Raskolnikov Produces a Corpse but no Real Motive

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Dostoyevsky wrote in a letter on the 16th of August 1839 that 'Man is a mystery. I am devoting myself to this mystery because I want to be a man.' (qtd. in J. Jones 207) Nowhere is this sense of mystery as great as in his most acclaimed novel Crime and Punishment. To say that Raskolnikov produces no real motive would be an almost violently reductive reading of the text, though less of a gross vulgarisation than to suggest that the text allows the reader to assign no real motive to Raskolnikov. The key is perhaps in the definition of reality. Raskolnikov's motivation is multiple and perhaps in the end indefinable but no less real for that. Indeed from the narrative voice to the description of time and place to the comments of Dostoyevsky in other writings comes the suggestion that Raskolnikov's motivation is all the more real for its mysteriousness.

(i) Criticism

The question of motivation is one that has been much discussed by critics of the novel, and it has become a critical commonplace to assert that the text posits two distinct motives. These two motives are termed differently in the various studies but are substantially the same. The first motive is that of helping his mother and sister and improving his career prospects. The second motive that is picked out is the will to power or the Napoleonic idea. Though early commentators such as N.N. Strakhov and Vladimir S. Solovyov were content to read the novel as having a single, unified fabula at its core, whether it be that of a talented youth spoiled by nihilistic ideas or of the egoist for whom his own superiority is a license beyond law, for critics of the twentieth century the idea of ambivalence is central to not only the question of motive but also to the understanding of the novel itself (qtd. in McDuff 11-12). Richard Peace, for example, sees the dualism of Raskolnikov's motivation reflected throughout the novel. He takes as his starting point the protagonist's name, "raskol" in Russian meaning "schism", finds further evidence in the single murder that becomes a double murder, in Raskolnikov's division of humanity into the ordinary and the extraordinary and in the oscillation of the novel between aggressive and submissive figures such as Alyona and Lizaveta, Sonya and Svidrigailov. For Peace, not only is a single, definable motive not to be found in Dostoyevsky's text but to produce one would be working against the very grain of the novel which seeks to contradict the monism of the radical younger generation that were so vocal in Russia during the period in which Dostoyevsky was writing, a monism, which for Peace, Raskolnikov begins with but is forced to renounce in the wake of his crime (34-48). There is much to be said for this view for not only does it recognize the lack of single, straightforward motivation on Raskolnikov's part but it acknowledges that rather than this being a failure of Dostoyevsky's to reach a satisfactory conclusion, it is a sign of his going further. As shall be seen however, this too is somewhat reductive and Mikhail Bakhtin's reading of the novel as polyphonic leads us to what would seem to be a more comprehensive understanding of Raskolnikov's motivation, which as has been said is multiple rather than dual.

(ii) The Money Motive

In the first place there is the motive of obtaining money for both him and his family as mentioned above. This was clearly a factor in driving Raskolnikov to commit the crime. Raskolnikov's reaction to Pulkheria Aleksandrovna's letter telling of her daughter's sacrificial marriage shows this.

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