136: Crime and Punishment

Hi, welcome to Classical Stuff, you should know, a podcast about the classical world, classical education, old books, old things, by young and handsome men. Yeah, thanks. We didn't have it wrong last time, so thanks for correcting that. Oh, yes.

So we are not old. They can see us. I don't know what you're selling. We didn't think this through.

We didn't think this through. Anyway, we are three teachers, educators, anything, at a classical school in Austin, My name is Graham Donaldson, and I am joined with AJ Hanberger-Tales, maybe. Whoa, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, hey.

Gotta keep the list of my toes. Change it up. Keep me on my toes. It's terrifying.

We now do the end of the beginning. You can find us at classicalstuff.net. You can tweet us at classicalstuff, C-L-S-S-C-A-L, stuff on the twits. You can patronize us on Patreon by finding classicalstuff on Patreon, and we've got some tears and some fears.

We've got some tears that you can subscribe to with prizes. Prizes? Sure, yeah. You're getting rewards.

You're getting rewards. And that helps keep the podcast going and growing. We can do more stuff. Cool.

And there's more audio on there if you want to hear more. That's right. We do between-episode banter where we talk about stuff. Not so much current stuff, but we talk about stuff that maybe isn't really classical stuff.

We spend a lot of time on the markets. I actually haven't been there. I think we also talked about demographics. My favorite is when we just continue the conversation from the last episode.

Yeah, yeah. Okay. I'll just keep recording. Thomas and I probably banter about the fourth turning.

We've got to do that. Yeah, for sure. Fun things. Okay.

But I'm feeling pretty good. Just like in general? Yeah. Thomas, I know you're feeling good.

I'm feeling good. Yeah, definitely. Hamburg, are you feeling good? Nah.

You're not feeling good? Well, maybe. So 66% of this podcast, I say, are great men. Yeah, great.

That's exactly right. You and I are the great men. We are great men. AJ's a normie.

He exists mostly to reproduce. He exists mostly to reproduce just to sort of continue on the status quo. Whereas us great men, we have like a sort of a vision of the future. The way things have to be.

And we have to be able to do whatever. We are willing to bring that future through a soft hand or a heart-clenched fist. But anyway, to quote one of my other favorite podcasts, I'm going to leave this in the cold hands and warm embrace of Mr. Hamburg.

Aren't my hands cold if my embrace is warm? Do I have a circulation problem? Seriously. The cold hands and warm embrace?

I don't understand. Yeah, seriously. They don't question it in my podcast. They start going.

I don't understand it. I'll be frank. I don't get it. My hands are very warm.

Okay. The warm hands and cold hands. My embrace is cold. Cold core warm hands.

Okay. So today we are talking about, is it Theodore? Not Theodore. It's Theodore.

Theodore with an F. Theodore. Dostoevsky's book, Crime and Punishment. And the funny thing is when I said I was doing this for the episode today, both of my compatriots were like, we've already done it.

And they thought we'd already done it because it just seems like one of those ones we should have done. We reference it. We reference the book all the time. But we scrolled to find it.

Yeah, they both scrolled. I scrolled this morning to see if we had done it and we hadn't. So it seems like it's about time to do Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment in the senior year. Although, our goofy titles mean that control laughing on a website is a little more difficult to find things.

I hear your criticism and I reject it. I like having silly titles and I'm going to keep doing it. You like calling our episode on Poetry, Pai? I hear your criticism and I reject it.

So yeah, today we're talking about Crime and Punishment. So here's what we're going to do. I'm going to give you a real, oh, so basic outline of Dostoevsky's life. I think you can find more of that on other podcasts where we talk about books Dostoevsky has written.

Or you can just go to Wikipedia. Like, stop being fucking lazy. Go look him up. Listen to our podcast.

And then I'm going to do, here's how I've planned it in my head and we'll see how it goes, where I'm going to kind of do a real basic summary of the book, but I'm guessing that most of you have already read it or you're maybe a teacher coming here to learn more about it. And in that case, if you haven't, I'll give you enough to go on. And if you haven't, then I'll actually give you some content that you can teach your students or may help to deepen your reading of the book. Because a lot of times when I do books, I just sort of summarize it.

And that's super fun when it's a goofy mythology that involves Thor in a dress. But it's not as fun if we're talking about Crime and Punishment. Because the book is depressing. It's about Crime and Punishment.

It's about Crime and Punishment. So here are some basics about his life. It's kind of depressing. It's very depressing.

Okay, so he was born in 1821 in November and he eventually died in 1881. So that's a good 60 years. He was born to a father who was a doctor that eventually got his coat of arms. So he became gentry.

So he wasn't poor. His mom was really well-learned and he grew up learning from her about all kinds of writers and poetry and all kinds of stuff. And then eventually he went into military school. And shortly after he got out of military school, he became a lieutenant and then did not like that very much and resigned and took a mental life living off his pen.

He wrote a short novella called Poor Folk and got immediate acclaim with some really important critics. And everyone was like, oh, he's the next big thing. And then his next few novels were kind of flops. And then he was kind of sullen and withdrawn and not very friendly.

And so everyone was like, well, that's the end. So they kind of booted him out of the circles. And then he got involved with a bunch of people who discussed utopian socialism. Part of a circle.

And as you can imagine, the Tsar, the head of Russia, was not super into ending serfdom and implementing socialism. And so they got in really big trouble. He got arrested and put in prison, even though he was pretty adamant that he was not about disseminating illegal propaganda, although maybe his friends were. He got out as being part of a dissenting circle.

And so he goes to prison and then they are basically sentenced to death, or at least that's the sentence that he receives. He is carted to a village square and lined up to be shot by guns in a firing squad. And he thinks he's going to die. And so he is not happy about this, obviously.

