Crime And Punishment

Russian novels are a hole in my reading--I've read Anna Karenina, but nothing of Dostoyevsky until perhaps his most famous book, Crime And Punishment, which I finished yesterday. While I can appreciate why it's considered a classic, it is certainly not an enjoyable read, and it was completely different than I expected.

Before I read it I could have told you it was about a man named Raskolnikov, who kills somebody and then feels guilty about it. That isn't even precisely true--Raskolnikov, a poor ex-student, does kill a pawnbroker (and her sister, who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time) with an ax, but his views on crime are somewhat different than guilt-inducing--he thinks he is a higher order of man, and entitled to commit crimes. He has even written an article in a magazine about it. His theory is presented to him this way: "Ordinary men have to live in submission, have no right to transgress the law, because, don’t you see, they are ordinary. But extraordinary men have a right to commit any crime and to transgress the law in any way, just because they are extraordinary."

Crime And Punishment is full of duality, as Raskolnikov is not great at all. He lives a shabby life, and he is constantly sick. For much of the book he is in a feverish delirium. Some of the pleasures of the early part of the book is how Dostoyevsky describes his main character's dire circumstances: "It would have been difficult to sink to a lower ebb of slovenliness, but to Raskolnikov in his present state of mind this was even agreeable. He had completely withdrawn from everyone, like a tortoise in its shell, and even the sight of the servant girl who had to wait upon him and looked sometimes into his room made him writhe with nervous irritation."

What surprised me about the book is the numerous melodramatic subplots. The book was published in 1866, and feels it. Much of the plot is given over to the marital prospects of Raskolnikov's sister, Dunia. She is at first affianced to an arrogant lawyer, Luzhin, but Raskolnikov, acting in place of his deceased father, refuses to bless the engagement and insults Luzhin. Later, Dunia will be pursued by an even lower character, Svidrigailov, the widower of a woman Dunia worked for as a governess. This guy is a real creep, but yet! Like Rasknolnikov, who is also an unpleasant person, he is given to great moments of generosity.

We see Raskolnikov's generosity when he befriends a drunkard, Marmeladov, who ends up getting killed by a horse-drawn carriage. Raskolnikov is so moved by the plight of his widow and small children that he gives them all the money he has. He then falls in love with the man's older daughter, Sonia, who is forced to work as a prostitute. Later he will confess his crime to her, and she still loves him, and will relocate to Siberia so she can visit him in prison.

These subplots sometimes take us far afield of the crime, and one almost forgets what the central moment of the book is. That chapter, when Raskolnikov wields the ax, is intense and brilliant writing, but I would have liked the author to have stuck to that storyline. Everything kind of comes together at the end, but a shorter book might have been a better one. When the notion of the crime is returned to--Raskolnikov is interrogated by a detective, Porfiry Petrovich, who is a kind of proto-Columbo, who uses psychological ploys to get under Rasknolnikov's skin and try to make him confess.

Crime And Punishment is a book to admire, but not to love.