Crime of Men and Punishment of All

Fyodor Dostoyevsky — slate.com

For a single hour I had the rather peculiar feeling of being relieved to have Covid. Let me clarify that statement, while my symptoms were hardly terrible and while I can’t imagine what some have gone through fighting the disease, the overall experience was admittedly far from a pleasant one. But on this one particular evening my infection spared me a fate far more insidious that the mild discomfort of my symptoms: watching lucidly the pilot of the new series “The Flight Attendant”. My girlfriend, whose own infection was as yet unroused from its initial state of gestative slumber, was unfortunate enough to learn in full gory detail that the series is nothing more than a masochistic exercise in cerebral desecration. Fortunately for my tired, fevered brain, its flittering in and out of full consciousness spared it the majority of the onslaught. Unfortunately, a particular scene managed to penetrate during a moment of lucidity and lodge itself, like a thorn in a sensitive piece of flesh.

The scene in question involves Kaley Cuoco’s character, an alcoholic flight attendant living a life of hedonistic nihilism, questioning the book choice of a charming and sophisticated, yet instantly-enamored-by-pretty-flight-attendants passenger. He is reading Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and is rather conspicuously flashing the book to the entire plane — not at all trying to seem intellectual. She questions the choice and asks him with a triumphant air how the book turns out for the female characters, to which he sheepishly mumbles some dying admissions of defeat. Undoubtedly the scene, very much in character with the trashily explicit nature of the pilot, was meant to simultaneously convey the shakiness of the gentleman’s sophistication and the fact that the airhostess, far from just another boozy refugee from responsibility, was actually composed of her own brand of sophistication and individualistic integrity.

What bothered me about the scene was not its vapid attempt at using horribly contrived circumstances to do spurious character development on the fly — I get that the whole pilot culture of TV must make actual three dimensional character development difficult while also fitting in a murder and subsequent attempts at cover-up — but rather the fact that the statement so flew in the face of my experience of reading the book. Having more recently finished reading “The Brother’s Karamazov”, I must admit that Dostoyevsky clearly held a few less-than-progressive ideas about women — probably not entirely peculiar for men of his era, but still enough to inspire some caution when approaching any feminine questions he might raise. The mistreatment of women is, however, a common theme in his work and something with which he was clearly concerned.

I feel that it is in Crime and Punishment, in particular, where Dostoyevsky gives perhaps his most scathing criticism of the treatment of women by men, and in a way that is generalizable and broad enough to be considered by all men rather than just the lowest of the low. In fact, the main message that I personally took from the book, outside of the author’s trademark religious considerations and the more general titular themes, was a study of all of the ways in which men fail the women that they purport to love. This may seem to justify the flight attendant’s impromptu literary criticism, but just as the best lies are grounded in truth so too the deepest ignorance is build on a foundation of fact — more succinctly, her statement was not even wrong.

To make my point I will look at three different relationships that appear through the novel, and the way in which they clearly show Dostoyevsky’s opinions on the failures of men in his era. I think it could be argued that while the position of women has certainly improved since a time where the beating of a disobedient wife was socially acceptable (sad to say it still is in some cultures), the poignancy of his commentary remains relevant in modern times. He presents these three relationships as possible archetypes, albeit probably not an exhaustive list, of the ways in which men can allow their own failings to weigh down the women in their lives. If this seems irrelevant to the story of a murder and its subsequent spiritual suffering, then one needs to remind oneself that the original title of the novel was meant to be “The Drunkards”. It is as much a criticism of the moral failings of the the author’s contemporaries in St. Petersburg as anything else, and it is against this backdrop that one can see his statements on the failures of men being painted.

Take as a first example, as it is in many ways the most explicit, the case of Marmeladov and his long suffering wife Katerina. She is a woman of somewhat spurious claims to nobility, whose character is defined by a fierce dedication to her and her family’s respectability. This makes all the more tragic her marriage to a man who is a black hole that cannot by the very laws of physics ever emit any of the light of self-esteem. He is a drunkard who hates himself for his failures as a husband and father, for the suffering he imposes on others, for his spiritual weakness, but who continues on the same course of drink and destruction nonetheless. Katarina’s life is made to be a living hell because of her insufferable husband, the pressures of raising young children while suffering from consumption and her ambivalent feelings towards her prostitute step daughter. The daughter, Sonia (or Sofya, who knows with Russian names?) is yet another example of how Marmeladov has destroyed the life of a woman, having turned her to prostitution to support the family which he has so profoundly failed. I will, however, leave discussions about her to a later point relating to her relationship with Raskolnikov.