And right after, like he was like second row, right? So the first row is up there about to be shot. And a guy runs up and he's like, the Tsar has just commuted your sentence. Just kidding.

So no one died. Nobody died. And then instead they all went to a work camp in Siberia. That's not just a funny joke.

That's a real thing that Russia used to do. They used to send people to work camps in Siberia. So he went and it was terrible. We're talking one bathroom for 200 people.

We're talking, he had his first bout with epilepsy there. The sanitation was terrible. The food was awful. He only had a New Testament to read, right?

And then it was generally a really bad experience. He would eventually come out and write about it. The rest of his life is, while he was in jail, he becomes convinced that what's going to save the world are like the good down-home values of the common man, right? Like good personal virtues.

And enough with all this intelligentsia nonsense. All the smart people are trying to figure out how to make the world a better place. And they suck at it. And what's really going to be better is good people working hard, doing their own thing.

And he is a gambler. So he became more conservative as he got older. Yeah, I think so. And one of my favorite facts about him is that he was a pretty adamant gambler.

And at one point he traveled and he was kind of leading this affair with his girl. And he promised one of his publishers that he would deliver a book in just an insane amount of time. It was like two months. And if he failed, then the publisher got all the rights to publish all of his previous material for free without paying him anything.

So the publisher could just publish willy-nilly. And he hired a stenographer and he pulled it off. And I think he was called the gambler, weirdly enough. And I think he actually eventually married that woman.

And she kind of put his affairs in order and figured out his finances and helped him to become the writer that he now is. I'm sort of glossing over the rest of his life. It's pretty interesting. It's not the most interesting writer's life I've ever read, but it's pretty well out there.

So that's what he asked himself. Some of those shades of meaning might come into play in the novel. So Graham, can you give me, I'm going to spring this on, he doesn't know this is coming. Can you give me a five-minute summary of sort of the ideas that were rising up in Russia at the time?

Oh, sure thing. This is a lecture he's for us, so I figured he'd be okay with this. Yeah, so you have in Russia, Russia's always kind of been a little bit behind, at least during the Enlightenment, Russia was always behind these other countries in terms of modernizing or getting out of a more medieval way of existing, an agrarian system. And so you had the English Revolution in the 17th century or whatever it was, the French Revolution in the 18th, yeah, the 18th century.

And Russia never really had it, but all of the intelligentsia or the bourgeois in Russia kind of cast their eyes towards the books that were being written in other parts of the world and were trying to think how they could apply it to Russia. Eventually, these more, what eventually grew, these were sort of seeds of communism, but what grew, I'm just trying to think of how to phrase it. An emphasis on seeing man purely in a material way was popular and in vogue, and then how can we organize society with purely material people in order to better society? And so these ideas were popping up of we need to get rid of these old superstitious ways of kicking out the star and kicking out this sort of divinely ordered kingdom, and if we just get the smartest and best people in centralized positions of authority, we can use modern science to better organize human existence.

And this is sort of, you know, what you would classically call a progressive idea in terms of human society. So this is that utopian socialism that we're talking about, that you organize men not according to a Christian cosmos, or you don't organize men according to a king, or even a constitution or a charter. You organize men basically by trying to focus it on materialistic scientific principles. It's probably how they would have described it.

Really, it just sort of centralizes power into a ruling class that was ultimately utilitarian in nature. So if you need to kill somebody in order to bring more food to millions of people, you kill that person. And eventually, this gets turned into the communist revolution of that sort of disenfranchised bourgeois wanted to be that ruling class, and they thought that you could do that by rousing the proletariat working man to overthrow the ruling class. Turns out proletariat working man doesn't really care about that kind of thing.

But the disenfranchised bourgeois cares really deeply about becoming the enfranchised bourgeois and is willing to spill blood in order to do it. And if they have to sacrifice the working man, they're going to do it. They're going to sacrifice the working man in order to have, you know, sort of be better in the future. Well, then so be it.

And that's eventually what ended up happening in Russia. So the ideas that were percolating along were sort of couched in a materialistic view of human nature and the sort of scientific determinism, as well as logical positivism, which we don't really need to talk about. But basically this view that there are better ways to organize society and these smart people who are doing it based on pragmatic and utilitarian means should be the ones that are doing it. And it ended up being a very, very violent way of a very, very violent revolution.

Whereas the English and the French Revolution was violent. Whereas the English one, well, it was pretty violent in England too. Anyway, but all those revolutions had slightly different flavors to them based on how early in history they came. So yeah, that's kind of, is that, was that enough for you to go off?

Yeah, that was good. So we got socialism, we got communism, all of that is kind of on the rise and invoke. Yeah, and if we want to sort of define the terms, socialism ends up being that you have a centralized state control over resources, money, industry, and, and that, and then so you get the famous, and five-year plans, right? You have these sort of famous plans wherein you are going to pull the strings for everything.

So you don't have a market that is determining how these things are working out. You have a centralized means of control of how are these things going to work out. Yep. Cool.

Perfect. That's good. Okay. So the novel opens and we are introduced to this character, Raskolnikov, Romanovich, Rodion Romanovich, Raskolnikov.

I have a name. Yeah, it's a lot of ours. And so this, have you, have you read the novel with us, right? Not with you.

So really? I read it for Summer Bingo, not this recent one, but the one before. Okay. So you're all over this.

Can you, can you disrupt? He's a disaffected, kind of idealistic guy, doesn't have much direction in life, and is in his head too much. Is that too simplistic a description of this? That's good.

He's 23. He's good looking. He's kind of dark haired, dark eyed, has a really silly top hat that he, and then like all the rest of his clothes are in tatters. He doesn't have good boots.

