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Chapter 6: Crime and Punishment 2.The Covetous Knight: Power, Transgression, and Legacy
- University of Wisconsin Press
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Of all Pushkin’s works,Dostoevsky was most influenced,one might even say most obsessed, by The Covetous Knight. I have discussed the parodic treatment of Pushkin’s miser Baron in Mr. Prokharchin. There are also references and resonances in several of the later works. The hero of A Raw Youth, Arkady Dolgoruky, experiments with what he views as the central idea of The Covetous Knight: achieving and enjoying potential power.He is also involved in a dispute about inheritance and in a fatherand -son rivalry. “The Gentle Creature” (“Krotkaia”) features a moneylender living in isolation who dreams of attaining absolute power over another creature. In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan Karamazov, like the Baron, creates a kingdom of power in his imagination; and Dmitry and Fyodor Karamazov fight over an inheritance. But I would suggest that The Covetous Knight receives its most powerful transformation in Crime and Punishment, in which Dostoevsky is able to concentrate, more than in any other novel, on the character of his central hero and the world of his imagination.1 There are obvious differences between the heroes of The Covetous Knight and Crime and Punishment: the Baron is an old, wealthy knight living in his castle in medieval France; Raskolnikov is a poor, young student of more humble origins (a raznochinets) living in a tiny garret in nineteenth-century Petersburg. But for Dostoevsky the central occupations and conceptual universe of the Baron resemble those of Raskolnikov , his intellectual hero. In each work, we encounter an isolated man who is cut off from real life and lives largely in his imagination.2 The hero craves absolute power and is willing to transgress moral and social chapter Crime and Punishment . The Covetous Knight Power, Transgression, and Legacy norms to attain it; he sees money as an essential step in his path to his goal, tries to justify his actions egocentrically, and experiences the thrill of transgression associated with the crimes he has either committed or abetted. All these elements of plot and theme are inextricably linked in each text.With the aim of seeing more clearly how Dostoevsky responds to The Covetous Knight, I will focus on how Crime and Punishment addresses the ideas of power, transgressive pleasure, and inheritance or legacy. Visions of Power: Potential and Actual Pushkin’s Baron is obsessed with the idea of power. He argues that the highest pleasure of power lies not in its exercise, but in its contemplation :“I know my power. For me the consciousness of it is sufficient” (Ia znaiu moshch’ moiu: s menia dovol’no sego soznan’ia, :). But the power he exults in is not just any power, but a form of absolute power. He imagines himself a tsar on a proud hill, which he himself has had constructed, surveying the realm of land and sea that he controls. But he controls more than he can see, he asserts, for virtually everything is subject to his power and he is subject to nothing.“What is there that I do not have power over.What is not under my control?” (Chto ne podvlastno mne?, :). He likens himself to a kind of demon that from his vault rules the world. But he is no ordinary tsar, although he controls a mighty state (derzhava sil’na), for he has no troops and occupies no territory . He rules by virtue of his money. The whole world is a dog that at his call will obey him, even lick his hand. He is an example of the personality that Vyacheslav Ivanov thought he saw in Raskolnikov: “Luciferian self-assertion of the personality that strives meanly to preserve itself and greedily to increase its wealth.”3 It is not the logic of the Baron’s argument but its poetic expression that has convinced many of the reality of the Baron’s power, or at least the magnificence of his imagination. But cut off from the real world for so long, the Baron creates for himself an illusion of power for which there is no basis in reality.Pushkin is not insisting on the historical accuracy of his portrait of medieval society, but it is hardly possible that a medieval French baron could control the world, even potentially, by means of his private accumulated riches.4 But even more prosaically, it Crime and Punishment turns out that the Baron has no more actual power than the Duke of his principality,who orders him to emerge from his castle.The...