrected by Jesus. The following morning, Raskolnikov visits Porfiry Petrovich at the police department, supposedly in order to turn in a formal request for his pawned watch. As they converse, Raskolnikov starts to feel again that Porfiry is trying to lead him into a trap. Eventually, he breaks under the pressure and accuses Porfiry of playing psychological games with him. At the height of tension between them, Nikolai, a workman who is being held under suspicion for the murders, bursts into the room and confesses to the murders. After dinner in one night, Raskolnikov goes to Sonya’s room and confesses the murders to her. They have a long conversation about his confused motives. Sonya tries to convince him to confess to the authorities.
Raskolnikov does successfully assert momentary power through the murder, this ensuing guilt, particular to humans, prevents him from achieving the stark, godlike indifference he craves. This guilt is undeniable mark of his humanity. Since he is definitively human, he innately impedes his own pursuit of godliness. His own subconscious, however manipulated for literary purposes by Dostoevsky, antagonizes him, portraying him as a weak, impotent outcast. In his attempt to assert his omnipotence, Raskolnikov has only proven himself weak and utterly human. Fyodor Dostoevsky's remarkable insight into the psychology of man is seen here in the development of Raskolnikov's dream on the beating of a horse by drunken peasants. The dream is significant on several planes, most notably in the parallel of events in the dream with Raskolnikov's plan to murder the old pawnbroker. It also serves as perhaps the most direct example of the inseparable tie between events of the author's life with the psychological evolution of his protagonists, as well as lesser characters, through the criminal minds of Raskolnikov. Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment is the fact of the emergence of the character who has failed to elude guilt since he is human; he suffers guilt, and hence, cannot get away with his crime. In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov murders the pawnbroker that according to him is not worthy to live. After he kills the pawnbroker, he feel guilty and he tries hard to repress this feeling but it manifested within his dreams. He tries to avoid guilt, but succeeded in merely forcing it into his unconscious. The old woman that he killed haunts him in the dream. Just as the old pawnbroker, representative of his guilt haunts Raskolnikov's dream, reminding him of the definitive restraints of his human nature. The dreams of Raskolnikov marked by the appearance of their now-vindictive victims are symptoms of the repression of their guilt. Like the victims themselves now returning, in dreams, as more powerful, threatening figures, the guilt which these victims symbolize emerges from the unconscious to likewise haunt the criminals.
In interpreting the dreams of Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, I would prefer to employ Freudian theories to observe character's psyche, but only in light of the fact that Dostoevsky, as author, created these dreams for a purpose, both literary and psychological. These dreams are not actual products of the unconscious, but, on the other hand, deliberate, conscious attempts to fill out a certain character's psychology. While on the other part, nervous, anxious, depressed, curious are also indicate Raskolnikov guilt. These symptoms lead me to observe Dostoyevsky life since he creates a unique creature with such strange feeling by using genetic stucturalism. Genetic structuralism emphasize that author Dostoyevsky background has given him great influence in his work.
Dostoevsky had epilepsy and his first seizure occurred when he was 9 years old. Epileptic seizures recurred sporadically throughout his life, and Dostoevsky's experiences are thought to have formed the basis for his description of child character in his works. He joins
St. Petersburg Academy of Military Engineering, Dostoevsky was taught mathematics, a subject he despised. However, he also studied literature by Shakespeare, Pascal, Victor Hugo and E.T.A. Hoffmann. Though he focused on areas different from mathematics, he did well on the exams and received a commission in 1841.

Dostoevsky was arrested and imprisoned on
April 23, 1849 for being a part of the liberal intellectual group, the Petrashevsky Circle. Czar Nicholas I after seeing the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe was harsh on any sort of underground organization which he felt could put autocracy into jeopardy. On November 16 that year Dostoevsky, along with the other members of the Petrashevsky Circle, was sentenced to death. After a mock execution, in which he and other members of the group stood outside in freezing weather waiting to be shot by a firing squad, Dostoevsky's sentence was commuted to four years of exile with hard labor at a katorga prison camp in Omsk, Dostoevsky's experiences in prison and the army resulted in major changes in his political and religious convictions. Firstly, his ordeal somehow caused him to become disillusioned with 'Western' ideas; he repudiated the contemporary Western European philosophical movements, and instead paid greater tribute in his writing to traditional, rural-based, rustic Russian 'values'. Even more significantly, he had a conversion experience in prison, which greatly strengthened his Christian, and specifically Orthodox, faith, his newfound condemnation of Western European philosophy especially on the Nihilist and Socialist movements; and his work, Crime and Punishment, gives criticism of socialist and nihilist ideas, as well as thinly-veiled parodies of contemporary Western-influenced Russian intellectuals.

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