Return from the Unknown Country:
A Swedenborgian Key to Dostoevsky’s Crime And Punishment

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

In Crime and Punishment we become intimate with Raskolnikov (from the Russian “raskol” meaning a schism or split). Initially he is presented to us as a man whose unrecognized internal spiritual identity is unwillingly subservient to the notions of grandiosity, self-importance, and irascibility that comprise his external persona. He is a “house divided,” as his name suggests, and while witnessing his internal dialogue we observe a man seeking to validate and fulfill his need for greatness while constantly battling with the annoying internal voice of conscience that accompanies his thoughts and dreams. He is in many ways completely enigmatic, which of course makes him completely and utterly human, despite his perception of himself as “extraordinary.”

What differentiates Raskolnikov from his loyal friend Razumikhin (from the Russian “razum” meaning “reason” or “intelligence”), is the conspicuous pride of self-intelligence which Raskolnikov possesses, (or which more appropriately possesses him), and from which, despite his impoverished conditions and appearance, he considers himself to be the visible and obvious superior of others.

In his essay “On Crime,” Raskolnikov argued the sentiments and ideas of the nihilism²⁰ and materialistic utilitarianism circulating in Dostoevsky’s Russia at the time. The basis of his philosophy was rooted in the perception that some men or “Supermen,” by virtue of the moral superiority granted them by their uncommon genius, are above the ethical and legal constraints by which “ordinary” men must conduct themselves. Such men, the “Napoleons” of their age, are not bound or compelled by facile notions of good and evil. They are rightfully laws unto themselves who inevitably and unavoidably must kill and destroy for the sake of the higher aims that are beyond the capacity of the lesser men beneath them. Raskolnikov considered himself to be such a man, a man who was not afraid to “utter a new word,” a word of his own invention that would no doubt redefine the world and thus provide him with his rightful place in a new order. But the word he is contemplating is a word of self-love uttered by a man for his own deification and is thus inherently opposed to the genuine Logos or Word, being the Divine Human which has already proceeded from God. This harbored “love of self,”²¹ which in the unconscious soul is an act of treason, is the source of his internal conflict that also reveals itself as the motive for his conscious actions. We will see later that despite the intellectual abstractions deployed by Raskolnikov to rationalize his otherwise unthinkable intentions, they arise from the most human sentiments of jealousy and contempt, the visible tip of Raskolnikov’s emotional iceberg which are the derivations of the personal humiliation and embarrassment that lies underneath. This is a fact that Dostoevsky reveals to us on the first page so that we can be prepared to recognize the fundamental truth that it is through the affections and not the intellect that a person needs to be reformed.

Throughout the novel, the city of St. Petersburg itself demonstrates a morbid character, effectively reflecting the internal states of the protagonist himself. The oppressive heat that symbolizes Raskolnikov’s fevers of conscience, the stenches that waft up from the open canals representing the torrents of falsity that commandeer his mind, the ramshackle buildings and impoverished citizens, all emulate his internal states with a surreal quality purposely suggesting something quite other-worldly. Raskolnikov’s cupboard sized “garret” or small attic room is described as a tomb. Coincidentally, Swedenborg describes people in the spiritual world who live in “dark attics” as those who live in fear about their fate and do not trust in the Lord’s providence,²² which is an applicable description of our protagonist. It is clear that Dostoevsky’s specific decisions for settings did not come from sources that he could not have known, but we can entertain the suggestion that the visions from the Spiritual World that Swedenborg describes are provided to be correspondential representations and conditions of spiritual states common to all humans and are therefore universal. Thus the setting, according to Dostoevsky’s rather powerful intuition about such correspondences, easily subliminally conveys something similar to what Swedenborg actually saw.

Raskolnikov is a handsome and able young man broken by poverty and forced to abandon his studies at the university due to his inability or unwillingness to continue sustaining himself through the lessons and translation work that he did. We might be tempted to extend sympathy toward him on account of his circumstances, but we find that Raskolnikov, in contrast to his friend Razumikhin, refuses to accept work available to him that he comes to consider as beneath him. Instead, he prefers to allow himself to sink into a self-induced despair and forced idleness that inevitably addles his mind toward practical matters. After a month of personal isolation, detached from the world by his self-exile, Raskolnikov is unwittingly but completely absorbed in the act of peering into the mental world of his eternity within his own mind and is consequently forced to confront what he finds there. We meet him as he is emerging from his tomb-like, dingy, attic abode scurrying down the stairs trying to avoid the embarassment of being confronted by his landlady to whom he is hopelessly in debt, whilst his mind is engaged in the exercise of rehearsing an idea that has recently obsessed him, the idea of killing another person.

In the throes of his poverty as a student Raskolnikov had come into contact with an old woman, Alonya Ivanova, a pawnbroker. In the act of failing to overvalue the pledges that Raskolnikov had brought to her in order to raise money, the old woman stirs up Raskolnikov’s latent humiliation in a feeling of revulsion and contempt for what he rationalizes as the real causes of his situation, which are nonetheless external effects. His bitterness over being unable to redeem himself with his “trinkets” is representative of the fact that our own “good” has no value. Raskolnikov’s reaction to this fact is to personify the old woman as the source of his difficulties, a parasite, a louse, and the worst form of miser whose very occupation oppresses vulnerable people and keeps them in their poverty. But because he is such an external man, the old pawnbroker is, in fact and effect, a personification of the condition of Raskolnikov’s own spiritual affection for Truth. He argues from his personal contempt arising from feelings of embarrassment that ridding the world of such people would not only be a service to humanity in general, but that robbing her of her hoarded impotent riches would also revitalize him in particular to serve greater aims. Dostoevsky demonstrates this hypocrisy in Raskolnikov’s confrontation with Luzhin²³, a character who represents Raskolnikov’s pride, or more acurately what Swedenborg refers to as “love of dominion.”²⁴ Luzhin’s purpose is to effectively demonstate Raskolnikov’s “love of dominion,” a derivative of self-love in its malicious form which Luzhin reveals in his soliloquy²⁵ as the basis of his designs toward Raskolnikov’s sister, a character who represents Raskolnikov’s moral integity. “Luzhin” is derived from the Russian word “Luzha,” meaning “puddle,” an image in the original language which delivers the contradiction between reflections of depth (of character) despite the shallowness beneath, a quite adequate description of the hellish pride arising from love of dominion. Raskolnikov’s rather strange betrothal to his landlady’s daughter is synonymous²⁶ with Luzhin’s pursuit of his sister, and has no other purpose than to expose Luzhin as a externalization of Raskolnikov’s pride—the child of contempt and embarrasment, two attributes which successively define Luzhin throughout the novel, ultimately leading to his ruin and departure through Raskolnikov’s defense of Sofya, who will later become Raskolnikov’s revitalized spiritual affection for truth.

