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station seems no bigger than a cupboard. And soon suffering criminality will put on the radiant robes of transcendence. Led by the saintly Sonya Marmeladova, who has turned harlot to support her destitute family, Raskolnikov looks at last to God. The nihilist, the insolent Napoleon, is all at once redeemed—implausibly, abruptly—by a single recitation from the Gospels, and goes off, docile and remorseful, to serve out his sentence in Siberia.
    Nabokov gleefully derides Dostoyevsky’s sentimental conventions: “I do not like this trick his characters have of ‘sinning their way to Jesus.’ ” Ridiculing Raskolnikov’s impetuous “spiritual regeneration,” Nabokov concedes that “the love of a noble prostitute … did not seem as incredibly banal in 1866 … as it does now when noble prostitutes are apt to be received a little cynically.” Yet the doctrine of redemption through suffering came to be the bulwark of Dostoyevsky’s credo. He believed in spiritual salvation. He had been intimate with thieves and cutthroats; he had lived among criminals. He had himself been punished as a criminal. Even as he was writing
Crime and Punishment
, he was under the continuing surveillance of the secret police.
    The secret police, however, are not this novel’s secret. Neither are the ukases and explosives of that Czarist twilight. Murder and degradation; perversity, distortion, paralysis, abnormal excitation, lightning conversion; dive after dive into fits of madness (Raskolnikov, his mother, Svidrigailov, Katerina Marmeladova); a great imperial city wintry in tone, huddled, frozen in place, closeted, all in the heart of summertime—these are not the usual characteristics of a work dedicated to political repudiations.
Crime and Punishment
is something else, something beyond what Dostoyevsky may have plotted and what the scholars habitually attend to. Its strangeness is that of a galloping centaurpulling a droshky crowded with groaning souls; or else it is a kaleidoscopic phantasmagoria, confined, churning, stuttering. St. Petersburg itself has the enclosed yet chaotic quality of a perpetual dusk, a town of riverbank and sky, taverns, tiny apartments cut up into rented cabins and cells, mazy alleys, narrow stairways, drunks, beggars, peddlers, bedraggled students, street musicians, whores—all darkened and smudged, as if the whole of the city were buried in a cellar, or in hell.
    This irresistible deformation of commonly predictable experience is what fires Dostoyevsky’s genius. Nabokov dislikes that genius (I dislike it too) because its language is a wilderness and there are woeful pockets of obscurantist venom at its center. But in the end
Crime and Punishment
is anything but a manifesto. Citizenly rebuttal is far from its delirious art. In the fever of his imagining, it is not the radicals Dostoyevsky finally rebukes, but the Devil himself, the master of sin, an unconquerable principality pitted against God.

The Posthumous Sublime
    There is almost no clarifying publisher’s apparatus surrounding
The Emigrants
, W. G. Sebald’s restless, melancholy, and (I am almost sorry to say) sublime narrative quartet. One is compelled—ludicrously, clumsily—to settle for that hapless term (what
is
a “narrative quartet”?) because the very identity of this work remains murky. Which parts of it are memoir, which fiction—and ought it to matter? As for external facticity, we learn from the copyright page that the original German publication date is 1993, and that the initials W.G. represent Winfried Georg. A meager paragraph supplies a handful of biographical notes: the author was born in Wartach im Allgäu, Germany; he studied German literature in Freiburg (where, one recalls, Heidegger’s influence extended well into the nineteen-seventies), and later in Francophone Switzerland and in Manchester, England, where he began a career in British university teaching. Two dates stand out: Sebald’s birth in 1944, an