“Crime and Punishment” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Cambridge University Press

When I picked up Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, I was expecting it to be dense, dull, and depressing – especially since the background materials I read stated that Dostoyevsky wrote Crime and Punishment as an explicit critic of certain radical theories that were current in 1860s Russia, including utilitarianism and rationalism.

It’s not a good sign when a novel has a thesis. This is usually an indication you are about to be treated to a bunch of cardboard characters clomping around mouthing platitudes, engaging in fake debates, and delivering essay-length monologues while sitting in a café smoking, humping each other, or bravely defying some oppressive bureaucrat or petty despot.

So I was pleased when I found Crime and Punishment to be a wilder, stranger, more flawed, more chaotic, more puzzling, and ultimately more engaging book than I expected.

Dostoyevsky, by all accounts, meant to deliver a lecture pretending to be a novel. He ended up creating a work of art. Here’s how (with a truck-load of spoilers in the discussion).

Crime and Punishment: A Black Comedy?

The first indication that I was following Dostoyevsky down his own particular rabbit hole, rather than sitting in his classroom dutifully taking notes, was that long passages of Crime and Punishment were both horrible and funny.

An early example is what happens after Raskolnikov, the handsome and arrogant law school drop-out who is the novel’s central character, famously murders an old pawnbroker and her sister. Raskolnikov falls into a fever that seems physical, emotional, and spiritual all at once.

But instead of taking us into Raskolnikov’s apparently tortured mind, Dostoyevsky focuses on his friends, who cheerfully encourage him to get better while chatting about mutual acquaintances or who view him as a fascinating case of morbid psychology or some undefined nervous complaint.

Another example is the character of Porfiry Petrovich, the detective assigned to solve the murders. Porfiry is short and stout, with a soft round face and a figure Dostoyevsky describes as “somewhat womanish” who laughs and titters through nearly every conversation he has.

Yet this comic-figure of a man is also Dostoyevsky’s figure of vengeance. Porfiry is convinced of Raskolnikov’s guilt early in the book, pursues him with relentless guile, and attempts to drive Raskolnikov to confess either to the police or in a suicide note when he concludes there isn’t enough evidence to arrest him.

My final example. After 500 pages of anguish and self-examination, Raskolnikov goes to the police station to confess. Here is the high dramatic moment. Here is the finale of the novel. What happens?

Raskolnikov encounters a pompous, idiot lieutenant who babbles on about nonsense so incessantly that Raskolnikov actually gives up and leaves. A few minutes later, Raskolnikov returns, tries again, and this time manages to get the lieutenant to shut up long enough to confess.

These are odd, distracting, irrelevant choices if you want to advance a narrow moral argument. But they are excellent ones if you want to explore the strangeness, complexity, unpredictability, and absurdity of life. Which is what artists do. And that is what Dostoyevsky did, I think, despite his intentions to the contrary.

Iago, Raskolnikov, Meursault: The Reasons for the Crime Are … What?

For a thesis book to examine whether it is moral to commit murder, it is important for the author to clearly establish the reasons the character committed murder before he can show why those reasons are wrong.

But here’s the problem. Dostoyevsky doesn’t. Instead, he gives us a Chinese menu of possible motives, none of which are particularly convincing even to Raskolnikov himself.

The best example of this is in Chapter IV of Part V when Raskolnikov confesses he murdered the two women to Sonya , the virtuous naïve Christian girl who loves Raskolnikov unconditionally and who also happens to be a prostitute. (I’m not making that up.)

Anyhow, first, Raskolnikov tells Sonya that he murdered the women because he wanted to be like Napoleon, who pursued his grand ambitions without regard for conventional morality. Then he tells Sonya he murdered for money, so he could finish his education and support his family. Then he tells Sonya he murdered the old woman because she was a “louse … a useless, loathsome, harmful creature.” Then he says the reasons he committed the murders are that he is “vain, envious, malicious, base, vindictive and … well, perhaps with a tendency to insanity.” Then he blames the murders on “sulkiness”. Then he serves up a Will to Power argument. Then he agrees with Sonya that the devil made him do it. Then he says he did it for himself. Then he goes over all these reasons all over again and concludes, I’m so unhappy!