Before the murders, from his idea of himself as a Superman, Raskolnikov is in fact uniquely disposed to regard a simple and hellish desire for revenge as a noble cause, and the obsession, born out of personal affront, insinuates itself within him to the exclusion of everything else. Dostoevsky shows us, in accord with what Swedenborg describes of the spirits in hell, that these manifestations of love of self²⁷ are not so easily constrained and do become uncontrollable obsessions in complete accord with the inherent maliciousness of that love.

All that remains is for Raskolnikov to carry out his intention, yet what he deems in his mind as a purposed resolution is also characterized as a compulsion that he cannot rally himself to resist, despite the pangs of conscience that torment him. It is as if he is drawn, not by ideological consistency and inflexibility in action, but rather, as Swedenborg describes it, by a leash or a cord into his hatred and lusts.²⁸ To eliminate any sympathy that we might feel for Rasklolnikov as a victim of forces that are outside of his control, Dostoevsky later shows us that Raskolnikov’s resolution or abandonment to follow his obsession is the cause of his abandoning his studies and the other aspects of his external poverty, not the reverse.²⁹

Nevertheless, the Divine providence intervenes in both the immediate and the future spheres. Before actually committing his crime, Raskolnikov, for the first time in his life we are told, enters a tavern and is introduced to a failed and pathetic drunkard named Marmeladov who shares Raskolnikov’s irresistible need to pamper and intoxicate himself in the same manner as Raskolnikov nurses on his obsession. (The name “Marmeladov” is derived from the Russian “Mamelad” meaning “Jam”). Marmeladov represents Raskolnikov’s frustrated desire for unmerited redemption, what Swedenborg describes as a misguided hope that spiritual life can be entered into without means, and from which arises an intoxicated belief that faith alone³⁰ without genuine charity can save anyone. Both men, having abandoned their stations, are tortured internally by their misalignments. Marmeladov desperately longs for the affection of his border-line abusive wife Katerina, who represents the affective side or external character of Raskolnikov’s proprium.³¹ The marriage between Marmeladov and his wife represents the infernal conjunction between the misguided false hope for unmediated mercy repleat with its dependence on salvation by faith alone, and the latent grandiosity, schismatic alterations, and vanity which demands it. Their impoverished children serve to provide numerous superficial reflections of Raskolnikov’s resultant internal states, his own neglected natural thoughts and affections. In an inexplicable act of what appears as kindness, Raskolnikov assists Marmeladov to return home and meets his family. By this encounter with himself, the soon to be murderer establishes a connection with Marmeladov’s daughter “Sofya,” a character who represents the unrecognized capacity for heavenly affections within him. Sofya has been pushed into prostitution by her step-mother in order to preserve the family from the threat of imminent starvation brought about by her father’s failure to rise above the worthlessness imposed upon him by his wife for failing to satisfy her expectation of being restored to the “nobility” that she insanely believes she belongs to. The grandiosity and pomposity of Marmeladov’s wife stands as an immediate affective reflection of Raskolnikov’s own conception of himself, presented by the character of a woman who manifests externally the burning lusts of self-love and revenge that Raskolnikov internalizes. Marmeladov’s wife has no difficulty in compelling the daughter of her husband, whom she also brutalizes along with her children, into prostitution. Sofya or Sophia, as her name signifies, represents the “internal affection for wisdom,” a desire to vitalize truth that is the essence of the divine feminine and the path through the affections to a genuine redemption. She is meek and easily embarrassed, but she maintains a strong religious faith and in this sense, her prostitution, because it is borne from a love of her family, is an act of charity. Contrasting Sofya to her stepmother (Raskolnikov’s externalized proprium) whose life is based on illusions of nobility and the resulting inevitable series of insufferable disappointments that only serve to entrench her insanity, Dostoevsky conforms with Swedenborg in demonstrating that the love of self will always prostitute heavenly affections for truth, debasing them and thereby converting what is good and true into its opposite to feed vain imaginings.³²

Raskolnikov is disgusted at the family’s treatment of their daughter, which reveals that although he is unable to recognize reflections of his own impoverished internal states, there is a burgeoning hope for him that will be actualize in the future. Before leaving, Raskolnikov deposits the little money that he has on a windowsill, establishing himself as a benefactor and kind person in complete contrast to what is actually transpiring inside him. However, immediately upon leaving the household he regrets his act, castigating himself for giving in to such a weak impulse. Despite the stirrings of his internal man he still considers goodness to be weak, which he must do if he is to muster the strength to do evil.

But the Divine providence intervenes by another encounter. While walking in the avenue, absorbed with his intention to murder, Raskolnikov encounters a young girl who appears drunk. By the way she has been apparently dressed by somebody else, he easily surmises that she has been raped. He notices also that she is being stalked by a man who Raskolnikov presumes is intending to take further advantage of the girl’s weakened condition. In a fit of indignation, inexplicable for a would-be murderer, he interposes himself to protect the girl and assaults the stalker which draws the attention of a passing policeman. The raped girl represents Raskolnikov’s treatment of his own spiritual affections and shows Sofya’s “consent” to being prostituted for what it really is. He is the one who has raped his innocence, and in effect the “stalker” is none other than himself. He calls the stalker a “Svidrigaďlov,”³³ identifying the lurking presence of the darkest side of his internal proprium which has now come to the surface and must soon be confronted. Initially he tries to intervene on behalf of the girl and calls the assistance of the police, the very people who he will later do everything to avoid. The police represent “Judgment” and the scene externally represents the state of temptation that Raskolnikov is suffering. But the opportunity is lost when Raskolnikov’s prevailing self-love resurfaces and he suddenly reverses himself, telling the policeman that the girl’s fate is not his affair and that he doesn’t care what happens to her (what remains of his own intoxicated and abused spiritual innocence) and walks away.³⁴

