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Dostoevsky vs. the Marquis de Sade
Modern Age, Fall, 2004 by John Attarian
Yet Raskolnikov is not completely Sadean. Unlike Sade's libertines, he has not totally quit humanity and is not loveless. He is intermittently kind, and tries to protect his sister Dunya from Arkady Svidrigaylov, a landowner who pursued her sexually when she worked as a governess on his estate and is now pursuing her again. Here Dostoevsky anticipates Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's argument that "even within hearts overwhelmed with evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained." (21) This bridgehead of good leaves Raskolnikov open to grace, to conversion through Sonia's Christian love.
Like Sade's Justine, Sonia personifies virtue. The daughter of an alcoholic father and a tubercular mother, Sonia has become a prostitute in order to support her family. Like Justine, she retains her purity of soul despite brutal exposure to depravity and evil. But there the resemblance ends. Through Sonia, Dostoevsky answers Sade. Sonia's Christianity is not liberal, sentimental, and indulgent, but stern and demanding.
When Raskolnikov rattles off his Sadean dehumanization of his victim, Sonia will have none of it, and her repudiation disconcerts him:
"But I only killed a louse, Sonia. A useless, nasty, harmful louse." "A human being--a louse?" "I know--I know it wasn't a louse," he replied, looking strangely at her. "But I suppose I'm just talking a lot of rot, Sonia," he added. "I've been talking rot for a long time. It isn't that--you're quite right.... I have an awful headache now." (22)
Dropping his rationalizations, Raskolnikov tells Sonia that he wanted "to murder without casuistry, to murder for my own satisfaction, for myself alone." Like Sade's libertines, he sought transcendence through transgression. He wanted, he says, to learn something about himself: whether he was part of the egoist elect or "a louse like the rest.... Whether I can step over or not.... Whether I am some trembling vermin or whether I have the right [original italics]--" Again Sonia responds with an instantaneous, fearless, categorical rejection: "'--to kill? Have the right to kill?' Sonia cried in horror." Raskolnikov answers with annoyance, then, Sade-like, attempts to shift the blame (on the devil), but she refuses to let him evade responsibility: "And you killed! You killed!" Her insistence breaks Raskolnikov's defenses; he collapses in despair, begs Sonia to leave him alone, then asks her what he should do. (23)
Sonia exhorts Raskolnikov to confess his crime and "accept suffering and be redeemed by it." This, she insists, is his only hope for salvation from radical isolation. Sonia does this at extreme risk; Raskolnikov could have angrily murdered her. Meek, gentle Sonia is "bold as a lion" (Proverbs 28:1). In her Christian love she repudiates Raskolnikov's evil, risks his wrath, demands repentance and conversion--then extends the true compassion of suffering with him. At the end, her patient love and kindness finally win Raskolnikov over. Through Sonia, then, Dostoevsky repudiates Sade's reductionism and dehumanization. He reaffirms the Christian moral restraints which Sade rejected, and holds out the hope of redemption and conversion through love.
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