Published in the Crime and Punishment programme, Theatre Cocoon, Tokyo, January 2019.

Crime and Punishment: ‘Hell is not other people…’

‘Hell is other people’ Jean Paul Sartre

What about me? 

It’s almost a cliche to say that Crime and Punishment changed my life. 

But it did. 

Eventually. 

At nineteen – the same age as Raskolnikov – I was fascinated by the darkness, the despair, the filmic descriptions of the minutia of the murder. But mainly I was fascinated with myself. (And the fact that I had read a novel that long). 

Then I returned to it in my late twenties when real failure was only of academic interest and found it funnier than I’d remembered, Raskolnikov’s poverty got under my skin, and like many fatherless boys I was drawn to Porfiry Petrovich. So I started to sketch out a comic play on these themes.  And because I wanted to be some sort of Neitzchean theatrical superman, the play was in three parts and nearly nine hours long. I suppose I wanted to find out whether I was one of the ordinary or the extraordinary people. It was never put on, so unlike Raskolnikov, I got a pretty unambiguous answer to that question. 

But the epilogue continued to haunt me, Dostoevsky’s premonition of how Europe would be engulfed in a conflagration, because in a Godless world, its people had contracted a disease that made them believe that each of them had the sole access to the truth. Thus neatly predicting Communism, Fascism and the fall out from our obsession with social media in one fell swoop. 

Patiently Crime and Punishment waited for me until my mid-thirties, until I had really made a mess of my life. I picked it up again as angry atheist who had spent too long railing against the world from his Twitter account. I remembered the novel being dark, it was far darker than that, I couldn’t see the edges. It was funnier than I could ever have imagined. And it took opposing views about God and human nature, evil and the possibility of forgiveness, suffering and goodness. In doing so, it set up no straw-man arguments, set up to burn easily to prove that the writer was right all along, it set up only iron men, tough, indestructible dialectics on both sides, taking every idea to the furthest possible point, and laced these arguments with an agonising depth of human feeling. 

There is forgiveness and grace in a world that is mostly cruel and unforgiving, posits Dostoevsky, and there’s redemption. What if we apply that idea to a man who premeditatedly, with full knowledge of what he was doing, murders a vulnerable woman, (and her sister as an afterthought) with an axe? What if we watch him attempt to justify it with arguments that range from the political to the psychological to the emotional? What is the thing that he cannot escape in himself and how does he know that what he has done is wrong? I know I’m excellent at justifying why I don’t recycle plastic carrier bags or give money to beggars, even though I know I should. I also know that if I’ve done something that doesn’t please me, I can find a way of altering the very fabric of reality by persuading myself that I haven’t actually done it. I’ve flown to Japan, I haven’t contributed to global warming. 

Dostoevsky puts us in the mind of an angry teenage petty thief and murderer who thinks he’s Napoleon Bonaparte, and through him, asks us to look at our own inner axe murderer. Crime and Punishment is a tragedy about someone who wants to be the author of his own life, he wants to be above the conditions, laws and conventions that bind us together, but when he does that, he finds that he has not risen above but, but fallen below his fellow man. By trying to be super human, he’s somehow become less than human. Raskolnikov’s great meaningful act of protest is messed up by something unforeseen, the murder of an innocent, and through this his whole picture of who he is shakes and dissolves around him. 

Sonya is one of the ‘other people’, one of the great mass of humanity that Raskolnikov so despises, they are moral, he thinks, because they are cowards. They haven’t got the courage to think of anything new. But Sonya, who is crushed by circumstance and has not had the freedom to rise above anything, by breathing in and absorbing the hurt and the pain and the humiliation and the exploitation of the world has become - paradoxically - free. And perhaps divine. Through her he is able to speak the truth simply and directly, admit his crime and begin to make amends to the world. It’s by becoming part of the world and living in service to his fellow man, where redemption is found.

Inescapably, at the centre of the Christian church service is the image of a man tortured in mind and body. Every human body and every human mind is vulnerable to pain. This is the tragic realism of Christian faith as Dostoevsky saw it.  As Sartre and his mates told us in the mid 20th century ‘hell is other people’. In Crime and Punishment , Dostoevsky showed me at various points in my life what we all know these days; hell is an obsession with the self. And the possibility of heaven can only lie in other people.


© Phillip Breen