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over’ their conscience and the limits imposed on them by themselves and by others. In this sense, everyone has their crime to commit; or, as a certain cynic tells Raskolnikov, everyone has their ‘steps to take’. Punishment, too, can be measured in steps – all the way to Siberia – but it must be imposed by another to be meaningful. Here, as throughout the novel, themes, motifs and verbal echoes (whether to do with walking, with air or fire) coincide with exceptional force and complexity.
    It is at this intersection, too, that autobiographical undercurrents can, if we so wish, be identified. If all people are determined by their plans for the future, then how did Dostoyevsky’s own theoretical plans as a youthful revolutionary differ from Raskolnikov’s? Were not the ‘criminal intentions to overthrow the existing state order in Russia’ with which he and his associates were charged (not without foundation) potentially even more murderous than the realized intentions of Raskolnikov?
    Speculation, however, is all we have. The elusiveness that Dostoyevsky cultivated in his fiction was replicated in his life and literary persona. He left no private diaries, no memoirs, no autobiography. Instead he gave us a very public
Diary of a Writer
, in which he appears before his readers wearing a variety of masks (notably that of the ‘Paradoxicalist’); letters, in which he frequently declares the impossibility of expressing his true self (his correspondence with his brother Mikhail is an important exception); and notebooks, in which his plots branch off along endless alternative paths. The author’s inner life, meanwhile, largely escapes us. We know the facts but not the person, and this is in tune with Dostoyevsky’s own lifelong polemic with modernity’s exaggeration of the value of mere data. Whatever ‘key fact’ we take from his life proves – as Porfiry likes to say – ‘double-edged’ in its potential meaning. Even the meaning of Dostoyevsky’s suffering eludes us. We might say that the sadistic charade before the firing squad on Semyonovsky Square traumatized the author for life, or we might say, with William Empson, that ‘It was a reprieve / Made Dostoevsky talk out queer and clear.’ 18 We might say that four years of forced labour in Siberia left him old before his time and disabused him about human nature, or we might say that it saved him as a writer and a man, removing him from the hothouse of St Petersburg literary society in which he was wilting and supplying him with a new-found maturity, as well as the trove of fresh material, linguistic and human, that he acquired by observing his fellow ‘common’ convicts – much of which resurfaces in the present novel. We can argue that his frequent and violent attacks of epilepsy were a curse, inflicting terror, near-madness and pain, or we can argue (following the late J. L. Rice) that they were a creative tonic. 19
    It is apt that some of the most interesting recent books on Dostoyevsky have been works of fiction. The ‘master’, one suspects, might well have approved of J. M. Coetzee’s
Master of Petersburg
( 1994 ), in which an invented plot sets off a compelling portrait of Dostoyevsky surrounded and oppressed by the atmosphere of his own novels. He himself needed invention as a path to understanding. Indeed, he appeared to need it to the same extent that his great rival Tolstoy – whose
War and Peace
( 1865–9 ) was published at the same time as
Crime and Punishment
, and in the very same journal – grew to abhor it. The two works meet in their dethronement of the ‘great man’ theory of history, the ‘Napoleon complex’, but have little else in common. Tolstoy needed certainty and truth, Dostoyevsky required ‘lies’: that vibrant stream of invention in relation to the past, present and future that,