As the basis for a thesis, this is a hot mess. As a portrait of humanity it is – well, some of you might think it a hot mess too – but I think it is brilliant. And a century ahead of its time.

It has become fashionable, based on the latest cognitive and behavioral science, to conclude human beings are deeply irrational creatures who use reason not to guide their actions, but too justify them after the fact. It is also an established principal, at least among the modernist writers, that the more closely you examine the human character, the more ambiguous and ungrounded in some final essence the human character seems to become.

I tend to think of this vision of humanity in terms of classic (or Newtonian) mechanics and quantum mechanics. In classical mechanics, matter at a certain size … typically visible to the unaided human eye … behaves in logical, predictable, and consistent fashions. But at the atomic and subatomic level, all hell breaks loose with matter doing seemingly impossible things, like being in two places at once, or being both “up” and “down”, or other weird stuff that gives the average person a headache just contemplating. And yet, the visible logical world is founded on the invisible chaotic one.

This seems to me to be a good description of Raskolnikov. He is a quantum character trying to exist in a classical world. And not succeeding particularly well. And upsetting Dostoyevsky’s program in the process.

Also, all this suggests to me that Raskolnikov committed the murders for nothing or because there was an emptiness at his center that made him so indifferent that no action he took, good or bad, finally had meaning. Which I think is the case with Shakespeare’s Iago and Camus’ Meursault, and so I’ve added Raskolnikov to that group.

Crime, Punishment. No Crime, Punishment. Crime, No Punishment. No Crime, No Punishment.

The final reason for thinking Crime and Punishment isn’t a thesis book focused on Raskolnikov’s murders, despite Dostoyevsky’s stated intentions, is the amount of extraneous, irrelevant, contradictory, and confounding characters and plots he includes.

This sounds like a criticism, but what it really means is that Dostoyevsky did not let his school-teacher impulses get in the way of his inspiration, which seems to want to explore the whole spectrum of crimes and punishments, with or without a causal relation between the two.

It starts with Raskolnikov himself, who despite having committed a pre-meditated murder and a impulsive one (Raskolnikov kills the old woman’s sister when she surprises him during the crime), gets all of 8 years in prison.

Now I am not familiar with standards of punishment in 19th century Russia, but this sounds a little light to my American but none the less opposed to the death penalty ears, and was a bit surprising to Raskolnikov himself.

There are also unpunished criminals in Crime and Punishment. For example, the character of Svidrigaïlov, a depraved landowner who is suspected of several murders and sexual assaults, gets away free from the law (although he does commit suicide in one of the novels most persuasive and harrowing chapters). There is also Luzhin, a sadistic bully who likes to prey on women he perceives to be helpless.

We also find punished innocents. Sonya becomes a prostitute in a desperate attempt to keep her family, especially her younger step-siblings, from starvation. These step-siblings themselves suffer from the drunkenness of their father and the angry despair, then madness, then death by consumption of their mother.

Finally, there are unpunished innocents such as Raskolnikov’s cheerful and loyal friend Razumikhin, who happily marries Raskolnikov’s sister, and the detective Porfiry, who succeeds in helping to drive Raskolnikov’s confession and serving the ends of justice.

Dostoyevsky renders many of these characters with a grotesque, Gogol-esque exuberance that also undermines the thesis aspects of the book. The fact of their existence, rather than what the characters mean or what “morals of the story” Dostoyevsky wants us to take away with us, seem the real point of the novel.

Which perhaps makes Dostoyevsky like Milton in Blake’s “Marriage of Heaven and Hell” when Blake says

The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it

But I think Dostoyevsky is more like the Oracle of The Matrix movies when she talks about a character called the Architect. She says the Architect’s role in the movie is to “balance the equation”. She tells Keanu Reeves her role is to “unbalance it”.

Fyodor set out to be the Architect. He winds up being the Oracle.

