A murderous poet inspired one of Dostoyevsky’s works

The Sinner and the Saint

By Kevin Birmingham (Penguin Press)

The truth about Fyodor Dostoyevsky has proved to be as mysterious and inexhaustible as the enigmatic figures he wrote about, drawing the attention of novelists (Leonid Tsypkin, J.M. Coetzee) and any number of biographers (Joseph Frank, Leonid Grossman). In “Dostoevsky in Love,” published this year, Alex Christofi combined genres, plucking lines from Dostoyevsky’s fiction and training them across a trellis of biographical fact.

The endless revisitation suggests something that Dostoyevsky himself may have appreciated. As Oliver Ready observes in the introduction to his superb translation of “Crime and Punishment,” knowing the facts is not the same as knowing the person — a notion that happens to align with Dostoyevsky’s own objections to the fixation on “mere data.”

So Kevin Birmingham has set out to offer something more interpretive and immersive in “The Sinner and the Saint.” Birmingham is the author of “The Most Dangerous Book” (2014), which told the story behind James Joyce’s “Ulysses”; his new book tells the story behind “Crime and Punishment,” another work of literary innovation, whose publication marked a turning point for both Dostoyevsky and the history of the novel.

“He was entering the greatest phase of his career,” Birmingham writes, a period that would include “The Idiot,” “Demons” and “The Brothers Karamazov.” He was also finding a new way of writing about self-consciousness and self-deception, by producing not a novel of ideas but what Birmingham calls “a novel about the trouble with ideas” — exploring their enormous power but also their pathetic inadequacy.

The distinction is essential. As Birmingham shows, Dostoyevsky wasn’t the schematic storyteller his critics make him out to be, mapping out some grand ideologies and then deducing the details. He usually started from bits of conversation, a person’s voice, a memorable image. Part of Birmingham’s intention is to give proper due to the inspiration provided to the novel by the 1835 trial of “poetmurderer” Pierre-françois Lacenaire, which Dostoyevsky learned about in 1861, when he and his brother were looking for material for their new literary magazine.

Lacenaire was a strange combination of haughty and dissolute — someone who read Rousseau’s “Social Contract” while waiting on an apartment landing for one of his victims. After robbing and killing two people, including an old widow lying in her sickbed, he and his accomplice took their meager spoils to treat themselves to dinner and then a comedy show.

“That was a great day for me,” Lacenaire later reminisced. “I breathed again.”

Raskolnikov of “Crime and Punishment” is no Lacenaire. Yes, he commits a double murder, killing a pawnbroker and her half-sister. Yes, he tries to exalt the grisly crime in the lofty language of utilitarianism — insisting that the pawnbroker’s money could be put to altruistic use. But where Lacenaire was cool, unflappable and languid, Raskolnikov is feverish, tormented and confused, torn between ideas and impulses, as divided as his own name (raskol means schism, or split) implies.

Birmingham ably guides us through the first few decades of Dostoyevsky’s astonishing life, paying particular heed to his time amid reformist circles in St. Petersburg, Russia. A sudden burst of literary acclaim in response to his first novel, “Poor Folk,” in January 1846 was swiftly followed by critical ridicule when “The Double” was published the month after. In 1849, he was arrested for political offenses against the state and put in front of a firing squad before being given a theatrical last-minute reprieve. He was then sent to Siberia, where he got to know some of the actual poor folk he had previously only written about. He talked to murderers, too, and was fascinated not only by their stories but by how they told them — the way they would boast of their formidable willpower at one moment and protest how utterly powerless they were the next.

It was the kind of oscillation that Dostoyevsky knew well.