We’re Reading Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment in October. Join Us.

Spencer Baum
Aug 31, 2018 · 4 min read

Deep Thinking About Great Books, the 10,000-member online community of classics enthusiasts, is reading Dostoevsky’s masterpiece this October.

Deep Thinking About Great Books is a Facebook page and online community that studies the classics. In the past year we’ve studied Les Miserables, The Iliad, War & Peace, Dante’s Inferno, and more.

This October, we’re reading Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Crime and Punishment was first published in 1866. It was Dostoevsky’s 8th novel but, importantly, the second novel he published after his imprisonment and exile in Siberia, an exile that would mark a dividing line in his career. Before Dostoevsky’s exile, he was an engaging and competent novelist, one whom literary critics look back on now as youthful and vain following rapid success.

After his exile, Dostoevsky became one of the best novelists ever to set pen to paper. Writing in the NY Times in 1986, Harlow Robinson said:

What Dostoyevsky gained in prison — a remarkable breadth of tragic vision and a painful new understanding of the violent, irrepressible human impulse toward self-expression — he later injected into the novels he started writing soon after returning to civilization.

After the Exile — Dostoevsky Becomes An Artist of Enormous Depth

In 1849, Dostoevsky and other members of a well-known intellectual circle in Russia were arrested for ideological subversion and sentenced to death.

On December 22nd of that year they were lined up to be killed by a firing squad.

They were separated into groups of three. Dostoevsky stood to the side, forced to watch as the first group of his intellectual peers was lined up and tied to the posts.

A sketch of the near-execution of Dostoevsky in 1849.

The guns were raised. Everyone awaited the command to fire.

The order to fire was never given. The Tsar had written an order of reprieve beforehand, and wanted it delivered at the last possible second so as to make a spectacle of Dostoevsky and his “conspirators.”

Dostoevsky’s death sentence was downgraded to four years in a Siberian work camp. He served those years, and in 1859 he returned to St. Petersburg and wrote all five of what are now considered his major works: Notes From the Underground, The Idiot, Demons, Brothers Karamazov, and the work that is often considered his masterpiece: Crime and Punishment.

Crime and Punishment — Published in 1866

Crime and Punishment is about an impoverished ex-student who decides to kill a woman and steal her money. He comes up with all sorts of rationalizations and moral justifications for this deed, but when the time comes to act on his plans, he finds that reality doesn’t conform to the clean fantasies of his imagination.

He also finds that the act of murder is much more ethically and spiritually profound than he thought. It’s not something you can just do and carry on as before.

Crime and Punishment might well be the greatest psychological novel ever written. And even as the novel aims squarely at the psyche of the individual, it also explores the ethics of the political reform movements at work in Russia in the second half of the 19th century, movements that Dostoevsky was himself a part of before his exile.

It’s a novel of the personal and the political, it is an attack on an ascendant nihilism Dostoevsky saw rising in St. Petersburg, it is a novel of intense, crushing drama, but also farce. It is a novel of its time, one that gives a prescient view of why Russian political reform would fail so miserably in the 20th century, and also a novel that is timeless, a work of art so intellectually dense and powerfully crafted that it remains one of the most studied and celebrated novels ever written.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Deep Thinking About Great Books

In the past year, Deep Thinking About Great Books has gone from one writer’s daily diary of the books he’s reading to a 10,000+ community of readers studying the classics. The page uses daily mini-essays on Facebook to encourage discussion in the comments, has an active Facebook group for more in-depth conversation, and shares links to supplemental videos and reading material from all over the web. We also do long-form essays to deconstruct the artistry and themes of the work we’re reading (here’s one we did during last year’s study of War & Peace), and videos to encourage a more in-depth understanding of the work (like this one from our study of Dune).

Like the Facebook Page to get the daily essays delivered to your feed and join in the discussion. Our fall schedule has us reading The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo in September; Crime and Punishment in October, and Doctor Zhivago and The Gulag Archipelago in November.

Spencer Baum

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On Medium I write about great thinkers and big ideas with a focus on classic literature. spencerbaum.net

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