Putin, Prighozin and being beyond the bounds of law or morality: Revisiting Dostoevsky's Crime & Punishment

 After the Wagner rebellion, I mentioned that I would revisit Fyodor Dostoevsky, and beyond Prighozin's aborted coup attempt, there was another story that some may have missed.  An author named Elizabeth Gilbert (best seller, unknown to me) recently wrote a novel set in the Soviet Union, with the Soviet government as the villains, and with the lunacy of left-wing censoriousness, she was told not to publish it because nothing can ever be set in Russia anymore, because Ukraine.  I am as much on Ukraine's side as anyone, and as critical of Putin as anyone, but the no-Russian-art response is beyond stupid.  So let's go back to Dostoevsky, the paragon of literary moralism.  I wrote several posts a while back, in a very disjointed fashion, on his best book, The Brothers Karamazov, but I will try to be more coherent this time.  The Brothers Karamazov is sprawling and complex, with so many insights that trying to write a few blog posts on it was not really practical anyway.  I would have needed a plan, which I did not have.  Maybe another time.  Crime & Punishment is both more topical, and more constrained.  A lesser work?  Sure, but still great.  Let's see if I can do something more coherent this time.

If you have not read it, then a) stop wasting your time with my ramblings and read someone smart, like Fyodor Dostoevsky, but b) I'll give you the executive summary regarding the relevant points on which I shall bloviate the way I usually do.  The novel follows Raskolnikov, an impoverished law school student, bitter about his condition and contemplating his life had he been born to privilege.  In other circumstances, I might write a post about whiny students, bitter about their loans, and the difference between Raskolnikov and his much more honorable friend, Razumihin.  Instead of lazing about and stewing in bitterness, Razumihin works, translating texts.  He is a bit of a blatherer, but he's pretty cool.  Anyway, Raskolnikov is creepy.  Sitting in his tiny apartment and stewing in bitterness and entitlement, he writes an article about how there are two categories of people-- the ordinary people who must follow laws, and those extraordinary people, like Napoleon, who are above the law because they are bigger.  Kinda.  See what I did there?  Anyway, the Napoleons of the world have grand purposes, and should they constrain themselves to follow laws, they could never achieve their purposes, so they must be freer to break laws in service to their grand goals and ambitions.  There is historical interest and irony to a Russian author-- Dostoevsky, or Raskolnikov-- writing in this manner about Napoleon in only 1866, no less, but part of the point is that Raskolnikov is villainous, and Dostoevsky is trying to teach you something.

So anyway, Raskolnikov writes an article about how the Napoleons of the world should be able to get away with murder, and sets his mind to murdering his pawnbroker, partly to rob her and free himself of financial constraints, and partly to make himself a Napoleon as a sort of test of his notions.  He wavers and agonizes about the idea, and then while sitting in a tavern, he overhears a conversation in which two people consider a kind of philosophical debate over the morality of murdering a rich person to distribute the wealth, for utilitarian moral purposes.  One says to the other, if you believed your own argument, you'd do it.  Nice response to utilitarianism taken too far, right?  Kant wins.  Anyway, Raskolnikov overhears this, while contemplating his plan, and he decides to do it because it fits with his thinking.  So he murders his pawnbroker, and then the pawnbroker's sister walks in, so he murders her too.

The rest of the novel plays out with Raskolnikov trying to evade a proto-Columbo investigator named Porfiry, while his sister, Dounia, has some very creepy old guys pursuing her, and he gets mixed up in the fucked up family of a dead drunkard whom he had befriended.  All of which is interesting, and maybe I will say more about it in a Part II (?), but none of it is as interesting or as topical as Raskolnikov's will to power.  Depending on how you date Nietzsche's ideas, one could put 1883 as the point at which the will to power went into print, but that is a matter of plus-or-minus a couple of years.  The concept of an amoral power quest was not exactly uniquely Nietzschean, and to be sure, that is a reductivist and perhaps slightly twisted reading of Nietzsche, but Raskolnikov's fictional essay did predate Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883).