Raskolnikov decides that he will not visit his old friend Razumikhin, who represents “Reason,” until after he has committed his murder, but providence intervenes again, providing him with a dream in which he recalls vividly a childhood experience of witnessing an “old mare” harnessed to a wagon full of jeering peasants that is whipped to death by the driver out of sheer malice for the sport of the onlookers. The peasants, representing the ignorant cacophony of evil spirits in Raskolnikov’s own head, cheer on the cruelty, eventually calling for an axe to “finish her off.”³⁵ As he did as a child, in the dream Raskolnikov is stirred to compassion for the suffering of the old mare. He “. . . put his arms round her bleeding dead head and kissed it, kissed the eyes and kissed the lips . . .”³⁶ The dream, which arises from a long-forgotten event of his childhood, is an effort by heavenly influences acting on his deepest internal affections to employ the remains of heavenly states residual from childhood that, according to Swedenborg, are used by the angels to assist in a person’s redemption.³⁷ Raskolnikov easily identifies the “old mare” in his dream as Alonya Ivanova, his potential victim. Swedenborg revels that a “horse” is a correspondential representation of the intellect or the understanding of truth, and that a female horse or a mare is the affection for truth.³⁸ For a moment Raskolnikov is horrified at his obsession to kill the old woman, to murder what remains of his affection for truth or more precisely, what he had allowed it to become. He temporarily renounces his intention. Stirred by compassion and momentarily humbled he actually prays; “Lord,” he prayed, “show me my path—I renounce that accursed . . . dream of mine.”³⁹ But we are not sure who he is calling “Lord” or which dream he is renouncing. Is it the fantasy of a killing another that he has justified in his heart as a proof of his own greatness, or is he renouncing the feeling of contempt that he felt for those who sought the death of an innocent animal for their amusement as weakness in himself?

Raskolnikov does not know who the “Lord” is. In fact, he has made a “god” of himself, enmeshed in the vanity of a Nebuchadnezzar, worshiping his own image and is in fact praying to no one other than himself, although he was incapable of knowing it. Dostoevsky demonstrates this immediately when Raskolnikov, wandering off his regular path coincidentally encounters Lizaveta, the innocent and subservient sister of the old pawnbroker. He secretly overhears her in the marketplace agreeing to attend a meeting the following evening at a precise time and assumes instantly that he has been “provided” with the direct knowledge of an opportunity (or a temptation) to commit his crime when the conditions necessary for his plan to succeed would be satisfied. This occurs immediately after his “prayer” to be shown his path. To conclude that God himself is sanctioning his intention to commit murder is a symptom of his burgeoning insanity rooted in his love of self, but will he act on it? Dostoevsky informs us how this circumstance, which was “to exert the gravest and most decisive influence on his whole destiny”⁴⁰, later haunted Raskolnikov, for the question at the heart of this coincidence is “Who is God?” Dostoevsky later espouses in “The Possessed”, “. . . if there is no God then I am God.”⁴¹ Swedenborg clearly indicates that love of self has no bounds and, unbridled, would assume to rule over the Divine itself.⁴²

Still in conflict over his plans, Raskolnikov starts to see that he is guided by “coincidences and peculiar influences” which are the characteristics not of fate but rather of the operation of reality in the World of Spirits. He recalls his instant revulsion toward the old woman on his first encounter with her after pawning his father’s watch given to him by his mother and a ring which was a gift from his sister, items which represent respectively his mortality and his eternity. After his first encounter with the old woman, he had gone to a little café and overheard another student conversing with a military officer at the table beside him. The “student” coincidentally was speaking contemptuously about the same “old woman” and ventured the opinion to the “officer” that all the pawnbrokers money, if it was given to those in real need, would justify her being killed. This conversation, an externalization of his own thoughts, overheard between strangers, merely echoes the particular idea already introduced into Raskolnikov’s molten state of revulsion which formed the nucleus of his crystallizing obsession in the ensuing month.

As the story progresses, we see that “coincidences and peculiar influences” of the World of Spirits are what in fact drive the progression of events. But as was said, these events, as with the characters themselves and the relationships between them, are correspondences and representations of Raskolnikov’s internal states. Such are the realities of the World of Sprits, as Swedenborg makes clear in his discussion of the interaction and correspondence between interior states and external conditions and events.

Raskolnikov, now confirmed in his internal capacity for intending evil as good, equipped with rationalized falsity as a motive, and provided, as if by what he misconstrues as fate, with an open opportunity to fulfill his obsession, has crossed the line and mobilizes his intent. He acts, not with a “thirst for social justice, a terrible ideological consistency or inflexibility in action” but rather, as Swedenborg describes a person confirmed in evil, as one who is drawn by his evil loves as if by a rope. Taking advantage of all his planning, he arms himself with an axe taken from his landlady’s shed and presents himself at the pawnbroker’s door when he knows the innocent and subservient Lizaveta will not be there. He finds the old woman alone and murders her with numerous blows, revealing the intensity of his malice. He begins searching for the valuables in the back room of the squalid apartment and fills his pockets with all that he can find, in his panic leaving behind a vast sum of money that he did not know existed. Footsteps in the outer room shock him, and to his horror he finds Lizaveta has returned and is standing stupefied with horror over the body of her murdered sister. Raskolnikov murders her with one blow as the poor woman whimpers, without even trying to protect herself. Here Dostoevsky provides a powerful representation of just how easily spiritual innocence can be extinguished. At that moment Raskolnikov realizes that the outer door had not been locked and in fact had been open all the time, a fact which later appears in the trial to demonstrate his state of mind. By means of the open door, Dostoevsky shows us clearly, as Swedenborg frequently reveals, that evil is always done in the open. In these two murders, one calculated and the other necessitated by the first, we see clearly that a person who murders his spiritual affection for truth, no matter how miserly or usurious it may have become in the service of self-love, will also simultaneously murder his Lizaveta, his ignorant and subservient spiritual innocence and her unborn child.⁴³ Raskolnikov is in effect responsible for three murders and is unaware of the third, a fact that most commentators have omitted. By murdering his spiritual affection for truth and his spiritual innocence he also murdered its unborn potential.

In a sort of blankness, Raskolnikov takes to washing the blood from his hands and the axe. The instinct to flee arises when suddenly he hears the voices of men ascending the stairs to the apartment. He locks the door, trapping himself inside the room with the bodies of the two murdered women, or in effect sealing the crime within himself, revealing that spiritually what is without is also within. Raskolnikov, in confirming his intention to dispose of what remained of his affection for truth in favour of the falsity necessary to serve his own grandiosity, had already murdered his own innocence. So it was that he would also unavoidably murder the innocent Lizaveta (and her unborn child), and in that singular un-contemplated act, all his rationalizations and intent to demonstrate to himself as belonging to a superior caste of men, evaporate like a mirage. The whole enterprise—with its internal justifications and practical benefits—is an instant and complete failure.

Two men bang on the door while Raskolnikov is trapped inside. Perceiving the oddity that no one answers when the door is locked from the inside they leave together to get help. Raskolnikov is provided with a chance to escape. He descends the staircase and ducks into a vacant apartment on a lower floor just in time in order to avoid detection. The similarity of this image to the manner in which we see Raskolnikov leaving his own garret trying to avoid detection by his landlady, introduces a parallel between his landlady and the old woman whom he kills with his landlady’s axe. He manages to steal away from the building, slipping past the eyes of anyone who might have seen him. Having cleaned the axe in the apartment, he returns it secretly to its place and seeks refuge in his garret. His mind is completely overwhelmed and tortured in the aftermath of his act, obsessing over details that he might have already forgotten, as he tries to determine to himself if there is any way he might have been recognized or left some clue as to his identity. Swedenborg affirms that the punishment is inherent in the crime, and in his panic and anxiety Raskolnikov cannot help but exclaim: “Surely it isn’t beginning already! Surely it isn’t my punishment coming upon me? It is!”,⁴⁴ as if on some level he intuitively knows that what he has done, quite apart from the hideousness of the crime itself, was an act of treason in his own soul and that the resulting internal punishment and the crime itself are now inseparable.

Raskolnikov passes out and is awakened the next morning by the porter in his building who delivers him a summons to appear at the police station. Afraid and nervous, he attends (too late) only to find out that the summons was issued on the basis of a complaint made by his landlady for the money that he owes her, in the form of a demand that has passed into other hands. The personal debt that he hoped to absolve himself of by his crime has now come back in an even fuller force and effect. The coincidence of the arrival of this summons, the day after his murders, leaves no doubt that Raskolnikov’s actions in favour of himself have initiated the unbridling—by an external authority—of the full consequences (that supersede the mild pangs of conscience initiated by his landlady’s petty indignities) that can exert a forced judgment necessary for the ordering of his external man. Here is an opportunity to strengthen his resolve, to negate his guilty conscience and blot out the memory and the consequence of what he has done, to plead for himself as a Marmeladov that he tries to do. In the police station he musters his entire ability to pass himself off as a victim, but overhears details of the murders that are being discussed and uncontrollably faints. In his paranoia he can’t help imagining that the police actually suspect him, and he hurries home to hide the stolen property, choosing to put all the proceeds from his crime, including a unopened purse that contained a quantity of banknotes that could have more than paid his debt, under a large stone in a courtyard, symbolically trying to suppress his conscience.

Raskolnikov visits his friend Razumikhin (Reason) who sees immediately that he is ill. It is not mere irony that Raskolnikov’s efforts to return to some semblance of normal mental activity, represented by his re-acquaintance with Razumikhin, is immediately cut short when he is presented with the opportunity to engage himself through his friend’s offer to earn money, translating from the German a pamphlet on the contemporary subject, “Is woman a human being?” Presented with this prospect, Raskolnikov instantly and silently flees from his friend, declining the work offered to him. He needs the work and the money, but it is too late. If he had gone to his friend before his murders, in short, if he had listened to reason, he would have been provided with a justification against killing a woman that he reasoned was not human, and thereby could have been empowered to overcome his temptation, if not by some internal change of heart, then at least by some external persuasion. But if abandoned reason cannot save when the affections are dedicated to evil, Dostoevsky shows that reason— confronted with the irrepressible truth—will be unable to avoid the falsity of the initial justification. In the last sentence of Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell is the closing revelation that “. . . all truth is in light.”⁴⁵

Raskolnikov is instantly mortified as indications of his crime, so insinuated within him, become so ubiquitous that he is compelled to research it and relive it as an entity that is enmeshed with his identity. Unwilling to respond to his friend’s current suggestions for his welfare, Raskolnikov finds himself walking “for some unknown reason”⁴⁶ in the middle of the street on a bridge. He is only brought back into consciousness by a lash from a coachman’s whip administered to prevent him from being trampled. He in effect is saved by the lash of whip, an external representation of the internal punishment that is to follow, but here Dostoevsky is also providing us with a foreshadowing of how Marmeladov—Raskolnikov’s frustrated desire for unmerited redemption, a desire to enter into spiritual life by faith alone without means—must die before any real reformation of his character necessary for regeneration can occur. After the incident, a smartly dressed woman accompanied by her daughter, taking Raskolnikov to be an impoverished beggar, gives him some money. Their act, which inversely mimics the charitable impulse that Raskolnikov had succumbed to when he left the little money that he had with the Marmeladov’s, reveals him to be essentially the same as those over whom he had previously felt so superior. He throws the coin into the river.

Raskolnikov returns home and dreams vividly that IIya Petrovich— the explosive police detective who humiliated him that morning on account of his landlady’s complaint—had come to the boarding house and was savagely beating the landlady. By means of Raskolnikov’s dream, Dostoevsky again reveals Raskolnikov’s unaltered latent selfishness and overpowering unconscious desire for revenge and blame, inseparable from a love of self, which was the real motive for his crime. In the depths of his mind, his landlady’s incessant and humiliating demands for payment lay at the root of the motive to kill the pawnbroker, another old woman, a substitute for the landlady herself. Despite his moral musings about Supermen, the unrecognized motive for his act was simply a need to be liberated from the humiliation and limitations caused by his debts. So Dostoevsky demonstrates clearly that Raskolnikov, while fooling himself that he is engaged in some experiment of superiority is actually only reacting to exaggerated feelings of personal worthlessness, in the worst possible way, that he won’t or can’t admit to himself; for if he had that capacity he might have prevented himself from being consumed by his obsession and thereby avoided his extreme fate in the first place.

Raskolnikov eventually wakes up in his tomb-like room to find himself surrounded by his landlady, her servant, Razumikhin and a doctor who is a friend of Razumikhin, unaware that they had been taking care of him. He has been unconscious and delirious for four days, the same number of days that Lazarus lay dead before his resurrection.⁴⁷ Raskolnikov’s re-enactment of Lazarus’ rising from the dead within the tomb of his small garret, represents what Swedenborg describes in the first state of man after death as the period of resuscitation, during which angels are attendant with the spirit to bring him into the spiritual world.⁴⁸

According to Swedenborg, there are three successive stages or states that occur after death.

There are three states that man passes through after death before he comes into either heaven or hell. The first state is the state of his exteriors, the second state the state of his interiors, and the third his state of preparation. These states man passes through in the World of Spirits.⁴⁹

Not coincidentally, references to Lazarus occur in Crime and Punishment three times. Each occurrence, in the context of the events and the progression of the story, corresponds to each of the successive states that Swedenborg describes as occurring in the World of Spirits⁵⁰ to facilitate the passage into either Heaven or Hell.