He's kind of really... He's naturally melancholy. Yeah, I would say. Naturally melancholy is probably an understatement.

At the point that we meet him, he's sort of like hiding in this tiny little cupboard of an apartment. He has like a spider. And he's thinking all day. At one point, his serving woman kind of comes up and she's like, what are you doing?

And he's like, thinking. She's like, don't you want a job? And he's like, have a job. She's like, what is it?

Thinking. So that's what he's doing. He was a student. He is no longer a student.

We find out later that he just couldn't make the payments. And so he stopped being a student. He doesn't have his degree. But there's sort of a rush at the time.

There's a saddest thing that comes along with being a student. If you're a student, everyone's like, oh, all right. So you're like the real deal. So he still kind of has that going for him, but he never really finished the job.

He's a kid from a small town who's gone to the big city to go to college. And when he went to the big city in college, he got me. Was he not? I don't remember.

Did I describe him before going to school? Was he not the way? He was always a little bit sloan. He was always a little bit sloan.

Prideful and thought himself about everybody else. But going to the big city and being like a hot shot philosophy major wasn't a healthy place to be. Yeah. So a couple of things happen early in the novel that are important.

One of these things is he meets a guy named Marmaladov. Now, Marmaladov is a kind of portly gentleman who drinks a lot and used to have a position in government. And now, because of his desperate drinking, he no longer has a position in government. He's partially a holdover from what was originally a separate book called The Drunkards.

And there were two books that eventually became one book. And so he is where, like, the book The Drunkards, I think, was going to focus more on the drinking issue. And drinking does pop up all over the novel. But it feels to me like Marmaladov is sort of a holdover from this.

And his name literally means jam or jelly. So think about a large person filled with jelly that drinks a lot of much alcohol. And you pretty much got Marmaladov. He speaks in one of those dignified, like, come here, young man, I'm going to tell you my story.

And, like, tries to keep it together. How do you do that in Russian, though? That's the real question. Definitely.

Okay, good. Thank you. Yeah. And so he turns out he's been, like, sleeping on hay barges and hasn't been home in two weeks.

And eventually Raskolikov will go and meet his family. And they are in really dire straits. And so he leaves a little bit of money. And then off he goes.

Another important thing that happens is he hears a conversation in a pub about a woman who is a pawnbroker. And the woman who's a pawnbroker is old. She's really mean to her sister. Liza...

No, Liza is the pawnbroker. No, Liza is the pawnbroker. The pawnbroker is like Alina... Alina...

Some brother. Yeah. She just knows... I call her the pawnbroker.

Yeah. She pretty much called her the pawnbroker through almost the entire book. So Alina, the pawnbroker, and her sister, Liza, Liza... So the pawnbroker is apparently really miserly.

And she's not very nice if you come and you pawn something about giving it back. And she's always squeezing the very last penny out of you. And she doesn't help anybody. In fact, it turns out that when she dies, she's going to give all of her money to a monastery so the monastery can pray for her own soul's salvation.

That's her plan. So it's... And she's terrible to her sister. Generally, it's thought that she, like, kind of beats her and abuses her.

And this other sister is not... Not fully there. She's probably retarded. She's probably some sort of mental retardant.

Yeah. Some sort of, yeah, developmental disability. And so that she treats her not nice is not a very cool thing. So here's these two guys talking to Barr.

And the one guy says... She's just a terrible person. A lot of cash. A terrible person with a lot of cash.

And he says, what we should do is we should kill her and then use her cash for everybody else to make everybody's lives better. Right? If we can remove her, we're taking away a negative in the society and we're doing a whole net positive, right? Which is disemning her cash and bringing a whole bunch of people out of poverty.

He says, how many guys would make amazing things in Russian society? They've got new ideas and fresh perspectives and they just need a little leg up. How many of those guys would benefit from getting her money? This is where I was going to tell Thomas that the real problem with the story of crime punishment is a lack of liquidity.

Anyway. Which really means you need like a lending. You know, some lending. Some entrepreneurial lending.

When you're reading this with the students, do any of them find this argument compelling at this point? Do you all talk about that? Unfortunately, many do. Yes.

And they will find it compelling for a while. Because even just having heard you describe it that way, there's a lot to what he's saying, right? Like that's, this is what I appreciate about the story, right? He's not painting a villain who's just like, um...

He's not the joker. He has reasons for what he's doing and in his mind there are noble reasons, right? Yeah. So far he's just hearing this conversation in a bar.

This is a little like, these two guys are having a BS conversation in a bar and being like, I said, girl, get her cash. Yeah. And so he turns out that these are the same ideas that he's been having himself about this very same person. This pawnbroker, Elena.

