The New Russian Dostoevsky: Readings for the Twenty-First Century

Commentary on Crime and Punishment: Space, Time, Material Details, Echoes

Commentary on Crime and Punishment: St. Petersburg References (Space, Time, Material Details, Echoes)* Boris Tikhomirov "Peterburgskii kommentarii k romanu Prestuplenie i nakazanie (Prostranstvo, vremia, reaIii, reministsenstsii)," in Dostoevskii: Dopoineniia k kom mentariiu, ed . T. Kasatkina (Moscow: Nauka, 2005), 49-127. [Lil p. 5. "At the beginning of July... " On the evening of that same day Marm eladov tells Raskolnikov, "Six days ago I brought home my entire first sal· ary" (19). Since payday for government employees was established by law as the first day of the m onth for the entire Russian empire, the precise date for the beginning of the novel's events can be identified as 7 July. The day of the murder, then, is 9 July. The crime takes place on the ninth day of the month in the first edition of the novel as well, the "Wiesbaden" edition, but in June, not July . In the su rviving fragment of the second edition, the murder is also dated " the ninth," but w ithout an indication of the m onth. [Lil p. 5. "During an extremely hot spell.. ." In Part III, Razumikhin lists the rea· sons for Raskolnikov's fainting spell in the police office: " ...foul-smelling >t What follows are some excerpts from Tikhomirov's extensive and authoritative new commentary on Crime mid Punishment. These take the form of line-by-line annotations of significant details in the text of the novel, and broader meditations on Dostoevsky's approach to using details of the real environment in his art. Rather than limit the reader to a particular English translation, I have identified, for each reference, the part and chapter of the novel in brackets [e.g., I.iJ, with page numbers referring to the original Russian text in the Academy edition: Po/noe sobranie sochincnii v tridtsnti tomakh, vol. 6 (Leningrad: Nauka, 1973), unless otherwise noted. Place names in this chapter follow a standard Library of Congress transliteration. Unless otherwise noted, Tikhomirov's emphasis throughout. Tikhomirov published an even more extensive set of commentaries to Crime and Punishment, which includes these, in 2005: "LAZAR', GRIADI VON!": Roman F. M. Dostoevskogo "Prestupienie i nakazallie" v SDvreme11lwm prochtenii. Kniga-kommentarii (St. Petersburg: Serebrianyi vek, 2005). The article as a whole, and Tikhomirov's book, are indispensable sources for any serious reader of the novel. -Ed. Carol Apollonio, ed., The New Russian Dostoevsky: Readings for the Twenty-First Century, Bloomington, IN: Siavica Publishers, 2010, 95- 122. 96 BO RIS TIKHOMIROV paint, thirty degrees on the Rumer scale, stuffiness..." (207). Thirty degrees on the Rumer scale corresponds to 37.5 degrees Celsius. When he wrote to M. N . Katkov in the middle of September 1865 (when he had just begun writing) to offer his future novel to The Russian Herald, Dostoevsky said that the plot was "contemporary, taking place in the current year" (28, bk. 2: 136). 1n further commentaries I shall show some instances in which the writer departed from "physiological" precision in his descriptions of Petersburg realiia, but in general we can agree with scholars who have noted that the "physiognomy" of that particular year is so vividly captured in Crime and Punishment that the novel could justifiably have been entitled The Year 18651 This is particularly true of weather-related details. We should note, though, tllat although the novel's first readers in 1866 could still vividly recall tile terrible heat of tile preceding summer, such temperatures (37.5 Celsius) are an obvious exaggeration for artistic purposes. According to the reports of the chief meterological laboratory, which were regularly published in the newspapers, the maximum temperature registered in SI. Petersburg during the time of the novel's action was observed on 9 July and came to 24.8 on the Rumer Scale (in the shade), which is equal to 31 degrees Celsius2 It is interesting to note that according to the novel's internal chronology, the protagonist commits the crime on the very day on which the actual Petersburg temperature hit the highest point of tile entire summer of 1865. [I.i] p. 5. "came out of his room [. ..Jin S- Lane [. ..Jset off toward K- Bridge." The autllor's wife explains these cryptonyms in the commentaries she made on the margins of the printer's proofs of the novel for the seventh edition of Dostoevsky's Complete Collected Works3 S- is Stoliarnyi Lane and K- is the Kokushkin Bridge.4 Stoliarnyi Lane leads from Bol'shaia Meshchanskaia Street (renamed Plekhanov Street in 1923) to the Kokushkin Bridge...