The Sociology Of Plants ....Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles Part of Cambridge Cultural Social Studies by Chandra Mukerji, Cambridge University Press Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies Migrant Farmworkers in the United States, With a Foreword by Philippe Bourgois Seth Holmes (Author), Philippe Bourgois (Foreword), University of California Press Edible Memory: The Lure of Heirloom Tomatoes and other Forgotten Foods by Jennifer Jordan,University of Chicago Press, 2015 Structures of Memory: Understanding Urban Change in Berlin and Beyond by Jennifer Jordan,Stanford University Press, 2006, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World Paperback – May 28, 2002 by Michael Pollan,, Random House A Natural History of English Gardening 1650-1800 by Mark Laird, Yale University Press

The questions at the heart of my research are always similar — how do memory and meaning shape the material world? — but I ask these questions in starkly different kinds of settings, as well as both indoors and outside. When I first started my dissertation research on post-1989 urban change and collective memory in Berlin, I headed to the State Library in the former West Berlin, or Stabi West — the modernist library in the opening scene of Wim Wenders’s film, Wings of Desire. This was 1996, so the serious but helpful librarians pointed me to the long row of card catalogue drawers where I spent hours flipping through the soft paper cards in search of knowledge and ordering books from the closed subterranean stacks. In those thoughtful days at Stabi West, there were a few clunky (but back then cutting-edge) computers with the beginnings of computerised databases. Web 2.0 was still years away, and most of my research was analogue and on-site.

On days when I wasn’t in that library or hidden away in one of the many archives across the city, my outside research involved a pair of sturdy sandals or urban-appropriate boots, a notebook and a camera — first my father’s Canon AE-1, in my brief foray into the world of SLRs, and then a Canon Sureshot that I could quickly pull from the pocket of my jacket, get the shot and move on. I would shoot 400 or sometimes 200, mostly slide film and sometimes black-and-white. I would get it developed at the local drugstore, always careful in how many pictures I took as each click of the shutter had a clear financial cost. A decade later, one of those photographs became the cover of my first book, Structures of Memory: Understanding Urban Change in Berlin and Beyond.

I would walk for miles and miles in Berlin. The city smelled of diesel, cigarettes and coal smoke, some generated by my own coal stove. For all their toxicity, these smells still provoke a deep nostalgia to this day. I walked through derelict postindustrial landscapes, which today house gleaming condos, and down row after row of apartment buildings hastily built in the late-nineteenth-century boom, which had become layered with the violence of the twentieth century — bullet holes, neglect, air pollution. The quiet hours in the library paired with the dogged, pedestrian inquiry into the forgotten corners and secret memories of this complicated city. For me, a researcher posing specific questions about human action and the material world, the one didn’t make sense without the other. My ability to read the landscape grew with the hours spent learning the unique German vocabulary for talking about the built environment. But those books, and the mimeographed papers I pored through in the archives, made more sense the more time I spent learning, inch by inch, the topography of the city.

Today this pairing of indoors and outdoors continues in my research, but the locations and objects of inquiry have changed — to gardens and fields and forests, and to the digital world. After completing nearly a decade of work on Berlin and on the violence that once occupied its streets and buildings, I turned to the plant-human intersection and to landscapes of sustenance. My last book investigated heirloom tomatoes and antique apples (Edible Memory: The Lure of Heirloom Tomatoes and Other Forgotten Foods), and I am now writing on the one hand about climate change and historical kitchen gardens, and on the other about the changing landscapes of beer brewing — forgotten hops fields, revitalised barley fields, abandoned malt houses and hop kilns and the like. My research continues to be profoundly material. Even in this digital age, I do much of my research with old-fashioned books and am still a committed user of libraries, taking advantage of the serendipity of open stacks and the tactile focus of paper books and interlibrary loans.

