Raskolnikov fascinates us because he appears free in a way that is far beyond normal freedom. But his thoughts are transitory and negative. They rise up but are soon gone replaced by new thoughts and new ideas. His freedom grounded in his mind leads him nowhere, to an unreal inhuman state. He ultimately reveals that he is a fiction, a self freely created uselessly by a mind based on nothing. Sonya is free because the cruelty and the injustice of the world force her to be free. Insults, suffering, loathsomeness do not allow her mind to create for her some comforting fictitious but practical self based on nothingness. Everything has been taken from Sonya. The hatred and cruelty around her in the world have stripped her of normal human falsity and forced her to retreat into her soul. Because she must give up everything, she finds everything. The meek and the suffering inherit the world because the powerful of the world despise them and crush them. The world forces Sonya to flee into the nothingness in her soul where she discovers miraculously asecrettreasure.
Some of Dostoevsky’s other characters, like Sonya, give evidence of secret treasure within them but most of them are groundless, on their own, disconnected from the normal world and also from the world of God. He constructed characters from nothing and delighted in watching them try to assert their extreme individuality among regular, normal people. He created a comedy so divine that the more he created living beings from nothing, the more he became sure that God was helping him create them in order to show the world that nothing can ever be as vital as a divine presence in the human heart. For Dostoevsky life for humans must be free and without any foundation because there is a God.
In one of his early novels published in 1846, The Double, his hero Mr. Golyadkin, a minor government official, discovers the appearance of another Mr. Golyadkin, another being exactly like himself. At the beginning of the novel before his double appears, he consults a doctor because he feels mentally unbalanced. It is natural to think as his strange story develops that he loses his reason. In reality he never loses his reason and he becomes more and more unbalanced and delirious because he is horrified that he is losing not his reason but his self. His self appears to him in a form exactly like himself in every detail, as a living foreign himself exactly like himself. His double arrives on the scene and this other alien self that is also himself becomes more dominant in their relations with one another than himself. Reason is always able to guide us to some logical and practical end. We feel it is a necessary integral part of our normal behavior that helps us directly. But when our imagination runs wild for some unknown reason, when our emotions start going berserk and we appeal to our reason, we find that our reason is still present but is indifferent to our trouble and of no help. Mr. Golyadkin’s reason tells him with indifference that he is the real Mr. Golyadkin and that the other Mr. Golyadkin is also the real Mr. Golyadkin. Reason does not abandon the poor man at all and merely remains a useless presence in his mind indifferent to the delirious state of his feelings. As the other false Mr. Golyadkin becomes more and more dominant and as the reason of the real Mr. Golyadkin is without any power to distinguish between the two and establish who is real and who is unreal, the feelings of the original Mr. Golyadkin go more and more berserk as he begins doubting that he is in fact real. He is forced to enter a mental hospital. His double walks behind the carriage bringing the original Mr. Golyadkin to his new home and as he arrives there, disappears. Dostoevsky’s message is that Raskolnikov’s self, Mr. Golyadkin’s self, our selves may not be real. Our reason allows our imagination to create a self for ourselves and on our journey through life we must carefully keep presenting our invented self to others in a conventional package with few deviations. We feel comfortable with ourselves because other selves around us accept our invention of our self as real. Poor Mr. Golyadkin can not feel authentic facing his double’s invention of himself because it is in fact himself and only he should have the right to invent himself! By way of contrast, Sonya’s self is barely imaginable to herself. The self she constructed for herself naturally has been humiliated, crushed, destroyed. The world will no longer let her invent, it will only let her be. But normal being causes her suffering that is relieved only by the