Laith
A fair amount of books we call classics are real stuffy, boring reads — written for a different audience, they don't hit the same for a modern reader. You know the type, the ones you only half-assedly read for class. That was my impression of Crime and Punishment, and so my copy sat fearfully unread on my bookshelf for years. Until now. Contrary to my expectations, this is not one of those books — it's a genuine joy to read, closer to modern literature than its stuffy contemporaries.
Dostoevsky's own history looms large over this book. In 1849 he was arrested for involvement with a group of radical intellectuals and sentenced to death by Tsar Nicholas I — a sentence carried out right up to the point where he stood before the firing squad, before being commuted at the last moment to hard labor in Siberia. By the time of his release years later, Russia was undergoing a period of liberal reform, with relaxing censorship fueling a burgeoning literary scene. It's against this backdrop that Dostoevsky wrote Crime and Punishment, while sinking into immense debt thanks to a gambling addiction — and the destitute conditions Raskolnikov suffers throughout the novel feel unmistakably drawn from this period of his life.
Every scene, every character, the city of Petersburg; it's all brought completely to life. The prose sings, the dialogue is deliciously dramatic, and the inner turmoil of the main character is rendered in the most gripping detail. This is a psychological thriller, and I don't just mean that it arguably established the genre — I mean it's so damn good in execution, in getting across the feeling of a murderer's guilt and paranoia, in watching him ever so slowly unravel.
The plot is deceptively simple: rather than a who-dun-it, this is a why-he-dun-it. The book opens on the destitute student Raskolnikov contemplating something terrible. Unable to pay for his education and thoroughly depressed, he has spent months locked away in his filthy closet of a bedroom entertaining dark thoughts; he's decided to murder and rob a local pawnbroker. Not quite in his right mind, and incensed by news of his sister Dunya's engagement to a dubious lawyer, he waits till dark, borrows an axe, and quietly sets about his gruesome business. What follows is nothing less than psychological torture, as the fires of Raskolnikov's guilt are stoked by illness, madness, and paranoia.
The ideology that incites Raskolnikov to his crime is just as important as the crime itself. He's convinced himself of a theory: that certain crimes are justifiable in service of the goals of extraordinary men, that humanity is split into two classes: mere mortals, and a Napoleonic class to whom ordinary morals and laws don't apply. It's a dreadfully half-baked utilitarianism, and Dostoevsky's commentary on the egoism of the Russian radicals of his time. There's a striking echo here of the arguments later made by C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man — the idea that rationalist thought reduces man to a mere product of physics and biology, and the warning against suppressing Christian compassion in favour of a nihilistic elite entrusted with the future. Raskolnikov believes himself one of these elites. But he is shocked, confused, and crushed by the guilt and horror he feels once confronted with the actual consequences of his deed, and it's this collapse — and his eventual absolution through Sonya and her faith — that gives the novel its real shape.
Raskolnikov is an asshole to basically everyone, all book long — and yet, seemingly despite himself, there's a whole host of characters who love and care for him. The rest of the cast is brilliant, and several completely transform the narrative in their respective moments. My favorite has to be the outwardly affable Inspector Porfiry; he absolutely steals the show, his innocuous, bumbling dialogue barely concealing a hunter's gaze, every seemingly innocent question oozing with suspicion and double meaning. Then there's Razumikhin, ever the upbeat and loyal friend — the golden retriever of the cast — his efforts to help unwittingly provoking Raskolnikov exactly as Porfiry intends. And finally Sonya, the self-sacrificing and compassionate daughter of a drunkard, whose shame in her profession and quiet moral strength become the catalyst for Raskolnikov's eventual confession.
There are people who insist you need to puzzle this book apart, to break it into its constituent symbols and philosophy, to really think on it. They should just try reading the story, because it's an awesome piece of writing, sure to captivate on its own terms. Part of what makes it so readable today is a stylistic innovation that was genuinely ahead of its time: Dostoevsky's fusion of third-person omniscient narration with the stream of consciousness of his characters. Contemporary readers were used to more linear, orderly narrative techniques, but this blurring of narrator and the inner thoughts of the protagonist is exactly what makes Raskolnikov's psyche feel so immediate to a modern reader. His stream of consciousness, the not-quite-first-person perspective, projects a vivid scene — an amazing drama of a man coming to terms with the crime he has committed. You peer into his psyche, come to know him, and watch his internal justifications crumble in the face of madness-inducing guilt. Just as you come to understand his mania, you also understand his weariness, the toll his guilt takes on mind and body. But you never lose yourself entirely in Raskolnikov; the scene stays grounded, the supporting characters animated and just as richly imagined as he is.
Crime and Punishment is proof that the classroom impression of a book and the book itself are often two entirely different things. I went into this recalling homework, and what I got was a genuinely gripping psychological thriller, one that happens to have also basically invented the genre. There's a tendency to assume that "classic" means "good for you" rather than "good", that anything assigned in school must be a chore to be endured rather than enjoyed. Sometimes that's true. But sometimes a book is a classic because it's genuinely that good, and reading it on your own terms, decades after it was forced on you (or you faked your way through it), is when it finally gets the chance to prove that. Being the grandfather of the genre doesn't make this book worse than the latest Stephen King novel — if anything, it's a testament to just how well it holds up that so much of what followed is still chasing what Dostoevsky pulled off here first.
P.S.The translation I read was the Pevear and Volokhonsky edition, which is significantly better than the older Garnett translation and worth seeking out. If you don't love the constant repetition of Russian names and patronymics, there's also the Katz edition, which is more modernised and localised to American English. Both are great — read Katz if you want something less Russian, and Volokhonsky if you want something as true to the original as you can get in English.