how he's going to maybe do the job and take her out now he happens to think that murderers on the whole are pretty bad in business they can't do it very well there's a sickness that comes beforehand and then during the event just because they don't have their wits about them they're going to screw it up but he because he's been thinking about the whole thing he's been playing it out he's going to do it better he's going to work this out and really nail it that does not happen it does not happen he's mostly kind of sick and spaced out and then as he's like thinking through this whole thing should I kill her should I not kill her is it okay is it not okay he happens upon her sister in the market who pretty much says she's not going to be at home at 7 o'clock tomorrow and at this point he feels sucked by fate into doing the deed he knows the pawnbroker is going to be alone by herself in the apartment and available and he's even said he's going to come back and pawn a thing in a few days and so she's primed for him showing up and so there's all this no I'm going to get that wrong I'm right so she knows he's around he says I might have something for you in a couple of days it's a cigarette case and so he just feels like everything is conspiring him to make him do this thing to take out the pawnbroker and snag her money so he goes home and he probably falls asleep which is what any good murderer someone who's planning a heist should do which is passed out for a really long time and he wakes up and he's like oh my gosh it's 6 o'clock or whatever it's like an hour or two before it happens and so he sews a little loop in his jacket and then he goes and finds an axe and he slips into the loop so he can walk with his arms free and not have anybody be the wiser he's just walking around town with an axe he slips up to her apartment hands her this wooden block enclosed in paper and while she's trying to get her to see the cigarette case he uses the blunt end of the axe and he bonks her a few times real good and kills her and tries to stay away from all the blood he pulls a little pouch off her neck and tries to grab her keys and he goes and he rifles through starts rifling through her drawers and he can't seem to figure out which keys go to which things and he's really panicking and he's having a really hard time thinking straight he gets a few things jams into his pockets and then he's like wait maybe she's alive so he runs back and he looks at her real hard yep she's dead and so then he runs back and he starts rifling through some stuff again and then he hears steps in the hall steps in the apartment and he comes back into the room to find his sister who is horrified at seeing this dead body on the floor and so he takes his axe and he does the job a second time and kills a second person we will later find out was pregnant so all in all three deaths the whole time the door had been open he had left it open and he's cursing himself and he all of a sudden suspects that he's losing his own dang mind because he can't seem to get the details right and then he's horrified by this and what else is he missing and then he starts he accidentally gets blood all over himself from that second kill and so now he's got to wash everything off so he starts washing everything off really frantically and then he shuts the door and then locks it and then some people come and he basically barely escapes by detection by like several twists of fate that let him slip into some doorways and slip behind a passing cart and basically make it out of there without being seen at all he goes and drops the axe back off where he found it or the sickness causes the crime it's kind of left up to you to decide but it happens to him he's not the murderer that he imagines himself to be don't we eventually find out he missed most of the money also so he gets like 10 bucks or whatever he gets way less than he expected to even for killing these three people so she had thousands of rubles stashed away and he probably only got what would you say like 100 rubles like nothing even worth the effort she had so much money just shoved away in drawers and he missed all of it so we find out the next day as he kind of wakes up that he's been called to the police station and it freaks him out obviously but he goes to the police station and finds out his landlady is just suing for rent because he hasn't paid rent in several months because he's a bum and because he doesn't have any money and he had kind of flirted with her and there was a promise to marry her daughter it didn't quite work out and so he thought he had kind of a sweet deal going turned out not really she wants the money because she's got this new guy who's a businessman in her life and so they start talking about the murder while he's there and he passes right out it just overwhelms him and now he goes yeah clerks are like talking about the murder and the other sort of saying hey this person got murdered and meanwhile the guy talking to him is like yeah you need to pay your landlady and he's listening to them talking about this murder and he's like oh just sort of passes out and so in a flurry of effort he ends up hiding all of the money under a rock in some abandoned law somewhere and he's just going to leave it there he's going to leave it there for two years until he can go back and get it and he feels that this is especially clever so and then he goes back home and passes out he has a friend named Rezumikin Rezumikin? Rezumikin Rezumikin who his name in Russian kind of means good sense or a person that kind of has their life together and he is an absolute peach he really is he finds Rezumikin sick and then nurses him back to health and at the same time takes some rubles that he had left over and goes and buys him a really nice suit and presents it in the most adorable way ever he's like what did you get out of these pants? you might say 10 rubles you might say 20 rubles it was 8 and he's like look they don't have that many holes it is adorable he gets them a hat he's like this is one of those shabby hats it's a good hat from a good hat seller he's like how do they know each other? they're old college buddies so he starts to nurse them back to health at the same time one of so Rezumikin Rezumikin I'm wondering how deeply to go into all this I wouldn't worry about the doing your letter losing thing yeah I was wondering if I should oh yeah okay why don't I have time for that so there's a whole sub sub plot about she's a noble creature that has to do this because Raskolnikov's inability to finish being a student has cast his family into poverty right so all of this stuff kind of happens to him as he is sick and having problems and everyone thinks that he's in some sort of weird psychological days and doctors come and see him and every once in a while he'll sneak out and do something one time he goes and thinks about committing suicide but sees a woman drown herself instead and he's like oh that doesn't seem like a very fun way to go so he doesn't do that and he goes and revisits the scene which is obviously a really bad idea starts asking about where all the blood went and people are like well that seems awfully suspicious and then Jellyman remember the guy he met in that pub dies and Raskolnikov kind of gets in touch with his daughter Sonia and his daughter Sonia because that guy had a penchant for spending all the family's money had turned to prostitution it was something she had to do to keep her family alive and so she would be a prostitute she had a little yellow ticket that meant she was a prostitute and she would send all of the money to her family she lived with barely anything in a nasty weird oblong apartment with all funny angles and all of her money was going to the family because Jellyman was going to spend it all so Raskolnikov meets this girl and she is meek and mild and good natured and she's a wonderful wonderful person she's sacrificing herself for the good of her family but she is so she's sort of meek and timid because of the cruel world she has to circle in right and so Raskolnikov feels for this girl and he really feels for the family of Marmaladov and he routinely will give money to them we actually see a weird generous streak in Raskolnikov he'll give money to people who are downtrodden girls that need help he'll just leave huge sums of money that he could have used for all kinds of good things right weirdly enough he wanted to get money in the first place to start some campaign of goodness and he just keeps on giving away money that isn't his to give away it's usually from his mom yeah he was supposed to like take this cash and make something of himself and then he's just giving it all away because his natural sort of his natural charity shines through but in those scenes where he gives away then he'll get really mad at himself he's like what am I doing this for this is ridiculous I'm you know 3% of the population has to go to prostitution every year anyway yeah he's like oh I'm an alpha male why am I giving away all this money right yeah I was going to ask does the book interpret it as charity or is it giving away too much no it's charity it's pretty clearly charity yeah even though he gives it away for bad reasons it's good reasons we simply see a split nature and his name in Russian actually means split so we see a compulsion to be generous and good and help people and then the immense instant regret of those actions as he applies his own philosophy to his own mind which we will meet in a second so all sorts of stuff happens and it's kind of the slow progression of the case against him as he sticks his foot in all kinds of cow pies like once he takes one of the inspectors to a bar and he's like here's what I would have done if I was the murderer I would take all the money I'd have it under a rock you'd never find it here's what else I would do I would do it with something like he just gives all these details and really freaks the guy out and obviously the guy's like alright so he passes out the police station while they're talking about it and now he's like giving me all these crazy details Raskolnikov would have had a home on like certain subreddits like I sometimes think about what Raskolnikov would be like if he had the internet or if the internet sort of has this proclivity to create people who are like Raskolnikov who have an inflated sense of their own abilities and take a particular kind of joy of being an outsider to civil society and he'll sort of like talk people with it and then alternatively think I'm so good at this and all of a sudden like oh my gosh I'm terrible I'm bringing all sorts of details oh no and then he'll sort of pass out and sleep before us like I'm so dark I'm so bad I'm on the outside is it wrong I choose?

