The Quintessential Russian Novel (Crime and Punishment, Part 1)

In Part 1 of our discussion on Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, we welcome translator Michael Katz to discuss the effects of Dostoevsky's personal and family life on his writing, the "big questions of life" and morality woven into Dostoevsky's works, and the challenge of translating Dostoevsky's repetitive writing style. 

Michael R. Katz is the C. V. Starr Professor Emeritus of Russian and East European Studies at Middlebury College. He has translated over twenty Russian novels, including The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, Fathers and Children, and Notes from Underground.

To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition of Crime and Punishment, go to https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393427950. 

Learn more about the Norton Library series at https://wwnorton.com/norton-library.

Have questions or suggestions for the podcast? Email us at nortonlibrary@wwnorton.com or find us on Twitter at @TNL_WWN and Bluesky at @nortonlibrary.bsky.social. 

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[Mark:] You are listening to the Norton Library Podcast, where we explore classic works of literature and philosophy with the leading scholars of the Norton Library, a new series from W. W. Norton that introduces influential texts to a new generation of readers. I'm your host, Mark Cirino, with Michael Von Cannon producing. Today, we present the first of our two episodes devoted to Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky as we interview its translator and editor Michael Katz. In part one, we discuss Dostoevsky's legendary career and how this masterpiece came about, what its central themes are, why Michael Katz calls this “the quintessential Russian novel,” and why the protagonist Raskolnikov has been so compelling since the novel's publication. Michael Katz is professor emeritus of Russian and East European studies at Middlebury College. In addition to his writings on 19th century Russian literature, he has translated over 15 Russian novels into English, including works by Turgenev, Tolstoy and, of course, Dostoevsky. He previously joined Norton Library podcast for a discussion of his edition of Nikolai Gogol’s Selected Tales. It's great to have him back on the show. Michael Katz, welcome to the Norton Library podcast.  

[Michael:] Thank you very much.  

[Mark:] What a pleasure to have you back on. We talked earlier about Gogol, about some of his selected stories, and now I'm looking forward to today's conversation about Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Maybe we can start, Michael, by talking about Dostoevsky himself. What do we need to know about him as we approach this great novel?  

[Michael:] He was born in 1821 in the Moscow Hospital for the Poor where his father was a doctor working in that hospital and his mother was the daughter of a merchant family. And he grew up partly in Moscow and then on his father's estate, which was outside of Moscow. He went to school in St. Petersburg at the military academy and he studied engineering of all things, mathematics and engineering. And while he was at school, he heard that his father had been murdered on his estate in the country by the peasants. And there's some ambiguity as to whether or not and why and so on, but it was a traumatic event for young Dostoevsky. And he writes, of course, in Karamazov about a patricide. So, murder was very much on his mind. And when he started writing his novels in the 1860s, there are murders enacted in every single one of his novels. Homicides, suicides, deicides, all sorts of examples of death striking his characters.  

[Mark:] Michael, did Dostoevsky have a particularly affectionate relationship with his father and this was kind of a wound that he carried for the rest of his life, or was he concerned about murder from almost a philosophical perspective?  

[Michael:] Well, it was somewhat distant relationship from his father, but he was certainly affected dramatically by the event, and he carried that wound for his entire life. But as I say, the circumstances of the murder are unclear and it's not definite exactly what happened on the estate.  

[Mark:] Dostoevsky continues his education... 

[Michael:]...in Petersburg and spends most of the rest of his life in Petersburg. He's regarded as a Petersburg author, the way Gogol was. He participated in a liberal circle called the Petrashevsky Circle and was reading a letter about Gogol's death. And when the circle was invaded by the police he was arrested for participating in this circle and he was imprisoned and sentenced to death. He was on death row when he was summoned and told that it was his turn. He was marched out, blindfolded, and the person in front of him in the line was shot when it was Dostoevsky's turn and all of a sudden a writer comes up brandishing a piece of paper which was a reprieve from the Tsar and a commutation of Dostoevskys death sentence into an exile. He was sent to hard labor in Siberia where he spent three years and then another few years in exile outside of Petersburg before he was finally allowed to return to Petersburg. So, he spent 10 years outside of the city.  

[Mark:] Was that rehearsed that he would have essentially been saved in the nick of time? Did that send him a message? Why was that choreographed that way?  

[Michael:] We don't know exactly, but the Tsar uh decided this was the way to proceed, and rescued him at the very last moment. Whether it was black humor, or whether it was to shock him and to warn him not to participate in this kind of activity, we don't really know.  

[Mark:] So, what year would that have been?  

[Michael:] That was in 1858 I think. I'm not sure.  

[Michael:] How about the writing career? How did this person who was, you know, we're thinking military or sciences and now he becomes immersed in a writing career.  

