However, Marmeladov is only the first out of several characters that cannot find a place to belong to and consequently, are constantly seeking shelter in another type of reality: their inner world. Katerina Ivanovna is another character that is almost defeated by a reality where she had to continuously struggle with poverty and an endless series of humiliations. Just like her husband, Katerina prefers to create a delusional world, which is mostly reflected in her internal life. She is constantly immersed in her past, where she imagines herself as respected and admired by her family and a couple of important figures in the society, among whom a governor. Katerina lives in an inner world of memories and illusions, and she literally refuses to acknowledge their current situation. Marmeladov praises her for the fact that she is very attentive to cleanliness, as she “works day and night, scrubbing and cleaning, and washing the children…” (15), in a desperate attempt to deny the reality. Her irrational attitude at the funeral is explained by fact the only place where she finds solace is in the illusion of her past life. Sonya understands Katerina’s need to believe in a new kind of reality, even if it is the creation of the mind and exists only in her inner world. Katerina decides to spend all the money Raskolnikov offered her to organize an honorable funeral for her dead husband. Moreover, driven by her pride, Katerina “wanted to show all these worthless and nasty tenants that not only that she knew how to live and to entertain, but that she had been brought up in a noble, one might even say aristocratic, colonel’s house” (378). She married Marmeladov out of necessity, as himself admits “because she had nowhere to go” (15), and this decision carried along the constant search for the life she had lost. Finally, the Marmeladovs are under constant danger of literally having no place to live in, since Amalia Ivanovna, the landlady of the house that they inhabit, threatens to evacuate them. This outer reality becomes a mirror of the inner reality, where the characters feel lonely, abandoned and rejected by their society. This is actually what Marmeladov means when he acknowledges that “he has nowhere to go” (15).
However, the Marmeladovs are only the means through which Dostoevsky introduces this idea of “not finding a place in the world” in the context of the novel. The main character, Raskolnikov is constantly confronted with this problem. Having an essentially good soul, Rodion is actually influenced to commit murder by the corrupt society he inhabits. Like the Marmeladovs, Raskolnikov cannot accept his own reality, since it would mean accepting the fact that he is incapable to financially sustain his mother and sister. This is the reason he decided to completely reject the society that would make him ashamed of his impotence and entirely dedicate himself to demonstrating that he can raise above society. That is why he develops the theory of “extraordinary” people that have the right to “step over”, to transgress both human nature and law in the name of an exceptional idea that could benefit a greater number of people. When talking to Porfiry, he explains that “an extraordinary man has the right…to allow his conscience to…step over certain obstacles, only in the event that the fulfillment his idea- perhaps salutary for the whole of mankind – calls for it…” (260). The method through which he wants to prove that he is indeed an “extraordinary” person is committing a murder without losing his temper and mathematical precision. So, since he cannot find a place and a purpose in their society, Raskolnikov decides to focus its efforts in the creation of this new idea which makes him become extremely engaged with his inner self. So Rodion creates in his mind a place where he can find comfort, since he believes that he is above all norms and feels he did not fail in his life. However, unlike the Marmeladovs, Raskolnikov actually wants to translate a world that until now operated only on the level of ideas into an outer reality. This desire to reflect an inner reality into the real world is what gradually makes him finalize his experiment and his murder.
Raskolnikov’s test fails, as his conscience takes over his entire inner world and makes him realize that he is not an “extraordinary” man. This power of the subconscious over the deliberate is expressed through dreams and hallucinations. Raskolnikov’s abject murder is amplified in a dream at the end of Part Three, showing that he is not totally free of his conscience. In the dream, he is coming the murder again, only that this time he has to hit the pawnbroker numerous times, since “she did not stir under his blows, as though she were made of wood” (277). Hence, Raskolnikov has not escaped the fear that created his ideas in the first place: he is scared of being impotent, of having to rely on his mother and sister to survive, being unable to protect them against evil people like Luzhin or Svidrigailov. The outer reality that he is constantly trying to evade is returning to him in the form of a dream, which is actually a manifestation of the inner world. In this context, Raskolnikov’s interior struggle and the actual reality he is confronted with are seen in mirror, one being the reflection of the other. In addition to dreams, he suffers from severe hallucinations as he almost never can distinguish between real objects and fictions created by his mind. This situation occurs especially after his murder, when he is mostly delusional and with high fever. His encounter with Svidrigailov is significant at this level, since Raskolnikov is wondering if their meeting is actually “a continuation of [his] dream” (281). Indeed, having a demonic attitude, Svidrigailov does seem to appear out of Rodion’s tormented conscience. At this point, Dostoevsky makes the line between dream and reality extremely blurry, as if the outer and the inner reality are in perfect mirror and it would not matter which one the character would decide to choose.
Aside from Raskolnikov, the character who is mostly associated with another kind of reality, at the boundary between the subconscious and the supernatural is Svidrigailov. As mentioned before, the fist time he actually appears in the novel, Raskolnikov believes he is a dream, so an embodiment of an inner reality rather than a real person. However, it is obvious that Svidrigailov is indeed real as he had a strong influence on Dunya’s life. As soon as we learn about his history and the conditions under which he married Marfa Petrovna, it becomes clear that Svidrigailov is also a person who rejects society and feels alienated. He is forced into accepting and continuing a marriage with a woman for whom he feels repulsion and disgust because of the social conventions he is facing. Also, he is a proof that the Russian society is hypocritical, as it forces the individual to constrain its attitude and forge its opinions. Hence, more than any other character, Svidrigailov is tormented by this inner world. Just like Raskolnikov, he has mortifying dreams that are an accurate depiction of the outer reality. Before he commits suicide, he dreams about saving a little girl who was beaten by her mother and who eventually loses her innocence. In a memorable description of the girl’s sudden and strange transformation, Dostoevsky focuses on her face, as she starts laughing in an “unchildlike” manner, with an air of “depravity”, until it becomes the “face of a Scarlet woman, the insolent face of a woman for sale, of the French sort” (509). Following the idea that dreams mirror reality, Svidrigailov’s dream can represent the depiction of the highest degree of vice that ruined the Russian society at that time. It suggests that it corrupts even the naïve figure of a child into becoming a prostitute, a person who would sell herself in order to survive. This degradation of the human being as reflected through the mind of Svidrigailov is triggered by the corruption already existent in the society.
Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment is on one level a highly romantic novel, if we look at the role the subconscious, as reflected though dreams. Since they cannot find “somewhere to go” in the deeply hypocritical society, they decide to take refuge in their inner self, to create a new type of reality. The mind becomes the world they view as real, although most of the characters are tormented even through this new perspective.