As with most of the other points in the novel, Marmeladov’s character is typically seen as a vessel through the author espouses the virtues of a Christian life, or perhaps more succinctly the dangers of a sinful one. But I would suggest that it can just as easily be seen as a statement on the parasitic relationships that can occur between men and women. In fact, I don’t think that it is entirely coincidental that Dostoyevsky juxtaposes these two concepts, as I will elaborate on later. It is made clear that while Katarina and Sonia bear the main brunt of his weakness, Marmeladov is hardly enjoying the fruits of a slack drunken lifestyle. He constantly battles his feelings of self-loathing and failure, and is ultimately trampled to death by horses when drunkenly stumbling into a road. What makes the nature of his fate even more profoundly tragic is the rather disinterested and dismissive attitude that most of his peers take to the death of yet another drunkard.

I think that the architype in this instance is quite clear: the man who has given in under the pressures of life and lives as nothing more than a leech on those who love him — most often wives, mothers and yes, even sometimes daughters. Could we even dream of suggesting that this archetype is outdated in modern times in the glaring light of alcohol and drug addictions, dead-beat dads, generations of arrested adolescence — hell, even a culture in which many husbands retreat every day from their obligations to the escapism of computer games? And are the costs of this any less insidious in an age where women in these situations still bear a disproportionate share of the load, and where men are, if anything, even more desperately in need of a sense of esteem and worth?

The second example is that of Svidrigailov and his wife Marfa. If Marmeladov is the example of passive evil, the evil of weakness and failure, then Svidrigailov is the novel’s embodiment of active evil, of the malignantly willful harming of others. He starts off as something of a lowlife who is wed to the well off Marfa and thereby becomes financially dependent on her. His dependence means that he tends to defer to her in most things, even though his malignance simmers below the surface in the form of infidelity, mistreatment of their serfs and ultimately in his failed attempted seduction of Dounia, another example of a woman who is corrupted by him, all while rumors of his previous hand in the death of a young woman hang over him. Marfa blames Dounia for her husbands infidelity and seeks to use shame as punishment, however when she realizes that Dounia actually acted nobly and that her husband was at fault, she immediately repents and tries to make amends. She later dies under strange circumstances which appear to have something to do with a beating received from her husband, although regardless of the full cause it is clear that he is the primary cause of her death.

So, one woman’s life has been ended and another’s damaged by the cruel whims of Svidrigailov. Incidentally, Dounia agrees to marry another man, partly in an escape and partly for the betterment of her brother, Raskolnikov, until chasing him away when it becomes clear that he only wants her as a sort of property. This could be treated as a forth architype of degenerate relationships; the man who believes that a woman is his property and expects her gratitude but is doomed to never receive her gratitude nor her love — though I won’t go further into that for the sake of some semblance of brevity. Initially it seems that Svidrigailov has escaped sanction for his misdeeds as he goes on living his life seemingly untouched by the evil that he has done, but it is when Douna declines to shoot him when he openly threatens to rape her that he realizes what he truly is, a monster that she could never love because he is pitiful and dim in the light of her strength. He commits suicide, haunted by the ghosts of the women that he has harmed.

Here again the trope is obvious, the sadistic man, and here again it certainly couldn’t be said to be outdated in a world full of rape, domestic abuse and misogyny. But Dostoyevsky points out that this course of action too is ultimately something that a man will come to regret. As much as he can hide in the shadows of his evil, eventually he will have to emerge and face the weight of what he is — like Dorian Gray stabbing the portrait of himself. I’ll admit that the certainty of this punishment is something that I’m not so clear on. Do the wicked always get their dues? If one doesn’t rely on a God for this, then it is unclear what mechanisms would make it so. It certainly seems that some of the wicked seem to enjoy their lives. But I will submit to Dostoyevsky that pulling behind one a wake of destruction is something that is bound to eventually catch up with one, or at the very least slow one down, if not by the weight of one’s own conscience then at least by the force of societal retribution.

The final relationship that I will present, and the only one thus mentioned that shows some faint glimmers of hope, however late and costly said glimmers may be, is that of the main character Raskolnikov and the aforementioned Sonia. Like in most other aspects of the novel, Raskolnikov finds himself in a sort of middle ground — between a rock and a hard place — between the two aforementioned architypes. It may seem strange to label the murderer of two women as a middle ground, but my reasoning here is that I read the murder as a comment by Dostoyevsky on the nefarious convictions that can be born of atheistic thought. So for the sake of this argument, please allow me the rather precarious position of claiming that it was the thought that was responsible for the murder, not the nature of the man.

