Crime And Punishment
“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.”
Raskolnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, wanders through the slums of St Petersburg and commits a random murder without remorse or regret. He imagines himself to be a great man, a Napoleon: acting for a higher purpose beyond conventional moral law. But as he embarks on a dangerous game of cat and mouse with a suspicious police investigator, Raskolnikov is pursued by the growing voice of his conscience and finds the noose of his own guilt tightening around his neck. Only Sonya, a downtrodden sex worker, can offer the chance of redemption.
‘To go wrong in one's own way is better then to go right in someone else's.’
Initially envisioned as two separate novels, one following the inner turmoil of a murderer and the other chronicling the melancholic destruction of a family due to a flighty, alcoholic patriarch, Dostoevsky deftly weaves together a multitude of unforgettable characters as they interplay through their tangle of plotlines. There are some incredible scenes that will forever haunt and delight me in my memory, such as the narrow escape from the scene of the crime which had me holding my breath in anxious anticipation, the darkly comical disaster of the funeral feast, or the emotionally charged and grim meeting between Dunya and the vile Svidrigaïlov. Each character is carefully balanced with their foil, each character is written with their own unique style of speech and language, and the novel seems to tie every thread together with such perfection and care as it churns forward, raining destruction on the lives of it’s characters to bring them toward their own personal redemption or demise.
This was a book that I was unable to put down as the words flowed from their pages to deep within my heart. Dostoevsky brilliantly straps the reader to the emotional states of his characters and is able to create seamless transitions between scenes or from the minds of one character to the next by riding the wings of an emotion. Most often this emotion is guilt, and the murder scene and it’s feverish follow-up is so expertly crafted that the reader feels they must share in Raskolnikov’s guilty burden. During the course of reading this book, I was overwhelmed by a crushing sense of guilt that was disconnected to any of my own actions. Yet, had police officers confronted me at any given moment, I would have held out my hands in surrender since I was so burdened by the guilty residue of the novel.
‘ I did not bow down to you, I bowed down to all the suffering of humanity.’
