Conrad’s Lord Jim and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment: Contrastive Axiologies1

Abstract

When the author of this paper began studying the works of Joseph Conrad half a century ago, literary studies were still dominated by New Criticism, which claimed that the purest criticism attends only to the text, ignoring by and large the historical context, the flesh-and-blood writer, and the horizon of expectations of the readers. The author, however, has favoured a less “pure”, contextualist approach, especially when dealing with writers so embroiled in historical reality as Conrad, and perhaps even more obviously, Dostoevsky. Finding support for his approach in the “question and answer logic” of the English philosopher R.G. Collingwood, the author argues that Dostoevsky’s 'Crime and Punishment' and Conrad’s 'Lord Jim' offer contrastive responses to the nineteenth-century axiological crisis – particularly in the sphere of ethics. Conrad’s view of human nature is essentially ironic and his model of the human make-up hierarchical. Our moral task and the measure of our humanity consists in disciplining and sublimating the lower instincts and passions. Dostoevsky, in contrast, emphasizes the dangers of perverted reason and locates goodness in nature and the human heart. Since he also finds there cruelty, greed, self-seeking and blind passions, there emerges a paradoxical vision. Dostoevskian man as well as his world is torn by irreconcilable dualities, which can only be transcended.