Disregarding the murder, one is left with a man who has vicious delusions of grandeur tempered by moments of empathy and conscience, who is tempted by the allure of lazy, apathetic dependence but cannot settle in it due to the constant pangs of pride. One can see how his character could go to either the extremes of Marmeladov or Svidrigailov, and the happenings of the novel can in a way be seen as something of a fork in the road. In some way he is his own architype but in another way I think he is Dostoyevsky’s diagnosis of what leads to the two extremes: nihilism. His unwillingness to commit to any belief leaves him floundering around with no moral compass, no ambition and no convictions. He tries creating an artificial world view, but devoid of the guiding hand of morality — and in Dostoyevsky’s opinion religion — his world view is a bastardized mess which he ultimately cannot sustain and which brings untold pain to himself and to others.

The reason why I want to look past the murder is that in his relationship with Sonia he is not like Svidrigailov — while he certainly doesn’t treat her lovingly, he isn’t actively malicious towards her. He can’t be said to have failed in the same way that Marmeladov has either, and this is how he forms his own architype. He fails Sonia not through his direct actions towards her, nor due to his inaction, but rather through the weight that she must bear as a consequence of his external actions. She travels with him to Siberia and vows to wait for him for the duration of his imprisonment, all the while achingly trying to reform him. Is this worth it for her, waiting next to a prison for a snotty self-involved nihilist, only to have him finally see the light and then still have to wait tens of years for him to be released in who knows what state? Doesn’t seem like it. Yet it is in this relationship, and in the much criticized epilogue to the novel, where the briefest glimpse of his retribution is given as he throws himself at her feet and submits to God, that Dostoyevsky’s primary message is made abundantly clear. Yes, as is so often pointed out, the message here is that deliverance is achieved through submission to God, but could one not as easily see it as a submission and sacrifice to a woman? He throws himself at her feet after all, and could it not be that she has finally given him a purpose, a grounding, and thereby broken the grip of his nihilism?

In many ways I think this is the most powerful message of the three relationships. It is clear enough that being an asshole is wrong, and probably clear enough that being a slob isn’t great either, but so often we forget that anything we do will necessarily have an effect on those that we love. This is a common theme running through many of Dostoyevsky’s novels, that all action has consequence for others, and that we are therefore constantly responsible to others for our actions. This is most obvious in modern society in the form of the burden that woman carry as a result of men’s incarceration, but I think it is so much more prevalent in a more benign form. Certainly nihilism is on the rise amongst all sexes, cultures and creeds, but it seems a particular problem with men who are all too willing to throw off the shackles of moral responsibility and make poor decisions to the detriment of all. Aggression, impulsiveness, self-importance, inconsiderateness — the list of small cuts that men can inflict on the women they love is near endless. This is where the message is at its most powerful, and where the suggestion of submission is most necessary.

Even though I have presented these are three separate couplings, one can see that the idea of women suffering under men in the novel is far more complex than that. Sonia suffers under her father and then for her lover. Dunia suffers under her employer’s sexual advances, then under her prospective husband and yet all the while Raskolnikov realizes that she is actually suffering for him, selling herself for his gain in much the same way that Sonia did for her family. The novel is filled with women suffering for the good of men, and yet both suffer because of the men’s incapability of accepting and reciprocating the sacrifice.

Is it really so strange to think that Dostoyevsky would believe this given the facts of his own life? A shattered man, raised by an abusive father and subjected to a terrifying imprisonment and near death sentence, he struggled financially under the weight of an inveterate gambling addiction and eventually had to flee the country that he so loved because of his overwhelming debts. During all of this, he held within him the brilliant literary genius that we have come to know, and at times it shone through, but it wasn’t until he met his wife that his greatness began to take its true shape. It wasn’t quick or painless, and one can imagine that his wife suffered no shortage of pains in dragging him onto a righteous path with many stumbles along the way, but eventually he was able to return to Russia and live a respectable and celebrated life. Is it in any way possible that he could have ascribed his deliverance only to religion, when his wife played such an obviously crucial role in it and when she had sacrificed so much?

I am fully aware of the potential criticism of this point, that it perpetuates the notion that the purpose of women is to suffer for the good of men — the trope of women wanting to fix the bird with the broken wing is something that has become rather synonymous with Dostoyevsky’s writing after all, although it is generally seen as a warning. But to criticize it would be to mistake it as being prescriptive. At no point does the novel suggest that this is the way women should act, rather it is diagnostic of a situation that he saw arising all to often in his era. And this is not a futile diagnosis either, as Dostoyevsky does offer a prospective prescription to these societal ills in the form of the one relationship that is reflected positively in the novel — that of Dunia and Razumikhin.

