ABSTRACT
Four days after Raskolnikov kills the old pawnbroker and her sister Lizaveta in Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment, Sonya Marmeladova reads to him from the Gospel of John about the raising of Lazarus. The scene is a scandal, which the narrative voice will not let us miss: “the harlot and the murderer strangely come together over the reading of the eternal book.” 1 It was meant to provoke, and it has. Religious conservatives still cringe at a prostitute playing the “evangelist” in a room where, presumably, she practices her trade. Arbiters of literary taste have been no less offended. Nabokov viciously attacks the episode as “the flaw, the crack in [the novel], which … causes the whole edifice to crumble ethically and aesthetically,” and declares his disdain: “‘The murderer and the harlot,’ and ‘the eternal book’—what a triangle. This is … a typical Dostoevskian rhetorical twist … that for sheer stupidity has hardly the equal in world-famous literature.” 2
