with religious feeling, “Yea, Lord: I believe that Thou art the Christ, the Son of God which should come into the world.”
But Raskolnikov will not say such words as his own. She asks him after talking much what is to be done.
“What’s to be done? Break what must be broken, once for all, that’s all, and take the suffering on oneself. What, you don’t understand? You’ll understand later…Freedom and power, and above all, power. Over all trembling creation and the antheap!…That’s the goal, remember that! That’s my farewell message.”
He is soon off away into the night after admitting to Sonya that he knows who murdered her friend Lizaveta and that if he comes back the next day, he will tell her who it is. But not for a moment does the idea enter her head that the murderer could be Raskolnikov. She is as extremely good in her thoughts as he is extremely bad in his.
He visits Sonya again at her room with the intention of confessing to her that he is the murderer of Lizaveta, her friend. But he is unable to confess the truth at once and instead tortures her with questions about who is worthy to live and who to die.
“‘You better say straight out what you want!’ Sonya cried in distress. ‘You are leading up to something again…Can you have come simply to torture me?’”
But he is still unable to speak the truth. He is in a kind of delirium. He leads up to the confession but does not confess. Finally he makes her guess the truth. She is shocked but abandoning him is as far from her mind as the awful truth is now solidly established in her mind.
“‘There is no one – no one in the whole world now so unhappy as you!’ she cried in a frenzy…” She begins weeping.
“A feeling long unfamiliar to him flooded his heart and softened it at once. He did not struggle against it. Two tears started into his eyes and hung on his eyelashes.
‘Then you won’t leave me, Sonya?’ he said, looking at her almost with hope.
‘No, no, never, nowhere!’ cried Sonya. ’I will follow you, I will follow you everywhere…’”
But for a few moments she can not believe he did it and asks him how it could have happened. He in turn has moments when he regrets letting her know the truth. She asks him to explain why he did it and he struggles to give her answers. She has touched his heart and brought tears to his eyes but he still is far from true redemption which is only possible if she can influence him to follow the feelings of his heart and discover the love that exists in his soul.
He goes into a long ramble to explain why he did it. “‘And you don’t suppose that I went into it headlong like a fool? I went into it like a wise man and that was just my destruction…I wanted to murder without casuistry, to murder for my own sake, for myself alone!…It wasn’t to help my mother I did the murder…I wanted to find out something else; it was something else led me on. I wanted to find out then and quickly whether I was a louse like everybody else or a man. Whether I can step over barriers or not, whether I dare stoop to pick up or not, whether I am a trembling creature or whether I have the right…’
‘To kill? Have the right to kill?’ Sonya clasped her hands.
‘Ach, Sonia!’ he cried irritably and seemed about to make some retort, but was contemptuously silent.”
Sonia argues that he must go to the police and confess his guilt. But he has doubts about doing what she wants because at bottom he does not believe he is guilty. He has done the murder so intentionally, so rationally that guilt is impossible and redemption and divine forgiveness just as impossible. Sonya haunts him, following him in his movements around Petersburg whenever she can. Dostoevsky thus reverses the usual kind of haunting. Instead of the devil haunting a good soul, a good soul haunts a devil. She will not leave him ever. When Raskolnikov enters the police station finally to confess, he has second thoughts and leaves the building. Outside he sees Sonya standing not far from the entrance, “pale and horror-stricken. She looked wildly at him. He stood still before her. There was a look of poignant agony, of despair, in her face. She clasped her hands. His lips worked in an ugly, meaningless smile. He stood still a moment, grinned and went back to the police office.”
At his trial he expresses no remorse or guilt for his crime. He is condemned to penal servitude in Siberia for eight years. Sonya follows him to Siberia and lives in a town near his prison. She lives only for him and does not bother him with thoughts about religion. Raskolnikov himself asks her after a year to lend him her copy of the New Testament. “It was the one from which she had read the raising of Lazarus to him.” But he does not take it up and start reading it right away. Its influence may be in his future but only his imprisonment is now sure and Sonya haunting him and waiting for him nearby with nothing to sustain her except her secret treasure.
6
A main character in Dostoevsky’s last novel, The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan Karamazov, says that if there is no God then we are free to do anything. The European existentialist philosophers took up this idea and held that all human acts must result from free choices since in a godless universe human being has no foundation. The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre went so far as to say that man is “condemned to be free”. Dostoevsky held that freedom must be the supreme human value, but instead of denying the existence of God in order to act freely like some existentialists, he reasoned that finding God is possible if we reach a state of spiritual and intellectual freedom. The groundless freedom Dostoevsky felt in himself inspired him to create any kind of character ready to think or to do anything at all. Logical thought and free will result in human choices that create a world where human behavior is forced to follow a premeditated pattern dictated by reason. The more man accepts to live a life ruled by his reason and a knowledge arrived at using the same logic used by scientists, the less able he is to discover the world within him of God’s divine grace which has nothing to do with reason and knowledge. God can control everything but he will not. He will not interfere with man’s freedom to do and think whatever he wants. For Dostoevsky grace is a divine gift, a secret treasure, but total freedom is also a divine gift, perhaps a more important one. God gives humans his divine grace freely but he can not give it or he will not give it to people who live enslaved by a rationalized intentional way of living. Dostoevsky’s rootless creations are enslaved by a power that does not originate in God.
Raskolnikov fascinates us because he appears free in a way that is far beyond normal freedom. But his thoughts are transitory and negative. They rise up but are soon gone replaced by new thoughts and new ideas. His freedom grounded in his mind leads him nowhere, to an unreal inhuman state. He ultimately reveals that he is a fiction, a self freely created uselessly by a mind based on nothing. Sonya is free because the cruelty and the injustice of the world force her to be free. Insults, suffering, loathsomeness do not allow her mind to create for her some comforting fictitious but practical self based on nothingness. Everything has been taken from Sonya. The hatred and cruelty around her in the world have stripped her of normal human falsity and forced her to retreat into her soul. Because she must give up everything, she finds everything. The meek and the suffering inherit the world because the powerful of the world despise them and crush them. The world forces Sonya to flee into the nothingness in her soul where she discovers miraculously a secret treasure.
Some of Dostoevsky’s other characters, like Sonya, give evidence of secret treasure within them but most of them are groundless, on their own, disconnected from the normal world and also from the world of God. He constructed characters from nothing and delighted in watching them try to assert their extreme individuality among regular, normal people. He created a comedy so divine that the more he created living beings from nothing, the more he became sure that God was helping him create them in order to show the world that nothing can ever be as vital as a divine presence in the human heart. For Dostoevsky life for humans must be free and
