1

Dostoevskys awareness of the condition of the multi-historicity in which Russia nds itself in
the late 1850s to the early 1860s anticipates Ernst Blochs inuential elucidation of the concept of
Ungleichzeitigkeit, or non-synchronicity, which has been taken up by numberless intellectual histo-
rians and philosophers of history throughout the twentieth century. See Bloch 97103.
2
For an excellent discussion of the relation between Crime and Punishment and the contemporary
Russian press from a literary-institutional perspective, see Klioutchkine.
ILYA KLIGER
Shapes of History and
the Enigmatic Hero in
Dostoevsky: The Case of
Crime and Punishment
T
HIS ESSAY STUDIES A CRUCIAL FEATURE of Dostoevskys novelistic
poetics, and the poetics of Crime and Punishment (1866) in particular, in light
of contemporaneous debates regarding the historical fate of Russia. The novel,
I argue, is a thought experiment exploring the emerging condition of multi-
historicity that is, a simultaneity of multiple emplotment possibilities for the
Russian nation.
1
In order to bring these possibilities to light, I read the novel with
an eye on Dostoevskys journalism from the early- to mid-sixties, a period charac-
terized by an urgent recognition of the openness of Russias historical future.
2

Although critics have long recognized that the central problems which pre-
occupy Dostoevsky in the nonction are the same as those that preoccupy his
characters in the ction (Kabat 113), reading ction and journalism side by
side does raise a number of methodological problems. Chief among them is the
problem of translation or transposition: how does one mediate between ction
and nonction without resorting to reductive procedures that posit the episte-
mological priority of one over the other? In what follows I attempt to effect this
transposition with the help of the formal (narratological) categories of charac-
ter and emplotment. I suggest, in other words, that there exists a fundamental
isomorphism in Dostoevskys journalism and ction between historical and nov-
elistic constructions of personality or selfhood, and that a similar isomorphism
can be observed between his historical and novelistic temporal imaginations. I
argue that his journalistic articulation of Russias national personality as an
enigmatic puzzle to be solved corresponds to his construction of the novelistic
protagonist as a mystery to himself and to others, a mystery the resolution of
Comparative Literature 62:3
DOI 10.1215/00104124-2010-012 2010 by University of Oregon
SHAPES OF HISTORY & THE ENIGMATIC HERO IN DOSTOEVSKY / 229
which is the work of the entire novel. Moreover, the establishment of the pro-
tagonists identity does not fundamentally take the form of a list of character
traits, pre-existing or acquired. Instead, it takes the form of a story binding his
past, present, and future into a meaningful whole. This novelistic search for the
proper emplotment of the hero, I argue, corresponds to the search in contempo-
rary journalism for the proper trajectory of the Russian nation, which, with the
emancipation of the serfs in 1861, is perceived as pregnant with multiple histori-
cal possibilities. An enigma soliciting narrative solutions, Dostoevskys socially
underdetermined (raznochinets) hero is thus best understood as a formal condi-
tion of the possibility of exploring Russias position at the intersection point of
multiple historical vectors. As such, the hero enables a series of temporal shapes,
laden with historiographic signicance, to be considered and then either chosen
or dismissed.
The discussion that follows examines four competing emplotment scenarios
and four possible temporal shapes for the resolution of the corresponding enig-
mas of the protagonist and of Russia. The rst is the radically accelerated time
of the crime or the great deed, anchored in the hero Raskolnikov himself; corre-
sponding to it is the time of revolution, the violent overthrow of the current state
of things in Russia in order to create an entirely new order. The second is the no
less precipitous hagiographic time of conversion, offered by Sonya, the saintly pros-
titute and representative of the common people (narod); the historical correlate
here is Russias religious regeneration under the inuence of the recently liber-
ated narod, with the messianic purpose of leading the peoples of the world into a
new age of universal brotherhood in Christ. The third is the homogeneous empty
time of a career, which tempts the hero in the person of the petit-bourgeois lawyer
Luzhin, whose historiographic analogue can be found in the post-1848 degraded
Western European vision of progress as mechanistic accumulation. And, nally,
there is the developmental temporality of Bildung, insinuated by the detective-
mentor Porry Petrovich and his distant relative Razumikhin and corresponding
to the romantic and nationalist Western European ideology of progress as organic
fruition. These emplotment scenarios can be divided further into two pairs, each
privileging a fundamental conception of time: time as rupture (Raskolnikov,
Sonya) and time as continuity (Luzhin, Porry-Razumikhin).
In conclusion, I suggest that the novel is ultimately indecisive about the pref-
erable emplotment for the protagonist at least in part because each positive
mem ber of the temporal pair (Sonya, Porry-Razumikhin) turns out to be
haunted by its negative double (Raskolnikov, Luzhin): regeneration by revolu-
tion, gradual organic fruition by homogeneous mechanistic accumulation. Hedg-
ing its bets, the novel strives for an imaginary resolution that would synthesize
the temporality of conversion with that of Bildung. What we end with is thus a sug-
gestion that Raskolnikovs (and Russias) fate is best grasped as something like a
saints life in Bildung time, infecting the slowness of accumulated meaningful
experience with the heroism of the sudden deed and thus imaginatively contain-
ing the threat of both revolutionary bloodshed and petit-bourgeois prose of the
world. A re-inscription of Crime and Punishment into the context of journalism
from the period of Great Reforms thus allows us to read the novel as a political
allegory that stages and imaginatively resolves the socio-temporal contradictions
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 230
3
For a discussion of the term political allegory see Jameson (7783). Some of the more fruitful
approaches to the relation between Dostoevskys ction and his journalism have tended to presup-
pose something like an intergeneric dialogue in which ction and essays exist in dialogue with
each other, provoking, qualifying and reecting on each other (McReynolds 29). Both Dostoevskys
journalism and his novels can then be seen as, in the words of Gary Soul Morson, threshold art, the
former including extended ctional or at least narrative sections, the latter directly addressing burn-
ing contemporary questions by means of characters thoughts, monologues, dialogues, and narrato-
rial intrusions each category generating hermeneutic perplexity with regard to whether one
should read the text as ction or nonction (Boundaries 3968). For two explicit attempts to cast the
relationship between Dostoevskys journalistic discourse on Russia and novelistic representations of
character in allegorical terms, see Susan McReynolds and Andrew Wachtel, both of whom tend to
link the national personality of Russia with the ctional personality of character by way of a set of
stable characteristics or logics. McReynolds argues that in Crime and Punishment Dostoevskys Russia
is enmeshed in the same paradoxical dynamic of resistance to, and acceptance of, a utilitarian sacri-
cial logic as the criminal Raskolnikov (11732). Wachtel offers a reading of The Brothers Karamazov
as a novel about the beginning of the end of history, as the three fraternal branches of the Chris-
tian faith the Catholic ideal (Ivan), the Protestant/pagan ideal (Dmitry), and the Orthodox ideal
(Alesha) enact the nal denouement of civilization as Dostoevsky knew it (14647). In what fol-
lows I diverge from this conception of historical allegory in Dostoevsky insofar as my central concern
is characterological and narratological isomorphism, that is, analogous forms rather than entities. A
more productive formulation, for the purposes of this essay, is thus Michael Holquists: [Dostoevsky]
was among the rst to recognize that the question of what a man might be could not be separated
from the question of what might constitute an authentic history. Each question is, in its own way, a
dilemma of narrative (194; my emphasis). For a recent overview of approaches to the problem of read-
ing Dostoevskys ction and journalism together, see McReynolds, 20709.
structuring a world torn between conicting demands for continuity and radical
change.
