Why is a novel as troubling as Dostoevsky’s Crime & Punishment still so potent 150 years after publication?
In part because it pushes back at the now common acceptance and even expectation that historical progress must derive from the violence of an ends-justify-means mentality. People have become numb to violence in its myriad forms: America fights “good” wars in the name of “freedom” and frames civilian deaths as “collateral damage”; on any given day we are as likely to encounter videos of beheadings and shootings of unarmed drivers as those of kittens; and social media has bred a kind of psychological and factual brutality that results in a palpable social hopelessness and even drives some of its unfortunate targets to suicide. The novel challenges our collective complacency to today’s ubiquitous violence.
Raskolnikov is not a monster. As much as we may want to deny it, he is one of us.
Many try to do what our anti-hero does all the time on social media, in some ways pushing it further. The internet’s democratizing platform gives anyone with access not only the privilege to assert their own extraordinariness — and, therefore, everyone else’s inferiority — but also a swift, vicious, and seemingly invincible mechanism to act on that belief. Whereas today everybody clamors to make their extraordinariness felt, Raskolnikov tempered his theory with an understanding that truly extraordinary people are very few in number.
In fact, Raskolnikov’s psychological response to his actions corresponds to what PTSD research has shown happens to people who carry out lethal violence, even when in the name of a good cause. By focusing on Raskolnikov’s psychological turmoil following the murders, Dostoevsky subverts the notion that ends justify means and reminds us that the moment a person believes himself to be superior to others, even if only to a small degree, he initiates his own spiritual destruction.