yeah exactly because he does have guilt like he does feel bad about what he did even though his philosophy says he shouldn't because he doubles down on this like I did the right thing the whole walkie doubles down on it intellectually but then it's almost like his own soul is crying out against his intellectual sin or his intellectual mistake and so then you get this war inside where he feels naturally charitable to people but intellectually he's like I'm their betters I should be rising above using my cash to make myself great like Napoleon so we're actually going to get to that in just a sec so he eventually goes and visits the home of Porphyry the investigator who is Graham's favorite character I think he's a hero of mine I feel like we always talk about I like him for a very specific scene that comes at the end of the book where he tells Raskolnikov he's like I'm going to arrest you in a couple of days but I'm giving you this opportunity to save your soul there's a certain kind of just like Porphyry or Porphyry he's just got like a keen sense into the human into like the psychology of the criminal which is not something that I necessarily find all interesting but the fact that he's got this profound sense into the motivations of people and also a concern for those who are not necessarily his favorite people that's right and then also a concern for the soul of the people who are all like got their heads all turned into this like dark philosophy of theirs but he doesn't like Raskolnikov Raskolnikov's not a likable guy only Raskolnikov likes Raskolnikov and heaven knows why so at one point Raskolnikov and Raskolnikov both go to visit Porphyry in his parlor and it's under the guise of Raskolnikov asking about some of the things that he pawned to the pawnbroker if everybody else comes looking for the things they pawned and he's the only one who doesn't it looks really suspicious so he decides he's going to go for the things that he pawned Porphyry spends the whole book wearing a smoking jacket which is another reason a while of him he's like a police inspector and he goes around smoking a pipe and drinking a cup of tea and wearing a smoking jacket and he brings up an article that Raskolnikov wrote that turns out several months earlier and it got published and Raskolnikov had no idea it had gotten published and it outlines his theory about the criminal and one of the things that it's sort of in the subtext of the actual article but it's brought out in conversation by Porphyry to sort of plumb exactly the motivations of Raskolnikov and we call it great man theory he might have just titled the article like murdering old ladies not a big deal that's essentially what it is does he get that specific in there waiting through a sea of blood is I think the line in the paper so here's the basic theory there are two types of people in this world there are the extraordinary people who are capable of doing or saying something new and then there are the people who are regos regulars like normies their job is to reproduce and keep the world going and they live according to the rules and they enjoy living according to the rules they don't break laws and they like it that way and they are scared and mistrustful of the great man yes and so his theory is that the great man if he has to do something like if he has a big he calls it a new word to bring to society then if there are obstacles in his way preventing him from bringing this new word to society that would move it forward he is allowed to give himself the moral allowance to do anything that is necessary to bring that to society and it has to be in proportion to his idea so his idea is like a new way to change a tire like that's his the things he could do is maybe like steal a couple of dollars from a neighbor but if it's like this is going to change the way that we view the universe and the way that we make all of our machines and it's like the invention of toilet paper then he can like sacrifice several lives to do it he can give himself the moral right now he doesn't mean he's not going to feel bad about it and it doesn't mean that society won't punish him for it in fact he probably will be punished for it but society is going to have a backlash against him overstepping these laws but they will probably kill him but he won't feel bad he might feel bad but he can allow himself within himself to overstep those obstacles and they'll even probably praise him two generations from now he'll be remembered as a great man who moved things forward but probably kill him examples? yes so he brings up and one of the reasons he thinks this is because some of the greatest men who have moved things forward are people who have by necessity broken laws to bring a new law you must buy your name to bring a criminal and break the old laws the things that were cherished by your father so he brings up like Fergus the founder of Sparta to found Sparta he had to abandon some other law and establish a new one meaning he was a lawbreaker and he was bloodthirsty the dude did wars Solon, a great Athenian I don't know why he brought up Solon because Solon is a pretty peaceful guy but then he brings up Napoleon and Mohammed and they were establishing a new law a new way for man to be and to do that they had to break some old law he says if Isaac Newton was in a position where his theory of gravity and calculus or whatever was going to be hindered by somebody Isaac Newton would have the moral right within himself to remove that person so that his new mathematical proves of the universe could come forward nothing is obligated to break laws all the time just anything that is getting in the way of your thing so it's not like you can feel good about blowing through stop signs wherever you go but as long as those stop signs are hindering you on your progress towards a greater future does he actually go further than that would Newton have an obligation in that situation to do whatever it takes for his ideas to be shared if Newton knows he's a great man he does have an internal obligation so the only way to know is you yourself know if you're a great sport or you test yourself so he even says there's a special birthmark that's what Porfrey says the next question is what if there's a mix-up what if one of the normies thinks that he's a greatie and is there like a birthmark or are there special stars they're born under because you know I have the utmost respect for these great men but I'm a little nervous about how many of them there are they're running around killing people I'm a police inspector so I just want to know and it happens a lot people think that they're greater than their station and they go off to accomplish one of these things and usually what happens is they don't have much because they're not great their word wasn't actually new in the first place or they don't have the capacity to accomplish it so they will punish themselves and the society their brethren around them will punish them so they won't succeed they'll try and they'll fail revealing their non-greatness and it happens all the time it's not really a big deal people try to accomplish things it's like people try to start businesses that they think are great and it just doesn't go anywhere well it depends on business depends on what kind of conspiracy theory so this is his great man theory that there are those among us who have the internal right to break these laws if you're feeling uncomfortable with this I might harken back to the American revolutionaries they felt it was necessary to pull down a law a cherished law the veneration of the British king in order to establish a new law they were revolutionaries they broke laws they were from the perspective of the British crown criminals there are many of these Julius Caesar also a criminal he broke a lot of laws you can't cross the river with an army you're not allowed to do that you're also not allowed to kill other senators just randomly if you want to he broke some laws Napoleon also broke some laws actually I don't know Napoleon broke a lot of laws he certainly shed a lot of blood he was exiled once and returned so probably exiled a second time so at least at that point but yes I don't think Newton shed a lot of blood but he certainly brought new ideas that no one had thought before right I can't help but think of Galileo, right? He got in a big trouble for his whole we aren't at the center of things idea, right? So if you are railing against this, you have to come to grips with the notion that a lot of the men that we believe are great were lawbreakers in themselves.