3
The Enigmatic Hero
In his seminal discussion of Dostoevskys poetics, Mikhail Bakhtin characterizes
the Dostoevskian hero as essentially self-conscious and therefore unnalizable.
Self-consciousness, argues Bakhtin, is here not just a feature of the heros psycho-
logical makeup, not one character trait among others, but the very principle for
the organization of psychological material, its artistic dominant. As such, it
destabilizes all static denitions, rendering everything that might be said about
the hero false by virtue of the heros capacity to forestall the others (and the
authors) characterization of him. Self-consciousness here is less Cartesian than
Hegelian, not isolated and self-sufcient but forever anxious, dependent on, and
hostile to other consciousnesses of it, struggling for and, just as obsessively, avoid-
ing recognition (Bakhtin 5054). On the level of psychology, the principle of self-
consciousness often surfaces as a kind of stubborn contrariness, a refusal of pre-
dictability. Dostoevskys heroes are thus frequently motivated by little more than
the need to frustrate expectations. They are intractable and capricious, and they
often justify their capriciousness by elevating it to the level of an explicit philo-
sophical principle. As one of the most vividly self-conscious of them, the hero-
narrator of Notes from Underground (1864), argues, And in particular [our caprice
or whimsy] may be more protable than all other prots even in the case when it
is obviously harmful and contradicts the most sensible conclusions of our reason
concerning prots because in any event it preserves for us the chiefest and the
dearest thing, that is, our personality and our individuality (2829). The reason-
able and the protable are refused in the name of personality and individuality,
SHAPES OF HISTORY & THE ENIGMATIC HERO IN DOSTOEVSKY / 231
and this refusal is complemented on the level of narrative by a resistance to emplot-
ment. Neither the calculations of instrumental reason nor the conventions of lit-
erary plot are allowed to delimit the thoughts and actions of the hero, who, in
Michael Holquists apt formulation, systematically [subverts] the traditional liter-
ary expectation of a neat beginning, middle and end (54).
All this is difcult to deny, but what nevertheless goes unsaid in discussions of
the radical narrative, psychological, and metaphysical openness of the Dostoev-
skian hero is that supplementing this same unnalizability is an insistent demand
to be nalized watched, understood, emplotted. What task are you and I faced
with now? says Ivan Karamazov to his brother Alyosha during their rst extended
conversation, My task is to explain to you as quickly as possible my essence, that is,
what sort of a man I am, what I believe in and what I hope for, is that right? (Broth-
ers 235). What we have is not just an unnalizable hero but an enigmatic one,
soliciting attention without yielding decisive knowledge.
I suggest, then, that it would be fruitful to understand Dostoevskys late poetics
as essentially hero-centric that is, as organized by the quest for the identity of
the insistently mysterious hero or heroine. The question who is s/he? shapes the
narrative of The Idiot (who is Nastasya Filippovna? who is Prince Myshkin?), The
Devils (who is Stavrogin?), The Adolescent (who is Versilov?), The Brothers Karamazov
(who are Ivan and Mitya?), and perhaps most of all Crime and Punishment (who is
Raskolnikov?). Indeed, as an idiosyncratic proto-detective novel, Crime and Punish-
ment renders the quest for the identity of the hero explicit and delineates its
parameters. Although we know the criminals name, his whereabouts, and even
the minute circumstances of the murder he committed, we lack essential knowl-
edge about him (see Rahv 20; Frank 20102). The whodunit is translatable as fol-
lows: What is the deeper underlying essence of this man, this former student
Raskolnikov, who killed the old pawnbroker and took her money?
The account of the crime itself, located in a eld of tension between competing
narrative trajectories, provides the ground of this ignorance. Prior to the crime,
Raskolnikov vacillates between two contradictory ways of thinking about it. First,
he emplots the crime as an event in the life of a great man: kill the old pawn-
broker, take her money, and become the benefactor of humanity. But, at the same
time, the planning necessary for the successful execution of the crime involves
imagining a series of decidedly unheroic acts: nding an axe, hiding, lying, get-
ting smeared with blood, trembling at the thought of detection. The plot of the
crime itself and the plot of the great mans biography (of which the crime is only
the rst step) interfere with each other so insistently that Raskolnikov vacillates
until the very end, and the murder unfolds as if someone had taken him by the
hand and pulled him almost wholly mechanically: as if a piece of his clothing had
been caught in the cogs of a machine (70). Because the numberless accidents
and friendly coincidences that accompany his dazed journey to the place of the
crime and back at once ensure his success and divest him of agency, they also posit
the crime as the place of the enigma, a mysterious event soliciting understanding
and re-emplotment. Who was it, after all, who killed the old pawn-broker? And
how exactly did it happen? If in more conventional detective ction the endpoint
of the narrative is reached when we retrace the criminals steps all the way up to
the moment of the crime, here the logic is reversed. The criminals way to the
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 232
4
Hence, yet another way to understand the signicance of his name: raskol a split, a crack
here, between the one who acts and the one who tries to understand the act.
crime, traced in detail, is itself the mystery, not the solution, and the criminal him-
self is the rst to attempt to answer the questions it poses.
Days after the crime, in a state of delirium, Raskolnikov gathers up everything
he has taken from the old pawnbroker and walks frantically through the city not
knowing what to do with the loot. At a certain point he even considers throwing
it all in the river. But minutes later he wonders: If indeed this whole thing was
done consciously . . . , then how is it that so far you havent even looked into the
purse and do not know what youve actually gained . . . ? Werent you going to
throw it into the water just now, this purse, along with all the other things which
you also havent seen yet? (110). Confronted with the task of making the crime
his own, Rashkolnikov is unable to do so. He has become a mystery to himself.
4

Self-historicity: A Russian Story
During a conversation with the investigator Porry Petrovich, Raskolnikov out-
lines a conception of crime according to which extraordinary men are permitted
to eliminate the obstacles standing between them and a genuine breakthrough in
the history of mankind, even if according to conventional standards this leads
them to commit illegal and amoral acts. Porry Petrovich raises a concern:
But tell me this: how does one manage to distinguish these extraordinary ones from the ordinary?
