1.  Dostoevski's lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity -- all this is difficult to admire. (p. 104)

 

2.  The very best thing he ever wrote seems to me to be The Double. ... It is a perfect work of art, that story... (p. 104)

 

3.   I must have been twelve when forty-five years ago I read Crime and Punishment for the first time and thought it a wonderfully powerful and exciting book. I read it again at nineteen, during the awful years of civil war in Russia, and thought it long-winded, terribly sentimental, and badly written... And only quite recently did I realize what is so wrong about the book.

      The flaw, the crack in it, which in my opinion causes the whole edifice to crumble ethically and esthetically may be found in part ten, chapter 4. It is in the beginning of the redemption scene when Raskolnikov, the killer, discovers through the girl Sonya the New Testament. She has been reading to him about Jesus and the raising of Lazarus. So far so good. But then comes this singular sentence that for sheer stupidity has hardly the equal in world-famous literature: "The candle was flickering out, dimly lighting up in the poverty-stricken room the murderer and the harlot who had been reading together the eternal book." "The murderer and the harlot" and "the eternal book" -- what a triangle. This is a crucial phrase, of a typically Dostoevskian rhetorical twist. Now what is so dreadfully wrong about it? Why is it so crude and so inartistic?

      I suggest that neither a true artist nor a true moralist -- neither a good Christian nor a good philosopher -- neither a poet nor a sociologist -- should have placed side by side, in one breath, in one gust of false eloquence, a killer together with whom? -- a poor streetwalker, bending their completely different heads over that holy book. The Christian God, as understood by those who believe in the Christian God, has pardoned the harlot nineteen centuries ago. The killer, on the other hand, must be first of all examined medically. The two are on completely different levels. The inhuman and idiotic crime of Raskolnikov cannot be even remotely compared to the plight of a girl who impairs human dignity by selling her body. The murderer and the harlot reading the eternal book -- what nonsense. There is no rhetorical link between a filthy murderer, and this unfortunate girl. There is only the conventional link of the Gothic novel and the sentimental novel. It is a shoddy literary trick, not a masterpiece of pathos and piety. Moroever, look at the absence of artistic balance. We have been shown Raskolnikov's crime in all sordid detail and we also have been given half a dozen different explanations for his exploit. We have never been shown Sonya in the exerecise of her trade. The situation is a glorified cliche. The harlot's sin is taken for granted. Now I submit that the true artist is the person who never takes anything for granted. (pp. 110-113)

 

Nabokov goes on to ask:

 

       Why did Raskolnikov kill? The motivation is extremely muddled... (p. 113)

       Did Dostoevski succeed in making it all plausible? I doubt it...  (p. 114)

 

Nabokov says in Lectures on Literature (1980) that the scene in Ulysses where Mr Bloom brings his wife her breakfast is "one of the greatest passages in all literature". (p. 306)

 

I think that Nabokov's account of what is wrong with Crime and Punishment is one of the greatest passages in all literary criticism. The only flaw in it seems to me Nabokov's muddled suggestion that Raskolnikov "must be first of all examined medically". What has Raskolnikov's ethical squalor and depravity to do with medicine?

 

Anthony Stadlen