That's the point, though. Like, those people weren't saying, I'm special, therefore I'll do whatever I want to. There has to be some, like, commensurate ideas have consequences, and I agree with that part of it, but you... That's Normie talk there.

Sorry, I guess I'm not one of your two great men on this podcast. I apologize. But, yeah, I'm just... Again, I'm sure this is being set up for us to be able to then critique it.

Well, the fact is that this is garbage and isn't a real thing. Like, this isn't the way the universe works. Why not? This is my question of, like, because those people did have to break laws.

Sometimes, again, what started America led to bloodshed, right? And people had to be okay with that. My point is that, like, Hergis and Caesar and Napoleon and Isaac Newton are not vacuums or islands. That, like, it's not...

Their life is a series of pitches and swings, and they make contact. I'm not saying that it was a completely random choice, a random chance. I'm just saying that, like, something like Esparta was going to happen somewhere. And so it's not that, like, Hergis has a moral ability to break laws.

It's just that when we look back, we say, like, Hergis did this. But when it's actually unfolding in front of you, you can't say, like, Hergis is going to do this, therefore we can justify his murder. Or justify his crimes. Nobody around needs to.

Only like Hergis gets to know that his mission is a good one, and he clearly did. Yeah. And then there's a problem that we have everybody who thinks this way. But at the same point, what Graham just said, these aren't just individuals acting as if they are great men, right?

You're saying these are, like, larger social forces that agree certain changes need to happen, and there are consequences to those. I'm not saying that there's no great people in history. I'm just wondering how cognizant of their greatness they are when they're doing the thing. Or how much of that driver it is.

It doesn't matter? I don't think it matters. I think, according to Raskolnikov's theory, I don't need to think as I'm doing it, I am a great man. I need to think, this law needs to be broken because my purpose is a grand one.

And that makes me great. So then he's just, it is a belief of praising the iconoclast or praising the contrarian, who has a better vision of how things should go. Sure. The contrarian, the...

Revolutionary is probably a better word. They don't just pick the opposite side. They want to change things, according to Raskolnikov, for the better, and move the world forward. I want to give his, instead of dismissing it offhand, I want to not do a straw man here and give his theory its real due because the book itself never gives you the solution to this theory.

It never solves it for you. It only solves it metaphorically, which is one of the criticisms. It's one of the criticisms of Dostoyevsky, right? With his inquisitor criticism, it never intellectually solves it for you.

It solves it spiritually, right? It's Russian history solves it for you. Yes. I believe in crime-consciously answers this question, Raskolnikov, I guess, would you just say, he wasn't a...

Spoiler it. No, not for that. He has had the sickness that comes after murder already at this point. Are you questioning whether he was just not great in the first place?

Well, that's the thing. I think the easy way is to apply this theory and say, well, he's not a great man. He made a mistake. His idea was not a new one.

He didn't have a new idea. There was nothing grand driving him. The only idea he had at best was this. And this isn't even that new of an idea.

They even talk about it when the article comes up, right? A lot of this has been said before. His only question was whether or not he was great and he was wrong. He even admits to that later in the book.

He says, I wanted to dare. I wanted to see if I was Napoleon and he is tortured by the notion that he is wrong. So if we were to correctly apply the theory, he is torturing himself. He is punished by his fellows and he did not accomplish his goal.

The only conclusion you can make is that he was not originally a great man. He's anormy. He's anormy. And he's real cheesed off about it.

And so even the book doesn't really solve the theory for you. That doesn't mean the theory is wrong. It doesn't mean he's on the wrong side of it. Sure.

There's something like, again, that it's centered on one person's idea of what great change should look like. It just doesn't do credit to there is a Russian identity. The right answer for what Russia should do is not made by, it's not only made by individuals. But individuals are involved.

