Yu Hua calls Dostoevsky the greatest writer of all — number one on his list.
My old idea of a great writer amounted to little more than vivid description and a fine-grained style. Then I finished Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
Great literature tells a story, yes — but along the way it lays out human nature in all its colors, and teaches us which values are false and which are true.
The plot of Crime and Punishment is simple: the protagonist kills two people. Set the epilogue aside and the whole thing spans less than a week — yet Dostoevsky spends hundreds of thousands of words on it. Yu Hua once said that what makes a great work great is not the story itself but the writer’s rendering of detail. Ask an ordinary person to describe what someone sees on stepping into another person’s home, and they’d be done in a few dozen words. Dostoevsky can write a thousand — and when it comes to a character’s appearance, and above all what is going on inside their head, he gives you even more. And no two of those descriptions ever repeat themselves. It floored me.
When I read Mo Yan, I thought his prose was already remarkably delicate. I had no idea Dostoevsky’s work sat on another level entirely. Truly the greatest of writers.
Raskolnikov, the protagonist, has a theory of his own invention — Napoleon was the inspiration — that divides humanity into the “ordinary” and the “extraordinary.”
The ordinary follow the rules; they are bound by morality. The extraordinary are exactly the opposite: they may do whatever they please in pursuit of their ideals, even if the price is a few human lives.
By killing two people, Raskolnikov seems to leap the abyss between these two kinds of men — but he never quite lands on the other side, because in the end he sinks into self-examination and doubt. Had he truly crossed that abyss, he would have become one of his own “extraordinary” men: no remorse, no self-reproach, and certainly no thought of submitting himself to punishment.
But Raskolnikov is, in the end, a man with a conscience. He blames himself — even if he never clearly recognizes it, something deeper in him does; otherwise he would not spiral into that near-feverish state, and he would not finally turn himself in, seeking to atone for his crime through punishment.
That conscience shows, too, in the good deeds Dostoevsky reveals at the close of the book: Raskolnikov once helped a university student and his father, and saved lives from a fire.
Raskolnikov is human, and humans are strange creatures. Sometimes we act nobler than anyone; sometimes we sink lower than beasts. That is the complexity of human nature at work. We ought to respect that richness — respecting it helps us make sense of all the strange things life puts in front of us.
He betrays me, he hurts me, he curses me — I can understand it all, because this is what a person is: not one shade of human nature is missing in him. I am human too, and some day I will fall as well, down into the abyss.
This is why we need the law. Society needs it to restrain what people do, to keep the world somewhere near harmony. The law is a set of chains — none of them unbearably heavy — laid on every one of us. Yet the law is not cold; it carries warmth too. That is why Raskolnikov’s record of good deeds, and the confession he made of his own accord, could win him a lighter sentence.
Making mistakes is not the frightening part — to be human is to err. What matters is knowing how to repent. Animals err just as we do, but only humans can blame themselves; only humans can repent.
Repentance can save someone stranded at the cliff’s edge. And love between people — at the book’s end, the love between Sonya and Raskolnikov rescues two souls both on the verge of collapse — can cleanse even a heart already soiled. But that must come after repentance.
Live boldly! Repent boldly! Love boldly!
And here is my favorite passage:
If I had the chance to live — even on a high cliff, on a ledge so narrow there was room only for my two feet, with the abyss all around me, the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting storm — if all I could do was stand on that scrap of ground, motionless, for a lifetime, a thousand years, all eternity… I would still rather live like that than die at once! Only to live, to live, to live! To live, no matter how — only to live!