Are they somehow marked at birth, or what [pri rozhdenii, chto l znaki takie est ]? What I am getting at
is that one could do with more accuracy here, more outward certainty, so to speak: excuse the natural
uneasiness of a practical and law-abiding man, but wouldnt it be possible in this case, for example, to
introduce some special clothing, the wearing of some insignia, or whatever? . . . Because, you must
agree, if there is some sort of mix-up, and a person from one category imagines he belongs to the
other category . . . (262)
The investigators question invokes the widespread contemporary complaint,
rendered classic in Balzacs Physiologie de la toilette, that it is no longer possible to
distinguish people belonging to particular social classes by the way they dress
(Balzac 20:461). In the liberalized period of the late 1850s to early 1860s a Rus-
sian version of such a modern man bursts on the social scene. Educated sons of
merchants and priests, students, tutors, journalists, poor or impoverished mem-
bers of the gentry in short, the so-called raznochintsy (literally, persons of inde-
terminate rank) ll the streets, salons, and ofces of the capital cities, and it is
no longer possible to tell who is who simply by looking.
In replying to the investigators sly question, Raskolnikov takes this new state
of affairs into account. Of course such archaic indicators of extraordinariness as
portents at birth ( Jesus?) or special clothing ( Joseph?) are no longer available.
Instead, he argues, in order to determine whether someone is truly exceptional,
we must wait and see how things turn out. If a person who takes himself to be
extraordinary tests himself by transgressing established social norms but soon
enough regrets his actions and ends up humiliating himself publicly and seek-
ing penance, then it becomes retrospectively evident that he has made a mistake,
and his identity is re-established on a ground more solid than that of mere fan-
SHAPES OF HISTORY & THE ENIGMATIC HERO IN DOSTOEVSKY / 233
5
My consistent use of man and the masculine pronoun here and below reects historically spe-
cic gender limitations on the position a raznochinets protagonist might occupy in ctional narrative.
This would start to change in the 1860s and 1870s, especially within the sub-genre of the so-called
new-people novel, in which female heroines begin to inhabit traditionally male roles involving
toughness, isolation, and struggle.
tasy. In other words, because it is not given a priori, the truth about the new enig-
matic man nds its proper medium in a narrative shape, in a story.
5

As the type of a new Russian man, the raznochinets began to attract intense nar-
rative and discursive attention with the ascension to the throne of the reformist
Alexander II and the end of the disastrous Crimean War in 1856. In an atmo-
sphere of relaxed censorship, and in anticipation (and later in the wake) of the
abolition of serfdom, journalistic polemics turned to the question of Russias
future. Some argued that Russia had fallen far behind Western Europe and had to
be brought up to date by means of moderately paced liberalizing reforms. Others,
less mainstream and less explicit in their writings, hoped to incite a great peasant
revolution that would destroy every foundation of the existing order. There were
those who believed that such a revolution, though desirable, could be realized
only after a relatively prolonged period of preparation and education of the
masses, while opponents of any change whatsoever instead defended traditional
Russian values: Autocracy, Nationality, Orthodoxy. Still others accepted the need
for progress but conceived of it in organic terms, as an internal development
rather than a consequence of the imposition of external principles, a forced West-
ernization (Karpachev 197398). Each of these narratives implied a different role
for the emerging raznochintsy in the countrys future. Were they going to be lead-
ers of the revolutionary avant-garde? Educators of the people? Cabinet ministers?
Apostates and insurrectionists? The novel of the 1860s and 1870s populist,
anti-nihilist, and other would explore all of these possibilities. Id like to pause
here, however, with a cluster of relatively immediate novelistic responses to the
post-emancipation condition authored by Ivan Turgenev, Nikolai Chernyshevsky,
and Dostoevsky himself.
Reacting to a prolonged journalistic polemic about the fate, in Russian litera-
ture and life, of the so-called superuous man the progressive-minded but, in
matters both personal and political, ineffectual nobleman, who by the early six-
ties seemed increasingly outdated Turgenev and Chernyshevsky attempted to
create or capture a new Russian type who was not a member of the gentry. Turge-
nevs Fathers and Children (Otsy i deti, 1862) introduced the gure of the nihilist,
an adherent of unprecedented views (naturalist, materialist, utilitarian), as well
as a practitioner of a scandalous ethos (direct, anti-hierarchical, provocatively
uncouth). Chernyshevskys What Is to Be Done? (Chto delat?, 1863) opposed to this
sullen and ultimately tragic type a number of more cheerful protagonists, who
espoused the principles of social justice, womens emancipation, and enlightened
self-interest. Placed side by side, these two competing representations of the new
man appear to be diametrically opposed. But, when compared with Dostoevskys
intervention in Notes from Underground, they turn out to share one crucial feature:
both endow the new man with a set of stable socio-psychological characteristics,
more paradoxically combined in Turgenev than in Chernyshevsky, but determinate
nonetheless. Dostoevskys Notes employs a wholly different principle of character
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 234
6
In a recent essay on Dostoevskys Notes from the House of the Dead, Nancy Ruttenburg elaborates on
another kind of enigma that structures this ctionalized memoir from Siberian exile: the enigma
of the common people of peasants and their way of life for the gentleman narrator. The mys-
tery of the simple folk in turn renders the narrator obscure to himself (Ruttenburg 748). The
enigmatic status of the raznochinets might thus be viewed analogously that is, as a function of his
failed integration into the body of the nation. This is indeed the view Dostoevsky endorses in his
journalism, which suggests that the questions central to the establishment of raznochinets identity
are twofold: who are the Russian people, and how can one become one with them? However, in his
post-Siberian novels it is the raznochinets protagonist and not the occasional minor character of the
peasant who most insistently solicits answers to the mystery of his own identity and the identity of
Russia. I suggest that this has to do with the fact that essential answers in Dostoevsky are shaped as
plots rather than wise sayings, are temporal rather than static. In this respect, the advantages, for
Dostoevskys ction, of the raznochinets over the peasant are, as far as the breadth of emplotment
possibilities are concerned, obvious.
construction, altogether depriving the hero of stable features and endowing him
with a self-consciousness that works tirelessly to forestall and annihilate all deter-
minations. To be sure, Dostoevsky did not produce this hero especially for the
occasion of this polemic. The protagonists of his early ction from the 1840s are
already self-conscious and unnalizable. But it is only here that the Dostoevskian
hero acquires the proportions of the new Russian man and, as such, becomes not
simply an agent of theoretical and narrative negation but also a site of potentiality
that requires proper emplotment. It is only in Notes from Underground, in short, that
the new man truly acquires all the requisite features of an enigma.
6
A glance at Dostoevskys contemporaneous journalistic activity reveals a histo-
riographic dimension to this development in his novelistic poetics. Soon after
returning to St. Petersburg from political exile, Dostoevsky began to publish with
his brother Mikhail the journal Time (Vremia, 186163). In it, a group of like-
minded writers and thinkers again and again attacked the abstract universalism
liberal, radical, and conservative alike that conned Russia to the same universal-
historical path traveled by the countries of Western Europe. They assumed, on the
contrary, that Russia should follow its own unique path, fulll its own unique des-
tiny, and in its own time. Thus, one regular contributor to the journal explains the
meaning of freedom (in general and of the former serfs in particular) as follows:
Freedom consists not in the capacity for development as such, but in the capacity
for active development, i.e. in complete originality [samobytnost ]: in self-rule
[samoupravlenie], self-activity [samodeiatelnost ], self-sufciency [samodostatochnost ]
and, most importantly, self-reliance [samoupovanie] (Time 123; my translation).
The incantatory repetition of the prex self- (sam-) renders especially vividly one
of the key philosophical assumptions shared by the contributors to the journal.
Like the Dostoevskian hero, the emancipated peasants and the Russian people in
general are not to be treated as objects. The bureaucratic question what is to be
done with . . . ? is inapplicable to them. Instead, they and Russia itself should
be posited as an enigma, not unlike the enigma of the living self, which can only
reveal itself through its own independent self-activity.
To the list of nouns prexed by self-, Dostoevsky soon adds another, the most
important one of all: self-historicity. We are distinct, he writes in an 1865 notice
announcing the publication of his second journal Epoch (Epokha, 186465), we
are peculiar, self-historical [svoeistorichny] (PSS 20:217; my translation). Whereas
the story of many Western civilizations may have already ended, Russias story is, in
many ways, only just beginning. For many years Russia has lain asleep; now it is
SHAPES OF HISTORY & THE ENIGMATIC HERO IN DOSTOEVSKY / 235
7
The association between Russianness and originality is taken to an extreme by Evgeny Petrovich
in The Idiot: Whoever of the Russian people says, writes, or does something of his own, inalienable
and unborrowed, inevitably becomes national, even if he speaks Russian poorly (334). For a detailed
recent account of the place of the Russian people (narod) in the journalism of Time and Epoch, as
well as a discussion of the place of folk legends, songs, and popular beliefs in Crime and Punishment,
see Ivanits 3176.
8
Cf. Gary Saul Morsons suggestive remarks on Dostoevskys vision of the present as being rife with
multiple futures. Morson calls the practice of depicting the present moment in all its openness and
incompleteness sideshadowing (Introductory Study 82) and points to passages in which a limited
third-person narrator suggests several possible accounts of an enigmatic event. The real point, he
concludes, is that whatever happened, any of these incidents could have happened. What is impor-
tant is the eld of possibilities, not the one possibility actualized (86). My account diverges from
Morsons, however, in its understanding of the specic character of this multiplicity. First, the tempo-
ral plurality at issue here pertains to the representation of many shapes of time rather than many
possibilities within a time that is itself uniformly conceived. Second, multiplicity is here not in the
service of an anti-totalizing and anti-utopian world view that celebrates indeterminacy, freedom, and
personal responsibility. Rather, multi-temporality allows for narrative experimentation with specic,
historically determinate, and socially grounded temporal trajectories available to the protagonist at a
particular historical moment. Freedom is more than the freedom to choose between several options,
and possibility is more than the possibility for things to have turned out otherwise. Rather, freedom
involves the choice of occupying an altogether different life of switching, say, from the biography of
a great man to the life of a saint or, more miraculously still, to the life of a petit bourgeois. And his-
torical possibility is understood as the possibility of belonging to an altogether differently shaped
history moving, for example, from a universal clock according to which Russia has been left far
behind to a national one showing it to be right on time; or from a liberal future-centric gradualist
time to a conservative past-heavy but similarly gradualist one, or even to a radically presentist, apoca-
lyptic now.
waking, ready to embark upon our own story (nasha sobstvennaiia povest ), which
is as yet a mystery, a puzzle (zagadka). Because Russias course must be intuited or
guessed (ugadat ) (18:5769), the journals central task is to nd a story that is
adequate to Russias self-historicity, that is uniquely and organically its own.
7

Dostoevskys novelistic preoccupation with the question who is s/he? what is
the unique and truthful story of a life of an enigmatic raznochinets hero? is thus
readable as a biographical recasting of the question what is Russia? what is the
narrative shape adequate to its distinctiveness, its particularity. Dostoevskys post-
Reform novels, and Crime and Punishment in particular, are testing grounds for
various modes of emplotment, zones of narrative experimentation, in which the
proper plot or conguration of plots can be identied among a number of his-
torically available possibilities.
8
Early Options: Why Crime Is Better than a Career
Early in the novel, Raskolnikov is presented with two alternative visions of
advancement in the world: a crime or a career. The narrative trajectory of a crime
is formulated as follows: Kill [the old pawnbroker] and take her money, so that
afterwards with its help you can devote yourself to the service of all mankind (65).
This, in the end, is the trajectory he chooses. Here is the one he rejects: Oh yes,
of course, [my] happiness can be arranged; [I] can be kept at the university, made
a partner in the ofce, [my] whole fate can be secured; maybe later [Ill] be rich,
honored, respected, and perhaps [Ill] even end [my] life a famous man (44). To
this bifurcation, whose locus classicus within the realist novel is surely Rastignacs
Mandarin dilemma in Pre Goriot, Dostoevsky adds a characteristic twist, casting
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 236
9
For different, though not contradictory, approaches to Dostoevskys appropriation of Balzac in
Crime and Punishment, see Frank 73. For a more extended discussion of the formal and thematic
links between Dostoevsky and Balzac, see Fanger.
the alternatives not merely as moral choices but as modes of self-knowledge.
9
The
question what is the better, more desirable alternative, crime or career? turns
into the transcendental inquiry will I be dened as one who committed murder or
became a lawyer? In Dostoevsky, wealth, success, and the paths to them are merely
material upon which a mysterious self weaves its self-identifying pattern.
Raskolnikovs choice to dene himself by means of a crime nds its correlative
in a certain narrative impatience: the desire to know immediately. Critics have
commented on the fact that Raskolnikov plays with the Russian word for crime,
prestuplenie, repeatedly calling attention to its etymological makeup. Prestuplenie
is a kind of overstepping, a transgression. Most explicitly, it evokes the overstep-
ping of moral limitations (whether absolute or merely conventional). It also recalls
a kind of Napoleonic stepping over of corpses on the path to glory. But perhaps
more fundamental, and certainly less readily noticed, is the temporal dimension
of the metaphor: a stepping over of stages in time, not merely for the sake of quick
success but also for the sake of the immediate knowledge that would obviate the
need to live out ones life, step by step, to the end.