[Mark:] Well, the first thing he did was translate a French novel, Balzac's Eugénie Grandet, into Russian. His knowledge of French was mediocre, but he translated it anyway and it's an object of study to see how he changed the novel. Eugénie Grandet is a novel about um love of a father, and about greed and avarice and Dostoevsky was quite taken by the plot, translated it into Russian, and then began writing his own fiction. Interestingly, his first work was called Poor Folk and that was heralded by the literary critics, in particular Belinsky who famously ran to see Dostoevsky the night he was reading the work, banged on his door and when Dostoevsky appeared he said a new Gogol has appeared. And Dostoevsky was taken to be Gogol's disciple. When I teach Poor Folk, there's one episode in it that is absolutely crucial to a study of Dostoevsky. It's when the hero of Poor Folk reads Gogol's story, “The Overcoat,” and is outraged that Gogol had treated Akaky Akakievich so shabbily. And Dostoevsky says—or the hero in Dostoevsky's Poor Folk says—how can they treat him like that? He's such a sympathetic character. He then—the hero of Poor Folk—reads a story by Pushkin. And in the story by Pushkin, the author treats a similar character, low ranking civil servant, with great affection and sympathy. And the character in Dostoevsky is touched by Pushkin's representation of this poor civil servant, and from then on Dostoevsky is under the major influence of Pushkin and Gogol. And if anybody wants to look up the episode, it's a terrific way to get involved in Dostoevsky.  

[Mark:] Last time, Michael, you were on the Norton Library podcast, we talked about Gogol’s “The Overcoat” and the treatment of that character. So, that's really fascinating. Would you say that poor folk or class issues was the primary motivation to Dostoevsky's fiction and to his writing career? Or did he write autobiographically? What were the themes that were driving him on his way to things like Crime and Punishment?  

[Michael:] It wasn't so much autobiography. It was the big questions of life: Is there a God? Is there good and evil? How does man live his life? By what rules, by what laws? And Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment plans an experiment to see if he might be a person who is exempt from those moral and legal regulations, if he can commit this murder, and get away with it, and not be burdened by his conscience. And we don't want to give it away, but it's an examination of this question, the big issue of where does morality come from?  

[Mark:] You're mentioning Gogol, and Pushkin, and Dostoevsky's reaction to them. And I'm wondering, in your experience of thinking about the Russian writers of the 19th century, can you sort of construct a timeline and how Dostoevsky fits in and where he ranks among that pantheon?  

[Michael:] Sure. Well, Pushkin was born in 1799 and his heyday of power as an influence is in the 20s and 30s. Gogol comes along in the 30s and 40s, and then Turgenev comes in the 50s. And Dostoevsky’s first major work, Crime and Punishment, is published in 1865, I believe, and he writes his series of five great books: Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Devils, The Adolescent, and Brothers Karamazov during the 70s. And Dostoevsky dies in 1881 after he finishes Karamazov. And Tolstoy—left out Tolstoy—who begins writing in the 50s, and writes in the 60s, and the 70s, and the 80s, and the 90s, and finally dies in 1904. Tolstoy lived a long time.  

[Mark:] In this timeline, is there something about society in the 1860s that would have been driving Dostoevsky to ask these big questions and to tackle the issues in his fiction?  

[Michael:] Well, I think the advent of Alexander II, who was the Tsar reformer, who was the one who freed the serfs, a couple of years before Lincoln freed the slaves. and his program of liberal reforms, legal reforms, military reforms, inspired Dostoevsky and other writers to engage with the most important events. They were freed of the worst restraints of the censor and managed to say things on paper that couldn't have been said before, that would have been blocked by Alexander's predecessor Nicholas I, who was very strict. During that same period, there were revolutionary circles that began meeting and ultimately in 1881, Tsar Alexander II was assassinated by the bomb of a terrorist as he was in a carriage going through Petersburg. So, the liberal era came to a rapid close.  

[Mark:] So, when Dostoevsky publishes this novel in 1866, it's put out into a particular cultural moment. How is it received by the public? Is it a popular novel at the time?  

[Michael:] It was a popular novel. It was published serially and each chapter ended with a bang so that the public was eager to hear the next installment. That was the way he wrote. And he was paid by the page, and he was very aware of the popularity of this serial so that he would keep his readers hanging. And it was a very successful novel.  

[Mark:] Was there anything that was challenging to the authorities at the time, the government having to deal with this, what would you, how would you call it, a revolutionary or such a incendiary novel? Was he risking any kind of blowback from this publication?  

[Michael:] The censorship was quite liberal at the time. So, he was able to publish that.  

[Mark:] The timing was right for it.  

