In The Possessed, all these deficiencies are made up. A final liability is the difficulty he has in making up his mind. He is reserved, proud and unsociable, and despite his boldness in theory, never had any plan to commit more than a single murder (the second was unplanned and regretted), obviously not a chain of crimes. Lebeziatnikov, who keeps talking about a commune and regards Sonia’s being forced into prostitution as ‘a vigorous protest against the organisation of society’, is certainly a socialist, but Raskolnikov, who has no time for idiots, consistently gives him a very wide berth. A minor figure, Lebeziatnikov, is lumped together with Raskolnikov by a spiteful person as one of a pair of ‘notorious infidels, agitators and atheists’. He appears to believe in socialism, yet his only friend, the former student Razumikhin, is a conservative and disquietingly thick with functionaries of the law. He is isolated, and his having a devoted mother and sister who bring out the ‘good’ in him makes him feel all the more cut off. There is the seed of a terrorist in Raskolnikov, which cannot come to fruit since he lacks a prime essential: organisation. It is possible to see Crime and Punishment as a prophecy of The Possessed. The exception is the superannuated old liberal, Stepan Trofimovich, an idealist in his writings and something more abject in his daily conduct, who naturally holds no terrors for his fellow citizens. But in the outcome there is no divergence between idea and reality: in most cases theory and practice have fused, which is what makes the novel so frightening. In The Possessed, there is a whole band of theorists, each possessed by a doctrinaire idea, and a whole innocent Russian town to practise on. In the earlier book, there was just one theory, Raskolnikov’s, which he fails to prove, owing to his own half-heartedness in applying it – an indication of a possible weakness in the theory itself. It does so on a wider scale, yet without any such reassuring conclusion. The Possessed, too, deals with ideas and their execution. Well, if you were a philistine, you could. You could say that Crime and Punishment was a novel about the difference between theory and practice.

Demons dostoevsky review