A fair amount of books we call classics are real stuffy, boring reads — written for a different audience, they don't hit the same for a modern reader. You know the type, the ones you only half-assedly read for class. That was my impression of Crime and Punishment, and so my copy sat fearfully unread on my bookshelf for years. Until now. Contrary to my expectations, this is not one of those books — it's a genuine joy to read, closer to modern literature than its stuffy contemporaries.
Dostoevsky's own history looms large over this book. In 1849 he was arrested for involvement with a group of radical intellectuals and sentenced to death by Tsar Nicholas I — a sentence carried out right up to the point where he stood before the firing squad, before being commuted at the last moment to hard labor in Siberia. By the time of his release years later, Russia was undergoing a period of liberal reform, with relaxing censorship fueling a burgeoning literary scene. It's against this backdrop that Dostoevsky wrote Crime and Punishment, while sinking into immense debt thanks to a gambling addiction — and the destitute conditions Raskolnikov suffers throughout the novel feel unmistakably drawn from this period of his life.
Every scene, every character, the city of Petersburg; it's all brought completely to life. The prose sings, the dialogue is deliciously dramatic, and the inner turmoil of the main character is rendered in the most gripping detail. This is a psychological thriller, and I don't just mean that it arguably established the genre — I mean it's so damn good in execution, in getting across the feeling of a murderer's guilt and paranoia, in watching him ever so slowly unravel.
The plot is deceptively simple: rather than a who-dun-it, this is a why-he-dun-it. The book opens on the destitute student Raskolnikov contemplating something terrible. Unable to pay for his education and thoroughly depressed, he has spent months locked away in his filthy closet of a bedroom entertaining dark thoughts; he's decided to murder and rob a local pawnbroker. Not quite in his right mind, and incensed by news of his sister Dunya's engagement to a dubious lawyer, he waits till dark, borrows an axe, and quietly sets about his gruesome business. What follows is nothing less than psychological torture, as the fires of Raskolnikov's guilt are stoked by illness, madness, and paranoia.
The ideology that incites Raskolnikov to his crime is just as important as the crime itself. He's convinced himself of a theory: that certain crimes are justifiable in service of the goals of extraordinary men, that humanity is split into two classes: mere mortals, and a Napoleonic class to whom ordinary morals and laws don't apply. It's a dreadfully half-baked utilitarianism, and Dostoevsky's commentary on the egoism of the Russian radicals of his time. There's a striking echo here of the arguments later made by C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man — the idea that rationalist thought reduces man to a mere product of physics and biology, and the warning against suppressing Christian compassion in favour of a nihilistic elite entrusted with the future. Raskolnikov believes himself one of these elites. But he is shocked, confused, and crushed by the guilt and horror he feels once confronted with the actual consequences of his deed, and it's this collapse — and his eventual absolution through Sonya and her faith — that gives the novel its real shape.
Raskolnikov is an asshole to basically everyone, all book long — and yet, seemingly despite himself, there's a whole host of characters who love and care for him. The rest of the cast is brilliant, and several completely transform the narrative in their respective moments. My favorite has to be the outwardly affable Inspector Porfiry; he absolutely steals the show, his innocuous, bumbling dialogue barely concealing a hunter's gaze, every seemingly innocent question oozing with suspicion and double meaning. Then there's Razumikhin, ever the upbeat and loyal friend — the golden retriever of the cast — his efforts to help unwittingly provoking Raskolnikov exactly as Porfiry intends. And finally Sonya, the self-sacrificing and compassionate daughter of a drunkard, whose shame in her profession and quiet moral strength become the catalyst for Raskolnikov's eventual confession.
There are people who insist you need to puzzle this book apart, to break it into its constituent symbols and philosophy, to really think on it. They should just try reading the story, because it's an awesome piece of writing, sure to captivate on its own terms. Part of what makes it so readable today is a stylistic innovation that was genuinely ahead of its time: Dostoevsky's fusion of third-person omniscient narration with the stream of consciousness of his characters. Contemporary readers were used to more linear, orderly narrative techniques, but this blurring of narrator and the inner thoughts of the protagonist is exactly what makes Raskolnikov's psyche feel so immediate to a modern reader. His stream of consciousness, the not-quite-first-person perspective, projects a vivid scene — an amazing drama of a man coming to terms with the crime he has committed. You peer into his psyche, come to know him, and watch his internal justifications crumble in the face of madness-inducing guilt. Just as you come to understand his mania, you also understand his weariness, the toll his guilt takes on mind and body. But you never lose yourself entirely in Raskolnikov; the scene stays grounded, the supporting characters animated and just as richly imagined as he is.
Crime and Punishment is proof that the classroom impression of a book and the book itself are often two entirely different things. I went into this recalling homework, and what I got was a genuinely gripping psychological thriller, one that happens to have also basically invented the genre. There's a tendency to assume that "classic" means "good for you" rather than "good", that anything assigned in school must be a chore to be endured rather than enjoyed. Sometimes that's true. But sometimes a book is a classic because it's genuinely that good, and reading it on your own terms, decades after it was forced on you (or you faked your way through it), is when it finally gets the chance to prove that. Being the grandfather of the genre doesn't make this book worse than the latest Stephen King novel — if anything, it's a testament to just how well it holds up that so much of what followed is still chasing what Dostoevsky pulled off here first.
P.S.The translation I read was the Pevear and Volokhonsky edition, which is significantly better than the older Garnett translation and worth seeking out. If you don't love the constant repetition of Russian names and patronymics, there's also the Katz edition, which is more modernised and localised to American English. Both are great — read Katz if you want something less Russian, and Volokhonsky if you want something as true to the original as you can get in English.
