I Am Going to Foreign Parts

s/books · Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky · Part VI

The night before his suicide, Svidrigailov gives away all his money.

He visits taverns with petty clerks, drinks no wine, pays for everything. He goes to Sonya and leaves three thousand rubles — "It was good advice when you told him to confess. It would be much better for him." He visits his child bride at midnight in the pouring rain and hands over fifteen thousand, then stands for a moment staring at the Little Neva before walking to a cheap hotel and renting the smallest room available, under the stairs.

He is not buying his way out of hell. He is dying tomorrow. The money goes because the people need it.

He gets a room so low-pitched he can barely stand. Mouse scratching in the corner, smell of damp and leather, wind roaring outside. He lies down and tries not to think.

Two dreams come.

The first: a country house on Trinity Day. Flowers everywhere, the scent of narcissus. In the middle of a large drawing-room, on a table covered in white satin, a coffin. Inside, a girl in white muslin, arms crossed, wreathed in roses. Fourteen years old. She had drowned herself. And the smile on her pale lips "was full of an immense unchildish misery." Svidrigailov knows her.

He wakes up, goes to the window. Thinks about the river flooding in the night.

The second dream: he finds a five-year-old girl shivering in the hotel corridor, soaking wet, hidden behind a cupboard all night from a drunken mother. He carries her to his room. Undresses her. Puts her in the bed and covers her. She falls asleep at once.

Then he looks again.

The flush on her cheeks deepens, becomes too bright. Her lips are too red. Her eyelashes flicker. She opens her eyes. "There was something infinitely hideous and shocking in that laugh, in those eyes, in such nastiness in the face of a child." She holds out her arms.

He wakes up crying "Accursed child!" with his hand raised to strike her.

The dreams are a map.

Dream one: the fourteen-year-old he destroyed, smiling at him with "unchildish misery." He knows her — meaning he knows what he did to her. The dream doesn't punish him. It just shows him the thing he made.

Dream two: a child he tries to protect transforms in his hands into what he has always made children into. He cannot touch innocence without his psychology turning it wrong. Even in the dream, even asleep, the mechanism runs.

This is not guilt making him see evil where there is none. This is self-knowledge. The dream shows him exactly what he is, in the most precise way available to a sleeping man. He can't protect a child. He can try, and the thing his psychology turns it into is the thing he's spent his life pursuing.

"What, at five years old?" he says, in genuine horror. He means it. He is horrified. And then he wakes up.

Raskolnikov in this same week has been discovering that he failed his test — he killed two people for a theory and can't live as the theory required. The theory was wrong about him.

Svidrigailov's discovery is different. He didn't have a theory. He just pursued what he pursued and now he understands what that pursuit was. He is not horrified by the theory. He is horrified by himself.

Earlier he said: "I never had a great hatred for anyone, I never particularly desired to avenge myself even, and that's a bad sign, a bad sign, a bad sign." He didn't know what he meant then, not precisely. He means: a man with no capacity for hatred has no brake, no resistance, no refusal to follow appetite wherever it goes. He said it while bragging. He means it more now.

The children's money, Sonya's three thousand — these are the acts of a man who still has the capacity to see the difference between right and wrong, who is not morally blind. He knows what to do with money on a last night. He does it. But the dreams also show him that knowing the difference is not enough when the mechanism runs anyway in the dark.

At five in the morning, after the dreams, he writes a few lines in his notebook. He leaves the hotel. He walks toward the Little Neva. He stops at the gate of a building where a guard in a soldier's coat is standing.

"What do you want here?" the guard asks.

"Nothing, brother, good morning."

"This isn't the place."

"I am going to foreign parts, brother."

He shoots himself.

"Foreign parts" is the phrase for America — where people run when Petersburg gets too hot. It's the joke he made with Raskolnikov hours earlier. He makes it again now, to a stranger who doesn't know the joke, in the early morning fog, with a revolver in his pocket. Not for the joke's sake. Just because this is how he goes — giving Sonya three thousand, patting the child bride's cheek, walking in the rain, saying good morning to the guard.

Matter-of-fact to the end. Slightly bored. Doing the right things and knowing what he is.

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