Crime and Punishment
By Fyodor Dostoevsky
My goodness, what a tome. I started reading it before moving, so I was never able to read it as quickly as I would have liked and probably put it down for days (or a week) at a time more than once. Consequently, reading the whole thing from start to finish stretched out over more than 2 months. Of course, this was in part because the book is
200,000+ words. Yikes. If you had to describe the book's length in one sentence (though the book itself would take 12), it's this: the
Epilogue is two chapters.
Crime and Punishment is, of course, an out-and-out classic, and I can't quibble with the designation. It's hard to imagine a more thorough and perceptive description of moral breakdown and desperation. The protagonist is named Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, but he's alternately known as: Rodion, Rodia, Riodon Romanovich, and Raskolnikov. And some of these might vary depending on which translation of the book you get. All the characters are like this: they're referred to by first names, last names, first and middle names (a Russian custom, at least at the time), or nicknames that are only slightly similar to their first names. It can be a bit tricky, to say the least.
Anyway, Raskolnikov has decided to kill an old pawnbroker woman. What's lovely about this is the the book thrusts us right into his life and internal ramblings
after he's made this decision, but before he's committed the actual act, leaving us at first to deduce just what he means by references to "it" (the action) as he talks to himself, a technique Dostoevsky will use again with another character near the end of the book.
There are a tremendous number of events in the book; Raskolnikov leaves his room, meets someone, and goes back. Then a friend or relative or stranger appears at his door. Then they leave. Then he goes out again. The sheer number of
actions nearly rival the amount of time spent inside each character's inner monologue, which is plenty significant in its own right. We see things from the point of view of Raskolnikov, his sister, his friend Razumikhin, and Sonia, a local prostitute who falls into her profession to support a drunken father and destitute family.
I have some thoughts about the book's key passages and most significant quotes ("a heart unhinged by theories" is one of the most memorable), but so much of it is contextual. If anyone else here has read it and cares to talk a little about it, I'd be plenty interested.
I am told that Dostoevsky essentially invented the third-person omniscient view that is employed here. It's hard to imagine how he could have told such a sweeping story without it, perhaps demonstrating that necessity really is the mother of invention, at least in the Motherland. Can't tell the tale you want with common literary styles? Well, make one up. I imagine it's hard to overstate just how significant this innovation is.
I'm not going to rate this book, because I feel I'd have to elevate myself to do so. I could quibble, in a very modern way, with the oppressive length, but the parts add up to a whole that's beyond reckoning.
That I can be alive almost 150 years after this work was published, in a completely different part of the world, and still find numerous universal insights into humanity from this book, is fairly remarkable. One would expect much older literature to be lacking in those moments where we recognize a character's thought process, reaction, or rationalizing as perfectly mirroring our own, but there are many such examples in
Crime and Punishment. It's almost as if it wants its reader to relate to what Raskolnikov thinks just enough to dare us to wonder if we have such wretchedness deep inside us, as well.
Quite a book. Has anyone else has the pleasure of reading it?
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Favorite themes/scenes? Obviously it's hard to pin down, but...the two themes that stand out, to me:
) fare than Dostoevsky, but so many great thoughts written from a perspective of a man who is familiar with every facet of the human mind and nature, which only the greatest of writers posses. Do check him out (especially The bridge on the Drina and The time of the consuls, if you can track them down), I'm sure you won't regret it.