I pair this indoor work with the work I do quite literally out in the field, with muddy feet, finding old apple trees or talking with gardeners in the shade of an arbor. While conducting this research I have been too hot, too cold, soaked to the bone, jetlagged, sunburned and mosquito-bitten. This research also requires an unfamiliar pace for my hectic self — being slow, standing still, watching, listening. It is a very physical, visceral form of research, and one that allows me to be present in landscapes that are often undergoing great transformations that are not always immediately apparent.

Royal Kitchen Garden, Hampton Court, London There are aspects of this research that are terrifying (thunderstorms, climate change), but there is also much joy and pleasure to be had. Because I focus on edible plants, there is almost always something good to eat or drink at hand. I have eaten plums pulled of a tree that is a research object, been nourished by the tea room at Hampton Court Palace with its Henry VIII-inspired menu and produce from the Georgian garden nearby and tasted tomatoes plucked from a garden in a vacant lot in Garfield Park in Chicago. This research engages all senses — it has smells (some good, some bad), tastes (almost always good). It also has the sounds I have learned to listen for of bird and insect life as well as the weather, those important forces that Mark Laird and others remind garden historians to attend to. This work is also utterly visual and tactile. I am certain that part of what has sent me in this direction is the deep draw of gazing out at a landscape that contains more shades of green than I will ever be able to name.

But the ability to read a landscape of plants is quite dependent on some kind of experience and expertise. This is most often the knowledge of plants acquired over a lifetime and handed down across generations in communities that rely, at least in part, on foods and medicines gathered from forests, meadows and seashores or grown in local gardens and fields. Most of the time I have a guide of some sort explaining the landscape to me — a seasoned gardener or young apprentice, a costumed interpreter or an eager volunteer. In many respects, landscapes do not speak for themselves. And, in contrast to how I feel in a library or a database, I am a novice in the landscapes I enter: an intruder, a visitor, uninitiated.

When I stand in a garden or a field or a forest, my interpretation of that landscape is profoundly limited. In other words, I see the forest and I see the trees, but without a conversation with the local expert or gardener, a look into the archive or a perusal of archaeological and meteorological reports, I have little ability to place this landscape into context. I have little way of knowing if it has changed, if I am glimpsing a snapshot of radical transformation or arboreal or horticultural continuity. A local forager, a historian, a botanist, a park ranger, a phenologist and a meteorologist might all have different takes on a given landscape. Or, surveyed, their takes on that landscape might line up in compelling or even startling ways.

So, for my purposes of seeking the links between human action, memories and meanings and the landscapes we inhabit, I triangulate. I sit quietly at home or in my office, reading a stack of library books or the dim glow of journal articles held in the vast expanse of my hard drive. Then I walk out into the world, either alone or in the company of a knowledgeable farmer or gardener, and seek to bring together what I see (and smell, hear, taste and touch) with what I have read, and with the instruction that my guide can give me in reading the ways of the landscape. Sometimes this is quite obvious, embarrassingly so, as when a young gardener at Old Sturbridge Village answered my question about their apple tree collections by pointing to a good-sized cider orchard that was sitting in plain sight and that I had just walked by — no excuse. Once this past summer, another costumed interpreter at a different historical garden, observing me from afar for a while, finally crossed the dusty road running through the centre of a reconstructed agricultural village. He had watched me taking an inordinate number of photographs — with my phone rather than the SureShot of my Berlin days — in the apothecary’s garden that he tended. My read of that garden changed utterly once he talked and walked me through it — my initial impressions were wrong, nearly the opposite of what I learned when he told me of its origins and intentions.
Image Credit: (Tracy Reid CC BY 2.0)

A sociology of plants is already underway, and is also very much demanding the presence of the researcher in the field and the archive. Two examples are Seth Holmes’s Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies, where the materiality of the research requires Holmes to work alongside the broken bodies of the women and men he writes about, to cross the border with them, to see and experience all the painful physicality of migrant labour, the people who harvest the fruit in such high demand across the USA and around the world. A quite different example would be Chandra Mukerji’s Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles, where the researcher triangulated the physical experience of viewing the garden at ground level and from above with deep archival records that explain not only the meaning of this particular arrangement of box hedges, annual beds and opulent fountains, but also the military technologies and intentions at work.

