Crime and Punishment — Fyodor Dostoevsky
Anguish, tension, misery and guilt. These are some of the words that came to mind while I read this novel. Crime and Punishment is one of those “books you have to read”. A Russian classic by one of its most revered authors, Fyodor Dostoevsky, which was initially serialized in the literary journal The Russian Messenger in 1866 and was then published as a novel.
The protagonist of this story is Raskolnikov, a young and handsome law student that has been forced to quit university due to the increasing burden of poverty. Dostoevsky sets the scene masterfully: it is a hot summer in St. Petersburg, during which Raskolnikov has spent most of his time isolated and locked inside his tiny and dilapidated apartment. Between his suffocating environment, the economic pressure to help his mother and sister, and his own megalomaniac ideas, Raskolnikov will reach the fateful conclusion that the only way to get the money he needs is by committing a crime. However, the guilt and paranoia he will suffer afterwards will be stronger than he anticipated.
Besides Raskolnikov, we meet a group of characters with tragedies of their own. There is his sister Dunya who feels pressured to marry Luzhin, a petty and superficial man, as a way to get herself and her mother out of poverty, and who is pursued by her former employer, Svidrigaïlov, a depraved but conflicted man. Marmeladov, a former public servant who spends his drunken days at the tavern too ashamed to face his wife Katerina Ivanovna, and his daughter Sonya who has become a prostitute to support her family. We also meet Razumíkhin, Raskolnikov’s one and only friend and voice of reason, and Porfiry Petrovich, the clever police detective that will take part in some of the most memorable conversations in this book.
Dostoevksy was no stranger to tragedy. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was 16 and two years later while he was away at military school, he received notice that his father had been murdered by his servants. He quit his career as a military engineer to become a writer, but when he was 27 he was arrested and sentenced to death because he was part of a socialist literary circle. Only moments before his execution — literally in front of the firing squad — he received a pardon by the tsar that commuted his death sentence to five years at a labor camp in Siberia. His health was severely affected by the terrible conditions he endured in this place and the epilepsy he had suffered since his youth and would be the cause of his death also worsened. He developed a gambling addiction and was at a point so indebted that he was forced to sell the rights of his works.
In the case of classics, I find it especially interesting to learn a little about the historical context of the time and place they were published since this makes for a richer experience. The socialist works of the French Charles Fourier and the German Karl Marx were relatively recent — the Communist Manifesto had only been published in 1848 — and part of the talk of the town at the time, which Dostoevsky chose to portray in the dialogues of the other young student in the book, Razumíkhin. In 1861, five years before the publication of this book, a reform was passed in Russia which effectively abolished centuries of slave-like serfdom. This initially increased poverty, and it is precisely this environment of ruin and desolation that we see represented in the novel. There is also a conversation that Raskolnikov happens to overhear in which one man asks another: If killing one person results in the benefit of thousands, isn’t the crime justified? This would resonate with the ideas of utilitarianism, a philosophical movement developed by Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century but popularized by John Stuart Mill in 1863, only three years before the publication of Crime and Punishment. Fiction is always a product of its time and can serve as a missive from the past about the sentiments of an era.
Why do people commit crimes? What would that feel like? These seem to be the main questions Dostoevsky wanted to explore in this book, although they are not the only ones. It is not an easy book to read — at least that was the case for me –, there were several times I had to go back and re-read passages or entire chapters, and it is definitely helpful to keep a log of all the characters’ names and their numerous nicknames. It is not one of those books that is difficult to put down, even if it is considered by some as the first psychological thriller. However, this book, as is the case with many other classics, is not to be devoured but to be savored. I assure you that the time and dedication spent on it will be more than worth it.
Crime and Punishment is a thoroughly atmospheric book. It is asphyxiating as in the internal monologue of Raskolnikov and introspective as in the philosophical discussions by Razumíkhin or Porfiry Petrovich. It is a book that among other things invites us to reflect upon the cruelty of misery and what we might be capable of doing to escape from it: “In poverty you may still retain your innate nobility of soul, but in beggary — never — no one.”
This review was originally published in Spanish at Cuaderno Reciclado.
