Raskolnikov’s crime and repentance in Russian and Hungarian literature of the second half of the twentieth century

Abstract

The article deals with the creative reception of a complex of motifs “sin - repentance - salvation” and the hero’s moral reflections that form the basis of Crime and Punishment and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s unfulfilled plan of a book about the “Great Sinner.” We analyze the works of several Russian and Hungarian authors of the 1960s-1990s. In Victor Pelevin’s novel Chapayev and Pustota, the hero involuntarily becomes a murderer. Instead of being exiled to Siberia, he ends up in a mental hospital, which functionally serves as a replacement for Raskolnikov’s “punishment” stage - a prison sentence. After leaving the hospital, the hero, who has not accepted the new reality, flees to a Buddhist monastery in Inner Mongolia to escape from the criminalized and dangerous modernity. The motifs of crime and failed repentance of the outsider writer are used by Vladimir Makanin in the novel The Underground or the Hero of Our Time. His hero recognizes Dostoevsky’s authority, projecting the novel’s situation onto his own. However, he rejects the need to repent the murders, since for him Raskolnikov’s story is an “alien” literary plot and a humiliation of his very “self.” The heroes of Limonov’s early prose constantly relate themselves to the marginal heroes and criminals of Dostoevsky. For them, the impossibility of repentance does not cancel the hero’s selfdoubt, his “state of hesitation” that determines, according to Dostoevsky, the behavior of the Great Sinner and Raskolnikov. In Russian prose of the 1990s, the text and plot allusions of which refer to Crime and Punishment, the main antihero is a writer and reader of Dostoevsky who tries on the situations and actions of Dostoevsky’s heroes, ultimately dismissing them as “alien” and “literary.” The classics of modern Hungarian literature, Janos Pilinszky and Miklos Meszoly, admitted that they literally lived inside Dostoevsky’s world. The novels of Meszoly of the 1960s, The Death of an Athlete and Saul, both tell the story of rebirth and conversion of two heroes - the runner Balint and the detective Saul. Balint is lonely and aspires to the absolute, a sports record, for which he is willing to sacrifice everything. He is similar to Dostoevsky’s sinner in his pridefulness. However, before his death, he ascends a mountain. The motifs that accompany his “spiritual ascent” point to the sacred symbolism of rebirth. The final change in the direction and purpose of running turns him into an “athleta Christi”, a repentant proud man. However, the plot of Saul does not follow the Bible to the end and finishes with Saul’s blinding, interrupting the biblical story and not representing his enlightenment as of the future Paul the Apostle. Similarly to Crime and Punishment, the novel unfolds around a murder - a “stoning” of the victim, Stephen the Apostle. Saul, like Raskolnikov, renounces his former self-identification and logic of the Law. The shock in both cases is the sin of murder, the internal experience of the crime. Saul takes the blame for the beating of Stephen. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.