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. ArtiFebruary 2, 2022 at 10:08 AM

    "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. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 2, 2022 at 10:26 AM

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

      Delete
    2. Yamini MacLeanFebruary 2, 2022 at 11:43 AM

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

      Delete
    3. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 2, 2022 at 11:58 AM

      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. Chinmayee Gayatree SahuFebruary 2, 2022 at 7:42 PM

    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
47 comments
Read more

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...
2 comments
Read more

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...
18 comments
Read more

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...
16 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more