Inspired by real-life murderers, Dostoevsky wrote a new kind of novel
In September 1865, Fyodor Dostoevsky reached his lowest ebb. The 43-year-old Russian was holed up in a cheap hotel room in Wiesbaden, the spa town in central Germany where he had come to recoup his fortunes at the roulette table. The military engineer turned writer had been in debt most of his adult life, having exhausted the lines of credit through which Russians kept their sclerotic financial system going — personal loans, promissory notes, even pawnshop tickets. A final devastating loss at the tables left Dostoevsky destitute, whereupon the Hotel Victoria promptly stopped providing its troublesome guest with candles and clean sheets.
In one last desperate throw of the dice, Dostoevsky decided to embark on a new novel, even though it had been some years since he had enjoyed critical or commercial success. It would be a story featuring a hideous murder, but there would be one significant departure from the usual crime format. The story would be told from the murderer’s point of view, with the result that readers would find Raskolnikov, whose name means “schism” or “split,” sympathetic and even admirable. They might wonder if they were capable, in extremis, of doing something similar themselves.
In his tautly constructed narrative, “The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece,” Kevin Birmingham traces the story of how “Crime and Punishment” came into being, wrenched up from the feeble frame of Dostoevsky, whose financial misery was compounded by his escalating epilepsy and grief over the recent deaths of his beloved brother and estranged wife.
Published in installments in the Russian Messenger, the novel was an immediate success. Crime fiction was all the rage in Europe: Dostoevsky’s new novel would share page space with Wilkie Collins’ similarly unsettling “Armadale.” More than that, though, in “Crime and Punishment” Dostoevsky unveiled an entirely new literary sensibility. Telling the story from the point of view of a protagonist who is alienated from society, he created a narrative in which stable egos dissolve and tangle with the external world so that the distinction between “inside” and “outside” no longer adheres. It was a technique that James Joyce and Virginia Woolf would bring to perfection, but not for another 50 years.
It is also a technique that Birmingham employs in this masterly book. As narrator, he sits as tightly on Dostoevsky’s shoulder as Dostoevsky does on Raskolnikov’s, so that we feel as if we are seeing the world — a terrifying, claustrophobic world — from their doubled perspective. Birmingham sketches out Russia’s mid-century byzantine chaos with a deft hand, up to the point in 1849 when Dostoevsky was sentenced to death for associating with the Petrashevsky Circle, a progressive group that advocated the ending of serfdom and other measures inimical to czarist autocracy.