Razumikhin is a friend of Raskolnikov who has a similar air of aimlessness to him but shows strong convictions which guard him from nihilism. In attempting to help his friend he falls for Dounia, and immediately sets to being of service in any way that he can to her and her mother. This is one of the few instances in the novel where a man treats a women well and I don’t see it as any coincidence that Razumikhin is really the only character that seems to be anywhere near the same area code as happiness by the end of the novel. Not incidentally another instance of a man acting well towards a woman is Raskolnikov’s treatment of Katarina after Marmeladov’s death, and this is really the only time in the novel that he is allowed any short respite from suffering. I think Dostoyevsky’s ideas here of what men should be doing in their relationships is quite clear.

I also see this relationship as a subtle note from the author to women. Dounia is constantly shown as a strong, willful and fiercely moral character, yet she suffers due to her goodwill towards men. With Razumikhin however she is perhaps a little stand-offish initially, although very polite, until the point that he has proven his worth, and then reaps the rewards of a man who is willing to commit himself to her happiness. Surely the message here is exactly that women should stop trying to fix the broken wings that they find, that they should rather wait for men to show themselves to be worthy, to be willing to commit fully, before giving anything of themselves. In this relationship is the full Dostoyevsky guide to dating, pessimistic and dark, yet fiercely moral — one wouldn’t expect anything else from the man.

So yes, flight attendant, the novel doesn’t turn out well for its female characters. I’d dare say that by the very nature of being a Dostoyevsky novel it was pretty much bound from the outset not to turn out all that well for anyone really. But the triumphant air with which this fact is articulated suggests that this is a criticism of the novel, that it is a failure of Dostoyevsky towards women in general. Yet if expressing the suffering of women is inherently a prejudice towards women then one would have to condemn most of feminist thought of being misogynistic, since surely a core part of feminism is a struggle against the subjugation that women have experienced at the hands of men, and one needs some serious acts of mental contortionism to make that concept work.

I certainly wouldn’t go so far as to call Dostoyevsky a feminist, and there is always the question of the potential influence of the female penned translation that I have read, but the point is that the novel reveals the suffering of women not as a inextricable part of nature but rather as an aberration to be corrected in the pursuit of a better world — and the target of this correction seems quite clearly to be men. Admittedly the short lifespan left to the charming airline passenger at this point of the story made any influence of what he was reading relatively unimportant, but seeing as how the flight attendant didn’t know this at the time, she should have been if anything happy with his literary choice if she saw him as romantic potential — of course I’m assuming here that romance extends beyond drunken copulation, which may not apply in this instance, so actually: react as you will flight attendant.

The message to be gleaned is not that men should by nature be subservient to women, or that women hold a higher absolute moral position than men, but rather that love, like religion, is a practice of surrender. Dostoyevsky wasn’t saying that men alone should sacrifice and surrender, but rather that we should all sacrifice and surrender to the ones that we love — for our good and for their own. Rather than build our relationships on our expectations of our partners, we should build them on a foundation of sacrifice for those we love. When both parties focus on what they are giving, rather than what they expect from the other, then both experience the fullest benefits. That the novel seems to aim this message primarily at men is a reflection of the asymmetry of relationships as they stood in his time. He saw that women so often already sacrificed for the ones that they loved, and he was calling for men of his time to balance the scales. Have we yet?

It is in this message of sacrifice and surrender that one can see the reason for his juxtaposition of relationships with religion, of the feminine and the divine. The message is that God and women have already made their sacrifices, and that it is up to humanity and men to meet the occasion so that all may experience heaven and happiness respectively. I’d go so far as to suggest that this principle underlies all of Dostoyevsky’s philosophy; that love and sacrifice of all to all is the way that Russia (and maybe the world, although he seemed less interested in the rest of it) would be saved. Personally I find this idea too utopian to be realistic, perhaps because I don’t have the religious convictions that he held, but as it relates to close relationships I think it a valuable message to a society that still desperately needs it.

Look, I probably have to admit at this point that my criticism of The Flight Attendant may be unfair given that I only caught moments of the pilot in what was probably not my finest intellectual state. Perhaps the comment on Crime and Punishment was actually a subtle hint at the underlying theme of the series, that women have given up the wait for men to change, that they have thrown off the chains of submission and are going to meet men on men’s terms. Perhaps it is not merely coincidence that Cuoco’s character drinks and screws around like any number of degenerate males in any of Dostoyevsky’s novels. Maybe the very murder of the charming gentlemen is a metaphor of women’s release from the trappings of men. I mean, I doubt it, but I suppose anything’s possible. It would be a shame though, as one can only hope that we all aspire to our highest ideals rather than sinking to a common low. So I hope that this series is not a portent of the end, not the rotting corpse of Dostoyevsky’s hopes for us — although in all honesty when something smells funky and you hear the flies buzzing, nine times out of ten it turns out to be nothing more threatening than just another turd.