Mariam Sidani | Staff Writer

If one’s entire identity is centred around being a warped and corrupted being, changing seems like a betrayal to the self. Some distort the moral code to their liking: It’s acceptable to do wrong because they are at a higher plane of thought, extraordinary beings who see differently and, therefore, can act accordingly.

That is Raskolnikov’s ideology at the beginning of Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky. He murders his landlady, Alyona Ivanovna, because she’s a bitter old miser who is ruining the lives of others (including himself) and kills her sister along the way to enable his escape. He believes that the ends justify the means. And that cost him. He ruined his soul and whipped his mind with fear and guilt—fainting roughly twenty times a page, barely able to ingest weak soup with insipid bread, riddled with fever and haunting apparitions in broad daylight. 

He killed her, as we later discover, not for financial reasons or any other tangible reason at all (contrary to his claim of doing a charitable service), but to prove to himself that he is independent of the clutches of morality. To prove to himself that he is like—as Dostoyevsky describes through his internal monologue— “a Napoleon of sorts.”

Raskolnikov delves into this abstract reality and loses himself in a delusion made of pure sentiment. Dostoevsky doesn’t condone not thinking in an abstract way—abstract thinking brought us math, mechanics, and the microscope after all—but rather finds discordance in isolating abstract thinking from the practicality of the real world. 

His very self betrays him, he slips almost on purpose, even after succeeding at hiding his crimes, in order to be acknowledged. Yes, he’s done the deed and has gotten away with it, but he’s tormented by the people around him not knowing his true self. It’s a delicate desire to be perceived, for his very incentive of committing the deed was to prove that he possesses extraordinary qualities. But proving to himself turns out futile, and, therefore, has to bounce that semblance of power off of something. 

His agonies persist. That is until he meets Sonya, the daughter of Marmeladov— a jobless man that Raskolnikov had met at a bar who remains lost in alcohol until his imminent death. Sonya saved him, seemingly changing his heart, making him confess and pay the price with eight years in prison. Sonya was the catalyst, but if Raskolnikov didn’t want to change, he never would have (catalysts aren’t the entire reaction, after all). I see that Raskolnikov was going to confess either way. Sonya was a mere piece in his game. Raskolnikov saw himself brought to a ridiculed feeble notion, experiencing the crisp reality of his humanness at last. Such energy had to let itself out in a way or another, and Sonya happened to be the spark that held on. 

One shouldn’t wait— for a Sonya, for the ghost of Christmas future, for a dream, for a sigh in the wind speaking of renewal— to change. And one can’t depend on time to revive the green foliage after the winter for the tree might be long dead. If one thinks that time will initiate change, they mustn’t wait too long. 

Yes, some people have been beaten by life; tormented by pain, plague, and poverty. But some enjoy bathing in self-pity like a lizard in the blazing sun. They savor suffering, perhaps it’s all they know, perhaps it justifies their idleness. 

Seeing the self in its raw form, looking in the eye, and knowing that it is infinitely flawed, is terrifying. Or is it liberating, or ecstatic? The bottom line is to know it can yield. You can always begin again, as our dear Raskolnikov did.