It has been noted that Russia bears deep misogynist scars because it missed the 12th century Chivalric Code. Equally important, Russia also missed the Age of Reason in the 17th century. It tried to catch up under its two monarchs who earned the moniker Great – Peter I and Catherine II – but still has considerable problems with Western rational thought.
Moreover, in the middle of the 19th century an ideology emerged that not only refused to follow the West on the path of rationality but actively rebelled against it. It originally developed as Slavophilia, a belief that Russian culture is destined to become the core of the Slavic (and Eastern Orthodox) civilization. Fyodor Dostoyevsky was one of the most effective proponents of Russian irrationality.
The old polemic – and the Russian embrace of the irrational – may prove relevant in today’s world, where rational thought seems to be in retreat everywhere. This may also be the basic reason why Putin and his Russia are gaining popularity in certain circles in the West.
As a writer of murder mysteries, I have been especially fascinated by Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s take on crime fiction – and how he turns the highly rational Western genre on its head.
The Age of Reason left the twin legacy of scientific exploration of the natural world and the rational organization of society. The Western detective novel was the ultimate product of the Enlightenment – because it brought together rational thought, scientific methods and civilized social order.
The British and the Americans, who embraced rationality earlier than other European cultures, naturally became the inventors of the fictional detective. The Sherlock Holmes prototype appeared well before Conan Doyle invented his famous character – in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, an 1841 short story written by an American, Edgar Allan Poe. It was the first instance when a fictional detective used deductive reasoning to solve a crime, working the way a natural scientist would: gathering evidence, conducting experiments and coming up with a theory which fits observable facts.
Crime in this kind of murder mystery is always a violation of the civilized social order. In Poe’s story, in fact, the murderer is an escaped orangutan, representing the irrational chaos of nature. Subsequent works featuring Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, along with many imitators, presented society as fundamentally well-ordered and rational, in which crime is an intrusion and a disruption.
These characters are in fact patterned on natural scientists, they are the Charles Darwins of detection: amateur sleuths imposing – or in their case reimposing – rational order on unruly nature.
The genre requires that the criminal act rationally as well. The typical criminal desires something society provides anyway – wealth, reputation or justice – but strives to attain it by breaking the rules and cutting corners. .
Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” not only breaks all these rules but deliberately rejects them. It is clearly a crime novel, as the word “crime” appears in the title. It was published in 1866, soon after Wilkie Collins’ “Woman in White” and two years prior to his “The Moonstone,” the two works considered first English detective novels. Poe’s short story had been published a quarter of a century earlier.
“Crime and Punishment” is also a detective novel. It has all the requisite accoutrements: the murder, the criminal, the detective and the solution – or rather, the resolution.
Except its structure of the book is completely different from an English murder mystery. We know from the start who committed the murders, since the act is described in detail. The intrigue is whether Rodion Raskolnikov gets away with murder.
Even more to the point, what makes it so different from Western samples is the attitude toward rationality. Raskolnikov is not motivated by enrichment: even though he robs his victim, money is a secondary consideration and he never makes use of his loot. In fact, a pedestrian motivation such as greed would have narrowed the novel’s scope. Raskolnikov’s ultimate purpose is to set himself above society, to prove that he is a special individual who “has the right” to disregard moral rules.
This is Raskolnikov’s real crime. The form he chooses – murder – is secondary to the transgression. He would have been guilty of this crime even if his nerve failed and he didn’t murder anyone. By aspiring to individual self-fulfillment – a thoroughly Western ambition – Raskolnikov already becomes a criminal. When he is doing hard labor in Siberia, his mates, who were guilty of mere murders, shun him because he continues to stick out of the great Russian collective.
Even his name damns him: “raskol” in Russian means split and refers most commonly to the mid-17th century schism in the Russian Orthodox Church, which created a sect of old-believers, or “raskolniki.”
Russian society, unlike its Western counterpart in the English detective novel, is shown to be neither rational nor orderly. Instead, it is godly, and its godliness is understood not by the mind by by the heart. Society is the repository of the collective good – which is contrasted with the individualistic evil. Two other deaths take place in “Crime and Punishment” and both are emblematic of this idea. Marmeladov, a down-and-out alcoholic, is humble and is only too glad to roll with the punches. In the end, he is forgiven by his wife and daughter despite causing them so much suffering. The true evil, however, is incarnated in rich land-owner Svidrigailov. Svidrigailov is rational and logical, but he voluntarily breaks away with society, which in the end drives him to suicide.
And then there is Dostoyevsky’s detective. He is certainly no Sherlock Holmes. He doesn’t so much investigate the crime – he knows that Raskolnikov is guilty all along. His job is to lead Raskolnikov to confession through a series of temptations. The path to confession is, in fact, the “punishment” in the title.
It is ironic that Marxism, a highly scientific ideology that grew out of the Enlightenment and rejection of the irrational German Romanticism, won its first victory in an irrational country such as Russia. Very quickly, however, Russia’s underlying irrationality defeated Marx’s social science forcibly imposed on the country. His laws of history, describing the development of the bourgeoisie and the gradual emergence of the industrial proletariat, were replaced in Soviet Russia by a series of irrational miracles. Socialism, which Marx expected to be built over a period of several centuries and appear first in the most advanced countries of the Western world with the highest level of industrialization, was declared accomplished in backward, agrarian Russia.
Dostoyevsky was banned during Joseph Stalin’s era – largely because of his advocacy of the irrational, his preference of faith over scientific inquiry and for soul over brain. But as Soviet Marxism transmogrified into a Potemkin village, and Russia returned to its irrational roots, Dostoyevsky’s popularity grew. The Soviet detective novel in particular owed a far greater debt to “Crime and Punishment” than to Holmes or Poirot. In line with the miracle character of the Soviet state, crime was declared a bourgeois phenomenon which no longer existed in the Soviet Union. Most of the detective stories before the 1960s featured not criminals but spies or enemies of the Soviet State. They were driven not by personal enrichment but by the pathological hatred of the Soviet people in its triumphant march toward communism.
Even in the late Soviet period, when detective novels and films became extremely popular, hardly any crime was a person to person affair. Since everyone in the Soviet Union was poor by design, criminals invariably had to be stealing from the state. And as such their crimes were not banal theft but an enemy act or even a sin – very much in Dostoyevsky’s mode.
In post-Vladimir Putin era, Russian television shows are saturated with police dramas which are surely a far cry from the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason or a classical detective story. Significantly, Boris Akunin, with his self-consciously “Western” detective novels, attempted in the late 1990s and early 2000s to bring Russia back into the mainstream of Western rational thought.
It is significant that at that time Russia was still, however tentatively, hoping to rejoin the community of nations. Not any more. It is sinking toward the neo-Soviet experience and Akunin lost much of his former popularity. He not only joined the opposition but moved away from detective novels and is now devoting himself mainly to writing history.
