Crime and Punishment Lecture

University of Dallas UDigital Commons Russian Novel Teaching January 2021 Crime and Punishment Lecture Louise Cowan Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.udallas.edu/cowanteach_rusnov Part of the Russian Literature Commons Recommended Citation Cowan, Louise, "Crime and Punishment Lecture" (2021). Russian Novel. 23. https://digitalcommons.udallas.edu/cowanteach_rusnov/23 This Lecture is brought to you for free and open access by the Teaching at UDigital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Russian Novel by an authorized administrator of UDigital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]. 5257 The three scenes I want us to look at during the course of my talk this morning are: Raskolnikov’s confession to Sonya; Svidrigailov’s last night alive; and the Epilogue– Raskolnikov in Siberia. So if I seem to get off the subject and into too much pontificating, remember that I have these three scenes in mind and that we are coming to them some time or other. But in the meantime I have to utter a few generalities— though most of what I have to say has already been admirably set forth in the fine lectures by Dr. Allums and Dr. Cowan—as well as by Dr. Arbery in his Introductory remarks. But their talks have stimulated me to want to dip my oar in the stream. It’s the group aspect of the thinking that goes on here on Routh street that is its energizing aspect. One doesn’t find this kind of exchange anywhere else, I’m convinced, on the planet. One of the distinguishing things about the studies in this program is that we think of works of art as belonging to certain large groupings—not that there are rules for these categories, not that anyone can legislate that a work has to fit into one of them. But we see it as in the nature of reality that certain kinds of attitudes of the soul determine a particular form of a work. Aristotle named the kinds back in the 5th century BC.—Tragedy, Epic, Comedy, and dithryambic (lyric). And just as the Greeks discovered philosophy, they discovered literary theory. I don’t think they discovered poetry, for poetry is natural to even the most primitive of tribes. But understanding poetry, seeing the significance of the world it posits—that is another matter. So you have had in this program a real introduction to the most marked, the most distinguished, examples of tragedy. And you’ve had a taste of comedy. We are ending the institute with two novels, both of which make use of elements of tragedy and comedy, each of them offering a different kind of totality—a different form. In its highest perfection, could we say, the Greeks produced tragedy. But a Christian world view, we might suggest, perfected the genre of comedy. The Greeks tended to think of being as emanation: there was the realm of the gods and the plane of truth, the ideas. And then, as a kind of afterthought, there was the world of matter, farthest removed from reality and hence a realm that suffered change and death, the world of becoming. That conception underlay the Greek myth that permeated all their works of art: the human is noble, like the gods, but subject to death. The gorgeousness of the Greek tragedies testifies to this inescapable ineluctable fate: we are mortal, we shall die. But we can leave behind us something of magnanimity; we can, as the epics testify, leave behind us Kleos, the memory of the heroic. And tragedy testifies that we can leave behind us the polis (as Aeschylus tells us) and, as Sophocles testifies, a specific blessing for it. Our lives then need not be lived in vain. Old comedy (Aristophanic comedy) testifies that we can enjoy life in the meantime; that we have certain delights that come from the body and from our wits, from our being mortal. And we are supposed to celebrate them, as though they were not tainted with what the Biblical tradition portrays as Original Sin. What we have to see, then, is that we are heirs to two traditions: the classical and the Scriptural. It is not a matter of religion; we are not concerned in literary studies with religion as such. That is not our task. Our task is to see what myth governs the form of the works we study. And it is not always clear to peopole that we must distinguish between the Christian myth (that has shaped our art and our culture and our science) from the Christian faith. One may be an absolute agnostic; yet one lives in a world that has been shaped by Christianity. And if one is a good artist, devoted to the poetic truth that comes into one’s imagination through a descent into the depths (not of oneself but of one’s people), then one’s work is likely to be deeply Christian. So we saw with Shakespeare the way in which he worked at the end of his life toward the expression of this strange pattern: incarnation and resurrection, both of them doctrines that involve body and soul. The word is made flesh and dwells among us. But as skilled readers of literary works of art, we need to separate our personal “belief,” our faith, from our insight as lovers of poetry. We have to see the truth that poetry expresses. And what we see in Dostoevsky in particular, whatever our own position, is that he has apprehended the startling shape of the Christian world view; and he sees it as based on: incarnation, forgiveness, and resurrection. The supreme Christian virtues are not justice, prudence, and temperance, but faith, hope, and charity. The final arbiter of things is not reason but grace. We saw the beginning of this insight in the Tempest; and the surprise that accompanied it was the major impelling force in the play. (It takes a while for a new world view to become natural enough that a poet can use it. A poet cannot simply write about his private belief but must express the heart of his people.) It was for Dostoevsky to retrieve the myth of holy Russia. You have heard Dr. Arbery, and Dr. Allums and Dr. Cowan speak of the impact modernity had on Russia: it tore apart the integrity of its psyche. Most of the aristocracy went with the new enlightened Western ideas; the peasants stayed with the kenotic faith of Old Holy Russia, the vitality of which, however, became less and less their governing way of life and—cut off from its cultural standing, tended to seem increasingly antiquated. Thus the modern city such as Petersburg, the world of which Dostoevsky writes, is a deeply divided world. Secularism is spreading its pall over a Christian past, hardly remembered. Yet that past is still available, still effective, and will outlive the new theories that seep into Russia from Europe. We see this old kenotic faith exemplified in Crime and Punishment in, of course Sonya. But her father Marmeladov, has it too. The murdered Lizaveta, the carpenter who hangs himself, the workingman who confesses to the murder in order to suffer: these are ikonic figures that point to something in the depths of the city’s soul, hidden, but powerful. Katerina Ivanovna belongs in this company, rebel that she is; she knows what suffering is and despite her railing, has accepted it. At her agonizing death, she doesn’t want a priest. “I have no sins,” she says. “And besides God knows them and will forgive them. And if he doesn’t I don’t care.” She dies in the arms of Sonia, “Ah, Sonia, are you here too,” she murmurs. So what Shakespeare saw beginning in the new age before him Dostoevsky almost three centuries latercompletes: the vision of the necessity of forgiveness among a fallen humanity, living in cities that are no longer polei but that have become fantastic cities, cities that are no longer a community to which people relate, that have so little heart that they allow numbers of people to live not simply in poverty, but destitution—cities that have no festivity, no carnivals, no rituals, not being based on community but on individualism, so that in a way not possible with the ancients, people are isolated, separate units, cut off, alone, underground, the ties severed–and what Nietzsche emphasized as ressentiment characterizing their relation to others rather than bonds of pietas. Dostoevsky is the great novelist of this condition. He is writing of 19th cn Russia, where modernization has rushed in upon a traditional society with the same devastation that we are witnessing all over again today, when with the collapse of the Soviet regime, we are allowing an entire mass of people to flounder in a global capitalism that they cannot comprehend. This is why Dostovesky has been called prophetic— because he was sensitive enough to certain changes to write about them long before they had taken place on the scale that he depicts. The Petersburg he writes about is our society; it is only incipient in 19th century Russia: ideological warfare, violence, mass murder, child abuse, broken homes, destitution, alcoholism, economic greed, the degradation of woman, the substitution of sensationalism for communal wisdom, of secular humanism for Christian love. What he writes about then is tragic material. But Dostoevsky writes about it from within the myth of his society, which is comic. It is comic because Christianity posits another world beyond this one.

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