[Michael:] Yes. He was living abroad for part of it and read the newspapers and found that there were trials reported on, and he followed trials of some of the young revolutionaries very closely and used details in his novel. And that was a very effective strategy because the public was reading the newspapers and then reading a fictional uh enactment of the trials in Crime and Punishment.  

[Mark:] You say in your Norton Library introduction to Crime and Punishment that this is the quintessential Russian novel. What do you mean by that, Michael?  

[Michael:] Well, it's shorter than the biggies and means that people can read it. It's fairly easy to get into. The very first lines of the novel have the hero rehearsing his crime. He's measuring the distance from his house to the pawn broker's house, and going to the pawn broker, and trying out a stunt to get into her apartment where the next time he goes, he will actually hit her over the head with an axe. It is a mystery novel. As one [unintelligible] once said, it isn't a whodunit because you know right from the very beginning who committed the murder. It's a why-he-done-it. And you spend 500 pages examining possible motives for Raskolnikov's crime. And ultimately, he comes to acknowledge, not until the epilogue, why he actually committed the crime, and faces the moral consequences of his act.  

[Mark:] Do you think Dostoevsky wants readers to sympathize emotionally with Raskolnikov or intellectually, philosophically? Where are our sympathies as we're reading this novel?  

[Michael:] Well, there's a wonderful scene when he's in the downstairs apartment after he kills the old woman and her sister. He's in the downstairs apartment hiding from the two people who have come to pawn something. And they're upstairs at the old woman's door. And then they come and they—no, he's not downstairs yet. He's up. He's in the old woman's apartment. And they come and they knock at the door, but the door is locked. They try to get in and they can't. And Dostoevsky is very careful to push us, the readers, to put us in the inside of the apartment with Raskolnikov. And he's banging on the door, and you read that passage, and you want him to get away with it. You don't want him to be caught at the time. And the passage is absolutely breathtaking. And usually people don't recognize that they're trembling inside the apartment with the hero, watching as the lock bounces back and forth and breathe a sigh of relief when the two people coming to pawn something go away and he actually escapes and gets out of the apartment.  

[Mark:] Does that make us complicit, or we now have to ask why are we sympathizing with a murderer?  

[Michael:] Exactly right. Because he's such an attractive character. He's handsome, although he's thin and he's uh exhausted and is kind of morally derelict at the time, but he's smart. He's clever. He has these moments of great empathy for victims. The woman who is being followed on the street by a dirty old man and he's trying to get her into bed, but Raskolnikov intervenes and calls the police. Those kind of reversals occur regularly in the novel where Raskolnikov goes from being a cold, rational intellectual to being a warm, empathetic bystander.  

[Mark:] Do you think, and you hint on this a little bit in your introduction, do you think that Dostoevsky's shift in narrative perspective and the voice of the novel goes a long way towards accomplishing what you just described?  

[Michael:] Exactly. Because it starts as a first person narrative. He carries that over from Notes from Underground, which he had written as a first person account, and writes about 150 pages in the first person. But it's harder to get the reader to sympathize with the first person. So he finds that if he switches into the third person, he can control his reader reactions much more effectively.  

[Mark:] One of the things, again, that you comment on in your introduction is Dostoevsky's focus on Raskolnikov 's consciousness, and even unconsciousness, and the chronicling of the dreams throughout the novel. I wonder if you could say a few words about that and how that adds to the structure of the novel. 

[Michael:] Raskolnikov has five dreams in the course of the novel. The most famous one is the first one, which is the dream of the beaten horse, which is probably my favorite scene in the novel. It's brutal, full of pity for the poor horse who's beaten up by the drunken peasant. But Dostoevsky chooses to use these dreams to reveal another level of consciousness of the heroes. He talks about what Raskolnikov thinks, what he feels, and what he does. But when he puts Raskolnikov to sleep, which he does, as I say five times, we're privy to Raskolnikov’s unconscious. And this is really the beginning of Russian interest in the unconscious or subconscious. Freud had said at one point, “I didn't discover the unconscious. It was the poets and philosophers who came before me who discovered it. I merely provided a system for talking about it, a way of talking about it.” And that is true of, I argue, in a book I wrote years ago, argue that this is in fact true of Russian literature. That one of the reasons Russian literature is regarded as so profound, is because it's dealing with questions of the unconscious much more so than the French, or the Germans, or the English were in their novels.  

[Mark:] So Dostoevsky 's presentation of the unconscious is consistent with what Freud would later write about in the interpretation of dreams and elsewhere. It's not, let's say, a classical presentation like dreams are omens or something along those lines. It's really a sophisticated modern psychology that Dostoevsky is promoting.  

[Michael:] Yeah. And in fact, Freud wrote an article about The Brothers Karamazov, arguing that it's a wonderful example of his own theories in fiction.  

