416
PHILIP RAHV
of undergraduates." The crime he commits- in the idea of it,
namely, which is so strange an amalgam of the abstract and
artificial with the sheerly fantastic--corresponds intrinsically
to the cha:racter of this city, frequently described in exactly
such terms.* It is in the heat and stench of its slums, as he
wanders endlessly through the streets, that Raskolnikov spawns
his idea, which he himself likens to "a spell, a sorcery, an
obsession." And afterwards, having carried his idea to its ter–
rible conclusion, though not at aJI in the bravura manner of
a Napoleon but rather like a man deprived of reason and
will
power by mental illness, on the very next day he resumes his
wanderings about the city in a state more often than not
bordering on delirium.
St. Petersburg was far more the capital of the Russian
empire than of the Russian land. It was erected on the Finnish
marshland with cruel haste and at the cost of many lives by
*
The ambiguity of Petersburg in its odd blending of the real and
the unreal is what Dostoevsky tried mainly to capture. In
A Raw You th
there is an especially suggestive p assage in which young Arkady speaks of
a Petersburg morning as being at the same time infinitely prosaic and
infinitely fantastic.-"On such a wild Petersburg morning, foul , damp
and foggy, the wild dream of some Hermann out of Pushkin's "Queen
of Spades" (a colossal figure, an extraordinary and regular Petersburg
type . . . the type of the Petersburg period) might, I believe, strike
one as a piece of solid reality. A hundred times over, in such a fog, I
have been haunted by a strange and persistent fancy: 'What if this fog
should part and float away? Would not all this rotten and slimy town go
with it, rise up with the fog, and vanish like smoke, and the old Finnish
marsh be left as before and in the midst of it, perhaps, to complete the
picture, a bronze horseman on a panting, overdriven steed?'"
The bronze horseman is Fa1conet's statue of Peter the Great, but
implicitly the referenoe is of course to Pushkin's famous poem of that
title. Hermann is the protagonist of Pushkin's story "The Queen of
Spades," in whom some scholars have discerned an early model of
Raskolnikov. For like Dostoevsky's hero, Hermann is under the spell of
Napoleon and he too, daring all on one throw, kills an old woman in an
attempt to wrest from her the secret that will make his fortune. What the
two characters share, basically, is the Petersburgian power-urge com–
bined with the peculiar Petersburgian dreaminess.
