Many of the great writers (and Doestevsky *is* great, if not always for his prose then certainly for his handling of human psychology) have the ability to feel, distill and describe the social climate in ways that make them feel prescient – hardly an original thought, but bear with me.
The moral arithmetic one sees at play in the novel Crime and Punishment seems so uniquely predictive, with its focus on economics in addition to morality, of the Russian Revolution – 51 years before.
Here’s what struck me from the text, where a university student discusses with an officer the same deed Raskolnikov eventually commits – the murder of the pawnbroker Alyona Ivanovna:
“A hundred thousand good deeds could be done and helped, on that old woman’s money which will be buried in a monastery! Hundreds, thousands perhaps, might be set on the right path; dozens of families saved from vice, from the Lock hospitals- and all with her money. Kill her, take the money and with the help of it devote oneself to the service of humanity and the good of all. What do you think, would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds? For one life thousands would be saved from corruption and decay. One death, and a hundred lives in exchange – it’s simple arithmetic! Besides, what value has the life of that sickly, stupid, ill-natured woman in the balance of existence!…”
“Of course she does not deserve to live,” remarked the officer, “but there it is, it’s nature.” “Oh, well, brother, but we have to correct and direct nature, and but for that, we should drown in an ocean of prejudice.”
Breaking an egg to make an omelette, and so on. I can imagine similar conversations being had about the “kulaks” 50 years later, before the Red machine really got rolling.
What do you think? Does anything stand out to you as interesting here?
by Profeseur-histoire