Anyway, consider Raskolnikov's belief in and desire to be a Napoleon, a figure who is unconstrained by law or the bounds of normal morality.  Is it a greater moral purpose served, a grand vision divorced from greater morality, or mere egotism?  Part of the point is that Raskolnikov, or rather, the references to Raskolnikov's essay, leave some wiggle room.  Everything, necessarily, is a rationalization.  Raskolnikov serves no greater good.  He robs the pawnbroker with the ostensible purpose that the financial gains will free him to greater purpose, unburden his mother and sister, and allow him to... to... um... invade Russia?  Yeah, not 100% clear on that point because in some ways, it is about unburdening himself from law or morality.  It is about saying, I am greater than you, unbound by that which constrains you, you peons, you, behold me, the Great Raskolnikov.  Axe Murderer, and ultimately nothing more.

Does he do more?  Actually, yes.  He reveals to his sister, for example, that the creepy, old guy, Luzhin, needs to take a hike.  He helps out the family of the dead drunkard, even if they wind up entangled with an even shittier guy, Svidrigailov.  At his trial, much more is revealed about his better works, and that earns him lenience.  Raskolnikov is not the most vile character in the book.  Gotta go with Svidrigailov on that.  Now that guy is creepy.  A murderer, and even by 19th Century age/marriage/consent standards, the ick is off the charts with him.

But Raskolnikov has that extra special thing of thinking himself extra special.  Above, unconstrained, and hence free to do anything including murder.  Dostoevsky spends the novel beating you over the head with no, moralist that he is.  Raskolnikov is crazy, and driven crazy by what he did until finally, the inevitable turn towards some repentance at the very end, in a Siberian prison.

Now let's turn to some modern-day Raskolnikovs in some unfortunate positions.  Some modern-day Napoleons.  Technically, Putin marched his army, or perhaps Prighozin's army west, and from Russia into Ukraine, but anyone who cannot see his Napoleon complex is blind.  There are really two differences between Raskolnikov and Putin.  Raskolnikov was not, by the vagaries of luck, placed into a position in which his attempts to put his ideas into practice accomplished anything.  He was a poor kid, trying to get through law school, with no money.  Boo-hoo, poor you.  Try working, like Razumihin.  Putin, having had the dumb luck to be able to find his way to the KGB, found opportunities aplenty where the very same amorality was rewarded.

The other difference, of course, is that Raskolnikov shrank and recoiled initially from the idea, and then from the execution, so to speak, of the idea.  He went even crazier than he was after having committed the murders.  Putin, true sociopath that he is, is incapable of remorse, by definition.  What distinguishes Napoleon or Putin from Raskolnikov?  Sociopathy, in its truer form.  As Raskolnikov wrote, Napoleon would not hesitate.  Putin does not hesitate.  Raskolnikov did, and then drove himself mentally and physically ill from what he did.  Putin would indifferently torture and murder anyone if it suits his goals.  He is what Raskolnikov described.  It is historically interesting, at least, that Russia so regularly puts such people in charge, and while Russia is not now a democracy, Putin was voted into power, and were he not popular within Russia, he would be toppled.  Yes, there is something very wrong with Russia.

So enter Prighozin.  But not into the Kremlin, I guess.  Is Prighozin a moralistic hero, disgusted by the death and brutality of Putin's decision to invade Ukraine and order such barbarism that all one can do is say... this, this is humanity at its most human?  No.  Prighozin thought that he, too, could be a Raskolnikov-styled Napoleon with a pre-Nietzschean will to power.  That he, too, had a vision that allowed him to rise above and beyond law, morality, whatever, take, seize.  Two Napoleons.  Now granted, Napoleon was not a big guy, and Russia is a large country, but this country ain't big enough for the both of them.  We are still sorting out why Prighozin did what he did, and we may never know all of the details, but as Raskolnikov wondered whether or not he truly had it in him to kill Alyona Ivanovna, Prigozhin did not make it.  He called off his plan to kill the pawnbroker dictator.  A sudden pang of morality?  It was not so with Raskolnikov, nor was it so with Prighozin.