Raskolnikov, owing to the total failure of his rational and affective faculties, is no longer capable of living consciously or amending his life in the material world of natural cause and effect. He is no longer able to be “bound for the sake of completeness and order to live only in this life,” as Svidrigaďlov later puts it. In effect, the superman that Raskolnikov had created died when he confirmed himself in the cause of his evils and committed his murders. What remains is his spiritual opportunity to renounce their effects. The man who is now engaged and absorbed in the mental world of his eternity, having regained consciousness after his symbolic interment for four days, has entered into a of life akin to existence in the World of Spirits, as described by Swedenborg, where the possibility of amending his life, if at all possible, can be given to him. Ironically, in retrospect it is Svidrigaďlov,⁵¹ the character representing Raskolnikov’s proprium who, while musing about the eternity that he has likely made for himself, provides the explanation to Raskolnikov as to what had transpired with him. Speaking with Raskolnikov about his encounter with the ghost of his murdered wife, Svidrigaďlov speculates, referring to ghosts:

A man in health has, of course, no reason to see them, because he is above all a man of this earth and is bound for the sake of completeness and order to live only in this life. But as soon as one is ill, as soon as the normal earthly order of the organism is broken, one begins to realize the possibility of another world; and the more seriously ill one is, the closer becomes one’s contact with that other world, so that as soon as the man dies he steps straight into that world.⁵²

“That World” is where the beneficial and necessary punishment that Raskolnikov would not otherwise accept will actually begin, so that he can experience in full that anguished state of being where the infernal affections that he allowed to incubate in his consciousnesses, and so permitted to become the guiding impulses which commandeered and directed his life, were actually leading him.

In the simplistic duality of men as spiritual wheat or tares, sheep or goats, saved or unsaved; where the unrepentant sinner is eschewed by God for being no better than his sin, it is clear that Raskolnikov is an unregenerate reprobate who is deserving of an eternity of torment in Hell. But Dostoevsky, clearly influenced by Swedenborg, does not lead us down that road, which is a reflection of the trap that Raskolnikov had led himself into in his attempt to separate the world into two classes of men. Despite the unquestionable depravity of his actions, Raskolnikov is allowed to suffer punishment, not as a feature of a retributive damnation but out of mercy, a mediated mercy that acts not for the validation of misguided ideas or as a temporary reprieve from immediate difficulties, but for the hope of his future regeneration, his eternal welfare. The punishment, even in the context of the living hell that Raskolnikov experiences, is nevertheless merciful because it respects his freedom, for as Swedenborg states: “The Lord withdraws no one from their hell unless they see that they are in hell and wish to be led out.”⁵³

Whereas in the portion of the novel leading up to the crime, Raskolnikov is isolated and cut-off from contact with others—due largely to his irascible character and crazed obsession—very quickly after the crime we are introduced to a parade of other characters who enter or invade Raskolnikov’s life in rapid succession to facilitate him or tempt him on the path that is being unfolded for his redemption, if he will take it.

As the World of Spirits is a place where outward appearances reflect internal realities, it is also a place where a person or a spirit, upon being presented with the appearance of their life, can also confront their internal realities. At first, Raskolnikov eschews the presence of others who mean him well, including his mother and sister who arrive from the provinces, declining their assistance and wishing to be left alone. We can see further a resemblance to the description Swedenborg provides of angels attending to newly arrived spirits, until the spirit, being of dissimilar affection, longs to be removed from them.⁵⁴

Raskolnikov takes to the streets eventually entering a café, only to encounter Zametov,⁵⁵ whose presence in the same café indicates that the truth is irrepressable. In the crazed conversation with the detective, Raskolnikov’s guilt bubbles out of him and he reveals many of the details of the crime that he can’t help reliving, but stops short of confessing. Leaving the café to escape his friend Razumikhin who is now looking for him, he contemplates killing himself until he witnesses a young woman hurl herself off the bridge into the canal at the very place he is standing. The woman is easily saved and Raskolnikov is thwarted in his idea of “making an end of it all.” As in all the coincidences, Dostoevsky makes use of parallel realities of internal and external experiences that characterize the World of Spirits, while all the time showing that Raskolnikov is no longer aware or able to think about “coincidences and peculiar influences” affecting his life, simply because he is no longer able to believe in his superior destiny. Despite his internal torment, he is slowly coming into an experience of the responsibility of spiritual freedom, the way it should be, for as Swedenborg reveals, “Everything that happens which is called accidental and is ascribed to chance or fortune, is of Providence. But the Divine Providence operates invisibly and incomprehensibly, in order that people may be in freedom to ascribe an event either to Providence or to chance.”⁵⁶

Thereafter, while still eschewing the company of others, he witnesses a crowd gathered in the street only to discover that the drunken Marmeladov has been trampled by a carriage in an accident that parallels what almost happened to Raskolnikov himself. The weak and pathetic Marmeladov, who represents the false hope of salvation by faith alone or unmediated mercy, is killed by horses hoofs and Raskolnikov, through this event, is thrust back into contact with the family to confront his states of grandiosity, misery, and internal oppression.

Dressed in the new clothes provided for him by the renewed presence of abiding reason in the person of Razumikhin and which represent the first state after death pertaining to the ordering of externals, he cannot resist leaving money for the widow and orphans of Marmeladov and gives twenty rubles from the money given to him by his mother, with promises of future support. Despite his own poverty this is the first act of genuine magnanimity he has undertaken and represents his emerging willingness to take responsibility for himself. He later apologizes to his mother, not for having wasted money on worthless people as before, but for being overly generous with property that was not his to give.

Through these subtle differences in behavior Dostoevsky reveals Swedenborg’s principle that a person’s spiritual identity is alive or dead according to the capacity for genuine charity. By means of the death of Marmeladov (faith alone), Raskolnikov is reunited with Sofya who represents Raskolnikov’s internal affection for truth and with whom he is now subtly and weakly able to form a bond. Raskolnikov is being prepared for entry into the second state where he can begin the work of ordering his internal life. For this Raskolnikov needs Sofya, whom he still undervalues, equating her as a sinner equal to himself, not yet realizing that the consequences she suffers are for the sake of others, while his suffering has been brought about solely by himself. He visits her and asks her to read the story of Lazarus to him, only to find out that the Bible Sofya reads from was a gift from her friend Lizaveta. Lizaveta, the woman representing Raskolnikov’s own ignorant spiritual innocence and its unborn potential that he had killed, was now repaying him by returning as a witness for the opportunity of his own restoration, in the company of another woman representing his prostituted affection for truth.

