But not all Western Europeans of Dostoevsky’s time were without compassion for the poor. The best of the Europeans were against modern bourgeois capitalist culture, as was Dostoevsky, but Dostoevsky by the time he wrote of Raskolnikov had abandoned the solution Europeans had found for the problem, socialism. They had really no answer for the sufferings of “the people” driven to poverty and despair by the bourgeoisie except some new form of society that would force all to become brotherly by working together collectively for common economic benefits. Dostoevsky grew to despise modern Europeans and their modern culture based exclusively on rationality and selfishness. He never ceases throughout his works to invent odd characters like Raskolnikov who have evolved into strange aberrations from everything normal in life except that they usually do not abandon rationality but instead transform it to new, strange expressions. Many of the European socialists saw clearly as did Dostoevsky the decadence of late-nineteenth-century capitalism, but Dostoevsky had given up the socialistic views of his youth and grew to hate all liberal and socialist based thoughts designed to solve Russia’s suffering.

Dostoevsky had been a member of a radical group when he was twenty-seven that was inspired by liberal and socialist ideas. Some members of the group met secretly, obtained a printing press, and planned to publish their radical notions for changing society for the better. Dostoevsky was arrested along with others and condemned by the government to be shot by a firing squad. The young writer stood on a platform on a cold December morning waiting for the bullets that would end all his radical thoughts and along with them all his regular human thoughts of whatever kind forever. In those seconds before his death Dostoevsky, to borrow Lev Shestov’s expression, received “a new pair of eyes”. Never again after he received his new eyes, both during the few seconds that remained to him before his death and in the millions of seconds that remained to him because the Tsar unexpectedly stopped his execution – – never again did he look at anything only with regular, normal eyes. But what changed the sight that came forth from his eyes was what the nearness of death had done to his soul. He would never again look at anything except with the new vision that the eyes of the soul gave him. We can not know ourselves what he experienced in those deadly seconds when his death was certain and about to arrive instantly and certainly. We see it with our normal eyes but our eyes are guided by our minds and not by our soul so we do not see what Dostoevsky suddenly saw and continued to see. We think he gained his new eyes because of some kind of religious experience and since we think of religion as being something above and beyond our normal life, we think that Dostoevsky must have begun looking beyond his merely human life to something divine and spiritual in some hidden world above and beyond the human world. Dostoevsky was a Christian but his Christianity did not change his purely human actions and instead taught him he should not change, that his human nature itself, insulted, injured and suffering, was the only temple in which the true God could be met truly. All types of religious experience that were based on seeking some divine experience achieved through some type of mental discipline became alien to him. He grew to hate all doctrines that tried to separate a human being from his authentic self. Liberal ideas, socialist ideas, even some Christian ideas – – he threw them all away onto the same garbage heap where the experience of facing death had thrown away his old eyes. He despised all Western European thought because it was all based on elevated forms of reasoning that did little more than alienate a human being from his own being. European critics experienced his despite and contempt for them and lashed back at him. The German bourgeois novelist Thomas Mann said that Dostoevsky’s works were full of “religious prating”. A Russian critic despised him as someone always “looking for buried treasure”. In his greatest novel, The Possessed, he creates a character, based on the Russian writer Turgenev, and makes him the butt of his satire almost maliciously. Turgenev in turn despised Dostoevsky’s Christianity and gave an example of the cruel beating he observed him once giving his servant as illustrating the effect on Dostoevsky of his Christianity. Turgenev believed Dostoevsky was a writer who knew nothing of real freedom, which for Turgenev was based, as among all Western European intellectuals, on the elevating power of the mind. What interested Dostoevsky most was not religion itself, or doctrines of any kind including even Christian doctrine, but humans driven to the point where they might change radically and discover not some divine world off somewhere in the clouds but the new self within them, rooted in their very humanity, that they themselves had been themselves hiding from themselves. The mind made men and women selfish and cruel humans yet Dostoevsky sought God paradoxically only in humans and nowhere else.