I now spend a lot of time with plants, both under the open sky and with the digital and analogue research materials at my desk. This is not ornamental work. Do I even have to say it? Without plants, there are no people. Water is life, and so are plants. Look to your plants. The weeds in the cracks of t

he sidewalks, the great trees like time machines from past centuries and millennia, the meticulously monotonous cornfields, kelp washing up on shore. The apple orchard, carrot patch and the rice paddy. The rain forest, the chaparral, the high desert with its plant life meticulously adapted to arid conditions, the alpine meadow. Without them, there is no us, no life on planet earth. Many of my colleagues, with good reason, write about space, territory and violence of various sorts. Violence and loss are never far away, and the sociology of plants is as intricately connected to power as any other realm of sociological inquiry. But I keep reaching for space, territory and joy, a very intentional move. There is much death in the world, and I want to write about life. So much cruelty, but I want, sometimes, to write about kindness. This is part of why I set out into the kitchen in my last book, and now wander forth into gardens and forests. It is impossible to ignore that these green spaces are intrinsically connected to systems of struggle, exploitation and deep imbalances of power, but, as Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and others make so clear, they can also be places where people find peace and create life.

The Coalition Effect, 2010-2015. Anthony Seldon & Mike Finn (eds). Cambridge University Press. 2015.

Ahead of the 2015 General Election, Anthony Seldon wrote a clear introduction to this expert volume of essays, setting out the observation that David Cameron’s place in history was already secured: for holding the coalition itself together; significantly improving the economic outlook; overseeing some steady domestic reform; restoring dignity to the PM’s office; and winning the Scottish referendum (25). To those, further cementing Cameron’s place in history, we might now add the 2016 referendum on Britain’s EU membership.

Yet, our judgement of the former PM will rest a great deal on the broader question of how history will judge the Coalition government. For a book that asks much more rigorous and specific questions, this volume, edited by Seldon and Mike Finn, helpfully comes very close to looking at that verdict. The Coalition Effect, 2010-2015 deserves serious recognition for setting out, and in many respects crystallising, the major and contemporary distinctive effects of the Coalition government on British politics. Its Herculean task is carefully pursued through 23 chapters of sober, analytically rigorous and critically evidenced observations which adhere to the final conclusions of Finn – that although Britain’s first peacetime Coalition government since the 1930s came into existence because of political necessity, this neither prevented it from setting high ambitions for itself nor inhibited its capacity to generate legislative, economic, governmental and political effects (601). This account and assessment of the ambitions, the visions and the ‘new politics’, including the Programme for Government, tell us much about the Coalition in terms of its history, its meaning and desirability.

For Finn, the Coalition was successful in some economic ambitions – notably, restoring the economy to growth (in terms of jobs and employment) – but that it failed in other significant areas e.g. eliminating the structural deficit, government borrowing and its position towards the ‘cost of living crisis’. It did not achieve its economic targets. As Paul Johnson and Daniel Chandler’s chapter on the Coalition and the economy expresses, the 2010-2015 government only endured Act One of a two-part process of fiscal consolidation in which Act Two may well have been tougher, albeit only now just unfolding (193).

Finn further concludes that the Big Society ‘failed emphatically as a unifying ideal’. And what is also notable about memorable figures such as Andrew Lansley, who ‘went rogue’, and Michael Gove in ‘carrying forward his personal agenda’, are their solo, independent and real effects – but that means they were not truly ‘Coalition effects’. The Coalition’s huge impact on the NHS and education was divisive. Furthermore, for all the debate, the government did not achieve much on constitutional reform. The relationship with Europe deteriorated significantly. It advocated intervention over Iraq and Libya, but could not carry the Commons or the country over Syria. Some of the most devastating Coalition effects were not on agendas as such, but on the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties. And England, of course, still does not love coalitions.
Image Credit: (themostinept CC BY SA 2.0)

Finn’s observations also raise issues particularly germane to the 2015 General Election: that an unintended net Coalition effect is the genuine emergence of four-party politics at Westminster (at that stage envisaged as being Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats and UKIP). The real ‘fourth party’ was, of course, the Scottish National Party (SNP), returning 56 MPs at that election. Yet, as a chapter by Neil McGarvey highlights, beyond Westminster, coalition and multi-party politics, fixed term parliaments and referenda were not truly novel since they had already become part of ‘normal’ politics in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales (110).

