Crime and Punishment

7/10

A strange and uncomfortable story which illustrates that the punishment we give ourselves is worse than anything that can be imposed upon us.

Right of the bat, I want to give a shout out the Penguin Classics edition of this novel that I read. It has excellent footnotes and annotations that really helped me comprehend the historical, geographic, and social context of the story. Parts of this story were distressing and horrifying to me. I’m a slightly squeamish reader and I don’t generally encounter any violence or murder in my usual fare. The dream horse being flogged and killed was horrible as was the extreme violence of the central murder(s). Indeed, when Rodion is en route to committing the crime, the tension is turned up to 11, and I was vicariously feeling stress for him when people were trying to enter the locked door in its immediate aftermath. “‘Crime? What crime?’ he exclaimed in a sudden fit of fury. ‘My killing a loathsome, harmful louse, a filthy old moneylender woman who brought no good to anyone, to murder whom would pardon forty sins, who sucked the lifeblood of the poor, and you call that a crime?” Later, during penal servitude, Rodion clarifies his crime. “Though of course in that case a great many of mankind’s benefactors who did not inherit power but took it for themselves ought to have been executed at their very first steps. But those people had the courage of their convictions, and so they were right, while I didn’t, and consequently had no right to take the step I did.’ This was the one respect in which he admitted to any crime: in not having had the courage of his convictions and in having turned himself in.” As for the punishment part, it certainly isn’t referring to the lenient 8 years of penal servitude in Siberia, rather it was the almost unendurable mental ramifications. “A certainty that everything, even his memory, even the simple faculty of reason, was deserting him had begun to torment him unendurably. ‘What, is it really beginning now, is this the punishment beginning? Yes, yes, I knew it!’”. Later, “‘all this must be brought to an end today, in one go, right now; otherwise I can’t go home, because I don’t want to go on living like this’. How was he to bring it to an end? With what means? He had not the slightest idea, and he did not want to think about it, either. He drove the thought away: thought tormented him. All he could do was feel, knowing that, whatever else happened, the situation must be changed, ‘by whatever means possible’, he kept repeating with a desperate, obsessive self-confidence and resolve”. Overall, I have to say that this book did not really connect with me. The story feels so far removed from my reality as to be almost completely unrelatable in every way. The world in which it is set is gross with its poverty, filth, and cramped spaces. As you are aware, I engage fully with all prescribed texts and, consequently, for this item, I went to my brimming digital book case, took down my copy of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lectures on Russian Literature, blew the dust off, and attained the view of a renowned literary critic. “My position in regard to Dostoevski is a curious and difficult one. In all my courses I approach literature from the only point of view that literature interests me—namely the point of view of enduring art and individual genius. From this point of view Dostoevski is not a great writer, but a rather mediocre one—with flashes of excellent humor, but, alas, with wastelands of literary platitudes in between. In Crime and Punishment Raskolnikov for some reason or other kills an old female pawnbroker and her sister. Justice in the shape of an inexorable police officer closes slowly in on him until in the end he is driven to a public confession, and through the love of a noble prostitute he is brought to a spiritual regeneration that did not seem as incredibly banal in 1866 when the book was written as it does now when noble prostitutes are apt to be received a little cynically by experienced readers… Dostoevski’s characters have yet another remarkable feature: throughout the book they do not develop as personalities. We get them all complete at the beginning of the tale, and so they remain without any considerable changes although their surroundings may alter and the most extraordinary things may happen to them. In the case of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, for instance, we see a man go from premeditated murder to the promise of an achievement of some kind of harmony with the outer world, but all this happens somehow from without: innerly even Raskolnikov does not go through any true development of personality, and the other heroes of Dostoevski do even less so… The only thing that develops, vacillates, takes unexpected sharp turns, deviates completely to include new people and circumstances, is the plot”. Here, Nabokov criticises Rodion’s rationale for the murder, but I can accept the character’s confusion and that his attempts to justify things to himself change as his original ideology was insufficiently developed. Comedically, with all the names, I got frequently confused as to who was mammy and who was Dunya when only the name and patronymic was used and, as ‘Sofya’ and ‘Sonya’ are used interchangeably and without warning, I almost had to go back and check I was reading the names correctly. When Arkady Ivanovich Svidrigailov shows up, it took quite a while for the penny to drop and for me to recall it was the perv that Dunya previously worked for. That’s one area where I really have to compliment the book. It uses its limited number of elaborated characters very effectively and it’s a reflection on me and my attention that I didn’t recall Svidrigailov. Of note, Rodion is so young. I don’t know if you caught this, but towards the end, the text reads, “An anxiety with no object or purpose in the present, and in the future nothing but endless sacrifice, by means of which he would attain nothing – that was what his days on earth held in store for him. And what of the fact that in eight years’ time he would only be thirty-two and would be able to resume his life again? What good was life to him? What prospects did he have?” You don’t need advanced mathematics to calculate that Rodion was 24 during this story. While Sonya was my favourite character and I enjoyed the sections with her the most, Porfiry Petrovich really got under my skin and I found him very annoying. He was sort of like a Colombo character that just wouldn’t give Rodion a break and was hoping to annoy him into a confession with his, “tee hee hee” laughter. Very pleased to say I learned some new words by reading this text, ‘auscultated’ and ‘gewgaw’. Finally, there was some comedy in the book, such as Dunya attempting to shoot Svidrigailov with all the delays and weapon malfunctions and when Rodion wakes up like an anti-christ, “Next morning he woke up late after a troubled sleep that did not refresh him. He awoke feeling bilious, shorttempered and uncharitable, and surveyed his little room with detestation”.