A Literary Mystery

by Julia Buckley
One of the fun things about teaching literature is that I have the opportunity to examine certain texts again and again, and often this gives me insights I never would have discovered with only one reading. It also brings to light certain mysteries within the novels or poems themselves.

For example, I teach the great Russian novel CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, which many of you reading this blog probably read in high school or college. Because I teach the novel, I have developed a deep love for it, and I have examined the moral dilemmas of poor, tormented Raskolnikov from many different angles. What I am about to write below references a crime that happens very early in the text. It's not really a spoiler, since the book's focus is less on the crime and more on the punishment. BUT if you don't want to read any mention about the crime, don't read on.

There are some mysteries within the text which, for me, have never been solved. Some of them are matters of differing translations. For example, one character, Lizaveta, is said in the Oxford version of the text to be pregnant, much to everyone's surprise. Lizaveta, a young and almost simple-minded character, has a kind heart, but lives with her much older and meaner stepsister, Alena Ivanovna. Her pregnancy, it is implied, means that some man has taken advantage of her.

However, in at least two other translations, Lizaveta is described as "always pregnant." This causes a great deal of discussion in our classes, as the second translation implies more that Lizaveta is of easy virtue rather than that one man managed to take advantage of her. But it also poses this problem: if she is "always pregnant," what becomes of all her children? There are no youngsters in the mean flat she shares with her sister. It would be difficult to believe that Lizaveta aborted them, since she is a devout Catholic and regularly reads the Bible with her friend Sonia.

The book never addresses this little mystery, and Lizaveta and her sister are murdered by Raskolnikov early in the novel. That brings us to another interesting mystery, although I think I know the answer. Lizaveta is pregnant when she dies; Dostoevsky goes to the trouble of including this little detail in the painting of her character portrait. But after Lizaveta is murdered, the baby is never mentioned again--not by police, not by Raskolnikov when he speaks of his crime. The child ceases to matter in the scheme of the novel with Lizaveta's death.

I understand that this may well be an issue of time period and of culture. An unborn child would be of little importance, since living women and children barely had any significance in society. In fact, one of Raskolnikov's friends is translating an article called "Woman: Is She a Human Being?" Still, I wonder why Dostoevsky bothered to mention the pregnancy if no one was ever going to make a point of saying that Raskolnikov ended three lives, not two.

Instead, the investigating magistrate says, at one point, "It's a good thing you only killed an old woman." It's an odd cultural contrast--think of Lacy Peterson and the huge focus that the media and society in general put on the fact that she was pregnant when she was murdered. When her husband Scott Peterson was eventually convicted of that murder, he was called a monster for killing his unborn child.

This is a far cry from the way that poor pregnant Lizaveta is treated in CRIME AND PUNISHMENT. If I, in some alternate universe, were able to talk with Dostoevsky about his great work, this would be one of the first issues I'd raise. I have a feeling, though, that his answer would disappoint me.

The Appeal of Psychology in Mystery

posted by Julia Buckley





I teach high school English, and for the last three weeks my students and I have been reading and discussing Dostoevsky's CRIME AND PUNISHMENT. I've always loved this book, ever since I myself read it as a high school senior (and then again in college, and then again as a grad student). The great thing, though, is that most of my students tend to agree with my assessment. They were prepared not to like it; some of them were even determined not to like it. It's big, it's Russian, it's intimidating. They had already checked to see how many pages it had and how small the print was.

They were surprised, therefore, when they realized that this was a book to which they could relate. The protagonist, granted, is a murderer, but he has much in common with seniors in high school: he often feels like an outcast; he regularly feels superior to almost everyone; he is uncertain of his own beliefs, and tormented by his uncertainty; he is continually paranoid; he is even uncertain about his feelings for a member of the opposite sex, and occasionally tormented by that, too. Oh, and there's the fact that he's killed people. That's not something they can relate to, but they can relate to the GUILT.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT is very much about guilt and the way that it works on the psyche. It has recognizable parallels, in fact, to THE SCARLET LETTER, in that the unhappy minister in that novel shares many of the same responses to his crime that Raskolnikov has to his own. The girls are fascinated, not only by what motivates one to commit a serious crime, but how impossible life becomes once that crime is committed, and how inauthentic a human being becomes once he can no longer remember innocence.

I have one student in particular who has never liked English. I've taught her in three different classes, and it's an effort for her to even keep her eyelids open, much less to respond in class or manage to squeeze out more than a paragraph or so of excruciating essay. She's a nice girl with a great smile, but I always assumed that she had simply written off this particular subject.

But I was wrong--because CRIME AND PUNISHMENT has opened her eyes. SHE LOVES THIS BOOK. Her hand shoots in the air with every question. She is thrilled to be able to analyze Raskolnikov, thrilled by the dramatic irony that is the premise of the entire novel, and thrilled to be able to analyze the pyschology of another so fully, so satisfyingly. She sees his division and his torment, and Dostoevsky has given her the privilege of seeing herself as a scholar, as one who can and should analyze the written word, even as she enjoys it.

This sort of epiphany is rare; I only encounter it with one student, every few years. About ten years ago it was a boy who fell in love with HUCKLEBERRY FINN, and asked me, in awe, whether all of the books we read would be this good. Back in the eighties it was a young girl whose life was changed by DAVID COPPERFIELD. The book actually made her eyes shine. She had been getting an F, and she shot to A range because she could not put down that book.

These are the moments that make teachers want to weep, but it ultimately has nothing to do with us or our methods. These moments are brought to us by the great writers of history, and by the thing that makes mystery itself so endlessly compelling: the fascinating world of human psychology.

(image: http://www.garyperlmutter.com/Surreal/images/two_faced.jpg)