I’m only about halfway through Crime and Punishment so things may still come together, but I’m having a hard time figuring out how I’m meant to understand Raskolnikov’s behavior.
Not the murder part, that actually makes sense in its own perverse way. But the wild swings in behavior: he’s cold then magnanimous then manic, suddenly without apparent explanation. When he encounters the drunk girl on the street, he begins by flagging down a policeman to protect her from the lecherous passerby, but suddenly changes his mind and decides he has no reason to care about her fate.
Or take the scene where when his sister and mother are confronting him in his apartment. He is scornful of Dunya’s decision to marry Luzhin, implying strongly that it would be akin to prostitution. But when the late Marmeladov’s daughter Sonya, an actual prostitute, comes in he suddenly shows her great compassion.
It feels somewhat stilted, as if the character were changing on the author’s whim. I’ve read John McWhorter’s criticism of Pevear and Volokhonsky’s War and Peace (“like every character has aphasia,” he said recently on Lexicon Valley), but I don’t detect the same stiltedness in their C&P translation. I don’t think my confusion is a translation issue, it seems to me it’s baked into the structure of the story.
It’s been a while since I’ve read Brothers Karamazov, but I recall feeling similarly about many of the characters there as well. Dostoevsky is concerned with the psychic turmoil of the Russian people under the late czarist system. Maybe he’s intending to show them casting about for who they are and how they should behave: vacillating between idealism and despair in a world where everyone is constantly teetering on the brink of poverty or political persecution.