Example of a summary/response of/to a critical article: Richard Gill's "The Bridges of St. Petersburgh: A Motif in Crime and Punishment"

     The subject of Richard Gill’s article is apparent without reading "The Bridges of St. Petersburg: A Motif in Crime and Punishment" in its entirety. This he defines with a straightforward introduction and an even more direct thesis: "My purpose [...] is to show more fully how this hitherto neglected motif of the bridge functions in Dostoevsky’s dialectical orchestration" (1). By examining previously explored symbols and reviewing possible literary inspirations for such a motif, Gill delves into various stages of the novel, analyzing a collection of bridges that correspond to significant plot details.

     Unfortunately, Gill seems to jump from example to example; the consequence of writing’s equivalent to island-hopping is a disorganized array of contradictory statements. Gill himself discusses the paradoxical quality of bridges as a motif: "They suggest both union and separation, distance and contract. Linking and joining what would otherwise remain separate, they also evoke the 'transitional,' the state of being in-between" (2). The reader is left to wonder which bridges in the novel are symbolic of which concepts.
     Gill focuses primarily on one bridge in his article. Taking on a cyclic role in both Dostoevsky’s novel and Gill’s piece, the Kokushkin Bridge appears at the beginning and end. Gill argues that "its climatic position implies that the movement of Raskolnikov towards the bridge and thus to the pawnbroker’s room [...] initiates the whole complex action of the novel" (1). There is no doubt about the importance of this bridge; it is later the same one at which Raskolnikov contemplates whether or not the time is right for him to "turn [...] from his crime to his punishment" (Gill 7). That said, I would not go as far as to claim that, by stepping towards the bridge in the first sentence of Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov is setting the whole course of events into action. Yes, I believe Dostoevsky strategically chose the same bridge to essentially start and end his protagonist’s criminal career, but there were many other events that led Raskolnikov to murder. As Zosimov says of Raskolnikov’s illness, explicitly tied to the murder, "'In two or three days, if this continues, he will be just as he was, I mean as he was a month ago, or two . . . or perhaps even three. This, you see, has been coming on for a long time [...]'" (188).
     What is most fascinating about this article is the one element that Gill seems to have downplayed, left only as a footnote: the translation of the word crime. He hints at Raskolnikov’s obsession with stepping over - Gill writes, "Such phenomenological implications of bridges are particularly relevant to Raskolnikov’s peculiar psychology, his obsessions with taking a 'new step,' his vacillation between one extreme state of mind and another" (2). However, Gill fails to fully engage this discussion, to draw the direct connection between this obsession and the common use of bridges as a symbol. An endnote to the Norton Critical Edition of the text reads: "The Russian word for 'crime' [...] is prestuplenie, from pre (across, trans-) and stuplenie (a stepping) [Prestuplenie’s meaning is] played on in the text in a manner which is lost sight of in the translation […]" (466). I believe that this is essentially the basis for Gill’s theory on bridges' importance as a motif. This forgotten element is what could have tied his piece together; while the clever bit of wordplay may have been lost in translation for Gill, it is found again for me in this refreshing look at how an element of the setting can carry so much weight in a novel.