Of course they are. But again, there's the right person at the right time and all the social conditions have come together. We do need great thinkers voting for great ideas. It's the bloodshed that then gets, instead of it being, then moving to persuasion or then moving to how do I incorporate other people's ideas to bring about this change?

It's that force is the only way to do it. I think that's the... He said overstep obstacles. If those obstacles can be overstepped with rhetoric, I think he'd be fine with that.

But there are those that can't. The American Revolution is perhaps an example. The abolition of slavery. That's different than, I mean, there were still royalists who lived in the United States that weren't all killed for their disagreement.

There is something fundamentally different too from, there was no force for 100% agreement on these issues. No, they overstepped obstacles to the accomplishment of their goal. What I still think is what Raskolikov has asked for. Yeah, I mean, that's where there would be boundaries on what, again, for change to happen, obstacles must be overcome.

It's at the point where violence is brought in that some type of boundary has been overstepped. Again, I think that's where, I guess this is what I appreciate in Dostoevsky, that it's complicated. There's a lot of truth to what he's saying, but he goes too far. So would you say that violence is never appropriate?

No, I would not be good to someone who is for saying that. Yeah, I don't know how I would, yeah, I would tend to be more comfortable with violence as in self-defense as opposed to initiated, but that's probably a bigger, separate conversation. Sure. Yeah, I think that's the, so if Raskolikov in the beginning had gone to the pawnbroker and said, hey, here's a cause that if you donated your money to, we could change the city and persuade her to do it, that she is an obstacle still, but it's overcome through rhetoric, not through violence.

Does that make sense? He would still accomplish his goal, but it wouldn't involve killing her. I mean, that's the part that is a problem. Oh yeah, I think we can all agree that Raskolikov is a total doofus and that maybe it doesn't apply his force in the right way.

There are times when force was appropriate, right? Some of Caesar's goals could not be accomplished without force. This is a separate episode I want to do at some point and just because we're, you know, 10 minutes before the end of this one, but like, we only have 10 minutes left to 13 if you're counting. Great golly.

Yeah, like, it's hard for us to even look back and understand the use and appropriate use of violence. Like, to be Beowulf, violence is a necessity because it's a different age and social structure than we have now. This will be a separate topic for another time, but yeah, I think violence is the point where I'm pushing back on for this. It was super cool.

Shields and swords and... Yeah, but also people die all the time in combat, so that was not great. Do you want to... What's your problem with it?

I don't have a problem with the violence. I think some goals are violently achieved. At the end of Nazi Germany it was violently achieved and the establishment of the American nation, not that necessarily America is a good in and of itself, but many people regard that as a good move and it was achieved with violence. I have a hard time describing like a view of history that sort of says we've got this sort of upward slanting slope of progress towards betterment and if there are impediments on that slope that need to be overcome by violence, then we do them.

So I need to... For a rest of the Holocaust view to work, you need to have a low view of people. So like the palm broker would not be convinced if you talk to her. And you need to have a hope in the future and you need to have a view that the problems in the world that exist can be solved by reorganizing the systems that exist.

Can many of the problems in the world not be solved by reorganizing the system? No, like the fundamental problems? The fundamental problems can't. The problems that can be reorganized that will benefit human beings don't need...

I don't think need to be solved by violence except when it's like the example you've given like a belligerent nation who is... like a Nazi Germany who is actually trying to enact rest common cause ideas in the world. The American Revolution against England. It matters that the violent portion of the revolution was started by the British, right?

That they fired the first shot. Like isn't that... I think that changes some of the same with the World War II example that violence was done before even America entered into... World War II because of Pearl Harbor ultimately.

So an attack on Americans then triggered a response there. There's also the liberation of the Bastille in the French Revolution. There are innumerable times when violence has... After the fact we see the violence as a good thing.

Yeah, but that's... Again, maybe we're all kind of trying to get to the same point. Violence is the first course of option is what is troubling. Again, I'm focused on the Raskolnikov incident.

He did not entertain other options. He jumped straight to and he'll kill the lady. That's because he wanted to see if he could do it. He just wanted to see if he could do it.

If he could dare step above everybody else if he was Napoleon, right? That's why he didn't consider anything else because nothing else would have proved to him that he was great. Yeah, that scene that you're referring to as he's confessing the murder of Estonia. He says, I wanted to see if I had what it took.

I wanted to dare. I wanted to see if I had the cojones to kill somebody. And I did, but I couldn't deal with it. So it was more like the murder was a litmus test to see if he was great as opposed to a first step of an entrepreneurial plan.

Right, but the great men are not proved by their act of violence. They're proved by the direction which they're pointing the country or the group of people whatever to. It's not proven there are people who push for revolution. So Thomas, I think you've touched on the way that I've solved it for myself, which is one of the things that Raskolnikov doesn't address is a cohesive vision of the future.

He keeps on talking about moving the world forward and improving things and moving the world even using the word goal, like moving the world toward its goal. But he never talks about what that is. And without a clear vision of the future then you never know if a great man is actually contributing or detracting. You end up with what one of my students pointed out was chaos.

If I'm a great man and you're a great man and I'm willing to kill to get my thing done and you're willing to get get your thing done we might end up just killing each other or I'll kill a lot of your friends who kill a lot of my friends which doesn't help. And so for Raskolnikov the right to overset boundaries is in accordance with your idea. And I think he's close to the truth. I think what one of my students a couple of years ago if you're listening great job buddy is he said there are no great men only great purposes.

And what he pointed out was that most of these great men have not done the things on their own. There are a few, Newton, right? But a lot of them had huge followings massive armies and put themselves at risk. They weren't just sacrificing other people they risked the sacrifice of themselves.

