My latest "favorite" book, "Crime and Punishment"

It is not uncommon for university students to go a little crazy. High tuition leads to lack of money, which leads to lack of food, which leads to the brain cells dying off. This condition is called Senioritis. And boy, does Rodion Raskolnikoff have it bad. So bad that he basically quits school, runs out of money, is cranky with everyone, and eventually commits a senseless crime under the excuse that he’s ridding society of a parasite. Since the title of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s classic book is Crime and PUNISHMENT, we know as soon as he commits the crime that he’s going to deal with consequences.

Raskolnikoff may be deranged with poverty, envy, and a sense of self-righteousness that places him above the law, but this is no crime of passion. He thinks over methodically and slowly what he intends to do. Dostoyevsky torments the reader with knowing that a crime is going to happen, and the agonizing tension mounts page after page as we anticipate the inevitable. The crime is described with such honest, brutal clumsiness that it made me wonder if maybe Dostoyevsky had secretly killed someone as research for this scene. So much for the crime. Now for the punishment.

Of course Raskolnikoff discovers as soon as he’s crossed that line into evildoing that he cannot escape; he thought it was the perfect crime, when really he has just sealed his own fate. He perceives that everyone suspects him, that his best friends and family somehow “know” what he has done. His own guilt, more than anything else, is the titular punishment. 

The police seem to catch on to him as a suspect almost immediately. Usually I root for the law: I fully expected when beginning this book to have the opinion “You do the crime, you do the time,” and “Book ‘im, Petrovich.” But the police aren’t presented as protagonists any more than Raskolnikoff; the detective hot on his trail, Porfiry Petrovich, comes across as a hunter dogging his prey through psychological manipulation. Much as I wanted justice to be done, Petrovich playing cat-and-mouse with Raskolnikoff seems somehow unsporting. 

It took me awhile to get “into” this book. About a third into it I was annoyed with Raskolnikoff (“Roddy, everyone goes through an existential crisis in college. Yet they manage to resist the desire to go on a murderous rampage. Maybe it’s time you got off your couch and, oh, I don’t know, GOT A JOB?!”), I was annoyed with his landlady who should have kicked him out to the curb when he didn’t pay his rent, and I was annoyed with his family and friends for not staging an intervention. 

Then, as the narrative intensified, so did my interest. Peripheral characters began to be important. The character Sofia in particular began to develop, as her father’s dissolute habits plunge their family into abject poverty and she is forced to prostitute herself to support her mother and younger siblings. It is she who tries to reach out to Raskolnikoff, sharing her devout Christian beliefs with him. The prostitute and the murderer are the two characters who yearn for redemption, possibly because it seems so far out of their reach. 
Dostoyevsky never glosses over or tries to excuse the presence of sin or evil in this world or in his characters. It is because they are tainted, ruined, and corrupt that they need forgiveness and salvation. And it is because they have endured the punishment that comes with being corrupted, forgiveness and salvation is so much more appreciated when it finally comes. 

 

Recommended Reading Age: Adult

Parental Notes: Crime. Punishment. Graphic violence, and a character is forced into prostitution (this is not graphically described).
Availability: Free on Kindle, there are several beautifully bound  hardcovers such as the Everyman Library edition and a particularly shiny Leatherbound copy from Barnes and Noble.