Crime and Punishment
I respect Dostoevsky as a writer and a human--and not just because he has an awesome, aggressive-sounding name. It’s funny when you realize that authors are actual people and not just huge assholes bent on ruining your sacred high school social life by appealing to English teachers. Dostoevsky was a very resilient man who definitely earned his platform for asserting his outlook on the world. The guy’s mom died when he was fifteen. Later in life, he was arrested for his participation in an underground politically-charged book club (think Reading Lolita in Tehran) called the Petrashevsky Circle. Following a casual eight-month grimy jail stint, he was sentenced to death—one of the accusations stated that he “[knew] of the intention to set up a printing press”. I have been desensitized to death because I just finished watching The Sopranos, but that seems slightly ridiculous. Then, when he was LITERALLY tied to a stake in front of a firing squad, Nicholas the First was like just kidding, let’s have them do some years of hard labor instead. One of his fellow oh-so-graciously spared prisoners went insane afterward, as is his right, but Fyodor went back to the books. He attempted to publish two journals, but his Majesty’s minions shot them down and he suffered financially. Needless to say, I would probably have spent the rest of my life pouting and repeatedly scribbling “I hate Nicholas l” on a sheet of paper. Conversely, he ended up producing this classic and The Brothers Karamazov, so there’s that.
So, after establishing that Dostoevsky has both the intellectual aptitude and enough life experiences under his belt to potentially create something poignant and thought-provoking…do I actually like the book? At the risk of dumbing down the novel, I will provide the briefest of summaries: a man (Raskolnikov), driven by very complex motivations, kills two women. Post murder, Raskolnikov undergoes a deeply agonizing internal struggle in an attempt to make sense of what he did and why he did it. In my opinion, a good book forces the reader to ask him/herself questions. As such, I found myself pondering—is this particular murder justified? Is any murder justified? Is said justification affected by the murderer’s state of mind or particular moral convictions? Moreover, a good book empowers you to learn about yourself. What does it say about me that I really wanted Raskolnikov to chill out, stop being such a dramatic baby about everything, and get away with the murder?
Raskolnikov is kind of a dick. In the end, it appears that his crime stemmed from self-pride rooted in nihilistic and utilitarian philosophies. He feels that there is a special class of superior men who are both capable (physically, emotionally) and entitled to violate societal laws. In the end, we have this character who mistakenly thinks he can accomplish “great” things without retribution… what happens to him? After roughly 700—sometimes rewarding, sometimes grueling—pages, Dostoevsky decided it might be a good idea to start smoking crack before he finished writing the rest of the book. While I have no definitive historical proof of this, the haphazard way in which he ended this novel strongly points in that direction. The ending is rushed and inconsistent. The majority of Crime and Punishment beautifully expresses the range of human experiences; unfortunately, it culminates in an ending that is more so a forced portrayal of Dostoevsky’s personal political and religious views than a natural progression of Raskolnikov’s guilt.
All in all, I give it 2 out of 5 flames. There were times when I desperately wanted to be done with this book and there were times when the element of surprise fueled me. On a broad scale, you don’t really know what will come of the murder, providing enough intrigue to keep you trucking. But I have rating-integrity, and I’m not going to throw good reviews at a book with an incoherent ending.
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