Raskolnikov is a holy man in reverse, that is, for Dostoevsky he is not a holy man at all and until he has himself discovered that his human nature when ruled only by the mind is foul, he will never be anything, nothing but a human nothing living in the categories where he thinks. He goes out of his little room a short time after his crime thinking not of the murders but only of walking about and finding some place to get rid of the objects he possesses taken from the pawnbroker that might be evidence of his involvement. He buries them under a huge stone. Then he walks on without resting. “He had a terrible longing for some distraction, but he did not know what to do, what to attempt. A new overwhelming sensation was gaining more and more mastery over him every moment; this was an immeasurable, almost physical, repulsion for everything surrounding him, an obstinate, malignant feeling of hatred. All who met him were loathsome to him – he loathed their faces, their movements, their gestures. If anyone had addressed him, he felt that he might have spat at him or bitten him…”

Who is mad, Marmeladov or Raskolnikov? If they are both mad then they are mad in two different ways completely. Before the murders just after the talk between Raskolnikov and Marmeladov in the tavern, we get a closer look at Marmeladov’s type of madness. It is profoundly human. The two leave the tavern and Raskolnikov aids the older, drunken man to walk home. Instead of walking into his one-room home with three starving children and his emaciated, sickly wife, Katerina Ivanova, Marmeladov drops to his knees in the doorway. “‘Ah!,’ she cried out in a frenzy, ‘he has come back! The criminal! The monster!…And where is the money? What’s in your pocket, show me! And your clothes are all different! Where are your clothes? Where is the money! Speak!’” All the money is gone. “She seized him by the hair and dragged him into the room. Marmeladov seconded her efforts by meekly crawling along on his knees.” Marmeladov’s madness separated him from his family but not by any means from human feeling and he returned to his family to remain with it full of remorse. Raskolnikov’s madness is purely of the mind so it is not Marmeladov’s kind of madness. It is a separation from human feeling. It is the doctrine of self-isolation taught by the mind whenever an ego submits to it that it wants to be nothing but an ego more powerful than all other egos, an ego that can not see with the eyes of a Dostoevsky that see that such an ego imprisoned by such a mind is worthless.

After the murder and after hiding the stolen objects, Raskolnikov returns to his small room. He is in a kind of delirium for five days, eating little, sleeping for long periods. His friend, the student Razumihin, looks over him and the servant girl in his rooming house, Nastasya, looks in on him at times offering food or tea. Razumihin informs him during one of his awakened periods that money has arrived from his mother and sister who will soon arrive in Petersburg. Razumihin, a young healthy positive type, uses the money to buy Raskolnikov a new set of clothes and he has brought to his room an acquaintance, the doctor Zossimov, to look over him. Raskolnikov treats them indifferently, even spitefully, paying little attention to them. Only when they start discussing the murders does Raskolnikov revive and give them his full attention. Pyotr Petrovitch Luzhin, a successful government official, arrives to present himself to Raskolnikov. He has recently become engaged to Raskolnikov’s sister. He is a forty-five-year-old positive figure. Raskolnikov has found out through a letter sent to him by his mother just before the murders that his young sister has accepted Luzhin’s proposal of marriage only to gain a higher more secure place in society for her mother and her brother Raskolnikov whom she loves dearly. Razumihin and Zossimov treat Luzhin respectfully, agreeing in their conversation with some of Luzhin’s liberal ideas. Raskolnikov accuses Luzhin, breaking in on the conversation, of putting his mother and sister up in a cheap boarding house in Petersburg. Worse still, influenced by what his mother has reported of what Luzhin said during his courtship, Raskolnikov again breaks in on the conversation. “‘And is it true,’ Raskolnikov asked Luzhin, in a voice quivering with fury and delight in insulting him, ‘is it true that you told your fiancee…within an hour of her acceptance, that what pleased you most…was that she was a beggar…because it was better to raise a wife from poverty, so that you may have complete control over her, and reproach her with your being her benefactor?’” After defending himself with some embarrassment, the insult soon drives Luzhin from Raskolnikov’s little room“How could you – how could you!” Razumihin says to Raskolnikov just after Luzhin leaves, “shaking his head in perplexity”.