surrendered himself to certain strange and half-baked notions
which are in the air, has decided to extricate himself at one stroke
from his terrible position.

Dostoevsky could not afford to 'extricate himself' from the
terrible position he was in with Stellovsky. He needed money
immediately. The advance from Katkov arrived late, but in
the meantime he had received money from a friend in Co-
penhagen, which he supplemented by borrowing from a
Russian priest in Wiesbaden. The letter to Katkov suggests
many of the fundamental features of the novel itself: the
emphasis on psychology, the contemporary actuality of the
setting, and even the unresolved nature of Raskolnikov's
motivation--is the crime committed merely for material
gain, or because of 'notions that are in the air'?

What makes Crime and Punishment a modern novel is pre-
cisely its unrelenting focus on the psychology of the central
character. Dostoevsky had first planned the work as a con-
fession, but the third-person narrative which he later substi-
tuted bears all the inward-looking quality of a first-person
narrative, in which other characters, although conceived
in their own right, take on the almost spectral quality of
figures working within the imagination of the central charac-
ter. The psychological battle with Porfiry is a case in point.
The examining magistrate appears to have intuitive, prior
knowledge about the murderer, in whom he recognizes great
qualities, so that his struggle to save him by bringing him
to repentance suggests Porfiry in the role of objectified
conscience.

Psychology in the novel 'cuts both ways'. Raskolnikov uses
psychological cunning in his attempt to put Porfiry off the
scent. The latter, on the other hand, uses similar tricks in
his apparently friendly and light-hearted interrogation of
Raskolnikov. Psychologists from Freud to R. D. Laing have
shown great interest in Dostoevsky's work. A character in his
novel The Idiot claims that the law of self-destruction has as
much force in human affairs as the law of self-preservation--
an idea that appears to anticipate Freud's theory of the death-
wish. In Crime and Punishment Raskolnikov feels the full force
of the 'law of self-preservation':

'Where was it,' Raskolnikov thought . . 'where was it that I read of
how a condemned man, just before he died, said, or thought, that if

-viii-