Raskolnikov is moved to confess but is unable to overcome his fear of the consequences. He learns that the police suspect him, not merely for reason of material evidence, of which there is little, but rather because his uncontrollable behavior openly reveals his guilt. In an informal interview, Porfiry Petrovich, the chief magistrate in the case and a relative of Razumikhin, lures Raskolnikov to share his views as to whether some men might have the right to kill under certain circumstances, a subject Raskolnikov wishes to avoid. To his astonishment, the magistrate produces a copy of Raskolnikov’s article “On Crime,” stating that he had read it with great interest. Up to this point Raskolinikov was unaware that his article had even been published, but again, by a guided series of coincidences, more evidence from his own hand, including his own words, surfaces to incriminate him. There is a clear parallel to this event and Swedenborg’s description of how papers and journals appear in the World of Spirits to indict those who refuse to admit their wrongdoings, for everything is preserved in the memory and in the Spiritual World a person’s memory can be read as if it was a book written in a man’s own hand. In the same interview, the magistrate quite casually asks Raskolnikov if he believes in Lazarus rising from the dead. The second state, which deals with the ordering of his internals, is unfolding and demanding a confession. Raskolnikov is later accosted by a stranger in the street who calls him a “Murderer” and retires to his garret where he is tormented by a nightmare in which he is trying to kill the old woman again while she laughs at him, a dream that also parallels Swedenborg’s description from the World of Spirits of a murder victim appearing to accuse his murderer. He wakes to find a stranger in his room.

The stranger is Svidrigaďlov, a depraved man from Raskolnikov’s home town and his sister’s former employer and illicit suitor who confesses to marrying his recently deceased wife for money. While denying the responsibility for his wife’s recent drowning in her country bathhouse, he is nevertheless haunted in person by her ghost, a mirror of Raskolnikov’s visitations by Alyona Ivanova in his dreams which unites the identity of the two men. Svidrigaďlov had come to Petersburg in pursuit of Raskolnikov’s sister and coincidentally, unknown to anyone, he is lodging in the same house where Sofya lives in the adjacent room. The juxtaposition of Svidrigaďlov and Sofya is in effect to show how the proprium of a person and a spiritual affection for truth are counterposed.

Earlier in his internal dialogue, Raskolnikov had speculated how his position as a condemned man was akin to living on “some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he’d only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once! Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!”⁵⁷

In a later conversation with Svidrigaďlov, to whom everything is permitted, Raskolnikov says he doesn’t believe in eternity or an afterlife. Svidrigaďlov then ponders why we think eternity must be vast. “Instead of all that, what if its one little room, like a bath house in the country, black and grimy and spiders in every corner, and that’s all eternity is?”⁵⁸ When an anguished Raskolnikov asks Svidrigaďlov why it is that he can’t imagine anything more just, Svidrigaďlov replies in a tacit admission of his culpability for his wife’s death: “Juster?”, And how can we tell, perhaps that is just, and do you know it’s what I would certainly have made it?”⁵⁹

Suddenly, Raskolnikov’s willingness to remain for a thousand years on a narrow ledge simply in order to live pales when confronted with the idea that all of eternity could be nothing more than a bathhouse full of spiders that he also had made for himself. Svidrigaďlov represents the darkest side of Raskolnikov’s proprium, cavalier towards everything, and conscienceless. A fellow murderer who is cavalier about his crimes, he torments Raskolnikov with the effect of subtly demonstrating to him his fate, should he remain what he is and numb himself to the pangs of his own conscience, eschewing the path of redemption. Raskolnikov’s anguish suggests he believes in justice, provoking Svidrigaďlov to torment him further by implying in his response that anyone who renounces good and evil has no right to ask for justice.

Porfiry Petrovich continues his torment of Raskolnikov, eventually revealing to him that the police more than suspect him and that it is only a matter of time before the evidence necessary to arrest and convict him will appear. Judgment, representing the coming to the light of all truth, is imminent. Raskolnikov is urged to confess in order that sentencing will go lighter for him and thereby avoid the full weight of the law, which could prescribe his own death. In order to obtain a beneficial judgment, Raskolnikov must first concede to justice, to have affection for the truth in relation to what is good. For this he intuitively knows that he needs Sofya, and he goes to her. But faced with the reality of what a true encounter with himself in the form of a confession would mean to him, “a sort of bitter hatred for Sofya passed through his heart.”⁶⁰ Nevertheless he persists and his hatred vanishes. He confesses to her.

“Good God!” broke in an awful wail from her bosom. … “What have you done—what have you done to yourself?” she said in despair, and, jumping up, she flung herself on his neck, threw her arms round him, and held him tightly . . .⁶¹

And so, for the first time, even as a result of his crime and his punishment, Raskolnikov discovers that judgment united with justice, or truth combined with an affection for truth brings life, and life is love that had been waiting for him, although he was still incapable of it and still longs to justify himself without the judgment of the truth upon him.

“Well, what am I to do now?” he asked, suddenly raising his head and looking at her with a face hideously distorted by despair. “What are you to do?” she cried, jumping up, and her eyes that had been full of tears suddenly began to shine. “Stand up!” (She seized him by the shoulder, he got up, looking at her almost bewildered.) “Go at once, this very minute, stand at the cross-roads, bow down, first kiss the earth which you have defiled and then bow down to all the world and say to all men aloud, ‘I am a murderer!’ Then God will send you life again. Will you go, will you go?” she asked him, trembling all over, snatching his two hands, squeezing them tight in hers and gazing at him with eyes full of fire.⁶²

Sofya, Raskolnikov’s prostituted affection for truth, shy and abused, is now a burning passion to be united with the word of truth. Not the “new word” that flows from a grandiose superman, but the word of truth that faces up to the judgment necessary for true justice.

Simultaneously Svidrigaďlov is listening to Raskolnikov’s confession through the wall in the adjacent room, and goes to Raskolnikov’s sister in an attempt to use information he has procured regarding her brother’s guilt, promising to save him as a means of blackmailing her into loving him. Raskolnikov’s sister is a strong, developed character who, by her family affiliation with her brother, as was said, represents Raskolnikov’s related but detached moral integrity. The attempt by the proprium—as represented by the character of Svidrigaďlov—to enslave moral integrity by desperate and scurrilous means to validate itself, is met with resistance, which incites Svidrigaďlov to attempt to rape what he cannot corral. Dunya resists and fires two missed shots from a revolver in order to protect herself. Svidrigaďlov retires, and realizing that the destructive designs that sustain his life are now irreversibly thwarted, shortly afterward kills himself with the same revolver in a description that can only be said to be worthy of how the “old man” dies. With the suicide of Svidrigaďlov, almost simultaneously as expected, Katarina—Sofya’s crazed and borderline step-mother who externally represents Raskolnikov’s exaggerated internal grandiosity and the affective side of his proprium—finally succumbs to her illness, and after a fit of madness parading in the streets, also dies. These two deaths, preceded and made possible by the death of Marmeladov, and followed by the death of Raskolnikov’s mother, although horrible and tragic in their aspects, represent the impending death of the “old man,” both in the internal and the external hold that they maintained over Raskolnikov’s spiritual identity; as Swedenborg indicates, “thus the old man must needs die, before the new man can be conceived.”⁶³

