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it for the sake of anyone in particular, but just for its own sake, purely and simply as “suffering”; all that matters is to accept suffering, and if it's from the powers-that-be, that's all to the good…’
    Porfiry's implication, skilfully presented by means of psychological suggestion and interrogation techniques, is that Raskolnikov, too, has been treading this path – and that he must continue to do so if he is eventually to find salvation. For this is one of the main reasons why Raskolnikov is able to be savedfrom the error into which he has fallen – his illness is of a specifically Russian kind, caused not only by the influence of ‘nihilistic’ Western ideas, but also by an inborn raskol ' nichestvo , an ancient Russian sympathy for and identification with the strong dissenter who challenges the authority of Church and State alike. The Epilogue to the novel describes the beginning of his journey back to them, a journey that will ultimately involve not only his own personal recovery and transformation, but also the regeneration and renewal of Russian society. It is the persistent tracing of this theme of a ‘Russian sickness’ of spiritual origin and its cure throughout the book that justifies the author's characterization of it as an ‘Orthodox novel’.
    Few works of fiction have attracted so many widely diverging interpretations as Crime and Punishment . It has been seen as a detective novel, an attack on radical youth, a study in ‘alienation’ and criminal psychopathology, a work of prophecy (the attempt on the life of Tsar Alexander II by the nihilist student Dmitry Karakozov took place while the book was at the printer's, and some even saw the Tsar's murder in 1881 as a fulfilment of Dostoyevsky's warning), an indictment of urban social conditions in nineteenth-century Russia, a religious epic and a proto-Nietzschean analysis of the ‘will to power’. It is, of course, all these things – but it is more. As the researcher and scholar Helen Muchnic pointed out in 1939, 3 it is hard when reading the critical literature on Dostoyevsky to avoid the feeling that interpretations of his work tend to say more about those who make them than they do about the novelist himself. Even half a century later, this is still largely true of the contributions by Western critics to the study of Crime and Punishment : nearly all of them have some special, personal reason for making the kind of statements that they do when writing of the novel. In the case of the British critics, who include J. A. Lloyd, E. H. Carr, Maurice Baring and John Middleton Murry, one receives confirmation of Muchnic's general claim that ‘the tone of the English studies has been either aloof or rhapsodic’. The most typical British response to the work was also one of the earliest – that of Robert Louis Stevenson, who after reading the bookin French translation wrote to John Addington Symonds in 1886 that while he relished its ‘lovely goodness’ and admired the power and strength of the action and characterization, he was bewildered by ‘the incoherency and incapacity of it all’. Continental European critics proved more deeply perceptive, though for a long time there persisted a fashionable view, first formulated by E.-M. de Vogüé in his Le Roman russe (1886), which interpreted Crime and Punishment as a work of Hugoesque social and civic ‘realism’ concerned with ‘the religion of suffering’, linked to Poor Folk and The House of the Dead , and thus cut off from the supposedly inferior later novels. Perhaps some of the most telling Western comments on the character of Raskolnikov were made by André Gide in his Dostoievski ( Articles et causeries ) (1923). It is Gide's celebrated remark – ‘humiliation damns, whereas humility sanctifies’ – that makes us most clearly aware of the depth of hurt pride in which Raskolnikov finds himself at the beginning of the novel, and of the journey towards self-denial that is mapped