Julius Caesar is one of these. What a perfect world looks like. So real progress is made only if we pursue that. And so I think Thomas what you touched on is that the idea of the man doesn't matter.

It's what he's pointing to. I'm going to liken this back to the Tao a central vision for the future. The reason that America rebelled is because they saw something unfair in the law. The law was not adhering to the way that man should be organized.

It wasn't right. Something was wrong. And then like Hercuse established the law not because he was overthrowing an old one but because he had a group of people that needed rule. Napoleon saw a France in turmoil and he tried to unite France to make it a better place to live or at least in the beginning and then widen his territory.

And so really what these men are doing is not like bringing their own new idea. What they're trying to do is get the world to adhere better to a C.S. was called the Tao. The way that the world should function.

A singular vision of utopia. And at some point if a nation is way off of that utopia if say people are being abused everyone is poor everything is terrible maybe revolution and violence is necessary. Those rules must be broken because they are evil rules. So I would say that it is not the level of your idea that gives you the right to overstep obstacles.

I would say that it is the goodness of your purpose that allows you to move forward and you can overstep obstacles who are truly evil. Things that are bad for the world and bad for man. And so what Raskolnikov did worked with his theory but it doesn't work with that theory. Did the problem broker actually bring more good into the world?

No. It made the world way worse. Did it align with how man should function? No.

Was there a cohesive vision for utopia? No. All of those things are broken. That's how I saw it from.

Yeah. I like it. Except there's also when you think of the ultimate righteous cause had violence but it was violence done on the great man. Yes.

So then in that sense I don't know so then we're talking about the gospel. And this is kind of like the question of the Grand Inquisitor which is probably the closest podcast that is a sister to this one that we're talking about. And that's what the Grand Inquisitor is asking Jesus. He's like you had the power to alleviate all the suffering why did you not?

And so knowing that Dostoevsky is an Eastern Orthodox committed man to the gospel how does that fit into Well I think it fits in in that as I pointed out many of these men were willing to sacrifice their own lives for the good. And like many of them were. Julius Caesar fought at the forefront. He never rested.

He was in the field with his men. And his purpose was not necessarily the one that was going to the most good for man. Maybe Napoleon's wasn't either. Yeah.

But like C.S. Lewis points out there are obviously misunderstandings about what is good for man and good for the world and people will fight for that thing. But they're not fighting for an idea that like I don't know how great we see them will be how well that adheres to the Tao I think. And that is what allows them the ability to step forward.

It's not like they're cojones. It's how great is the pull of that purpose. I used to worry that then you get utopian thinkers who well utopia is perfect therefore much violence is allowed. Correct?

Wouldn't that fit with what you're saying? Well if violence is a piece of that utopia and I think that we see that happen. Like people fight for what they think is a utopian world and maybe they're right maybe they're wrong but I think they're evaluated not on like do they have the right in themselves the question is not do they have the right but does their purpose give them license to do the things that they've done and are the laws that they're breaking evil laws, laws that hurt men or good laws that help men? How much violence would actually need to happen to eliminate all crime in New York City?

Like all crime. Every single crime is a crime. And how many freedoms would need to be curtailed and all these sorts of things. So that's how I've answered it for myself.

I'm fairly comfortable with the answer. I think it's an all right one and I'm glad I'm going to post this for my students after they revise their great man papers. So if you're listening to this and you're a senior ha ha ha joke's on you. But yeah that's kind of the way.

Well we've got two minutes left. I feel bad just flat out spoiling it for everybody. There's so much more in this book. I was actually hoping to get to the point where Dostoevsky himself outlines the idea of the novel in three points in his notes at the end of the book.

Oh really? Sam, are you interested? So the idea of the novel as it's entitled in his notes. Number one, orthodox view what orthodoxy is.

I don't know how that relates. I think that's the question for another time. How does orthodoxy relate to the novel? Number two, there is no happiness in comfort.

Happiness is purchased by suffering. We see this again and again. Sonja the prostitute is, he actually says on the page opposite of what I'm reading it says Svidrigelov is despair the most cynical he's a character you meet in the book that is kind of like the working out of Raskolnikov's theories in like if Raskolnikov has succeeded he'd be this guy. And he's got the like luckiest, cushiest life you can imagine.

Anytime he does something stupid like he just gets a deus ex machinus salvation and gets to like live happy. Sonja is hope the most unrealizable. And so he so Sonja is hope Svidrigelov's despair and Raskolnikov's copy between these two extremes. Number three, man is not born for happiness.

Man earns his happiness and always by suffering. There's no justice there. for knowledge and consciousness of life, i.e. directly felt by body and soul, i.e.

by all life process. So this is clearly a notebook, right? Not all this can make full sense. Is acquired by experience pro and contra, which one must get through one's own by suffering, such as the law of our planet.

But that direct knowledge felt by life process is such a great joy that one can pay for it by years of suffering. So your consciousness of life, your salvation is bought by suffering, by experiencing the process of life. In his image in the novel is expressed the idea of extraordinary pride, arrogance, and contempt for all society. His idea is to take that society into his power.

Despotism is a trait of his. It goes to meet him. So those three ideas. What orthodoxy is?

I don't really know how that connects. He's not very clear. Number two, there's no happiness and comfort. It's purchased by suffering.

And three, man is not born for happiness. Man earns his happiness and always by suffering. There's not a great difference between two and three. Clearly a notebook, right?

One thing I've heard about Russian literature is people say, okay, English literature, I will die for honor. French literature, I will die for love. American literature, I will die for freedom. Russian literature, I will die.

I love it. All right, I hope that was good. That was good. Good stuff.

Well, this has been Classical Stuff You Should Know. You know where to find us. Thanks for listening. Classical Stuff You Should Know.