The relevance of this last meaning of prestuplenie nds conrmation in Dosto-
evskys polemic against the radical intelligentsia in an 1861 essay published in
Time: You yearn for enormous activity; would you like us to give you one, one that
will exceed all of your expectations? . . . Here it is: sacrice all of your giant-ness
for the sake of the universal good; instead of seven-mile steps, take inch-long ones;
accept the idea that if it is impossible to step farther, then an inch is after all more
than nothing (PSS 18:68; my translation). According to Dostoevsky, for radicals
impatient to transform Russia once and for all according to pre-existing models
developed in the West, the future is not something that must await fruition; it is
already upon us. Therefore, Russias identity must be precipitated in the form of a
popular uprising that would allow the people to become who they (really) are, or
in the form of a coup led by intellectuals telling the people who they should be. In
short, something fast some overstepping is necessary.
This is the historiographic content of the narrative shape Raskolnikov chooses.
But what about the one he rejects, the signicantly slower path of a career, a choice
associated with the unattractive gure of the arriviste Pyotr Luzhin? The man to
whom Raskolnikov could owe his career advancement, Luzhin is an intelligent
man (umnyi chelovek) who knows how to look out for his own advantage. To make
a fortune and to have as many things as possible this is surely his motto. But it is
not to be found in Crime and Punishment itself. Instead, the formula appears again
and again in Dostoevskys reminiscences about his visit to Paris, which were pub-
lished as Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (Zimnie zametki o letnikh vpechatleniiakh)
in the third volume of Time (1863). According to Dostoevsky, these words express
no less than the highest moral principle of the Paris bourgeois (Time 333).
Still more to the point is his description in Winter Notes of the temporality
associated with bourgeois accumulation. This temporality is twofold. On the
level of human history, time has ended. The petit bourgeois considers himself to
be the pinnacle of existence, the crown of creation. The entire course of history
SHAPES OF HISTORY & THE ENIGMATIC HERO IN DOSTOEVSKY / 237
10
Perhaps paradigmatically for Dostoevsky, Alexander Herzen echoes the Abb Sieyss famous
dictum, the third estate is all, where all [vsio] is meant to imply nality (119).
leads up to him and, with him, stops. There is nothing beyond what exists, no
future beyond the status quo.
10
Moreover, because history has ended one can only
faire fortune and accumulate as many things as possible; this and this alone is
now the duty of nature and humanity (dolg prirody i chelovechestva) (PSS 5:77).
The personal temporal dimension of petit bourgeois accumulation is described
as follows: So, Ill do a little business today in the shop and, tomorrow, God will-
ing, Ill do some more, and maybe the day after tomorrow, too, with Gods great
mercy. Well, and then, then, only to have saved up a tiny bit as quickly as possi-
ble, and aprs moi le dluge (7475). The comic insertions of phrases like God
willing or with Gods mercy insertions that would in another context invoke
the uncertainty of the future here emphasize the absence of any weighty con-
ception of the future at all. The time of accumulation, of a career, is meaning-
less repetition and merely quantitative advancement.
Raskolnikovs choice of crime over career thus adumbrates the distinction
between the narratological conditions of a Russian raznochinets and a Western
European petit bourgeois. While the Balzacian modern man, deprived of a direct
correspondence between appearance and social essence, is still both enigmatic
and dangerous, his descendent has degenerated three decades later into some-
thing so thoroughly knowable and predictable as to be nearly unrepresentable in
narrative. In contrast, Dostoevskys raznochinets is, if anything, too little known, in
possession of too much potential narrative energy. And in this sense the plot of
the enigmatic crime is not a plot like others but rather an enabling condition for a
multiplicity of alternative emplotments. This in turn allows us, recalling the lan-
guage of the underground man, to revisit the distinction between what is reason-
able and protable, on the one hand, and what is properly individual or personal,
on the other. The reasonable and the protable are the existential categories orga-
nizing the overdetermined life of Dostoevskys petit bourgeois, whereas individu-
ality and personality characterize his enigmatic raznochinets, driven to commit a
crime by an overarching historical logic requiring him to seek detection.
The Shape of a Bildungsroman: The Detective as Mentor
Raskolnikovs early choices are not, however, limited to career and crime. From
the very start, there is another possibility located at the margins of his conscious-
ness and linked to the character of his fellow student Razumikhin. While wander-
ing through St. Petersburg in a daze of murderous preoccupation, Raskolnikov
realizes to his surprise that he is unconsciously walking in the direction of Razu-
mikhins lodgings. So did I really mean to straighten things out with Razumikhin
alone? To nd the solution for everything in Razumikhin? he asks himself. The
answer, mysteriously enough, appears to be yes, and yet he decides not to go: I will
go to him . . . the next day, after that, once that is already nished and everything
has taken a new course (52). But, of course after that it is already too late, and it
seems clear that had he gone to Razumikhin then, that the crime may never
have happened. Razumikhin, it turns out, presents Raskolnikov with yet another
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 238
11
For an interesting reading of the issue of translation in Crime and Punishment that focuses on
Dostoevskys views of national originality, see Baer. Whereas I view translation as connected to the
gradualist and mediating temporality of the Western European Bildungsroman, Baer sees it as a
method of engaging (either imitatively or creatively) the cultural heritage (one might say, Bildungs-
gut) of the West.
12
Curiously, at one point in the novel Luzhin mistakes Razumikhins name as Rassudkin. In
doing so, he points to a key distinction between two Russian words for reason: razum and rassudok.
Rassudok, very much in evidence in Luzhins own behavior, is a kind of practical know-how, reason as
essentially instrumental. Perhaps closest to what in German idealism is referred to as understand-
ing or Verstand, it analyzes the world and manipulates it to ones advantage. Razum is a higher form
of reason, or Vernunft, characteristic of Razumikhins character zone (see note 14) even if not
always of his experience. It refers to a capacity for seeing the world in its overarching organic inter-
connectedness.
13
An illuminating and paradigmatic encounter between bearers of these two temporalities
occurs in a remarkable passage towards the end of Goethes Wilhelm Meisters Years of Apprenticeship.
Here, Wilhelm meets his childhood friend Werner after a long separation. While the hero of the
novel has been undergoing his Bildung, Werner has been making money as a merchant. When the
two see each other again, Werner comments: Look at how you stand! How well everything ts
together! Indolence makes one prosper, whereas I, poor wretch . . . , if I had not spent my time earn-
ing a mint of money, there wouldnt be anything to say for me (306).
narrative possibility. In order to support himself at the university, Razumikhin
works as a tutor and translator, and, when Raskolnikov does visit him, he suggests
that Raskolnikov take on translations as well. The play on the difference between
crime (prestuplenie) and translation (perevod) is audible in the original: to step
over, to transgress, on the one hand, and to lead to the other side, to translate, on
the other.