Raskolnikov confesses his guilt to his sister, who is now bonded with Razumikhin, a union which represents the newly formed association within Raskolnikov between his developing understanding and recovering moral integrity. Although all the elements are now in place for a full confession to the police, Raskolnikov hesitates and goes to see Sofya again, who takes out two crosses, a wooden one that she places on Raskolnikov, and a copper cross that was worn by Lizaveta at the moment when Raskolnikov killed her. Raskolnikov asks Sofya to wear the copper cross, which symbolically represents that the initial stirrings of a willingness to repent has commenced the process of restoring the unification of his spiritual innocence with his affection for truth, in essence, bringing back to life what he had murdered.

Raskolnikov waffles as he approaches the police station, but nonetheless acts on Sofya’s presciption for him and bows and kisses the ground at the “Cross-roads.”⁶⁴ While harboring his confession within, he hears himself being dispatched to the New Jerusalem⁶⁵ by a passer-by. Seeing Sofya, who is following him at a distance, he renews his conviction and enters the Police station where he comes into the knowledge that Svidrigaďlov, the last man with a motive to betray his secret, was dead. This event gives Raskolnikov the opportunity to pass off his appearance there as pertaining to some triffle and walk away, which he intially does. Dostoevsky, drawing from Swedenborg, is reminding us that reformation must be accomplished in complete freedom, and that if we are to be compelled by anything it must be by a love for the truth and the good for its own sake, exercised in freedom or there is no spiritual validity to our actions.

Upon emerging from the Police station Raskolnikov is in complete freedom to walk away, to acquit himself and fall back into the trap of his illusions and justifications and perish. His confrontation with Sofya again outside the Police station provides Raskolnikov with a reminder of the necessary motive for his confession, which would otherwise be meaningless, that he is not a cornered criminal reacting out of fear of the rapidly descending forces of fate over which he has no control, but rather is able “to enter as a man,”⁶⁶ endowed with a restored liberty and rationality, who for the first time is in control of himself. Only an acknowledgement and submission to a genuine affection for truth can empower him with the courage to allow his true spiritual identity to act according to the demands of truth in the moment of truth, “the fatal place.” Sofya, by her abiding presence ultimately provides him with that courage.

Raskolnikov at that moment felt and knew once for all that Sofya was with him forever and would follow him to the ends of the earth, wherever fate might take him. It wrung his heart . . . but he was just reaching the fatal place.⁶⁷

Facing her the second time, Raskolnikov reenters the police station and gives a complete confession, submitting to the justice and judgment that he needs to complete the work of ordering his internal man.

The story could well end here if the spiriutal significance of Raskolnikov’s ordeal is not understood, especially in relation to Swedenborg’s descriptions of the three stages which occur after death in the World of Spirits.⁶⁸ Many commentators have questioned the pertinence of the epilogue, considering it to be an obligatory convention in nineteenth century fiction or a simple means of tidying up loose ends that does not technically belong to the formal structure of the novel. Superficially this view may play back logically in relation to the conventions; however, the epilogue in Crime and Punishment, which represents the third state of preparation for regeneneration as descirbed by Swedenborg, is the climax of the work, which quite the opposite from simply tidying up loose ends, actually provides the meaning for all the preceeding events. Without it the essence and purpose of the story carried in the structure of the novel would be an unconluded failure. Dostoevsky carefully and purposefully reserves the actual ending of the work, the fulfillment of his purpose, for this moment.

On account of the free confession, the sentence is commuted to eight years of hard labor in Siberia.⁶⁹ Raskolnikov goes and suffers his penance. Sofya, who is liberated from her prostitution by the changes in Raskolnikov, follows him, and while engaging herself in service, waits for him, although at a necessary distance. Swedenborg relates that during periods of extreme temptation we are indeed given to feel that we are cut off or alienated from our spiritual affections, especially our affection for truth. In the epilogue we are given details of the trial and discover, by means of testimony offered in defense of the character of Raskolnikov provided by his landlady and Razumikhin,

That while Raskolnikov was at the university he had helped a poor consumptive fellow student and had spent his last penny on supporting him for six months, and when this student died, leaving a decrepit old father whom he had maintained almost from his thirteenth year, Raskolnikov had got the old man into a hospital and paid for his funeral when he died. Raskolnikov’s landlady bore witness, too, that when they had lived in another house at Five Corners, Raskolnikov had rescued two little children from a house on fire and was burnt in doing so.⁷⁰

From our first and abiding impressions of Raskolnikov it would be impossible to imagine him ever or at all capable of such selfless generosity and saintly acts of charity, yet Dostoevsky introduces these seemingly incongruous facts, almost too matter-of-factly, which serve to create a balanced view and to support Raskolnikov’s defence, aided by the fact that he is no longer intending toward relying on the indefensible ideations and self-justifation he mistakenly believed as lying at the core his actions. In the work Heaven and Hell, Swedenborg affirms that man is in equilibrium because of his constant, although unconscious, association with the spiritual world. Evil spirits, which excite lusts and exaggerate guilt, are counterbalanced by good spirits who assist in exciting heavenly affections and the calling to mind of the good that a person has done, or retains in him, as a means of combating evil.⁷¹ Dostoevsky applies this principle from Swedenborg by the simple inclusion of a reference to Raskolnikov’s history that, without reference to Swedenborg as a source, would otherwise be so utterly incongreous as to cause us to doubt if Dostoevsky is really describing the character he had already so artfully introduced us to.

During the final preparation, though Raskolnikov confronts his insanity in dreams, sickness, and even an attempt on his life, his sister’s marriage to Razumikhin and the death of his mother represents the unification of the understanding and the will, released from the limitations and expectations of natural heredity that is subtly and secretly transpiring within him. These events are outside of the confines that he is restricted to, beneath his conscious awareness, simply because it is not a process that he is controlling. Raskolnikov’s journey through his arduous final preparation for reformation is characterized by Dostoevsky this way, through sickness and sullen moods, even doubting the new life of a future resurrection; in effect a reenactment of the temptations Raskolnikov already passed through in his former states.

