What the Money Cost

Snegiryov doesn't know he's going to trample the money until he does it.

Alyosha has spent the whole conversation watching him light up — the relief of it, the gratitude too sincere to hide, the little calculations about the new town they could move to, the jobs available, the daughters' prospects. Snegiryov is glad, genuinely, desperately glad, and in being so glad he has shown Alyosha the inside of his soul, which he immediately hates himself for. A man who has suffered degradation and humiliation cannot afford to be so openly saved. It names the wound. It makes the wound public. It makes the wound real.

So he crumples the notes and throws them down and tramples them with wild fury: "So much for your money! So much for your money!"

And then, before running away, he stops and shouts back: "What should I say to my boy if I took money from you for our shame?"

Alyosha tells Lise about it afterward with great feeling. He has understood everything: why the Captain showed his relief too clearly, why the showing made it worse, why the trampling was inevitable from the moment the relief showed. He even predicts that the Captain will take the money tomorrow — because today he has vindicated his honor, and having vindicated it, he is free to take the money without having sold it.

Lise asks the pointed question: "Aren't we showing contempt for him, in analyzing his soul like this? In deciding so certainly that he will take the money?"

Alyosha answers: "How can it be contempt when we are all like him? For you know we are just the same, no better. If we are better, we should have been just the same in his place."

This is the reversal of Raskolnikov's theory.

Raskolnikov believed that great people can step over, that the ordinary rules of morality don't bind the extraordinary man, that there is a hierarchy of souls. His Napoleon theory. He murdered to prove it and proved instead that he was not Napoleon — that he had a conscience, that he was ordinary, that ordinary rules applied to him.

Alyosha's version is the opposite. Not "I am above you" but "I am just the same as you." Not "I can analyze you from above" but "I understand you because I would be you in your place." The analysis is not contempt because its foundation is solidarity.

This is what Dostoevsky is doing in the structure of the novel: putting Alyosha beside Ivan and beside Raskolnikov to show what the alternative looks like in practice. Not the man who steps over. Not the man who theorizes. The man who says: I know why you did it because I would have done the same.

The thing Alyosha knows, that makes his prediction correct, is not superior intelligence. It's the refusal to separate himself from the human material he's analyzing. He keeps finding himself in Snegiryov — the pride, the relief, the shame at the relief — because he recognizes those things as his own.

The Captain takes the money the next day. Of course he does. Not because Alyosha was clever, but because Alyosha was right.

"We are all just the same" is either a consolation or a diagnosis. Dostoevsky seems to think it is both.