11

There are also other and better clues to Razumikhins position on proper
narrative shapes. At a crucial point in the novel, apparently by way of a digression,
Razumikhin explodes with a diatribe against Westernizing socialists (most likely
admirers of Fourier, Proudhon, and Feuerbach):
With them its not mankind developing all along in a historical, living way that will nally turn by
itself into a normal society, but, on the contrary, a social system coming out of some mathematical
head will at once organize the whole of mankind and instantly make it righteous and sinless, sooner
than any living process, without any historical and living way! Thats why they have such an instinc-
tive hatred of history . . . . Thats why they so dislike the living process of life . . . . You cant overleap
nature with logic alone. (256)
Note the emphasis on historical development as a living process and the rejec-
tion of mathematical, pre-given formulas for social organization in contrast to
the desire to overleap, to nd a shortcut to perfection. Note also the association
between theory and radical temporal precipitation. Much of this could have been
taken verbatim from any of the numerous polemical and historico-philosophical
passages in Time or Epoch (see, for example, PSS 20:21621). Razumikhins pro-
posed temporality moves step by step; it translates, leads over (perevodit) rather
than transgresses or oversteps (prestupaet); and, in the process, it educates.
It is this last characteristic that helps us distinguish between two kinds of step-
by-step progression: Luzhins petit bourgeois accumulation and Razumikhins
nationalist historiography. For Luzhin, temporality is merely serial: the distinc-
tion between one moment and the next is quantitative rst this much, then more
of the same, then still more, and so on.
12
The trajectory advocated by Razumikhin
is one in which every moment contributes something essentially new; it is, on the
level of history, the trajectory of organic development, and, on the level of the
individual, the shape of a Bildungsroman.
13

SHAPES OF HISTORY & THE ENIGMATIC HERO IN DOSTOEVSKY / 239
Towards the middle of the novel Razumikhin seems to pass the baton of this
mode of emplotment to his distant relative Porry Petrovich, who is the detective
investigating the recent murder of the pawnbroker. During his three long conver-
sations with Raskolnikov, Porry Petrovich bemoans the young mans impatience
and subtly interpolates the logic of passivity and duration into the heros experi-
ence of time. He makes him wait and refuses to get to the point, deliberately brak-
ing Raskolnikovs impetuous movement. Suffering, passivity, letting the course of
ones life take care of itself all invoke the dynamics of the Bildungsroman. There
is Reason (Razum) outside of the hero, a design not of his making that, at least for
now, transcends his understanding; were he willing to abandon himself to it,
everything would turn out for the best. The temporal dimensions of the life Porry
is offering are strikingly different from those that compelled Raskolnikovs choice
of crime over the options suggested by both Luzhin and Razumikhin. Ten years, a
long time in Siberia with no one to see him only this, according to Porry
Petrovich, will make it possible for Raskolnikovs true biography to begin to unfold.
As Franco Moretti has argued, The trial that the protagonist of the Bildungsro-
man must overcome consists . . . in accepting the deferment of the ultimate mean-
ing of his existence (46).
The investigators methods of detection depend upon a recognition that the
truth about a self is impossible to grasp in static terms, that the medium of a story
is inescapable if one wants to establish the identity of a certain raznochinets. As a
result, the truth about Raskolnikov is a temporally distended truth. However, it is
not enough for Porry Petrovich simply to put Raskolnikov in prison, try him, and
exile him to Siberia. He must also contextualize these events within a plot shaping
a life in its entirety: Suffer, then . . . . [ Just] give yourself directly to life, without
reasoning; dont worry it will carry you straight to the shore and set you on your
feet (460). Instead of merely detecting the criminal, catching and punishing
him, Porry Petrovich attempts to re-inscribe him into a different narrative, to re-
congure his relationship to time.
If Luzhins trajectory (that of a career) is identiably petit bourgeois, what are
the socio-historical implications of the investigators Bildungsroman-like narrative
shape? To begin to answer this question is to recognize how uncharacteristic Por-
rys conception of Bildung actually is vis--vis the paradigmatic Western Euro-
pean model most inuentially instantiated in Goethe, but developed by Balzac
and, on Russian soil, by Ivan Goncharov. The most striking divergence of the inves-
tigators suggested (and interpolated) narrative from its more classical instances
pertains to the question of the heros socialization in a modernized world. The
path sketched out for Raskolnikov by his mentor-investigator is one that leads to
a long sojourn in Siberia, that is, as far from the modern world as possible. Further-
more, its central organizing category is not, as in Goethe, the aristocratic, philan-
thropic Society of the Tower, nor, as in Balzac, Restoration-era Paris, or even the
more abstractly conceived modern age of Goncharovs A Common Story (Obykno-
vennaiia istoriia, 1846). Rather, it is the life characterized simply by a certain
vague benevolence, by something verging on Providence. In short, the investi-
gators mode of emplotment, although resembling a Bildungsroman, diverges from
that form, especially in regard to the Bildungsromans concern with the ascent of
a middle-class hero into maturity through socialization in the modern world.
Some other shape is clearly being sought here.
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 240
14
On character zones, see Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination (31620). Although Bakhtin characteris-
tically conceives of heterogeneity in the novel in discursive terms as a multiplicity of world views
expressed in speech there are indications in his work that a similar multiplicity might be found
at the level of temporal organization. Thus, at the end of Forms of Time and Chronotope in the
Novel he writes that Chronotopes are mutually inclusive, they co-exist, they may be interwoven
with, replace or oppose one another, contradict one another or nd themselves in ever more com-
plex interrelationships (Dialogic Imagination 252). See also a related discussion of heterochrony
in Morson and Emerson, 42529. Bakhtins hostility towards the literary-theoretical category of
plot (as distinct from the broader philosophical conception of temporality) is, however, well docu-
mented. In afrming the epistemological centrality of emplotment zones as end-directed, nalizing
temporal discourses, this essay thus departs sharply from Bakhtins understanding of multiplicity
in the novel. For Bakhtins polemic against the prominence of plot as a literary-theoretical category
in the 1960s and 1970s, see Sobranie sochinenii 6:388; 6:58588.
15
Leslie Johnsons analysis of subjective time in Crime and Punishment presupposes a loosely exis-
tentialist framework and is largely incompatible with a zones-of-emplotment approach adopted
here. The latter, by analogy with the conception of character zones offered in Bakhtin, focuses less
on characters personal experiences of time than on objective that is, historically operative, specic
and therefore generic auras of temporality accompanying them through the novel.
Zones of Emplotment: The Hagiographic Plot, the Suicide
In light of what we have already seen, and in light of what is still to come, it is
tempting to introduce another corrective to Bakhtins inuential account of Dos-
toevskys polyphonic novel. For Bakhtin, the polyphony most forcefully at work in
Dostoevsky involves the characters discourses and the world views embodied in
them. Yet, because particular world views are reected not only in characters
speech but also in their manner of plotting, the polyphony of discourses in Crime
and Punishment, reecting the multiplicity (heteroglossia) of social dialects of
the time, is complemented by the polyphony of emplotments, representing some
of the most prominent temporal shapes competing for dominance over the his-
torical moment. The two polyphonies are impossible to tell apart, and what Bakh-
tin refers to as discursive character zones are also zones of emplotment.
