The Certificate of Honour

Dostoevsky | Crime and Punishment

Katerina Ivanovna has a certificate proving her father was a colonel and almost a governor. She keeps it for moments like this one.

The memorial dinner for Marmeladov is chaos: the respectable lodgers didn't come, the ones who came are drunk, Amalia Ivanovna is posturing in her mourning cap, someone has passed Sonia a piece of bread cut in the shape of two hearts pierced with an arrow. Katerina Ivanovna has spent twenty of the twenty roubles Raskolnikov gave for the funeral on rum, Madeira, and rice-and-honey. They will have nothing for tomorrow. She spent it anyway.

The certificate comes out to prove she's better than the people who didn't come, better than Amalia Ivanovna, better than the whole performance. It goes around the table among the drunken lodgers. It contains in print that her father was "of the rank of a major, and also a companion of an order."

It proves nothing. It helps nothing. It is passed around the table and eventually comes back to her, meaning exactly what it meant before she produced it.

What Dostoevsky is doing here is not satire. He is not laughing at Katerina Ivanovna. He is not showing that pride is foolish, or that the poor should be humble. He is doing something much harder.

He is showing that the certificate is the right response.

Katerina Ivanovna is dying of consumption. She has three small children and no money. Her husband drank himself to death. She has nowhere to go. The dinner she organized to honor his memory has turned into a brawl, and she is about to be evicted. She has every reason to know that none of this matters, that the certificate proves nothing, that the fight is unwinnable.

She fights anyway. She produces the certificate. She kisses Sonia in front of everyone and declares her "gentle, patient, devoted, generous and of good education." She throws a crumpled ten-rouble note at Luzhin's face when he frames Sonia, and it hits him in the eye.

The dignity is not delusion. She knows what her situation is. She knows what the certificate is worth. She does it anyway because the alternative — to be beaten without protest, to accept the humiliation demanded by poverty, to become someone who does not defend herself and the people she loves — would be to agree with her situation's assessment of her.

Katerina Ivanovna refuses to accept the verdict.

There is a logic here that Raskolnikov's theory cannot accommodate. The Napoleon theorem asks: does the action produce a net positive outcome? If not, why take it? The dinner produces no positive outcome. The certificate proves nothing. The note thrown in Luzhin's face is immediately picked up by Amalia Ivanovna.

But the logic Dostoevsky is working with isn't consequentialist. It's about what you assert by your actions, independent of outcome. Katerina Ivanovna's resistance asserts that she is not reducible to her circumstances. The certificate asserts that her father was a colonel, that she had a life before this, that she has the right to produce evidence on her own behalf. The note thrown at Luzhin asserts that Sonia is worth defending even in a losing situation.

These assertions don't change the situation. They don't have to. They establish what Katerina Ivanovna holds to be true about herself and the people she loves, regardless of what the situation can do to her.

The last time we see her in this scene she is running out into the street with the green shawl thrown over her head, going to find justice. She doesn't find it. There is no justice available for someone in her situation. She knows this better than anyone.

She goes anyway. The going is the assertion.

The novel is not optimistic about this. Katerina Ivanovna's assertion changes nothing. But Dostoevsky doesn't frame it as futile either. The certificate passes around a table of drunk lodgers. She holds her certificate in her hands. She was a colonel's daughter. She dances the shawl dance. These things happened.

The circumstances don't get to take that.

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