[Mark:] Michael, let's shift for a second and talk about the process of translating Crime and Punishment. So we I remember we had a similar discussion when we talked about Gogol in the earlier episodes. First of all, what is Dostoevsky's writing style in Russian? How would you describe his prose style and what challenges does that present?  

[Michael:] He's usually described as writing at white heat; that he is rapid and he doesn't do much revision. He does revise but nothing in the way that, say, Tolstoy revises War and Peace and has poor Sonia copy the thing over, and over, and over each time he changes his mind. Dostoevsky is writing quickly, especially because he's publishing it in a serial and he has deadlines that he has to meet for the editor of the journal. And his revision is somewhat limited compared to other writers. He repeats words. Sometimes they have semantic meaning. They have importance and need to be repeated. At other times, it's almost like he's being careless and using the same word over and over again rather than finding a synonym. My job as a translator is to decide which of those repetitions are semantically loaded and keep his repetitions and which are just, sort of, not exactly careless, but insignificant repetitions, and then I find a synonym or use a pronoun as so as to relieve the reader. I think a Russian reader can tolerate more repetitions than an English or American reader, just as a Russian reader can deal with the names of the characters, their nicknames, their patronymics, their full names.  

[Mark:] Is that the number one complaint that you always get when you teach is that we're slippery when it comes to when it comes to the names and we're not sure exactly who we're referring to. That's that would not bother a Russian reader.  

[Michael:] That's right. So, I always include a list of the characters with all the forms of their names. And I suggest to my students that when we start reading it, they Xerox that page and use it as a page marker, fold it and keep it in the book, and every time they meet a character, even one they've met before, to double check on the list and see who they're talking about.  

[Mark:] Is it strategic about which version of the name is used at a particular time or is it six of one and half a dozen of the other?  

[Michael:] No, it's absolutely, they are meaningful names. They're diminutives in which the author is expressing his affection. So Raskolnikov, Rodion, becomes Rodya, R-O-D-Y-A, when there's affection being expressed towards him, or else he'll be, Rodion, his full name if it's neutral or derogatory. Some names have affectionate forms and derogatory forms. When I was a graduate student, when my friends liked something I was doing, they would call me Misha, which is Mike, a nickname for Michael. When they didn't like something I was doing, they would call me Mishenka, which is damn you, Michael. You can tell what feeling is being attached to your name.  

[Mark:] One other question about the translation is if Dostoevsky writes with a kind of white heat, and the intensity, and energy of his writing, it seems like translation requires this kind of painstaking patience. Is it hard to capture that kind of spontaneity and energy in your translation?  

[Michael:] Yes. [Laughter.] I think that's the easy answer for that.  

[Mark:] But that's the goal, right? 

[Michael:] It is. And sometimes a paragraph takes a day to translate. And you keep—my process is I do a draft, then I read it over myself, then I send it to a native speaker of Russian who reads it and who checks my version against the original. She sends back suggestions. Then I read it again and make various changes. Then I sometimes send it out to another reader, who doesn't know Russian, but whose English is very good and they'll read it and tell me if there are awkwardnesses or literalisms that should be modified. And then I get it back and I read it over again and I make changes, and then it goes to the copy editor who reads it and makes changes. So it's a long process. Then I get it back from the copy editor and do it again. And when I get stuck with something, I will look at one of the previous translations and see what they did. Often finding a way that I don't want to do it in the previous translations, but sometimes it helps and explains a passage that I'm having trouble with. And if I really have trouble, I put on the Slavic Listserv what my question is. and I get a couple of answers from the Listserv within a day and that's very helpful.  

[Mark:] Can you find one example from your translation that might present a translation issue or something you're either particularly proud of or something that was thorny that could give us an idea of the process?  

[Michael:] Well, it would come from Karamazov, not from Crime and Punishment. In Karamazov Dostoevsky writes about ruptures in the emotional and intellectual fabric of the novel and he uses the word laceration. Well, let's say he uses the Russian word [unintelligible], which is [unintelligible], which is a break or a rupture. And Constance Garnett back in 1914 chose the word laceration to use it. And a modern translator has to find an equivalent for the Russian word. And it really means a tearing or ripping of something. And I have looked at all the alternatives. I can't recite them now by memory, but I decided that her laceration was probably the best alternative. So, I've kept it in my translation and it's noted by some scholars that they're glad that I did. They, too, agree that it's the best version.  

[Mark:] Michael Katz, thank you so much for joining us on the Norton Library Podcast to discuss Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.  

[Michael:] You're very welcome.  

[Mark:] The Norton Library edition of Crime and Punishment by Fodor Dostoevsky, translated and edited by Michael Katz, is available now in paperback and ebook. Check out the links in the description to this episode for ordering options and more information about the Norton Library, including the full catalog of titles. 

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