14
So far,
I have considered three such zones: Raskolnikovs, which compels him to stake
everything on a single act; Luzhins petit bourgeois, careerist option, which views
time as homogeneous and serial; and the Razumikhin-Porry model of an idio-
syncratic Bildungsroman.
15
The crime and the career are, as far as Raskolnikov is concerned, plots of incep-
tion. They answer the question, where to start? The Bildungsroman, especially as it
is interpolated into the protagonists fate by Porry Petrovich, is a plot of comple-
tion, affording Raskolnikov a way out of the impasse in which he nds himself:
confess, suffer, let life take care of you, and you will know. But side by side with this
possibility we nd another plot of completion, this one arising from within the
emplotment zone of the saintly prostitute Sonya (whose name, in turn, invokes
Holy Wisdom). After committing the murder, Raskolnikov repeatedly seeks or
nds himself in Sonyas company, and their acquaintance culminates in a gothic
scene during which, at his request, she reads to him the Gospel story of the raising
of Lazarus: At the last verse: Could not this man, which opened the eyes of the
blind . . . she lowered her voice, conveying ardently and passionately the doubt,
reproach, and reviling of the blind, unbelieving Jews, who in another moment, as
if thunderstruck, would fall down and weep and believe . . . And he, he who is also
blinded and unbelieving, he too will now hear, he, too, will believe yes, yes! right
now, this minute (327). Sonyas thinking rejects all mediation. To her, what hap-
SHAPES OF HISTORY & THE ENIGMATIC HERO IN DOSTOEVSKY / 241
pened nearly two thousand years ago is happening eternally still, right now,
this minute. She makes no difference between reading and witnessing, narrating
something and testifying to it. In short, she confuses the time and space of narra-
tive with those of discourse. It is this kind of reading that allows her to draw a
parallel between Raskolnikov and the disbelieving Jews, a parallel that also allows
her to hope that her listener, too, will come to have faith in Christ upon hearing
about (or, witnessing again, for her there is little difference) the great miracle of
the resurrection of Lazarus.
Sonyas penchant for the immediate acquires socio-historical content towards
the end of the novel, when, having followed Raskolnikov to Siberia, she demon-
strates a mysterious inner intimacy with the common people among the con-
victs. As a mouthpiece for the expression of the most sacred moral and religious
(Christ-centered) values of the Russian peasantry, Sonya emerges as a speci-
cally Dostoevskian gloss on a Russian novelistic archetype: a heroine with deep
national (popular) roots. Her zone of emplotment thus appears to provide
Porrys somewhat qualied Western European Bildungsroman with something
like a native alternative.
We get a clear sense of what such an alternative might look like when, having
learned that Raskolnikov is a murderer, she tells him: Go now, this minute, stand
at the crossroads, bow down, and rst kiss the earth you have deled, then bow to
the whole world, on all four sides, and say aloud to everyone: I have killed! Then
God will send you life again (420). The narrative into which she attempts to inter-
polate Raskolnikov is lled with symbolic acts, stressing the now, this very moment,
the crossroads, the four corners of the world. The sequence of actions she suggests
invokes the conversion of a saint, a conversion that brings chronology to an end
and begins a new life outside earthly duration. The life here invoked is thus very
different from the life of the hero in the investigators projected Bildungsroman.
For Porry Petrovich, life is temporally distended meaning. Sonyas is another
life altogether, one that echoes the verse she has just read so passionately from
the Gospel of John: I am the life and the resurrection. Thus, if Porrys and
Sonyas emplotment strategies lead Raskolnikov in the same direction to the
police station, to trial, to Siberian exile the meaning of confession is in each case
radically different. In one genre of emplotment, it is the beginning of true growth,
the inception of a peculiar Bildungsroman; in the other, it is the end of time and
the beginning of eternally blissful paradise on earth (cf. Elder Zosimas mysteri-
ous visitor in The Brothers Karamazov 303).
There is one other option for the proper emplotment of the story of this enig-
matic Russian raznochinets. During his exile in Siberia, Raskolnikov wonders why
had he not killed himself [as soon as he realized that he was just a criminal and
not a great man]? . . . Was there really such a force in this desire to live, and was
it so difcult to overcome it? Had not Svidrigailov, who was afraid of death, over-
come it? (545). Svidrigailovs suicide scenario heavily shadows Raskolnikovs last
days of freedom, and, just as Luzhin represents a degraded Balzacian parvenu, so
this depraved landowner is best understood as a fallen version of the hero who
dominated the Russian novel until the early 1860s: the long line of aristocratic
mists morally confused but psychologically fascinating from Pushkin to Ler-
montov to Herzen to Turgenev. Starting in the 1860s, literary critical debates
about the place of the so-called superuous man in the liberalized environment
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 242
16
The ction of Lev Tolstoy from the sixties and seventies constitutes a formidable exception to
this trend, at least insofar as it continues to focus on the nobility while largely neglecting the emerg-
ing new social class. However, Tolstoys noblemen do not t easily into the category of the superu-
ous men either. He tends to treat them, or at least the positively marked among them, as aristo-
cratic frondeurs capable of launching a thoroughgoing critique of contemporary Russian society
while keeping their dignity and, ultimately, their happiness intact.
of the Great Reforms coincided with the replacement of this type within the Rus-
sian novel by the positively, negatively, or, as in Dostoevskys case, enigmatically
construed gure of the raznochinets.
16
Svidrigailov thus appears as a relic of the
past, a grotesque instance of aristocratic indolence, depravity, and degeneration.
Like Luzhins projected temporality, Svidrigailovs possesses no genuinely sig-
nifying dimension. It is empty serial time not of career and accumulation, to
be sure, since Svidrigailov already has everything he needs but the serial time
of a monstrous boredom. And if, as the novel suggests, Svidrigailov is indeed a
criminal, he is a criminal of a very different kind from Raskolnikov. Raskolnikovs
crime is a way of testing himself; it possesses the status of a question, a wager, a risk.
Svidrigailovs crimes are once again serial and senseless, guided only by the needs
of the moment. He risks nothing, attempts no leap. Suicide, then, is here depicted
as Svidrigailovs natural death, the most appropriate form of death for a man
any moment of whose life is indistinguishable from any other. It is no wonder,
then, that suicide becomes an attractive option for Raskolnikov in exile that is,
after the ordeal is nished, the test has been failed, and time has been divested
of the ability to bring out the truth.
The End and the Contours of Plot beyond the Novel
What, then, is the true identity of Russias enigmatic raznochinets hero? The sto-
ries of the great man and of the mere criminal (both of Raskolnikovs own cre-
ation), of a career (Luzhin), of depravity and suicide (Svidrigailov), of the sinners
conversion (Sonya), or of Bildung (Porry, Razumikhin)? The novels epilogue, in
its brief treatment of the trial and the rst months of Raskolnikovs life in Sibe-
ria, eliminates the rst four possibilities. Its nal pages unfold in the ambiguous
shadow of the remaining two.