While four-party politics could still potentially have far-reaching implications for Britain at home and abroad, as Finn argues, one is left with the niggling question of whether such an emergence could just as easily be viewed as a consequence arising from, for example, an absence of catch-all, cohesive and strong leadership within mainstream parties in a rapidly changing environment rather than stemming from a peculiar ‘Coalition effect’ as such. Peter Riddell, citing Robert Hazell, describes the essence of the broader problem in his own chapter that all the authors of this volume face: ‘It is important to try to distinguish what is a necessary consequence of coalition government and what is merely contingent’ (130). This volume, then, is a significant move towards identifying those distinctions and features from necessary but seismic fudges and the intricate but often unforeseeable complexities and promises-turned-compromises of coalition government.

Martin Loughlin and Cal Viney’s chapter on the Coalition and the constitution is supremely notable for its consideration of fixed term parliaments, voting and House of Lords reform, sovereignty and the EU, rights protection and Scotland and Wales in the UK. It is well justified in concluding that ‘the experience of the 2010-2015 coalition government highlights the dangers of a minority party [the Liberal Democrats] seeking to use its leverage to bring about basic constitutional reform on matters for which there is no cross party consensus’ (86). There is one proviso, however. The implicit division and tension of parliamentary and popular government, theorised by Vernon Bogdanor and which Loughlin and Viney adopt, does not explain precisely how coalitions preclude democratic government and principles. Most importantly, Parliament as a whole (as well as the electorate) did not endorse by any kind of mandate the Coalition arrangements, which in turn endorsed the Coalition Agreement. Their view, therefore, that the implication of the formation of coalitions between the parties is that Parliament, rather than the electorate, has the decisive role in determining who will form the government (84) is problematic in this case – neither Parliament as a whole nor the electorate directly endorsed the Coalition arrangement preceding the Agreement.

It seems more likely that the Coalition of 2010, as organised by a very small clique of political elites (probable ministers and senior party figures), required the bypassing of Westminster and the Coalition agreements, precluding formal democratic procedure and parliamentary government founded on accountability to the electorate. The Coalition Agreement itself was not a Westminster phenomenon, but a Whitehall one. As Seldon writes in his introductory essay, ‘the advice from Whitehall officials was that the national interest demanded stable government’ (2): thus, the Coalition was born. It is for this reason that Loughlin and Viney’s chapter provides and provokes a stimulating essay and debate on the key principles of coalition government.

There is also sometimes a point of caution, or perhaps reservation, towards supposing multi-party coalition arrangements are themselves a ‘Coalition effect’. Anthony King in The British Constitution (2007), for example, considered a line of argument that briefly came to the fore during the turbulent 1970s when adversarial politics and the extremism of party political rides on the ‘ideological big-dipper’ occurred, alleged to have led to economic stagnation, political chaos and a society at odds with itself (270). As a result, some began to see the solution as Proportional Representation and the essential formation of moderate, anti-extremist, inter-party, coalition governments. It bears some political resonance with the UK’s post-2008 wave of economic recession followed by tighter post-2010, Conservative-led, governmental austerity measures; it is possibly too soon for political analysts and scientists to predict again only a long future of coalition governments.

The wonderful hindsight of the 2015 General Election following the publication of this volume showed us that a wafer-thin majority Conservative government could be capably formed while coalition arrangements are rapidly, but with dignity, consigned to history. Yet, if anything, the indispensability of this text lies with the fact that five years after the first coalition government was formed since the Second World War, a wide variety of esteemed experts from Whitehall, Parliament, academia and think tanks have given their professional and intriguing assessments of the ‘Coalition effect’ across all major policy areas.