Most important are the further details of this experience:
I began to look about intently and suddenly I noticed some strange people. They were all strange, extraordinary figures, completely prosaic, not Don Carloses or Posas to be sure, rather down-to-earth titular councilors and yet at the same time, as it were, sort of fantastic titular councilors. Someone was grimacing in front of me, having hidden himself behind all this fantastic crowd, and he was fidgeting some thread, some springs through, and these little dolls moved, and he laughed and laughed away.
The ambiguous laughter of this demiurge or demon can be heard in all of Dostoevsky's later works. Here, in germ, was the reality that challenged his powers of imitation, an indefinite “something new,” a completely new and unfamiliar world, prosaic and at the same time fantastic, which could have no image until he gave it one, but was more realthan the vanishing spectacle he contemplated on the Neva. That he recorded this moment of vision when he did suggests that in some way he was reliving it.
Behind the ideas of radicals like Chernyshevsky, Dostoevsky could hear the demiurge's laughter (not that he underestimated the serious consequences of these ideas; he foresaw them only too clearly). His response was the world as viewed by the man from underground, whose ruminations are circumscribed by the same ideas, but who has recognized that his life cannot be accounted for by them, that in fact it cannot be accounted for by any laws or with any logical consistency. Nor can it be narrated as a meaningful sequence of events, in harmonious and dignified prose. It is all discontinuous, full of the sudden and the unexpected, disharmonious and undignified, terrible and at the same time comical. From this basis he generalizes his attack on the world view of enlightened Europe, particularly as adopted by the Russian intelligentsia.
No one before Dostoevsky had ever written such a book. That it failed in its immediate purpose, as a reply to the radical ideology of the day, is not surprising: its dialectic was much too complex for the purpose, and artistically it was too strange, even offensive, for the common reader. Indeed, to make such admissions about oneself as the underground man does, and to lash out with such sarcastic wit at the most self-evident “truths” of society and human reason, is more a transgression than an argument, as the nameless hero is aware. Notes from Undergroundgives voice to the double-mindedness, at once guilty and defiant, of the conscious transgressor. But the man from underground transgresses only inwardly, philosophically, for the sake of a truth that he clings to although he cannot name it, knowing that the limits he is violating are false in any case, even if he can never find the “something different” that is better than his underground.
In Crime and Punishment,published two years later, the hero is an actual transgressor—the “theoretician-murderer” Raskolnikov. And the relations between the viewer, the spectacle of the world, and this “something new” or “something different” (betrayed by the demiurge's laughter), essentially the same in Notes from Undergroundand in the “vision on the Neva,” appear once again. Indeed, there is a passage in part two of Crime and Punishmentthat almost exactly parallels the moment Dostoevsky had described in Petersburg Visions.The day after he commits the murder, Raskolnikov is crossing a bridge over the Neva and stops to gaze at the city:
He stood and looked long and intently into the distance; this place was especially familiar to him. While he was attending the university, he often used to stop, mostly on his way home, at precisely this spot (he had done it perhaps a hundred times), and gaze intently at the indeed splendid panorama, and to be surprised almost every time by a certain unclear and unresolved impression. An inexplicable chill always breathed on him from this splendid panorama; for him the magnificent picture was filled with a mute and deaf spirit...He marveled each time at this gloomy and mysterious impression, and, mistrusting himself, put off the unriddling of it to some future time. Now suddenly he abruptly recalled these former questions and perplexities, and it seemed no accident to him that he should recall them now.
The loud laughter has here become a chill breath, the demiurge a “mute and deaf spirit”—the riddle remains, but the tonality has darkened considerably. Raskolnikov received this impression many times; it does not come as the result of his crime; on the contrary, he recalls it now as if his act were somehow the first step in its unriddling. Crime and Punishmentis a highly unusual mystery noveclass="underline" the most mystified character in it is the murderer himself.
We know a good deal about the genesis of the novel from Dostoevsky's letters and notebooks. When he went abroad in July 1865, he had plans in mind for two separate works—one, a long novel to be called The Drunkards,dealing with “the current problem of drunkenness,” as he wrote when proposing it to the editor of Fatherland Notes(who turned it down); the other, “the psychological account of a crime,” an idea that had first come to him in prison fifteen years earlier. He hoped to finish The Drunkardsquickly, but instead got carried away by the other story. In September 1865 he was able to send a detailed outline of it to Mikhail Katkov, editor of the Russian Herald.Originally he conceived of it as a short work, written in the first person—the confession of the criminal himself. The murderer, as he wrote to Katkov, would be “an intellectually developed young man who even has good inclinations” and who kills “under the influence of some of those strange, 'incomplete' ideas which go floating about in the air . . .” In other words, the tale was to be a further exploration of the consequences of Russian radical ideology, particularly the ideology of the so-called Nihilists who emerged in the mid-1860s. In form it would have been similar to Notes from Underground.This was the version that Dostoevsky eventually burned.
In its new form, the novel retained the general features of the hero as he had outlined them for Katkov, but the material was greatly expanded, and it was no longer cast as a confession. By chance, close to the beginning of Crime and Punishment,Raskolnikov makes the acquaintance of a certain Semyon Zakharovich Marmeladov. The story of this unemployed official, his consumptive wife Katerina Iva-novna, and their family came to the novel from the abandoned pages of The Drunkards;the organic link between the two initially unrelated works would be Marmeladov's daughter Sonya. Just after this meeting, Raskolnikov receives a long letter from his mother, introducing yet another story involving his sister, Dunya, the man of affairs Luzhin, and the sinister but charming Svidrigailov. There were now three plots instead of one; and we begin to see something of Dostoevsky's method of composition in this juxtaposition—within an extremely foreshortened narrative time—of large scale, self-dramatizing speakers.Part one ends with the murder itself but is already rich in possibilities for future encounters, exchanges, conflicts.
Important questions remained unresolved in Dostoevsky's mind when the first part of the novel appeared in the January 1866 issue of the Russian Herald.His notebook for February shows him still working out Sonya's role and, more significantly, Raskolnikov's real motive for his crime. In some sketches, he was to be a much more articulate spokesman for the Nihilists, who combined “rational egoism” with a view of themselves as benefactors of mankind. This idea was supplanted by the Napoleonic figure of the “strong individual” who acts for the sake of his own power. In one version, Raskolnikov was to end with a vision of Christ and a heroic deed of self-sacrifice and reconciliation; in the other, his rebellion would become truly demonic, and he would finally shoot himself. Dostoevsky eventually decided against both outcomes, and Raskolnikov's motives were left unresolved, to the great advantage of the novel. And to Sonya, whom he had thought of making a more articulate opponent of Raskolnikov's idea, who would confront him sharply and even write him letters “possessing high artistic qualities,” he finally gave only the almost mute witness of example. Instead of the vision of Christ, there is her reading of the Gospel account of the raising of Lazarus in part four. The rational egoism goes mostly to the miserly Luzhin, the bullet to Svidrigailov.