Crime and Punishment (1866)

The first of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s majors was a reread for me. I have always liked it, but perhaps never more. It is intense, sprawling, never less than fascinating, and compulsively readable—you just have to get used to the names. Our main guy, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, is one of literature’s great antiheroes. He’s not particularly likable but it’s also hard not to pull for him. As with the unnamed narrator in Notes From Underground he is at war with the terms of existence. There is some sense that his double-homicide axe murders—the first 100 to 150 pages of the novel are harrowing and mesmerizing—is some kind of philosophical test of a “superman” idea. Certainly the 23-year-old Raskolnikov has published an essay to that effect, which brings the attention of the police. There’s an even greater sense he has no idea why he killed. If it was part of a robbery he botched it entirely. If it’s to rid the world of a shrewish pawnbroker, all right, maybe, but he also kills the pawnbroker’s kindly sister Lizaveta. You need the stupid “superman” idea to justify that at all, and basically you can’t, and basically Raskolnikov knows that. But Dostoevsky is not done with just these murders. He goes spinning off handfuls of threads with a web of characters associated with Raskolnikov—his mother and sister, his sister’s suitors, a good and loyal friend, destitute families, and a police investigator who is reported to be the model for TV’s Columbo. Crime and Punishment was serialized and involved agonies of rewriting for Dostoevsky. What he produced may feel impromptu and full of digressions but in fact it is well organized for what it is doing. It works first as a thriller and then, as long as it has your attention, it has another million things to tell you and they are all interesting. You are there for them. I don’t know how to describe reading this amazing novel any other way. It has always held my attention even though I don’t always remember specific details. How could I forget it was a double-homicide axe murder?! Yet what I always remember, even when it’s not as fresh, is that it is a wonderful experience to read it. Any translation, but this time I was happy to go with Constance Garnett again, one of the great translators of Dostoevsky (and Chekhov too).

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.