In Crime & Punishment, Dostoevsky writes frequently of the redemptive power of suffering, of taking upon one's self any punishment, regardless of why that punishment is inflicted or by whom.  For example, Raskolnikov narrowly escapes Porfiry at one point when a painter-- Nikolay-- falsely confesses to the murder, perhaps believing in the value of accepting punishment for the redemptive value of suffering.  Similar statements are made about Dounia's martyr complex.  Dostoevsky's beliefs here are a combination of religious and, within his framework, optimistic.  There are shitbags in his books, from Fyodor (the father) in The Brothers Karamazov to Svidrigailov in Crime & Punishment, but Dostoevsky believed and wrote about redemption and the possibility of redemption.  Hence, Raskolnikov's turn towards repentance at the very end of Crime & Punishment, along with several of the more compelling characters in The Brothers Karamazov, notably Zosima, and even Mitya.

One has a difficult time imagining Putin, Prighozin or the like feeling remorse or seeking any redemptive path.  Fyodor, Svidrigailov... take your pick.  Raskolnikov thought he was a higher form of being, but the fact that his own mind tortured him showed something else.

One might ask, among the mundane shitbaggery in the world, to what degree such peoples' minds torture them.  You can tell yourself that it happens, if it makes you feel better.  You can wonder not at all, as they are irrelevant to you.  To seek that punishment, internal as it might be, is still to seek the punishment of others, as retribution.  If you find yourself hoping that some shitbag or other is mentally tortured, as Raskolnikov is, just for wronging you, then you are still fantasizing about vengeance, and that is both always wrong, and equally destructive to you.

Never vengeance.

Yet as a point of curiosity, one sometimes wonders how others think after they have done wrong.  On the left, people use self-righteous and self-congratulatory slogans like, "be kind," while setting explosives, burning down cities, physically assaulting those who disagree with them on matters of politics, society and even basic biology.  On the right, they wrap themselves in the King James while throwing out all of the charity of the sermon on the mount in favor of a cult to the most anti-Christian, self-worshipping, violence-obsessed psychopath in the history of American politics.

Is there any remorse?

Dostoevsky warned for religious reasons of the ambition to rise above morality and law, yet Kant's reasons, too, were sufficient.  Deontology is predicated on the universality of rules, which means no exceptions.  That means you, Raskolnikov, you too, Putin, and you too, Prighozin.

But sure.  Throw out all things Russian because of Putin.  That makes sense.  I guess no more Stravinsky?

Consider Wagner.  The composer, not the mercenary army.  His music is not performed in Israel, and there are freakouts any time someone raises the notion.  In 2022, the Haifa Symphony (quite a good orchestra) decided to break the taboo, and still people got twitchy.  Why?  Wagner, himself, was quite anti-Semitic, and he was Hitler's favorite composer.

I have always stated the following rule: separate art from artist.  Do I follow that rule with Wagner?  As a Jew?

Yes.  100%.

Keep in mind that classical music is not my favorite genre.  I dig Bach.  Mahler.  Some of the other more modern composers, like Bartok and Stravinsky.  Anyone fond of piano must appreciate Chopin and Rachmaninoff.  Still, I'll take Miles and Coltrane any day, and I'm pretty sure I've called Duke Ellington the greatest composer ever.

I'll say that now.  Duke Ellington was the greatest composer ever.

(There may not be a jazz singer who can touch Diana Damrau, I'll admit.)

Wagner?  He's OK.  Not as a human being, but as an artist, and that is how I must judge him.

And if that is how we should treat Wagner, then Fyodor Dostoevsky?  The very concept of Russian art?  The best response to Putin, to Prighozin, to all of this vileness is the fundamental goodness and decency of Fyodor Dostoevsky.  (As opposed to Fyodor Karamazov, who was a shit, and strangely Trumpian.)  I do not know why so much evil comes from Russia, but from the perspective of 1945 Germany, I would not have predicted Germany to be what it is today.  We only ever observe a small fragment of history, and among the worst mistakes is losing perspective of how little perspective that is.  That perspective is nothing.  Great art, too, will eventually fade into the mists of history, but it is somewhat longer lasting, and its lessons are timeless.

If I ever choose to listen to Wagner, it will be no betrayal to do so, and nothing is more enriching than Fyodor Dostoevsky.

This one is a bluegrass classic, and while there are many great versions, I think Norman Blake did the best.  "Bonaparte's Retreat," in a medley with "Bully of the Town," which is also appropriate for the theme today.  This is from Live at McCabe's.