“how an intention becomes reality, how theory is enfleshed, how abstract reasoning ends in a sensitive, compassionate man slipping in ‘sticky, warm blood’. What state of mind is needed for this to happen? Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) responded to this quandary in his late essay ‘Why Do People Stupefy Themselves?’ (1890), where he sought to explain the state of mental automatism in which Raskolnikov carried out his crime. But Tolstoy, an aggressive teetotaller by this stage in his life, was surely exaggerating when he implies that the glass of beer Raskolnikov consumes at the end of the first chapter ‘silences the voice of conscience’. Raskolnikov’s utter passivity, which makes him succumb to ‘ideas in the air’ and to gamble everything on one desperate act, reaches back far further than the glass of beer, deeper even than the question of ‘conscience’. Nor can it be reduced to the verdict of insanity, as Raskolnikov himself is aware (even when others are not). This passivity is a state of spiritual death and it is this that enables the crime.”