But there is a difference. Swedenborg reveals that suffering in temptations only has value, that is, only has the potential to advance a person’s spiriutal condition for the better, if the object or the objective at the center of the temptation is a spiritual one. Temptations arising after natural objects, such as Raskolnikov previously suffered, were therefore necessary to be repeated, at a time when the natural object can be effectively subsituted for a spiritual one. For Raskolnikov this could only occur in prison, which, as a consequence of falsity, represents a state of instruction. To Raskolnikov it feels the same, even unfair as he has always been aware of his suffering, even to the point of convincing himself that he has already suffered enough. The character of Nikolay,⁷² who Raskolnikov was willing to allow to shoulder his guilt, represents the naturally simplistic and therefore unsustainable suffering for the wrong object that has no value and is essentially meaningless. This class of suffering does not constitute or provide any advancement, and in effect only adds to the burden of the wrong by extending it. Raskolnikov’s “great striving and great suffering,” as part of his prepartion for true regeneration, was yet to come. Dostoevsky pulls back the curtain further on Raskolnikov’s soul.

In misery he asked himself this question, and could not understand that, at the very time he had been standing looking into the river, he had perhaps been dimly conscious of the fundamental falsity in himself and his convictions. He didn’t understand that that consciousness might be the promise of a future crisis, of a new view of life and of his future resurrection.⁷³

Raskolnikov is not looking for religion. In fact we are told that his fellow prisioners fall on him, calling him an infidel who does not believe in God and who ought to be killed. He is looking for his spiritual identity. After the first year in prison, one day, after having read from the Testament given him by Sofya that had once belonged to Lizaveta (from which Sofya had read the story of Lazarus), Raskolnikov contemplates what it means to have a sincere affection for truth, an affection for the truth for the sake of the truth. He falls at Sofya’s feet.

He wept and threw his arms round her knees. For the first instant she was terribly frightened and she turned pale. She jumped up and looked at him trembling. But at the same moment she understood, and a light of infinite happiness came into her eyes. She knew and had no doubt that he loved her beyond everything and that at last the moment had come . . .

As a result of having submitted to his punishment, Raskolnikov received the benefit of its purpose and was introduced into the path that would lead him to Heaven.

Dostoevsky concludes:

But that is the beginning of a new story—the story of the gradual renewal of a man, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his passing from one world into another, of his initiation into a new unknown life. That might be the subject of a new story, but our present story is ended.⁷⁴

Crime and Punishment is a great novel which succeeds on multiple levels, as has been revealed by the unceasing criticism it attracts, both the adulatory and the disparaging. As a psychological drama, the first of its kind, it is deserving of its status as a masterpiece of fiction. It is clear that Dostoevsky, as a keen writer and a sensitive observer of the human soul, had he persisted in the amalgamation of the elements that he originally conceived and drew from for his story, could not have done otherwise than to produce a great book. It is equally clear that had Dostoevsky not incorporated the spiritual realities described by Swedenborg in Heaven and Hell, Crime and Punishment would not be the novel that it is. His encounter with Swedenborg compelled and enabled him to envision and produce the new plan for his novel, in the new form that reflects not only the structures and activities of the psyche but also their immutable spiritual foundations. This is seen in the successive stages of ordering proper to the external and internal man, and the subsequent instruction made possible by that ordering that Dostoevsky so artfully demonstrates through Raskolnikov.

As a penetrating insight into an extreme man who commits an extreme act, Crime and Punishment cannot fail to captivate our imagination to be engaged in its contents without being astonished, and yet, our daily newspapers are lamentably full of reports of similar and even more heinous crimes, to the point where the outward actions of Raskolnikov have an element of the mundane.

The same was true in Dostoevsky’s time, but the purpose of Crime and Punishment was not merely to pull back the veil on the inexplicable nature of extremities of thought and action which by their pervasiveness have become commonplace. If Raskolnikov is an isolated figure who is caught in the personal web of his own self-deceptions, and motivated by his particular brand of insanity to commit a crime for which he and he alone must pay, we can be interested in him as much as pathology interests or fascinates us and then dismiss him to his fate. Crime and Punishment is established in a different reality and in effect dramatizes more than the story of what happened to a man as a result of what he did. The power of Dostoevsky’s novel is precisely because it touches the core of what is true and thus pertinent to all men, not only in a relation of what happened, but in relation to what always happens.

It is the story of a man, a young man, who, in the search for the meaning of his life, attempts to attain an unified, universal identity that will nullify the growing schism between his burgeoning internal man and his rarified external persona, and who mistakenly pledges his mortal heredity and his eternity to a self-serving understanding of the world that is naturally ignorant of spiritual reality. A man who, unwittingly, without knowing what he is really doing, dispenses with any affection for truth that his grandiosity cannot tolerate, and loses his spiritual innocence at the same time. It is the story of a man who is under the influence of a love of self that influences all men to a greater or lesser degree and who is therefore forced, by the Order that governs the universe according to spiritual laws, to reap the exact opposite of what he intended to sow, only so that he can be brought into contact with what his real heredity and his real eternity mean. Vain demands for unmediated mercy, the trap of external and extraneous expectations, destructive and overbearing pride and all its rationalizations, the internal and external manifestations of the worst that a person can be because of what he or she is all must die or be disenfranchised, according to the spiritual laws of order.

These deaths must occur to permit the possibility for the emergence and eventual fruition of true spiritual identity. In effect it is the healing of the schism which proceeds, as all healing does, by the overpowering of the disease that is necessary for a return to health. This result is achieved through the agency of a liberated chaste affection for truth that restores the lost spiritual innocence, and a return to reasonableness and rationality that is compatible with moral integrity in liberty.

This is the story of Raskolnikov, and it is a story that is carried by the disclosures of Swedenborg on the nature of the Spiritual World and spiritual reality. Although the drama carries and demonstrates the full enactment of all these elements, there is still more that elevates Crime and Punishment into the status of a masterwork on the human soul. Dostoevsky presents us with dynamic characteristics of two worlds, the inner and the exterior, the spiritual and the natural, whose essential aspects are as skilfully drawn from Swedenborg as they are blended in Raskolnikov’s reality. In the throes of the novel, we, the readers, in common with Raskolnikov himself, are actually in the spiritual domain without knowing it. The foundation truth that Dostoevsky subtly presents to us by deliberately erasing the imagined line between Heaven and Earth is that there really is only one reality, and it is a spiritual reality; a person is in the world as to his body or externals and in the spiritual world at the same time as to his interior or his mind, which is the real person. Swedenborg relates this theme in Heaven and Hell repeatedly. In this we have a lot more in common with Raskolnikov than we might otherwise think, for, like him, we also experience our singular spiritual reality and live simultaneously, whether we realize it or not, in two worlds.