Crime and Punishment - Fydor Dostoevsky (1866) This version translated by Richard Pavear and Larissa Volokhonsky (1992)

 

Rating: Admirable

"Why do people who read Dostoevsky look like Dostoevsky?": Here Comes a City - The Go-Betweens (1996)

For the record, I don't look like Dostoevsky, but by the time I finished Crime and Punishment I certainly felt like I could relate to how Dostoevsky might have felt (bleak, to put it bluntly). I thought it was time to try and read some of the Russian literary greats and chose to begin in the most obvious place with Dostoevsky. Firstly, reading a novel that was written in the middle part of the nineteenth century is a very different proposition to reading novels written a century later. It takes a while to adjust to the archaic writing style, let alone the very Russian archaic writing style. Crime and Punishment is written in the third person, but it is a very closed third person. The famous main protagonist, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, very much dominates the oppressive narrative with his nihilistic world view. It is extremely claustrophobic and bleak, with scenes dominated by Raskolnikov cowering in his hovel of a bedsit or wandering the dark streets of St Petersburg; or scenes involving the many other characters talking to him, or talking about him to each other as if he isn't in the room. I wouldn't be giving anything away by mentioning the double murder he commits in the first part, as it is one of the most famous murders in literary history. The murder scene is quite gruesome, but what Crime and Punishment is really all about is what happens in the aftermath of the murders, enabling Dostoevsky to explore the moral quandaries of human nature and the intellectual and spiritual scaffolding humanity places around itself to cope with what lies beneath. As a precursor to the existential writers of the twentieth century, like Sartre, Celine and Camus, Crime and Punishment is a fascinating read. Raskolnikov rejects pretty much everything, God, religion, the State, education, work, money and close relations with other humans. He is completely alienated and is a totally unsympathetic character, to the extent that you couldn't even refer to him as an antihero. It's hard going and I needed to read the novel in three seperate periods of time. Frankly it was a triumph of will just to finish it, maybe I should have read Nietzsche in-between to give me strength (apparently Nietzsche loved Dostoevsky's work).

Dostoevsky, looking like Dostoevsky after reading Dostoevsky

I've read that Dostoevsky is not necessarily known as a great literary stylist, or even as a storyteller, but that he is all about exploring ideas. Crime and Punishment is best read with this in mind and it will help, just. It's a hard slog through a dialogue heavy narrative, in particular during the scenes involving multiple characters, where it is hard to keep track of who is saying what and just who is in fact there, as each character is know by at least three different names. It is extremely long-winded, with whole chapters going by with not much happening in terms of action or plot, just long extrapolations of conjecture, philosophy, or just downright misery. With this in mind it is useful to remember that authors in the nineteenth century were often paid by the word and their works were serialised, giving them an income for as long as they could spin them out. The novel does not arrive at its main thematic thrust until 260 pages in, when suddenly Raskolnikov's murderous actions makes sense in terms of his world view. The novel then became a bit easier to read, for a while! One of the main problems, from a modern readers' point of view, is that there is not much in the way of extrapolation from the author, Dostoevsky's authorial voice is mostly absent, instead the characters explore the novel's themes via dialogue, or via their actions, which are often confusing or confounding. Looking on Goodreads I noted that some readers proclaim Crime and Punishment as one of the greatest novels ever written, while others condemn it as a bloated wreck of a novel, with few redeeming features. I sit somewhere in-between, whilst I appreciate the novel's historical importance, in particular in terms of its ideas and themes, I did not enjoy reading it much at all. However I'm pleased I've read it and it hasn't put me off reading other novels by the Russian literary greats. If you read Crime and Punishment, do some prior research and keep in mind that it was written for an audience very different to us and that will help you through the challenge of actually finishing it. Good luck!