The rst of these reects Sonyas emplotment zone and narrates the event of
Raskolnikovs conversion. The moment is carefully prepared: There, on the
boundless, sun-bathed steppe . . . was freedom, there a different people lived, quite
unlike those here, there time itself seemed to stop, as if the centuries of Abraham
and his ocks had not passed (549). We are transported into an archaic space that
appears timeless. Nothing of St. Petersburg modernity remains; history collapses
into myth. Sonya appears. How it happen[s], [Raskolnikov] himself [does] not
know, but he falls at her feet, bursts into tears, and embraces her knees: Seven
years, only seven years! At the beginning of their happiness there were moments
when they were both ready to look at those seven years as if they were seven days.
He did not even know that a new life would not be given him for nothing, that it still
had to be dearly bought, to be paid for with a great future deed (551). The cona-
tion of seven years with seven days (the seven days of creation to boot), the treat-
ment of time as everlasting kairos, the persistence of the miraculous these are of
SHAPES OF HISTORY & THE ENIGMATIC HERO IN DOSTOEVSKY / 243
course characteristic of Sonyas emplotment temporality. We once again encounter
a break in the normal state of affairs a grand, revelatory, or redemptive event
inaugurating a saintly life and retroactively redeeming the life of a sinner.
But it is not the end. The nal paragraph gestures beyond the novel to another
story, one that is only about to begin: the account of a mans gradual renewal, the
account of his gradual regeneration, his gradual transition from one world to
another, his acquaintance with a new, hitherto completely unknown reality (551).
Contrary to the sacralizing impetuousness of conversion, we have here a triple
insistence on the gradual. The narrative shape at which the novel gestures beyond
itself once again looks strikingly like the narrative Raskolnikov has rejected at the
start of the novel, the slow biographical story of development, given voice to, early
on, by Razumikhin and, towards the middle of the novel, by Porry Petrovich.
In a recent essay, Gary Saul Morson suggests that many readers feel dissatised
with the novels epilogue because, while the novel as a whole tends to align itself
with Razumikhins prosaic practical goodness, the nal passages are cast wholly
in Sonyas terms (The God of Onions 108). As a result, there is an inconsistency
between the novels privileging of practical reason and small acts of [prosaic]
goodness, on the one hand, and its celebration of religious faith, on the other.
From the perspective that views character not as a set of psychological traits but as
a historically determinate and historiographically fruitful temporal shape or zone
of emplotment, however, the place of both Razumikhin and the epilogue in the
novel appears in a different light.
Although as a moral-psychological type Razumikhin is indeed a decent fellow,
he is consistently associated with the ideology of organic historiography and the
generic aura of a Bildungsroman, and his very name presupposes a higher reason
(razum) than the one associated with practical activity and good sense (rassudok).
As a zone of emplotment for his enigmatic friend (and, with him, for Russia),
Razu mikhin thus comes to represent not so much a potentially innite series of
prosaic little acts as a global and thoroughly theoretical conception of both
universal history and individual biography that emphasizes the gradual unfolding
or fruition of the organic spirit of a human being or a nation. The re-insertion of
Razumikhins temperament into the temporal (historiographic and generic) shape
with which it is associated makes it clear that the ideology of small prosaic acts
(good or bad) is more properly associated in Dostoevsky with the petit-bourgeois
historiography of a Luzhin than with that of the hero of a possible national epic
(bogatyr ), Razumikhin. In fact it might be this very heightening of the pathos of
the gradual that allows Razumikhins zone of emplotment to be reactivated along-
side Sonyas in the last words of the novel, with their triple insistence on the slow-
ness of the heros regeneration.
How, then, do we make sense of the novels ultimate vacillation between the two
shapes of Raskolnikovs future? The fact that we are confronted with something
other than a Bildungsroman and something other than a saints life is, I would
argue, not altogether surprising. We have seen that the Bildungsroman, insofar as
it is an emplotment possibility for Raskolnikov throughout the novel, departs in
signicant ways from its classical Western European models. While appearing to
adopt this sub-genres gradualist temporal shape as well as its faith in the heros
eventual formation and ascent into meaning, it rejects the assumptions about what
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 244
that formation would amount to and what that meaning would endorse. It rejects,
in other words, the genres tendency to posit the goal of the heros Bildung in social-
ization, adaptation to the exigencies of modern city life, and ascent into the petit-
bourgeois mechanistic time of prosaic acts and material accumulation. That is
why the novel transfers the site of consummation into the pre-modern wilderness
of Siberia, displaying suspicion of contemporary social institutions.
Meanwhile, the hagiographic mode of emplotment, although prominent
throughout the novel, emerges as dangerously resonant both with the narra-
tive impatience of the radical intelligentsia and Raskolnikovs own compulsion
to commit the inaugural crime. A saints life, like the life of a radical or a great
man, hinges on precipitant acts, ready results, and immediate knowledge. And
so the narrator must intervene, disabusing the protagonists and the readers of
their hopes for an imminent (and immanent) resolution.
A saints life in Bildung-time, then this is the shape of the story beyond Crime
and Punishment, transcending it and constituting its regulative ideal. This is the
narrative and generic synthesis that would constitute the imaginary solution to
the contradictions tearing at Russian temporality in the period of Great Reforms.
Rupture and continuity, apocalypse and development, the archaic and the mod-
ern, saintly self-sacrice and robust worldliness two genres and two narrative
shapes could hardly be further apart, and yet it is they that are called upon, at the
end of the novel and beyond, to coalesce in constituting the proper story of the
enigmatic raznochinets Raskolnikov and with it, synecdochally, the proper shape of
Russian history.
New York University
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1
Abstract

ILYA KLIGER

Shapes of History and the Enigmatic Hero in Dostoevsky:
The Case of Crime and Punishment

This essay studies a crucial feature of Dostoevskys novelistic poetics, and the poetics of
Crime and Punishment (1866) in particular, in light of contemporaneous debates regarding the
historical fate of Russia. The novel, I argue, is a thought experiment exploring the emerging
condition of multi-historicitythat is, a simultaneity of multiple emplotment possibilities for the
Russian state. In order to bring these possibilities to light, I read the novel with an eye on
Dostoevskys journalism from the early- to mid-sixties, a period characterized by an urgent
recognition of the openness of Russias historical future.
Mediating between the novel and its contemporary journalistic discourse with the help of
the formal (narratological) categories of character and emplotment, I argue that the novelistic
search for the proper emplotment of its enigmatic hero corresponds to the search in
contemporary journalism for the proper trajectory of the Russian nation, which, with the
emancipation of the serfs in 1861, is perceived as pregnant with multiple historical possibilities.
As an enigma soliciting narrative solutions, Dostoevskys socially underdetermined
(raznochinets) hero is best understood as a formal condition of the possibility of exploring
Russias position at the intersection point of multiple historical vectors. As such, the hero enables
a series of temporal shapes, laden with historiographic significance, to be considered and then
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