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Chapter Five - India Rubber, the Living Soul, and the Process of Moral Change
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114 Chapter Five India Rubber, the Living Soul, and the Process of Moral Change AT T H E E N D of Crime and Punishment, the embittered Raskolnikov feels—and resents—a mounting pressure to confess. Speaking with Dunia hours before turning himself in, he argues angrily the absurdity of his surrender. The punishment that is in store for him is nothing but meaningless suffering. “This, they say, is an ordeal that is necessary for me!” (Eto, govoriat, dlia moego ispytaniia nuzhno!), he says to Dunia. “But what purpose is served by all these senseless ordeals? What are they for? Would I know any better then, when I am crushed by suffering, idiocy, in senile impotence after twenty years of hard labor, than I do now? What is the point of living then?” (CP, 440; translation modified) (K chemu oni, luchshe li ia budu soznavat’ togda, razdavlennyi mukami, idiotstvom, v starcheskom bessilii posle dvadtsatiletnei katorgi, chem teper’ soznaiu, i k chemu mne togda i zhit’?) (Pss, 6:401). Raskolnikov’s rancorous questions seem to link (although his wording seems purposely vague) the meaning of punishment to amplifying one’s understanding of punishment’s very meaning: after twenty years of hard labor he may come to see why his punishment was necessary. That is what might give punishment, to recall Gorianchikov’s term, “a rational purpose.” Raskolnikov does not expect this to happen, however, and sees no point in subjecting himself to senseless suffering. He believes that instead of heightening his understanding, twenty years of hard labor will lead to dotage and idiocy. After taking leave of Dunia, Raskolnikov elaborates on his thought, now in an interior monologue. He is still spiteful and resentful, and he still sees his future punishment as nothing but a means of crushing him physically and psychologically, of stamping out his spirit, of pounding him into docility and submission. But a new note ever so slightly enters his embittered reflections: He began to consider earnestly “by what process [kakim zhe eto protsessom] it might come about that he would finally humble himself before all of them, India Rubber, the Living Soul, and the Process of Moral Change 115 without reservations, out of conviction! [bez rassuzhdenii smiritsia, ubezhdeniem smiritsia] And yet why not? Of course, it must be so. Would not twenty years of unrelieved oppression crush him in the end? Water wears away a stone.” (CP, 440–41; translation modified) A new idea whose distant echoes we hear in this passage, and which he has not admitted to Dunia, is that the suffering and the servitude might lead to a change in understanding after all. However fatal for his present sense of self, his future “submission,” which he believes would almost inevitably be worked out in a slow course of years, will be, at least to some extent, a matter of “conviction.” For Raskolnikov the main purpose of punishment, or at least of punishing him, is to mortify his spirit, to vanquish his pride, to make him “submit to all of them.” One could say perhaps that Raskolnikov “submits” when he chooses to confess his crime, which is long before his formal punishment begins. But the submission he has in mind is not of a mechanical kind, nor is it a matter of (relative) convenience, as it is at the time of his confession. (What he wants then is merely to alleviate the agony of self-doubt, of tormenting uncertainty, and of self-punishment.) The submission that will be worked out under the sustained and protracted pressure of punishment will be a matter of conviction (ubezhdenie). In this sense, Raskolnikov imagines his future submission as the destruction of his personality, in which he himself will become complicit. This is not, of course, how Dostoevsky wants us to see it. Raskolnikov’s “conversion” at the end of the epilogue is presented as a positive, profoundly productive change, and his “submission” as the acceptance of Sonia’s liferestoring beliefs. Besides the substance of the transformation, Dostoevsky and his character also seem to disagree on how moral change can be worked out within a person’s mind and heart. As we will see below, Raskolnikov’s rather sudden “conversion” has little in common with the slow process of change that he himself morosely foretells in his future. It is the process of moral change, as Dostoevsky depicts in his writings, particularly of moral change taking place in the context of punishment, that will be our focus in this chapter...