Skip to main content

The heart of the matter

 


“The really great men must have great sadness on earth,” Dostoevsky wrote in Crime and Punishment. Dostoevsky believed that enlightened intelligence and deep heart can only come through much pain and suffering. Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Crime and Punishment, is intelligent. But he does not have a loving heart. On the contrary, he detests humankind. He thinks of the human species as essentially evil – cruel, scoundrelly and corrupt. There is nothing wrong in doing away with some of these evil creatures. In fact, if you want to be another great person like Napoleon, if you want to be the Nietzschean superman, you need to rise above the sentimental morality of mediocre people. So Raskolnikov goes and commits a murder. He kills an old woman whom he thinks of as an evil person. In the process, he ends up killing an innocent woman too in order to get rid of the witness to his crime.

Raskolnikov does not become a Napoleon or a superman, however. He is tormented by the murders he has committed. He suffers much as his mind is racked with guilt. But he is incapable of accepting his guilt. His mind does not let him see the murders he has committed as a crime. And his heart is yet to evolve.

Sonia, a poor woman who has become a prostitute in order to look after her ailing sister and that sister’s children, is the one who helps Raskolnikov’s heart to evolve. A prostitute may be a much better human being than an intellectual! A perverted mind is far more treacherous than a mediocre heart.

What matters more in the end is the heart. Sonia the fallen woman becomes the redeemer of Raskolnikov the intellectual superman. The heart wins over the brain. Any philosophy or ideology that cuts you off from your fellow beings is utterly evil. To perceive the moral ugliness of hate-peddling ideologies, you need a heart, an evolved one at that.

Evolved hearts are not common among human beings. Most people have mediocre hearts and hence humanity is trapped in the quagmire of banality. But that banality may be less evil than the corrupted philosophy of people like Raskolnikov which alienates them from humanity.

While in the prison of Siberia at the end, Raskolnikov falls seriously ill and has a dream. He dreams that a virus is sweeping the country. The virus creates a kind of madness in its victims which makes each to think of him-/herself the sole possessor of truth.

The most worthwhile truth lies in the heart, not in the mind. And that truth is not singular. That truth is common to the entire humanity. Unless you learn that truth – the truth of the heart – you remain subhuman even if you are following the highest ideals preached by some theory or ideology. Humanity stands above all theory and ideology. Even if its heart is banal.

“Go at once, this minute, stand at the crossroads, bow down, first kiss the earth which you have defiled and then bow down to all the world and say to men aloud, ‘I am a murderer!’” This is Sonia’s counsel to Raskolnikov when she learns about the murders he committed. Put aside all your ideology and reasoning. Get your heart out. Your only chance of redemption lies there – in your heart’s ability to establish a bond with the rest of humanity.

Dostoevsky

xzx

 

Comments

  1. "Put your heart out." Would solve all of our problems if it were the default setting of human beings.
    I met a friend recently who considers Dostoevsky her mentor. His words, she told me, connected so deeply with her that she saw her 'pain' as a 'natural state of being'--something to help her get deeper into her understanding of the self rather than an unnatural state to be healed out of. She's put the idea in my head that I must read Crime and Punishment again. Honestly, when I tried to read it in my early twenties, I couldn't go past the first few pages.
    Your post is a sign that I must get myself a copy.
    Thank you for writing it.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Dostoevsky demands patience from readers but he's worth it. He's one of my favorite writers.

      Delete
    2. Hari om
      Mine too! Another enjoyable summarry from you. YAM XX

      Delete
    3. It's hard to justice to any Dostoevsky novel in a few hundred words. I looked at this one from a very limited perspective.

      Delete
  2. Get your heart out. Your only chance of redemption lies there – in your heart’s ability to establish a bond with the rest of humanity.

    Such an engaging review from you. I haven't read this book but the above lines about redemption and bonding with humanity has inspired me to read this book ASAP.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv

Cats and Love

No less a psychologist than Freud said that the “time spent with cats is never wasted.” I find time to spend with cats precisely for that reason. They are not easy to love, particularly if they are the country variety which are not quite tameable, and mine are those. What makes my love affair with my cats special is precisely their unwillingness to befriend me. They’d rather be in their own company. “In ancient time, cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this,” Terry Pratchett says. My cats haven’t, I’m sure. Pratchett knew what he was speaking about because he loved cats which appear frequently in his works. Pratchett’s cats love independence, very unlike dogs. Dogs come when you call them; cats take a message and get back to you as and when they please. I don’t have dogs. But my brother’s dogs visit us – Maggie and me – every evening. We give them something to eat and they love that. They spend time with us after eating. My cats just go away without even a look af

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation