crime and punishment dostoevsky book review

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The Best Fiction Books » World Literature » Russian Literature Books

Crime and punishment, by fyodor dostoevsky, recommendations from our site.

“There was a real murder in Moscow in 1865, two elderly women killed by axe. Dostoyevsky was deeply moved by this crime. When a writer is deeply moved, he writes a novel. When it is a great writer, the story turns out to be a great novel. Crime and Punishment is on my list because I wrote my own version of the events. In a novel called F.M. (Dostoyevsky’s initials, Fyodor Mikhailovich) I introduce a newly discovered manuscript by Dostoevsky, a first version of Crime and Punishmen t, and it is a 100% mystery about a serial killer.” Read more...

Five Mysteries Set in Russia

Boris Akunin , Thriller and Crime Writer

“ Crime and Punishment is probably Dostoevsky’s most conventional novel. It’s effectively a sort of literary crime novel, and is in some ways quite typical of its time. It’s got a fascinating structure, where a full 80% of the novel comes after he’s committed the crime but before he reaches the punishment. So for the majority novel, you are in suspense and, despite the title, a part of you genuinely believes he might get away with it.” Read more...

The Best Fyodor Dostoevsky Books

Alex Christofi , Literary Scholar

“It is not a crime book in the way that we understand crime fiction today. Instead it is like an existential psychological thriller.” Read more...

Irvine Welsh recommends the best Crime Novels

Irvine Welsh , Thriller and Crime Writer

“The second time I read it was at a monthly police officers’ reading club where we’d get together and discuss a book over beer and pizza, and that time it struck me as funny and somewhat naive that a cold-blooded killer’s pangs of conscience lead him to confess.” Read more...

The best books on Policing

John Timoney , Policemen

“I think Dostoevsky understood psychological and social contradictions in life to a peak of intensity later writers have seldom been able to match.” Read more...

The best books on Totalitarian Russia

Robert Service , Historian

Other books by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Memoirs from the house of the dead by fyodor dostoevsky, translated by jessie coulson, the gambler by fyodor dostoevsky, the brothers karamazov by fyodor dostoevsky, demons by fyodor dostoevsky, our most recommended books, crime and punishment by fyodor dostoevsky, the queen of spades and other stories by alexander pushkin, solzhenitsyn by michael scammell, five plays: ivanov, the seagull, uncle vanya, three sisters, and the cherry orchard by anton chekhov, lady macbeth of mtsensk by nikolai leskov.

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REVIEW: Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Dear readers,

I have reread this book quite a few times, but this time I went back because a friend of mine argued that Raskolnikov never experienced remorse for the murder he committed, not even at the very end. And I was under the very strong impression that he did, so I decided to reread the book again. It had been several years since my last reread and if I misinterpreted it so badly, then the story I loved was one I created in my mind, not the real one, because a murderer without remorse is not a fictional character I am interested in reading about.

In this novel we have a young smart guy in 19th century Russia who comes up with the idea that some people should be allowed to kill with impunity, because they are geniuses who are performing amazing deeds. Any murders which help to advance these deeds, which are for the good of all mankind, are worth the cost and should not be prosecuted. Of course, what our protagonist, Raskolnikov, came up with is not really new, and Napoleon is listed as one of the main inspirations for the thoughts he is struggling with. Raskolnikov is poor and hungry, his beloved mother and sister are living far away from him and struggling, and he is trying to decide whether he is one of those chosen few people or not. The person he is thinking of killing is an old lady who is lending people money at very high rates, and of course she is described in a very negative way.

As an aside: sometimes I think that for Dostoevsky money lenders were the worst people in the world, although I suppose those who were Jews were worse. I may sound sarcastic right now, but I’m not – I am sad. I know I forgave Dostoevsky his anti-Semitism, but every time I see an off-the-cuff remark in his book about Jews ( for example, here a character remarks when he is doing something bad that he is turning into a Jew), I feel so sad. I know how much the man suffered in his life, I consider him one of the most brilliant writers if not the most brilliant writer of all time, I know that he is a product of his times and I’m well aware of how imperial Russia treated Jewish people. But I still can’t help but wish he had been able to overcome his prejudice.

But back to the book. Raskolnikov has a theory, and he is torturing himself trying to decide whether he can be fit enough to implement his theory.

““What? How’s that? The right to commit crimes? But not because they’re ‘victims of the environment’?” Razumikhin inquired, even somewhat fearfully. “No, no, not quite because of that,” Porfiry replied. “The whole point is that in his article all people are somehow divided into the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘extraordinary.’ The ordinary must live in obedience and have no right to transgress the law, because they are, after all, ordinary. While the extraordinary have the right to commit all sorts of crimes and in various ways to transgress the law, because in point of fact they are extraordinary. That is how you had it, unless I’m mistaken?” “But what is this? It can’t possibly be so!”

The story is really not a mystery; we all know that Raskolnikov does kill an old lady. And the kicker is that the old lady’s sweet and decent sister unexpectedly comes home when Raskolnikov is doing the deed, so he has no choice but to kill her as well.

After the murder his self–torture increases. He falls ill and often becomes delirious. He cannot decide what to do with the things and money he took. He tries to interact with the people around him without giving in to his impulse to confess to his crime. Seriously, as far as I am concerned nobody wrote angsty, tortured souls better than Dostoevskiy.

On this reread I wondered for the first time whether Dostoevskiy might have gone a little easy on Raskolnikov. Oh, I know the poor man goes through a whole lot of pain – in that regard he certainly did not get off easy, but I wonder if letting him kill the sweet, innocent sister made his eventual remorse come more easily? In my past readings I’ve always thought that killing Lisaveta was to show that even if you are a supposed super-genius and plan a murder for the good of other people, innocents are bound to get in the way. It is not easy to stick to killing only a horrible person. But if the eventual moral of the story is that only God can decide who lives and who dies, shouldn’t have Raskolnikov come to understand that he was not allowed to take away a life, no matter whose life it was, even if he only killed a greedy old lady? I don’t have an answer.

I thought that the verbal duel between Raskolnikov and Porfiriy Petrovich (the investigator) was absolutely brilliant; it was such a pleasure to read again. I still don’t know if I understand Porfiriy completely – he seemed to be a very decent guy who truly thought that Raskolnikov should not throw away his life even if his theories were not supported by facts, but I just felt so bad for Raskolnikov. Yep, part of the reason I love this book so is because it has such brilliant angst.

The supporting characters were again wonderful all around – and they are written with so much compassion. This book is obviously no romance, but it has a brief love story for the main character and it even has a somewhat hopeful ending. Of course the love story is tied to the murder investigation and Raskolnikov’s eventual confession. It is not quite a “saved by love” ending – I always read it as “saved by God” ending — but the young woman is a true believer in Christ, so in my mind they are always connected together.

And then there is Raskolnikov’s sister Dunya, who actually had several suitors , two quite horrible, but she ended up with a really good man and I was very happy for both of them. It sounds soap opera-ish, but a lot of Dunya’s story is so realistically horrible, and it shows what the “little people” who were poor had to go through in Tsarist Russia.

I do think that Raskolnikov showed remorse, and that he was on the path to redemption in the epilogue. Readers, what do you think?

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CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

A new translation.

by Fyodor Dostoevsky ; translated by Michael R. Katz ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 21, 2017

It’s not quite idiomatic—for that there’s Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s version—but the translation moves easily...

“ ‘I don’t need any…translations,’ muttered Raskolnikov.” Well, of course he does, hence this new translation of an old standby of Russian-lit survey courses.

Driven to desperation, a morally sketchy young man kills and kills again. He gets away with it—at least for a while, until a psychologically astute cop lays a subtle trap. Throw in a woman friend who hints from the sidelines that he might just feel better confessing, and you have—well, maybe not Hercule Poirot or Kurt Wallender, but at least pretty familiar ground for an episode of a PBS series or Criminal Minds . The bare bones of that story, of course, are those of Crime and Punishment , published in 1866, when Dostoyevsky was well on the road from young democrat to middle-aged reactionary: thus the importance of confession, nursed along by the naughty lady of the night with the heart of gold, and thus Dostoyevsky’s digs at liberal-inclined intellectuals (“That’s what they’re like these writers, literary men, students, loudmouths…Damn them!”) and at those who would point to crimes great and small and say that society made them do it. So Rodion Raskolnikov, who does a nasty pawnbroker, “a small, dried-up miserable old woman, about sixty years old, with piercing, malicious little eyes, a small sharp nose, and her bare head,” in with an ax, then takes it to her sister for good measure. It’s to translator Katz’s credit that he gives the murder a satisfyingly grotty edge, with blood spurting and eyes popping and the like. Much of the book reads smoothly, though too often with that veneer of translator-ese that seems to overlie Russian texts more than any other; Katz's version sometimes seems to slip into Constance Garnett–like fustiness, as when, for instance, Raskolnikov calls Svidrigaylov "a crude villain...voluptuous debaucher and scoundrel.”

Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-63149-033-0

Page Count: 608

Publisher: Liveright/Norton

Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017

LITERARY FICTION

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BOOK REVIEW

by Fyodor Dostoevsky ; translated by Richard Pevear ; Larissa Volokhonsky

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest ) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

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by Mark Z. Danielewski

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NORMAL PEOPLE

by Sally Rooney ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2019

Absolutely enthralling. Read it.

A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!

Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends , in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.

Pub Date: April 16, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Hogarth

Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

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crime and punishment dostoevsky book review

Book Review: Fyodor Dostoevsky's Classic 'Crime and Punishment'

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It’s been said about Bernard Madoff that he wanted to be caught. That knowledge of the extent of his crimes was its own burden, one relieved by those same crimes being exposed. It was impossible not to think of Madoff while reading Fyodor Dostoevsky’s very sad, frequently insightful, and ultimately unputdownable classic, Crime and Punishment .

Early on in what from now on will be referred to as Crime , central character Rodion Romanych Raskolnikov commits two murders. Eager to change his and his family’s bleak financial circumstances ahead of resuming university and what he imagines will be the life of an academic, Raskolnikov murders an old female pawnbroker in pre-meditated fashion only for Alyona Ivanovna’s half-sister to arrive on the scene. He then kills her too before escaping undetected. Or was he undetected?

Allowing for the likely truth that Crime requires several reads to be reasonably well understood, almost from the time of his crimes it seems Raskolnikov has occasional yearnings to be caught so that through imprisonment and hard labor, he can relieve himself of the major burden that comes with having done something terrible. As Raskolnikov imagines soon after committing the murders, and with the police station less than a quarter of a mile from his “apartment” (his “whole room was of a size that made it possible to lift the hook [the front-door lock] without getting out of bed”), “I’ll walk in, fall on my knees, and tell them everything…”

The problem is that as the minutes and hours go by, it at least appears on the surface that Raskolnikov will escape prosecution for the murders based on his own perception that, while a murderer, people don’t see him as one. Raskolnikov is educated, particularly by 19th century Russian standards, he’s had an article published in a magazine, something his deceased father never accomplished, and some would say he has the qualities of a “gentleman” underneath his emaciated, ragged bearing. How could he be a killer?

People imagining themselves to be what they’re not is of course a major theme of the novel, and there will be more on this in a bit. The main thing is that having committed two horrid crimes, Raskolnikov can’t even seem to convince chief police clerk Zametov that he’s the killer despite aggressively alluding to it, plus later on someone not Raskolnikov actually confesses to the murders. It seems an easy way out, but then the crimes have already been committed. There’s no escaping the horrors of what he’s done, the horrors so enervating that Raskolnikov is reduced to a crazed, very sickly person, someone so wrecked internally that he didn’t even bother to quickly search the dead pawnbroker’s apartment for substantial amounts of ruble notes that were within it, nor did he pawn or spend what he did take. Crime doesn’t pay, rather the act itself suffocates us. Or at least it has suffocated Raskolnikov.

Where it gets really interesting is that Dostoevsky was plainly working to draw a bigger picture of what crime is. Communicating this view through the magazine article that the destitute Raskolnikov published before the murders, and that he’s notably owed rubles for, crime is an expansive concept, and arguably even a driver of progress.

Dostoevsky makes a case for the criminal element in the broadest of senses as the extraordinary . Quoting Porfiry Petrovich, the head of the police detail investigating the murders of Alyona Ivanovna and her half-sister, and who is attempting to describe Ralkolnikov’s argument to Raskolnikov, “The ordinary must live in obedience and have no right to transgress the law, because they are, after all, ordinary. While the extraordinary have the right to commit all sorts of crimes and various ways to transgress the law, because in point of fact they are extraordinary.”

It seems Dostoevsky’s point is that crime isn’t just the killing and stealing kind, rather it’s expressions and actions that run against conventional wisdom. In other words, criminals are frequently the greats who “move the world and lead it towards a goal.” Criminals are the individuals “who are a tiny bit capable of saying something new.” And by saying something new, they “cannot fail to be criminals.” That they’re “off the beaten track” is almost tautological simply because if they were ordinary, they never would have gotten off of the track to begin with different thoughts or actions.

The criminals “are destroyers or inclined to destroy, depending on their abilities.” While the lower category, the ordinary, exist “solely for the reproduction of their own kind,” the extraordinary “have the gift or talent of speaking a new word in their environment.” One guesses Dostoevsky would see Elon Musk as criminal in the great sense, Jeff Bezos too, and surely Steve Jobs.

All three through their actions called “for the destruction of the present in the name of the better.” Dostoevsky thought of the criminal element as the individuals willing to “step over blood – depending, however, on the idea and its scale,” but keep in mind that Crime was written in the 19th century. It strikes me that he would view the modern entrepreneur as someone similarly pursuing “the destruction of the present in the name of the better,” all the while walking over vanquished people and processes hopelessly stuck in the past.

Some will say Bezos just made the world better without pursuit of destruction, as did Musk and Jobs. Sure, but it’s an argument made in hindsight . It ignores that Bezos endured years of “Amazon.org” ridicule, and a frequently turbulent stock price, to reach the top of the business pyramid. So did Musk. With him it’s so easily forgotten that while Tesla is presently worth $736 billion, for much of its existence (including in 2023) its shares have been the most shorted in the world, by far. When Jobs took over Apple in 1997 after having previously been pushed out of what he created, Apple was staring at bankruptcy. And no, investors were not lined up to back Jobs the second time around. Absent a sizable investment by Bill Gates, it’s possible Apple goes bankrupt.

It’s worth adding that proof of just how far “off the beaten track” Musk, Bezos and Jobs were can be found in how often all three stared at failure, ruin, or both. They weren’t and aren’t feeding the future as the ordinary frequently do, they were and are creating it. That all three are now lionized is in a sense all the evidence we need to know that they were formerly ridiculed. If they’d been ordinary, their accomplishments would be so pedestrian as to not rate comment, before or after. All of which is a piece of Dostoevsky’s thinking. He writes that the ordinary “punish them and hang” the extraordinary in the figurative sense at first, but “subsequent generations” of the ordinary “place the punished ones on a pedestal and worship them (more or less).” Well, yes.

Dostoevsky says the realization of greatness is found in future generations, but the novel was yet again written in the 19th century. The bet is that if Dostoevsky were writing now, that he would point to the speed of information creation as such that the “criminals” are discovered to be great much sooner, and in time to enjoy their vindication. Put another way, Bezos, Musk, and Jobs were fortunate to have been born when they were. In the 19th century, their extraordinary ways would have most likely only won them ridicule, and yes, punishment.

Speaking about his own article, Raskolnikov asserts that “Generally, there are remarkably few people born who have a new thought, who are capable, if only slightly, of saying anything new – strangely few, in fact.” What a treat it would be to talk economics with Dostoevsky in order to show him the monolithic thought that informs economic thinking, including the simplistic notion that the path to lower inflation is paved with unemployment and bankruptcy. In a more horrifying sense, the same economists who think that suffering is the path to reduced inflation similarly believe that the killing, maiming and wealth destruction that is war boosts economic output. The economics profession desperately requires individuals with new thoughts, but it lacks them. And then those with new thoughts are ridiculed as is. While telling a story from long, long ago, Dostoevsky was describing the present.

Thinking more expansively about Dostoevsky’s expansive definition of “crime,” it’s useful to spend a little more time on Bezos, Musk and Jobs in consideration of an observation made by Dmitri Razumikhin, Raskolnikov’s eager, optimistic, and romantic friend. Razumikhin observes that “crime is a protest against the abnormality of the social set-up.” Razumikhin, like Raskolnikov, is desperately poor, and his expressed view is presumably a socialist thought that Dostoevsky is trying to convey. But it’s backwards. Think about it. Money’s sole worth in society is a function of what it can be exchanged for. The problem in 19th century St. Petersburg isn’t a lack of money, rather it’s a lack of goods and services. A lack of money is just a reflection, or measure of this reality.

Which has me commenting that if anything, “crime” as Razumikhin sees it is a protest against a lack of inequality . Individuals become wealth unequal by mass producing former luxuries. Where the unequal are is also where those with the least enjoy the greatest access to abundance.

The above is something to consider through the character of Arkady Svidrigailov, the first person in the novel to expose Raskolnikov that he is in fact a murderer. Describing himself midway through the novel, Svidrigailov observes that “I’m decently dressed, of course, and am not reckoned a poor man.” How fascinating yet again it would be to be able to talk to Dostoevsky in modern times, or transport him into modern times. Thanks to the growing number of “hands” and machines the world over cooperating in the production of everything, “everything” is increasingly accessible to everyone.

Applied to Svidrigailov’s description of himself, mass production has somewhat blurred the “gentleman” distinction that formerly was so distinct. Precisely because good clothes were once so incredibly expensive and rare as a consequence of too few hands and machines, the vanishingly few of means could distinguish themselves. No more. The profit motive has made it possible for more and more of the world’s inhabitants to dress fashionably, and at prices that continue to fall. Inequality has naturally soared as lifestyle inequality has shrunk. Yes, “crime” is a protest not against the “abnormality of the social set-up,” but instead against a lack of inequality that reveals itself most cruelly through a lack of abundance.

Of all people, Pyotr Petrovich, the evil character drawn to Raskolnikov’s beautiful younger sister Avdotya (“Dunya” or “Dunechka”) Romanovna Raskolnikov, embodies what could be for the masses in a more unequal society. “Having risen from insignificance, Pyotr Petrovich had a morbid habit of admiring himself.” The important thing is that while Petrovich wasn’t of “noble” or “aristocratic” stock, he’d acquired the means to dress as though he had been. As mentioned earlier, a major them of Crime is people trying to be what they aren’t. Petrovich can dress as though he was born to prosperity, he can potentially win the hand of “a well-behaved and poor girl (she must be poor)” who was also “well born and educated,” and possibly complete his own transformation into the noble classes. There will be no spoilers as to the entertaining outcome for Petrovich, but it should be said that whatever his character and motives, society needs more of people like him.

Better yet, Petrovich understands that production is what lifts all boats. He observes that “by acquiring solely and exclusively for myself, I am thereby precisely acquiring for everyone, as it were, and working so that my neighbor will have something more than a torn caftan, not from private, isolated generosities now, but as a result of universal prosperity.” Petrovich is evil in the novel, but the character doesn’t lack for insight. The unfortunate thing is that Dostoevsky seems write him as though his expressions are unwise.

Compare Petrovich to how Dostoevsky writes Sonya Semyonova Marmeladov, daughter of a shiftless, alcoholic, Russian official, Semyon Marmeladov. So crippling is his drinking that Sonya is reduced to prostitution in order to help keep her father and his new family afloat. Sonya’s “other” seems to be that she’ll suffer in the worst of ways for the greater good of a family, including her father’s new wife Katerina Ivanovna, she arguably the most delusional of all given her routine proclamations that she and her children from her first marriage are “of a noble, some might even say aristocratic house.”

The main thing is that while Raskolnikov might be trying to fool himself about what he’s not, he’s not fooled by Sonya. Talking to Sonya, Raskolnikov observes “Isn’t it a horror that you live in this filth which you hate so much, and at the same time know yourself (you need only open your eyes) that you’re not helping anyone by it, and not saving anyone from anything!” As he puts it seven pages later, “You laid hands on yourself, you destroyed a life… your own .” Sonya sees her horrid living conditions as a noble sacrifice for her father and his desperate family, but the underlying truth is that she’s just a prostitute.

Pyotr Petrovich believes he can do the most for others by doing the most for himself, while Sonya Marmeladov believes she can do the most for others by doing the least for herself. Petrovich is right, though the evil underlying his reserve of common sense is ultimately exposed by Sonya. And then it seems everyone in this slow-starting, but eventually hard-to-put-down novel, comes to terms with the person they actually are.

As Porfiry Petrovich so crucially and bluntly conveys it to Raskolnikov late in the novel, “it was you, Rodion Romanych, it was you, sir, there’s no one else.” And in this forced realization of his status as a murderer, Raskolnikov inched closer to the suffering and hard labor that would free him of the agony of his crimes.

What a remarkable novel Crime and Punishment is. At the same time, it’s remarkable in concert with the realization that so much might have been lost in the translation from Russian to English, so much nuance missed, and so much misunderstood in the presumption that the suffering is the crime, and suffering is the only way to relieve the suffering from crimes committed.

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Crime and Punishment

Murder, Motives, and Malice

Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky

Have you ever thought that you are better than your circumstances? Have you ever thought that maybe you are meant for something more? Have you ever thought that maybe the rules don’t apply to you?

Romanovich Raskolnikov is a poverty stricken student in Petersburg with aspirations. An ardent follower of philosophy, a lover of historical figures with the grit and tyranny to do what needs to be done, Raskolnikov’s published essay proposes a two pronged morality: rules for the masses and no rules for the great people: the leaders, the influencers, the figures of history, the unconquerable men. Raskolnikov, needless to say, suspects that he is one of these great men, and it’s that suspicion that convinces him to commit a murder.

The motive for murder is a simple one: Raskolnikov needs money and he has convinced himself that the grizzled old pawnbroker deserves a violent end. It hardly matters what happens to her – one of the ordinary – because with the money Raskolnikov will start his extraordinary future, one with activities and results that will absolve a multitude of sins. There’s just one problem: the reality of murder is far different than Raskolnikov could have ever suspected, and when things start to go wrong, he is forced to confront both his theories and who he is as a person.

Image by Markus Spiske from Pixabay

Crime and Punishment is a convoluted and surprisingly fast pace devolution into madness and murder. Dostoevsky, in the vein of the Russian novelists who came before him, concentrates on the big questions of morality and social justice but not in an abstract way. The story starts in the action, Raskolnikov working out the finer details of committing a grisly axe murder in broad daylight. Walking the slums, his disjointed conscience is already cringing, but he remains determined to become a great man. The only way to do that is to break the rules. To be worth more than a penurious old woman. To start his journey he needs money; to get money, he needs to kill.

Meanwhile, Raskolnikov’s mother and sister are encountering their own difficulties, escaping a vicious rumor and then falling into the hands of a scheming suitor. Their sad story will bring them all way to St. Petersburg where an ailing Raskolnikov is trying to overcome the hideousness of his crime and escape a clever police detective. It would be a comedy of errors, except there is more terror than comedy, more sickness than hilarity, and a long spiral downward that will take all of the characters to the brink of what they can bear.

Crime and Punishment has a surprisingly contemporary feel because of the immediacy of the action and the escalating cat and mouse game between Raskolnikov and Petrovich, the lead investigator. There is a continual sense of paranoia, an almost thriller-like tension that is complimented by a great cast of villainous characters who play the devils on Raskolnikov’s shoulders.

Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay

There are also a few (very few) good characters, namely the sex worker Sonya, who through selfless dedication to her distraught family holds on to her faith and goodness despite her situation and social ostracism. It’s inevitable that she will play Raskolnikov’s angel and try to lure back a man who put all his hope in ideology only to come out the other side. Raskolnikov’s dedication to his “rightness” despite the mental and physical calamities that are overtaking him and a conscious that is not quite dead add a level of poignant realism, and, as with most (if not all) classic Russian novels, the ending is not happily ever after. It’s not, however, entirely bleak either.

Crime and Punishment makes its points, but it’s also just a good story that puts readers in the moment and makes hundreds of years ago seem like yesterday. The characters are vibrant and sordid, hopeful and hopeless, and the inhumanity of the individual is played out to the utmost degree without ever entirely divorcing us from the dark souls who populate this story. Other than the usual and expected difficulty with the names (every character in a classical Russian novel has several names, nick-names, pseudo-names, etc.) the story is easy to follow and dynamic. A must read for anyone who likes a good story with a gut-punch and a moral.

– Frances Carden

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The Lockdown Lessons of “Crime and Punishment”

By David Denby

At the end of “ Crime and Punishment ,” which was completed in 1866, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s hero, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, has a dream that so closely reflects the roilings of our own pandemic one almost shrinks from its power. Here’s part of it, in Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s rendering :

He had dreamed that the whole world was doomed to fall victim to some terrible, as yet unknown and unseen pestilence spreading to Europe from the depths of Asia. Everyone was to perish, except for certain, very few, chosen ones. Some new trichinae had appeared, microscopic creatures that lodged themselves in men’s bodies. But these creatures were spirits, endowed with reason and will. Those who received them into themselves immediately became possessed and mad. But never, never had people considered themselves so intelligent and unshakeable in the truth as did these infected ones. Never had they thought their judgments, their scientific conclusions, their moral convictions and beliefs more unshakeable. Entire settlements, entire cities and nations would be infected and go mad. Everyone became anxious, and no one understood anyone else; each thought the truth was contained in himself alone, and suffered looking at others, beat his breast, wept, and wrung his hands. They did not know whom or how to judge, could not agree on what to regard as evil, what as good. They did not know whom to accuse, whom to vindicate.

What is this passage doing there, a few pages before the novel concludes? Recall what leads up to the dream. Raskolnikov, a twenty-three-year-old law-school dropout, tall, blond, and “remarkably good-looking,” lives in a “cupboard” in St. Petersburg and depends on handouts from his mother and sister. Looking for money, he plans and executes the murder of an old pawnbroker, a “useless, nasty, pernicious louse,” as he calls her; and then kills her half sister, who stumbles onto the murder scene. He makes off with the pawnbroker’s purse, but then, mysteriously, buries it in an empty courtyard.

Is it really money that he wants? His motives are less mercenary than, one might say, experimental. He has apparently been reading Hegel on “world-historical” figures. Great men like Napoleon, he believes, commit all sorts of crimes in their ascent to power; once they have attained eminence, they are hailed as benefactors to mankind, and no one holds them responsible for their early deeds. Could he be such a man?

In the days after the crime, Raskolnikov vacillates between exhilaration and fits of guilty behavior, spilling his soul in dreams and hallucinations. Under the guidance of an eighteen-year-old prostitute, Sonya, who embodies what Raskolnikov sees as “ insatiable compassion,” he eventually confesses the crime, and is sent to a prison in Siberia. As she waits for him in a nearby village, he falls ill and has that feverish dream.

For us, the dream poses a teasing question: Is it just a morbidly eccentric summation of the novel, or is it also an unwitting prediction of where we are going? Dostoyevsky was a genius obsessed with social disintegration in his own time. He wrote so forcefully that Raskolnikov’s dream, encountered now, expresses what we are, and what we fear we might become.

I first read “Crime and Punishment” in 1961, when I was a freshman at Columbia University, as part of Literature Humanities, or Lit Hum, as everyone calls it, a required yearlong course for entering students. In small classes, the freshmen traverse such formidable peaks as Homer’s and Virgil’s epics, Greek tragedies, scriptural texts, Augustine and Dante, Montaigne and Shakespeare; Jane Austen entered the list in 1985, and Sappho, Virginia Woolf, and Toni Morrison followed. I took the course again in 1991, writing a long report on the experience. In the fall of 2019, at the border of old age—I was seventy-six—I began taking it for the third time, and for entirely selfish reasons. In your mid-seventies, you need a jolt now and then, and works like “ Oedipus Rex ” give you a jolt. What I hadn’t expected, however, was to encounter catastrophe not just in the pages of our reading assignments but far beyond them.

In April, when the class began eight hours of discussion about “Crime and Punishment,” the campus had been shut down for four weeks. The students had arrived in New York the previous fall from a wide range of places and backgrounds, and now they had returned to them, scattering across the country, and the globe—to the Bronx, to Charlottesville, to southern Florida, to Sacramento, to Shanghai. My wife and I stayed where we were, in our apartment, a couple of subway stops south of the university, sequestered, empty of purpose, waiting for something to happen. I trailed listlessly around the apartment, and found it hard to sleep after a long day’s inactivity. I loitered in the kitchen in front of a small TV screen, like a supplicant awaiting favor from his sovereign. Ritual, the religious say, expresses spiritual necessity. At 7 P.M. , I stood at the window, just past the TV, and banged on a pot with a wooden spoon, in the city’s salute to front-line workers in the pandemic. Raskolnikov has been holed up in his room for a month at the beginning of “Crime and Punishment.” Thirty days, give or take, was how long I had been cut off from life when I began reading the book again.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, instead of making my way across College Walk and up the stairs to a seminar room in Hamilton Hall, I logged on to our class from home. The greetings at the beginning of each class were like sighs—not defeated, exactly, but wan. Our teacher, as always, was Nicholas Dames, a fixture in Columbia’s English Department. Professor Dames is a compact man in his late forties, with dark, deep-set eyes and a touch of dark mustache and dark beard around the edge of his jaw. He has been teaching Lit Hum, on and off, for two decades. He has one of those practiced teacher’s voices, a little dry but penetrating, and the irreplaceable gift of never being boring. At the beginning of the class, his face shadowed by two glaring windows on either side of him, he would struggle for a moment with Zoom. “This doesn’t feel like the experience we all signed up for,” he said. He couldn’t hear the students breathe, or feel them shift in their chairs, or watch them take notes or drift off. But his voice broke through the murk.

A man dressed in a Beatlesesque suit sits on a bench and looks for love in the petals of a flower.

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Nick Dames led the students through close readings of individual passages, linking them back, by the end of class, to the structure of the entire book. He is also a historicist, and has done extensive work on the social background of literature. He wanted us to know that nineteenth-century Petersburg—which Dostoyevsky miraculously rendered both as a real city and as a malevolent fantasy—was an impressive disaster. In the early eighteenth century, Peter the Great had commanded an army of architects and disposable serfs to build the place as a “rational” enterprise, intended to rival the great capitals of Western Europe. But, Professor Dames said, “ecologically, it was a failure.” Prone to flooding, the city had trouble disposing of sewage, which often found its way into the drinking water; in 1831, Petersburg was devastated by a cholera epidemic, and ordinary citizens, battered by quarantines and cordons, gathered in protests that turned into riots. After 1861, when Alexander II abolished serfdom, Professor Dames said, peasants came pouring in, looking for work. It was an unhealthy place, and it “wasn’t built for the population it was starting to have.” He put a slide on the screen, with a quotation from “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903), by the German sociologist Georg Simmel:

The psychological basis of the metropolitan type of individuality consists in the intensification of nervous stimulation which results from the swift and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli . . . the rapid crowding of changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a single glance, the unexpectedness of onrushing impressions.

“The rootlessness that Simmel writes about comes from detachment and debt,” Professor Dames said. “And it produces a constant paranoia—a texture of the illogical. And dreams become very important.”

Dostoyevsky ignores the magnificent imperial buildings, the huge public squares. He writes about street life—the voluble drunks, the lost girls, and the hungry children entertaining for kopecks. His Petersburg comes off as a carnival world without gaiety, a society that is neither capitalist nor communist but stuck in some inchoate transitional situation—an imperial city without much of a middle class. It seems to be missing the one aspect of life that insures survival: work. “With very few exceptions, everybody in the novel rents,” Professor Dames observed. “They are constantly moving among apartments that they can’t afford.” Social ties were frayed. “And the absence of social structure destroys families,” he said. “To the extent that families exist, they are really porous.”

Cast in this light, Raskolnikov’s rage against the pawnbroker looked quite different. He and a few of the other characters are barely clinging to remnants of status or wealth: a dubious connection with a provincial nobleman; a tenuous prospect of a meaningless job; or a semi-valuable possession, like an old watch. No wonder they hate the pawnbroker who helps keep them afloat, Alyona Ivanovna, “a tiny, dried-up old crone, about sixty, with sharp spiteful little eyes.” Raskolnikov is in a wrath of dispossession.

The city that Dostoyevsky experienced and Raskolnikov inhabited had long been a hothouse of reformist and radical ideas. In 1825, Petersburg was the center of the Decembrist Revolt, in which a group of officers led three thousand men against Nicholas I, who had just assumed the throne. The Tsar broke the revolt with artillery fire. In the late eighteen-forties, Dostoyevsky, then in his twenties, was a member of the Petrashevsky Circle, a group of literary men who met regularly to discuss reorganizing Russian society (which, for some members, included the overthrow of the tsarist regime). He was arrested, subjected to a terrifying mock execution, and sent off to Siberia, where he pored over the New Testament. By the time he returned to Petersburg, in 1859, he believed in Mother Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church, and hated both radicalism and bourgeois liberalism. He put his ideological shift to supreme advantage: he was now the master of both radical and reactionary temperaments. “Crime and Punishment” is a religious writer’s notion of what happens to an unstable young man possessed by utopian thinking. Dostoyevsky certainly knew what was simmering below the surface: in March, 1881, a month after the novelist died, two bomb-throwers from a revolutionary group assassinated the reformist Tsar Alexander II in Petersburg. Thirty-six years later, Lenin returned to the city from exile and led the Bolsheviks to power. Raskolnikov was a failed yet spiritually significant spectre haunting the ongoing disaster.

The lively discussions around our seminar table earlier in the year were hard to sustain among so many screens; the students were often silent in their separate enclosures. But, as Professor Dames sorted through the form of the novel and the many contradictions of Raskolnikov, one student, whom I’ll call Antonio, burst out of the dead space.

“He’s arrogant,” Antonio said. “Self-righteous.” He noted that Raskolnikov seemed unbound by the rules that bound others. “But there’s something very appealing about this great-man idea,” he ventured. “Is this possible? Could somebody incarnate ‘the world spirit’ by murdering two women with an axe and getting away with it flawlessly? That some of us are rooting for Raskolnikov is a reflection of that question. Is someone really capable of rationalizing such a horrible action? After the twentieth century, this becomes a challenging question. What kind of person would you have to be to get away with it?”

Antonio, from Sacramento, was slender, a runner, with large glasses and a radiant smile. He had had a good education in a Jesuit school, and, at nineteen, he was erudite and attentive, abundant in sentences that sounded as if they could have been written. Listening to him, you heard a flicker of identification with the theory-minded murderer.

For all Raskolnikov’s sullen self-consciousness, he has moments of fellow-feeling and righteous anger. His family and friends adore him; even the insinuating and masterly investigator, Porfiry, believes that dear Rodya is worth fighting for. In our class, Raskolnikov’s feelings about the vulnerability of women—an important issue in “Crime and Punishment”—stirred a number of students, especially one I’ll call Julia, who often returned to the theme. There was the matter of Raskolnikov’s sister, Dunya, a provincial beauty, extremely intelligent but almost impoverished and therefore the victim of insolent monetary bids for her hand from two despicable middle-aged suitors. The situation incenses Raskolnikov.

“He firmly believes his sister is prostituting herself,” Julia said. “He has what seems to me a very radical and even progressive thought—marriage is a form of prostitution, a form of slavery. It’s kind of Catharine MacKinnon.”

Julia, who came from a Catholic Cuban family, had been an embattled feminist in her South Florida high school, which was filled with MAGA boys. In class, she hesitated for a second, but then, grinning in complicity with herself, moved swiftly through complicated feminist and social-justice ideas. Raskolnikov was a puzzle for her. “He’s using this philosophical defense to separate himself from the murder,” she said. Yet he wants to protect women, not just his sister but hapless young girls in the street. Was his interest a case of male “triumphalism”—a way of enhancing his power over women by helping them? Dostoyevsky’s writing about the subservient status of women was as outraged as anything the Brontës had produced, with the Russian additive of persistent violence. The male characters, telling stories in jocular tones, assume their right to beat women. “ ‘She’s my property,’ ” Julia mimicked. “ ‘I could have beaten her more.’ ” In the course of the novel, three different women, all given to extravagant tirades—a Dostoyevsky specialty—fall apart and die in early middle age.

I couldn’t escape the novel’s larger theme of decline: the incoherence of Petersburg, the breakdown of social ties, the drunkenness and violence. At that moment in April, our own city felt largely empty, but I often imagined American streets filled with jobless people, some clinging to hopes of returning to work, many without such hopes. We were halfway through the novel, halfway to the confusion and proud madness of Raskolnikov’s dream. Would we go the other half? Julia’s feminist reading, new for me, opened still another connection. The newspapers were reporting that domestic abuse had gone up among couples locked together. Women were now being punished, as the critic Jacqueline Rose would note, for the recent liberties they had achieved.

Looking for present-day resonances, I knew, was a grim and limited way of reading this work. “Crime and Punishment” is about many things—the psychology of crime, the destiny of families, the vanity and anguish of single men adrift. But, midway through the book, Dostoyevsky’s writerly exuberance allayed my worries. He’s an inspired entertainer, with his own hectic style of comedy. His characters show up reciting their troubles and lineages, their lives “hanging out on their tongues,” as the critic V. S. Pritchett put it. I was now sequestered in a welter of betrayals and loyalties, gossip and opinion: the assorted virtuous and vicious people in the book believe in manners, but they never stop talking about one another. Even the company of Dostoyevsky’s buffoons was liberating.

And Dostoyevsky’s extremity—his savage inwardness, his apocalyptic feverishness—had never felt so right. How many millions were now locked in their rooms muttering vile thoughts to themselves, or wondering about the point of their existence? He wrote about the absolute rationality of evil and the absurd necessity of goodness. He taunted himself and his readers with alarming propositions: What happens to man without God and immortal life? Big questions can result in banality, but when an idea is put forward in Dostoyevsky’s fiction it goes someplace—runs up against an opposing one, or is developed and refuted two hundred pages later. Such contradictions notably exist within characters. Dostoyevsky turned Raskolnikov’s unconscious into a field of action.

The students had returned to familiar surroundings (dogs barked in the background), but they had three or four other courses—not to mention all the anxieties of a precarious future—to contend with. Their college careers were messed up, their friendships interrupted, their campus activities and summer internships wiped out. As we read together in April, the university’s hospital, New York-Presbyterian, was filled with victims of the pandemic. Across the city, hundreds of them were dying every day. So many elements of our civilization had shut down: churches, schools, and universities; libraries, bookstores, research institutes, and museums; opera companies, concert organizations, and movie houses; theatre and dance groups; galleries, studios, and local arts groups of all kinds (not to mention local bars). Who knew what would perish and what would come back?

Two cats look at an unshreddable midcentury chair.

The students were discomfited, often quiet, almost abashed. In between classes, they sent Professor Dames their responses to the reading, and he used their notes to pull them into the conversation. As we approached the final dream and its awful picture of social breakdown, I continued searching the novel for indications of what could summon so dreadful a vision—and also of what suggested its opposite, a possibly more benevolent world that was also presaged by Dostoyevsky’s whirling contraries. In class, the conversation turned toward questions of moral indifference and sympathy. What obligations did we have to one another? Was there any redemptive value in suffering? For Americans, that last question was strange, even repellent, but in mid-April the language of hardship was all around us.

Antonio remained fascinated by the idea that one might achieve greatness by doing wrong in the service of a larger right. But during the crime itself Raskolnikov falls into an abstracted near-trance and does one stupid thing after another. Antonio had noted that Raskolnikov, standing in a police station, faints dead away when someone mentions the pawnbroker: “His body shuts off. The consequences of the act become unstoppable, even if you try to take intellectual approaches to prevent yourself from getting caught.” Antonio’s flirtation with the murderer was short-lived.

Raskolnikov blurts out many griefs and ambitions, but is never able to say exactly what propelled his actions. Dostoyevsky doesn’t want the reader to solve the mystery: he makes the crime both overdetermined and incoherently motivated. It was hard to judge a young man so intricately composed, and, when Professor Dames asked, “Do we want him to get away with it?,” he got no better than a mixed response. Raskolnikov wants, and doesn’t want, to escape punishment. His sulfurous inner monologues alternate between contempt for others and contempt for himself. Professor Dames, answering his own question, said that Dostoyevsky creates extraordinary suspense, but it’s psychological suspense: “Is he going to crack?”

Dostoyevsky intended moral suspense as well: Would Raskolnikov come to recognize that what he did was absolutely wrong? In the last third of the novel, the gentle but persistent Sonya offers a way out for him. “She’s not coming to Raskolnikov from a position of judgment,” Professor Dames said, “nor from a position of implied moral superiority. She’s saying, ‘We are two sinners.’ ” A deeply religious girl, she had taken to working the streets in a failed effort to save her crumbling family, and must endure Raskolnikov’s taunt that she has given up her happiness for nothing. In return, she presses him hard: Was he capable of acknowledging his own misery? The subsequent conversion of the snarling former student to Sonya’s doctrine—the necessity of suffering and salvation through Christ—is perhaps the most resolutely asexual seduction in all of literature. What could it mean for us?

In the next class, we were guided through the epilogue. Raskolnikov is in a prison camp, and Dostoyevsky’s narration shifts to a more removed, third-person voice. “For the first time, we’re outside Raskolnikov’s head in a sustained way,” Professor Dames said. “We’re separated from psychology, and it feels like a loss.” But Julia said she felt “relief,” and quoted the narrator’s remark about Raskolnikov: “Instead of dialectics, there was life.” By dialectics, Dostoyevsky meant all the theories plaguing the former student. A young man with a head crammed full of ideas, Raskolnikov needed “air.”

And what was “air” in this claustrophobic novel? The word, Professor Dames said, “was an articulation of something transcendental, certainly religious.” Julia was right to steer us to the line “Instead of dialectics, there was life.” It was the most important sentence in the novel. “But what is meant by ‘life’?” Professor Dames asked. Raskolnikov tries strenuously to shape that life, but in the end transcendence comes from a surrender of individuality, not an assertion of it. “The novel is a strong rebuke to individual happiness and individual rights and autonomy,” he said. At the end of the class, Zoom froze on Professor Dames, and he remained immobile on my screen, his dark eyes staring straight ahead. We all needed air.

The final dream is lodged in the novel’s epilogue. That dream is a creepy invention, evoking the genres of science fiction and horror: “Here and there people would band together, agree among themselves to do something, swear never to part—but immediately begin something completely different from what they themselves had just suggested, begin accusing one another, fighting, stabbing.” The struggle has a sinister dénouement: the few survivors of the disease are “pure and chosen, destined to begin a new generation of people and a new life.” The dream presents a vision of society even more feral than the author’s rendering of Petersburg earlier in the novel. Surely it’s also an extreme expression of Raskolnikov’s mind: having murdered two people, he now wants to murder the multitudes. But isn’t it the opposite as well? An expression of Raskolnikov’s sympathy, a boundless pity for a collapsing world? He remains complex and contradictory to the end.

I wasn’t the only reader in April to be alarmed by the dream of an “unknown and unseen pestilence.” As Julia wrote me in an e-mail, the dream was science fiction, but political science fiction; the notion of a few special survivors suggested a master race, a new form of white male privilege. She also saw the dream as reflecting on us. “I noticed that the infected persons who are stubborn in their beliefs to the point of madness bear a striking resemblance to Americans trying to talk politics,” she wrote. “The mobs of people described by Dostoyevsky recalled photos I saw of conservative folks in Michigan protesting stay-at-home orders at the capitol. The expressions on their faces and their screams, so convinced that their moral convictions are correct.” And Antonio wrote to me that “people can’t agree on what’s right and wrong, and, in our case, we know that ambiguity concerning the future can make people restless and highly partisan when reason and compassion is what’s needed in this situation.” His hope was that “we can humble ourselves enough to realize where we’ve gone wrong, to throw ourselves at the feet of the ‘insatiable compassion’ that Sonya represents and emerge better people. If we can do that, then we won’t have to simply survive.”

Two months later, my classmates had survived one experiment—the strangeness of intimate reading through remote learning. But the struggle for clarity and understanding had intensified on so many fronts. I thought of all the people acting with courage and generosity, not just the front-line warriors and the outsiders who rushed to New York to help when the outbreak began but the many people who created communities of faith or art online, or sent out all manner of useful advice on how to resist despair. The marchers protesting the murder of George Floyd and all that it symbolizes risked disease to express solidarity with one another. As the summer began, Antonio, to make money, found work at a nearby country club—cleaning floors, windows, and golf carts. He told me that it was hard for him to “think about the future, because of the current situation, with the protests and the pandemic,” although he didn’t rule out a job in government. Julia was interning for a legal nonprofit, and making plans to become a human-rights lawyer, perhaps for Amnesty International.

Every day, in Trump’s America, it seemed as though we were coming closer to the annihilating turmoil—the mixed state of vexation and fear—in Raskolnikov’s dream. The disease was everywhere, and it only heightened our world’s fissures and inequities. More than a hundred thousand had died, tens of millions were unemployed, many were hungry, and, at times, the country appeared to be unravelling. Some spoke of racism as a “virus,” the American virus; and the language of disease, though it miscasts a human-made scourge as a natural phenomenon, captures just how profoundly it has infiltrated the life of the country. The President’s every statement, meanwhile, was designed to widen chaos. He spoke of the need to “dominate,” and many of us were determined not to be dominated. We would not lose our individuality, like the poor murderer in his exile. But neither could we escape responsibility for the mess we had made, a mess we had bequeathed to the students, and to all of the next generation. I kept returning to Dostoyevsky’s book, looking for signs of how collective purpose can heal social divisions and injustices, stoking hope and resolve alongside fear, anything that would overtake the desperate anomie that Raskolnikov’s dream had conjured: “In the cities, the bells rang all day long: everyone was being summoned, but no one knew who was summoning them or why.” ♦

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By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

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Themes and Analysis

Crime and punishment, by fyodor dostoevsky.

'Crime and Punishment' features salient themes that are relevant today as they were in Dostoevsky's Russia.

Article written by Israel Njoku

Degree in M.C.M with focus on Literature from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

‘Crime and Punishment’ contains numerous themes, reflecting Dostoevsky’s preoccupation with and response to the flurry of ideologies coming into Russia from Western Europe. Asides from complex ideological issues like nihilism and utilitarianism, everyday relatable issues that occupied Dostoevsky like poverty, suffering, and societal alienation are also addressed within the work.

Crime and Punishment Themes and Analysis

The Dangerous Effects of Nihilism

One of the key themes of ‘Crime and Punishment’ is the effect of harmful ideologies. The problem here is not simply that an individual comes to wholly believe in a dangerous idea and so carries it out, it is also about the parasitic effects of these dangerous ideas as they slowly corrupt our minds and subtly strip us of control and autonomy, pulling us towards the actualization of its destiny even when our hold of and understandings of these ideas are incomplete and tenuous.

Before Raskolnikov decided to kill the old pawnbroker whom he had deemed expendable on the basis of her wickedness and nastiness, Raskolnikov had written an article where he argued for the right of a certain class of special, superior men to raise themselves above conventional morality and commit crimes in service of aims they deem noble.

For Raskolnikov, this means an ascendancy to a Napoleon-like personality who has earned the right to kill and commit all sorts of crimes in service of greatness. This extraordinary person is marked by his capacity to commit this crime and profit off it, feeling neither remorse nor weakness in a manner that would undermine the validity of his ideas, or his greatness.

The more Raskolnikov became possessed by the truth of this idea, the more he wished to be an extraordinary man, to prove he has the capacity to transcend conventional morality in order to do what Raskolnikov deemed noble. Gradually this small theory assumes the nature of an obsession with proving his strength, and that culminated in the murder of the old pawnbroker. It resisted Raskolnikov’s erstwhile moral conscience.

Even when Raskolnikov gets disgusted at the idea of killing the old woman and feels free from the thoughts, he loses control when he overhears at the Hay market that a prime opportunity for the murder was going to present itself soon with the availability of Alyona alone at the house without her sister,

Raskolnikov finds himself without any control and is thrust into an autopilot program, driving him to test his theory and prove himself extraordinary. The idea took on a life of its own in Raskolnikov’s head and convinced him of its own validity. But when Raskolnikov tries to justify his murder in terms of it being in service to humanity, he finds that he cannot sincerely explain his motivation that way. He discovered that none of the motivations he put forward in his conversation with Sonia inspired him as much as the simple, selfish desire to prove he was “extraordinary”.

A much less pronounced, but definitely evident, theme in the book is that of Egoism. This is an idea espoused to different degrees by a number of characters in the book-namely the likes of Raskolnikov, Svidrigailov, and Luzhin. It can express itself in a direct, undisguised form in service of evil aims, as we see in Svidrigailov’s behaviors.

Svidrigailov lives for his pleasures and base desires and is not embarrassed by them. He speaks freely to Raskolnikov about desiring and relishing the effort to get these desires. He lives entirely for his own pleasures and is not concerned about others until the very end. Furthermore, he is ruthless in the pursuit of his own gratification and does not consider a grander, nobler aim, nor pretends to consider it in any way.

Raskolnikov is also similar but up until his real motivation is unraveled and understood, he masks this with a pretense of employing his capacity and actions for a larger good. He convinces himself that he was only killing the old pawnbroker because she was a net negative to humanity and her death would benefit many in terms of redistributing her wealth to the poor and preventing her from being wicked to the vulnerable under her.

It was not until Raskolnikov was forced to examine his motivations for the murder that he realizes that his main aim for committing the murder wasn’t humanistic altruism but rather a naked, selfish pursuit of power, just the same way Svidrigailov was pursuing pleasures. Luzhin similarly masks his egoism under a front of benevolence. In his first encounter with Raskolnikov and Razumikhin, he argues that private charity was in the end counterproductive to the poor and that there would be a net good to society if those who are privileged focused on themselves and refrain from giving handouts to the poor. This argument is obviously only an excuse to legitimize his miserliness.

The competing forces of natural good and learned evil

In ‘Crime and Punishment ‘, Raskolnikov seems to struggle with the moral demands of his conscience and that of his adopted nihilistic and rational egoistic philosophical outlook. Possibly resulting from his Christian background or a naturally altruistic and humanistic disposition, Raskolnikov seemed to have a basic constitution that has molded a conscience that inspires him to do good. We see this sentiment in his acts of charity towards the Marmeladovs as well as towards the young girl he saves from the lecherous individual stalking her on the streets.

However, Raskolnikov has also been exposed to and adopted new dangerous ideas which emphasized a cold utilitarian outlook towards life in service of one’s self-interest. The philosophy of the extraordinary emphasizes his elevation over the troubles of the common people. It encourages a cold, statistical approach to life that sees the common people not as individuals but as numbers.

So just after he rescues the young drunken girl from her stalker, he immediately regrets the action because there were bound to be people like her all the time who will make up the number of people who would be vulnerable to predators, who are condemned to a life of prostitution, diseases, and vulnerability. It was a mathematical and sociological certainty, so why bother trying to interfere?

Also, when he gives Sonia money after he was dragged to the home of the Marmeladovs, he regrets doing so almost immediately for the same purpose. For large stretches of the book, Raskolnikov struggles between these two competing aspects of his personality.

The theme of Alienation is a prominent one in ‘ Crime and Punishment ‘. Raskolnikov’s alienation from society as a result of his haughty ideals, as well as his overpowering guilt as a result of his murders, is one of the plot points that move the book. Raskolnikov’s ideas separate him from most of the rest of humanity in theory and principle. His conviction that society is divided between a few superior men and a mass of inferior men sets him on a proud and arrogant path that alienates him from most people whom he views as inferior.

Although poor and near destitute, Raskolnikov still manages to feel disgusted at the surrounding poverty in his area of St Petersburg. After committing the murders, he is overpowered with guilt and a strong sense that he did not belong with society and with the pure people around him, who are far removed from his destructive and tortured state of mind. His guilt makes him believe he cannot bear to continue to interact and coexist normally with his family and friends, who are good people.

Helplessness

The theme of helplessness is also featured in ‘ Crime and Punishment ‘. Raskolnikov is a very poor student who is dependent on sacrifices from his mother and sister to be able to sustain himself. Given that his family has high hopes for him and views him as a potential breadwinner, Raskolnikov finds himself under great pressure.

His poverty strips him of any capacity whatsoever to help his family and realize the expectation placed on him. Worse of all, he could do extremely little to prevent his family from enduring humiliating circumstances like Dunya’s employment at Svidrigailov’s and the prospect of a less than happy marriage with an unsavory character, like Luzhin.

This sense of hopelessness contributes to driving Raskolnikov towards the robbery and murders. Other characters in the novel also find themselves in helpless situations. Marmeledov cannot conquer his addiction and bring himself to stop drinking away the little money the family is able to procure, largely out of Sonia’s prostitution. Sonia herself is helpless against the forces that drove her into a life of prostitution against her will.

Punishment and Suffering

The theme of suffering and punishment is predominant in the book. The book seems to advance the idea that only commensurate punishment and suffering can put the condemned and guilty on the path to redemption. Repentance is not enough and must be backed by a genuine willingness to pay for one’s sins. After Raskolnikov murders the old pawnbroker, his punishment begins almost immediately after. He suffers from crushing guilt, illness, and self-loathing. He cannot master his conscience, and in the end, he succumbs to it.

His guilt and the triumph of his conscience mean he cannot get away with his crime. He betrays himself and therefore leads himself to be suspected by the authorities. This punishment however can only be expatiated by further punishment. Raskolnikov can only get reprieve and redemption if he confesses publicly to the police and suffers the embarrassment of being thought a fool with crazy ideas and a weak constitution, as well as suffer the disappointment of his family and friends, as well as the loss of his freedom.

Analysis of Key Moments

Raskolnikov witnesses a young student argue with an army officer over the morality of killing the old, detestable pawnbroker, Alyona.
Raskolnikov has a dream where he tries to prevent some peasants from heartlessly maltreating a mare
Raskolnikov receives a letter from his mother outlining the interesting events happening at home with his family
Raskolnikov kills Alyona the pawnbroker and her sister Lizaveta.
The police begin to suspect Raskolnikov due to his strange behavior at the station after his landlady reports him over unpaid rent.
Luzhin makes the unfavorable acquaintance of Raskolnikov.
Dunya and Pulcharia arrive in Saint Petersburg. They are shocked at Raskolnikov’s cold and erratic behavior.
Dunya breaks off the engagement with Luzhin; A spiteful Luzhin blames Raskolnikov and plans his revenge.
Svidrigailov tries and fails to rape Dunya
Porfiry encourages Raskolnikov to confess and accept his suffering in a heart-to-heart talk.
Raskolnikov confesses his crime to Sonia, then the Police.
Raskolnikov repents for real in a Siberian prison and acknowledges the defectiveness of his ideas.

Tone and Style

‘ Crime and Punishment’ is a forerunner of the realistic style that would come to replace the romanticism that was dominant in Western literature at the time. Dostoevsky’s novel is a classic detective story, but the norms of the genre are subverted when we see the killer commit the crime in the first few pages. There is no mystery as regards who committed the crime or the surface level motivations behind it, rather the novel immediately devotes itself to the consequences of the crime on the individual in a psychological, ideological, and spiritual sense.

Dostoevsky employs realistic descriptions to bring into sharp relief the starkness of Raskolnikov’s poverty, and his very deliberate world-building and scene-setting allow us to glimpse some motivation behind his crime through the skillful use of strong opinionated characters and interesting, realistic dialogues.

Dostoevsky brings forth the opposing arguments he wants to comment on and allows them to fight as fairly as possible in the world in which he has set them out. Dostoevsky lends little outright authorial or editorial presence in the book, as the omniscient narrator stays mostly objective. But Dostoevsky advances his ideas through the mouths of certain characters. Through dreams, Dostoevsky provides clues as to the psychological makeup of the characters, as well as the principal motivations for their actions.

Analysis of Symbols

The hay market.

A section of St. Petersburg that is reserved for the very poor. This area is the symbol of poverty, and of the common destitute that Raskolnikov feels himself above. There is a distinct sense of filth and wretchedness that Raskolnikov comes to be all too aware of when he passes by. By making Raskolnikov come here to confess, Sonia makes sure Raskolnikov gets the fullest possible punishment for his murders. This is because the hay market is populated by a mass of people whom Raskolnikov despises and thinks are inferior to himself. Confessing here accentuates his humiliation but at the same time fast tracks his redemption.

The cross is a symbol of wilful suffering in service of pious and redemptive aims. Raskolnikov goes to take Sonia’s cross only when he is ready to confess publicly for his sins.

Saint Petersburg

The city of Saint Petersburg was often seen as the most Westernized Russian city, therefore for Slavophiles, or people with slavophilic sentiments in post-Petrine Russia, Saint Petersburg was the most corrupt of Western cities, the city that has strayed farthest from traditional Russian values. The city is depicted this way in ‘Crime and Punishment ‘. Raskolnikov’s descent into the dark extremities of radical ideals begins only after he abandons the conservative society of rural Russia for corrupting Saint Petersburg. The city disgusts Raskolnikov, too, with its stench of filth and poverty and cynical residents. It is infested by “foolish” ideologues, too.

What are the major themes in ‘ Crime and Punishment ?’

‘ Crime and Punishment ‘ contain themes like helplessness, poverty, nihilism, suffering, and alienation, among others.

What did Dostoevsky set out to achieve in ‘ Crime and Punishment ?’

Dostoevsky’s major objective is to display the folly and dangers inherent in radical ideals like utilitarianism, atheism, and nihilism

What literary style did Dostoevsky employ in ‘ Crime and Punishment ?’

Realism. Dostoevsky wrote in a very realistic style, favoring an accurate mimicking of reality over romanticism.

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About Israel Njoku

Israel loves to delve into rigorous analysis of themes with broader implications. As a passionate book lover and reviewer, Israel aims to contribute meaningful insights into broader discussions.

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A portrait of Fyodor Dostoevsky projected on to the side of a building in St Petersburg in November 2020.

The Sinner and the Saint review – the story behind Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment

Kevin Birmingham’s clear and gripping new study of the Russian writer digs deep into the inspiration for Raskolnikov

F or many in the west, Fyodor Dostoevsky is the most “Russian” of Russian authors. His work teems with holy fools, holy prostitutes, nihilists and revolutionaries. Crime and Punishment , his best-known novel, radiates a dark chaos and apocalyptic sensibility. Its murderous antihero, Raskolnikov (from the Russian raskolnik , “dissenter”), embodies a violent ideology of redemption through suffering that Vladimir Nabokov, for one, found distasteful. (“Dostoevsky is a third-rate writer and his fame is incomprehensible,” he judged.) For all that, Dostoevsky remains a quasi-divine figure in Russia. His Slavophile bias and Orthodox-heavy chauvinism endeared him to Stalin’s propagandists, who tailored his image to fit Soviet ideology.

He is a difficult quarry for biographers, though. With his appetite for affliction and self-torturing asceticism, he was a casebook of neuroses. Joseph Frank’s celebrated five-volume biography, published between 1976 and 2002, devoted more than 2,500 pages to the life of a man who was dead at the age of 59 from untreated epilepsy and a gambling addiction (also untreated). Rowan Williams’s scholarly Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction concentrated instead on the novelist’s tormented Christian messianism.

The radical politics and anti-tsarist personalities that fed into Crime and Punishment are the subject of Kevin Birmingham’s excellent biographical study, The Sinner and the Saint . As Birmingham shows, Dostoevsky was exposed at an early age to tragedy when, in 1839, his landowning father was murdered by his own serfs. Unsurprisingly, Dostoevsky was left with a bewildered awareness of human cruelty. Later, inspired by a reading of the gospels, he espoused a proto-Soviet socialism that sought to abolish serfdom and return Russia to a state of original Slav holiness. In St Petersburg in the 1840s, he fell in with a circle of intellectuals who preached French utopian politics and the redemptive possibilities (as they saw it) inherent in the Russian peasant soul. Tsar Nicholas I’s secret police were watching: opposing serfdom was a “clear threat to the throne”, Birmingham writes.

In 1849 Dostoevsky and his co-conspirators were arrested and interrogated by General Nabokov, the great-great-uncle of the novelist. Subjected to a gruesome mock execution, the 28-year-old graduate engineer was afterwards deported to Siberia. His four years of hard labour in the “Asian side” of the Ural mountains convinced Dostoevsky more than ever that Christ was alive in Russian lands. Even the most degraded of convicts showed a readiness for penance and redemption, Birmingham suggests. The book that emerged from Dostoevsky’s Siberian ordeal, The House of the Dead , pretty well created the gulag genre in Russia and remains a work of unsparing lucidity and documentary realism. (“I don’t know a better book in all modern literature,” Tolstoy enthused.)

Released from Siberia, Dostoevsky seemed to court disaster and illness. Epilepsy was associated in the popular mind with demonic possession and visitations from the beyond. It left Dostoevsky in permanent dread of the next convulsive onset. His growing discontent with the west stemmed in part from its betrayal (as he saw it) of Russia’s Christian cause in the 1854-6 Crimean war. France and Britain had sided with the Ottomans against Russia to defend their imperial interests and thus ensured the “crucifixion of the Russian Christ”.

Dostoevsky’s anxiety about national character – what does it mean to be Russian? Are Russians even European? – contained a streak of xenophobia and antisemitism that surfaced during the trips he took abroad in the 1860s to avoid gambling debts back home. Mid-Victorian London represented the “soullessness” and “hard-nosed mercantilism” of capitalist western life; Crystal Palace appalled Dostoevsky with its thousands of tonnes of glass and iron – “like something out of Babylon”.

‘A quasi-divine figure in Russia’: Dostoevsky circa 1865, the year before the publication of Crime and Punishment

Crime and Punishment, published in instalments in St Petersburg in 1866, was partly inspired by the sensationalist story of Pierre François Lacenaire, a Parisian murderer-poet whose trial Dostoevsky followed avidly. Lacenaire’s influence on the creation of Raskolnikov had been explored by Frank, but Birmingham goes further and braids Lacenaire’s story with that of Dostoevsky. A dandified fop, Lacenaire set French society ablaze with his catalogue of gratuitous, unmotivated crimes. He appeared to kill simply in order to act (or perhaps to alleviate boredom). His motiveless murders would be mirrored in Raskolnikov’s axing to death of an old moneylender and her sister. Nothing – no inkling of anger, or rage, or hatred – apparently has the power to shake Dostoevsky’s existentially disaffected creation.

The notion that Raskolnikov is moved to repent and find God is, Birmingham writes, one of the aspects that “nearly everyone gets wrong about Crime and Punishment ” . Raskolnikov does eventually confess to his crimes, but without obvious remorse. Killing for the nihilist sake of killing is the theme that runs like the black line in a lobster through Crime and Punishment and behind it all lay the bizarre figure of Lacenaire. In pungent, well-researched pages, Birmingham reveals the “secret” background behind Dostoevsky’s great murder novel – the gambling debts, the epileptic seizures, the Tsarist police surveillance.

Crime and Punishment might have been accused of promoting nihilism and even tsaricide (an attempt was made on Tsar Alexander II’s life just as a chapter went to press). Fortunately for us, it was not successful. A model of luminous exposition and literary detection, The Sinner and the Saint can be recommended to anyone interested in the dark twisted genius of “Dusty”, as Nabokov (with a touch of mockery) nicknamed the ill-fated Russian maestro.

The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky, a Crime and I ts Punishment by Kevin Birmingham is published by Allen Lane (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply

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Book Review: Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky

Crime and Punishment remains the single most widely known Russian novel as well as one of the greatest works in world literature. It is first and foremost a fascinating detective novel, but one in which we know from the very beginning who committed the heinous crime.

It focuses on the mental anguish and moral dilemmas of Raskolnikov, an impoverished law student in St. Petersburg unable to pay for his studies. He can be viewed as a materialistic rationalist, an oddity at that time and taken by the idea that God was dead. He was convinced that the only reason that anyone acted in a moral way was because of cowardice and tradition.

Dostoevsky wanted to set up a character who had every reason to commit murder: philosophically, practically, and ethically.

It starts of early with Raskolnikov formulating a plan to kill an evil and wealthy person after eavesdropping on a conversation in which a student claimed that the world would be better off if that person were dead and the money were given to someone who needed it more.

It is a book disguised as a murder mystery that delves deeply into the psychology and the mind of what a “murder” can be. The character development is fantastic. What fascinated me about Dostoevsky is his ability to make the opposite of his beliefs, the antithesis of what he believed, the strongest views possible – often making his characters the strongest, most handsome, smartest and most admirable people in his books, which takes great moral courage. Raskolnikov as a dissident and atheist nihilist, Razumikhin as the reasonable friend, Sonya as the wise one, and so on.

The book is focused on Raskolnikov’s moral dilemma between good and evil, he distinguishes between ordinary and extraordinary people (such as Napoleon). Raskolnikov’s pride separates him from society, he sees himself as a sort of “higher man”, a person who is extraordinary and thus above all moral rules that govern the rest of humanity, and so he cannot relate to anyone of the ordinary people, who must live in obedience and do not have the right to overstep the law.

After the murder, his isolation increases. The novel deeply explores the psychology of the inner world of Raskolnikov. Dostoevsky seems to suggest that actual imprisonment and punishment is much better than the stress and anxiety of trying to avoid punishment. One must eventually confess or go mad.

Dostoevsky portrays Raskolnikov as a nihilist, gloomy and with a feeling of deep emptiness, for the most part of the novel. He is a utilitarian who believes that moral decisions should be based on the rule of the greatest happiness for the largest number of people, thus justifying, in his mind, the murder.

“In general, an unusually small number of people are born with a new idea, or who are capable of even uttering something new…”

“…and great geniuses, the culmination of humanity – perhaps only as a result of the passing of many billions of people across the earth.”

Thus, he considers himself one of them, and in view of unfortunate worldly circumstances and the advancement of mankind in some way, he steps over the obstacles of murder and robbery.

However, things did not go as planned. After the carefully planned murder, he finds himself confused, paranoid and with disgust for what he has done. He enters periods of delirium in which he struggles with guilt and horror and has a series of disturbing dreams. In a way, along with the murder, he had also killed a part of himself. Add to that his atheism in a highly religious era and his nihilism.

In 19th century Russia nihilism became prevalent, espousing for the end of belief in religion and God and for it to be replaced by something new. At this time German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously wrote that God is Dead, not a celebratory but a tragic statement. However, he believed that men could do without religion and create new values, rising up to the figure of the Übermensch or Overman. Thus, man becomes God.

Dostoevsky saw this new atheist movement as incredibly dangerous; it laid the seeds for the character of Raskolnikov, with his own superman beliefs. Nietzsche read and admired Dostoevsky, he called him “the only psychologist from whom he had something to learn” , and that he “ranks amongst the most beautiful strokes of fortune in his life.”

Both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky had strikingly similar themes. Both are haunted by central questions surrounding the human existence, especially ones concerning God.

Can Raskolnikov endure to be extraordinary? How does he cope with life? Why should he go on living? What would he have to look forward to? To go on living merely to exist? Or is existence itself to little for him? Perhaps he wants something more than to merely exist among the ordinary people.

You’ll have to find out!

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Crime and Punishment in 10 Minutes | Fyodor Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment first published during 1866, remains the most widely known Russian novel as well as one of the greatest achievements in world literature.

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The Best One-Star Reviews of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment

"in about one hour, i am going to walk down to the beach and throw this book into the red sea.".

Criticism is hard to take. Nobody likes hearing that their work is, in anyone’s evaluation, disappointing or even a downright failure. But any writer who means to make it ought to steel themselves for the occasional vicious takedown from readers, critics, friends, neighbors, possibly even your loved ones. Look up just about any consensus historically great work of fiction on Amazon, Goodreads, or your other forum of choice and you’ll find there are people giving that book the notorious “one star” and eviscerating the writer in the comments. Reading these reviews can be, strangely, invigorating. As an offering to aspiring writers, and to all those working authors fending off the hate and putting in the good work, we offer you this post (and others like it to come). The message, in short: Dostoevsky has haters, too.

Crime and Punishment , first published in 1866 in serial installments in The Russian Messenger , is generally recognized as a high water mark of world literature. It’s also a seminal crime novel: a sprawling, ambitious work of existential angst composed of transgressions, detectives, fugitives, and investigations. It’s the kind of book around which there is an agreement of worth. Still, it has dissenters, most famously Nabokov but also many, many people on Amazon.

We’ve gathered up 25 of our favorite critiques of Crime and Punishment here. Many we consider valid; some are funny, some irreverent. A few offer up suggestions for how better to spend your time than reading Dostoevsky’s door-stopper.

Whether you agree or disagree with the critiques, we hope you writers out there will find them heartening.

(The following quotes are real Amazon one-star reviews, edited for spelling, and excerpted for length.)

__________________________________

Unlikable Characters Reminiscent of Saturday Night Live

“I felt like my crime was buying the book and my punishment was reading it. I bailed out mid-way when I could no longer ignore that the characters constantly reminded me of the ‘two wild and crazy guys’ from Saturday Night Live. The idea for the book was good but, at least to me, the characters were idiotic and boring. Given the acclaim and popularity of this book, I’m sure that my opinion is in the minority, if not altogether alone.”

Objections on Moral Grounds…But Not the Kind You Think

“Exaggerated Piousness: There is no doubt that Crime and Punishment would have been one of the greatest novels of the century had not Dostoevsky leaned towards the more acceptable sense of morality related to the weak tenets of Chrisitanity. In doing so, he made Rasknolikov a caricature of himself, lethargic and yet redeemable by accepting Christ’s suffering.”

“Another distressing characteristic of this book is that it reflects the depressing attitudes and values of the stereotypical Russian. There is no humor or cheerfulness, no admiration of success or prosperity, and no optimism. And heroes, instead of being winners, are suffering victims of tragedy.”

Short and to the Point

“Heard about this book for years… finally drudged my way through it. Russian psychobabble.”

“It. Sucks.”

“Very slow & plodding.”

“I don’t dig Russian literature.”

“This brought to mind the worst “Classic” book I have ever read, namely “Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger. Save your time, effort and money because this is a waste of all three. I gave it one star because zero was not an option.”

“This book was P to the double O P don’t waste your hard earned money on this piece of total and complete crap.”

“This book is long and every time i put it in my bag and put it on back gave me back problems”

“ The most depressive book I ever read.”

“Not sure what all the fuss is about. I could not connect with the characters and I found it very odd.”

“I never ordered this book. Please make sure I have not been charged for it!! Please let me know as soon as possible.”

Because Dostoevsky Was a Bad at Writing (Nabokov Agreed)

“Why I just HATED Crime & Punishment! The plot—a young student murdering an old, unpleasant pawn-broker and having to deal with the psychological aftermath—could have been promising, if not for the story telling, the writing style, the character depiction. In short, if not written by Dostoevsky. He goes into monstrous proportions of expressing everything in the characters’ minds without relating any one thing to another or tying any of it to the overall plot in even a remotely tangible way. He—the author—is nearly as disturbed and as much on the verge of insanity as his protagonist, Rascolnikov, and while it may sound fascinating, it does not bode well for story-telling of any kind.”

“Virtually every other review says that this book is ‘the greatest of all time.’ I’d like to be respectful, but I can’t imagine anyone saying this. Please don’t take offense. This book is very badly written. The author was an incredible genius, but that didn’t make him a good writer. The main problem is that the book loses whatever momentum it gained by the murder with page after page of needless digression. Dostoevsky is a great philosopher, and that shines through here—he anticipated a lot of Nietzsche (though he would have strongly disagreed with him) and existentialism. This book, like his others, has some great philosophical dialogues, but that does not make a great novel (or even a good one). Karl Gauss, Bobby Fisher, Beethoven, Wittgenstein, Thomas Edison, and Hegel were all geniuses. Would you want to read a novel written by one of these guys? Yet any of them would probably have crafted a better piece of coherent fiction than C & P.”

A Few Alternative Recommendations

After reading this indulgent garbage I had to bore a hole in my head with my 7v Black and Decker cordless drill. This trefening technique will be of use to you should you make the fool hearty decision to read C n’P.

“first of all, the names are so similar that it is extremely tedious and difficult for the reader to have to fumble baaaack and fooorth.. page to page.. to recall which character is the doctor and which one is the detective. second of all, the entire book is a coincidence conspiracy. out of nowhere, connections were made, characters reappeared, etc. for example, when raskolnikov is walking around and sees m. [whatever the hell is name was.. proving my first point] get run over by a horse. HMMM. just by chance? third of all, this book is really interesting, but takes forever to read. hey, if you’re someone who has no sex life and nothing better to do.. then go for it. otherwise just watch CSI.”

“This is quite possibly one of the most horrible books I have ever opened. I have tried at least ten different times over the past year to read it and under different conditions, but it is just plain painful to read. The dialogue is choppy and irritating. The actions of the characters are not very believable, and I felt no compassion for any of the people. I personally wished bad things upon each and every one of them — not because of their character, but because how horribly written the book was. I am quitting now after reading only two-thirds of it novel. I wish I could resurrect Lermontov and have him write another book so I could enjoy a proper Russian author. In about one hour, I am going to walk down to the beach and throw this book into the Red Sea. I am in Africa and this is the right thing to do.”

[ responding to the previous reviewer: ]

“Although I’m sure this book is wonderfully written in many ways, I cannot help but say that I absolutely hated it. I’m certain that persons with more scholarly inclinations will completely disagree with me, but I cannot help but envy another reviewer who has tossed his copy into the Red Sea. Although I cannot pinpoint exactly where this novel and I got off on the wrong foot, I will say that there was too much repetition, and I could not identify with or even like any of the characters. By the time I got to the end, I was thinking that I wished someone had jerked the book out of my hand and slapped me with it before I ever opened it.”

Dreary, Depressing, Boring, Required

“Very dreary stuff. A seemingly endless fixation on troubles: drinking, poverty, violence, hopelessness, concern about one’s status in the society. One comes away with no real idea of who these characters are. Only to be read if required for a class.”

“This is literally one of the worst books I have ever almost read. Never have I ever been so insulted by any book. I would never recommend this book to any one ever in my life. This book made me dread reading it (had to read it for class) and now I am just reading the summary because it is so boring.”

“If this book doesn’t drive you to drink nothing will. I haven’t encountered this many melodramatic people in my entire life. Really, truly, one after another is dropping dead of guilt or shooting himself or going insane, or hating and loathing his friends and family and sweethearts, or, when all is copacetic, just drinking himself stupid. Let me do you a favor and save you a few hours: Man kills 2 women and then proceeds to feel guilty for 600 pages. If I could have killed him myself I would have!”

“Not a great novel by ANY means. VEEEEERY SLOOOOOOW, INCREDIBLY BORING and NEVER really gets going at all (I bet most people will fall asleep after the first chapter or two). Defies logic how this novel gets so highly rated by ANYONE. Quite a bizarre/weird writing style and I really struggled with this one. Don’t waste your time reading this garbage.”

“I find the book boring because the main character is a lazy spoiled wimp. I would only recommend this book as a cure for insomnia. It would put anyone to sleep.”

Actually a Two-Star Review But Still Solid

“I liken the experience of reading Crime and Punishment to that of an exhausted man clothed in rags crawling through miles of desert in search of water. This is the only book I recall reading in my adult life that I desperately wanted to end. If you suddenly crave a 19th century Russian classic, and you’re one of those people who has to finish a book even if it doesn’t hold your interest, do not read Crime and Punishment.”

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Crime And Punishment Book Review

Over 150 years old, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment continues to captivate readers with its dark exploration of morality, guilt, and redemption. The novel follows Rodion Raskolnikov, a destitute former student who commits a heinous crime and grapples with the psychological consequences. Through intricate character development and philosophical musings, Dostoevsky explores deep into the psychological complexities of his characters, making this novel a thought-provoking and timeless masterpiece worth exploring.

Table of Contents

Key Takeaways:

Psychological depth: The novel investigates deep into the psychology of its characters, providing a thought-provoking exploration of guilt, moral dilemmas, and redemption.
Complex moral themes: Crime and Punishment raises important questions about the nature of crime, punishment, and justice, challenging readers to reflect on societal norms and personal ethics.
Gripping narrative: With its suspenseful plot and compelling characters, the book captivates readers from start to finish, keeping them engaged with its twists and turns.

About the Author

The life of fyodor dostoevsky.

If you are interested in the life of the iconic author behind “Crime And Punishment,” examine into the intriguing life of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Despite facing personal tragedies and political turmoil, his experiences greatly influenced his writing style and themes throughout his literary career.

Dostoevsky’s Influence on Literature

On exploring Dostoevsky’s impact on literature, we find a profound presence that has shaped the literary world. His deep psychological insights, complex characters, and exploration of moral dilemmas have inspired generations of writers and readers alike.

Another significant aspect of Dostoevsky’s influence is his ability to address the dark aspects of human nature and society, such as crime and punishment, with unflinching honesty and profound philosophical depth .

Plot Synopsis

Set in 19th-century St. Petersburg, “Crime and Punishment” tells the story of Rodion Raskolnikov, a destitute former student who formulates a plan to murder a pawnbroker for her money. After carrying out the crime, Raskolnikov’s guilt and paranoia lead to a psychological and moral breakdown, with his inner turmoil gripping readers until the novel’s powerful conclusion.

Exploring the Depths of Raskolnikov’s Mind

Raskolnikov’s internal struggle drives much of the novel, as readers explore into the complexities of his character. Haunted by his crime, Raskolnikov grapples with his own beliefs of superiority and nihilism, ultimately leading to a profound examination of his conscience and sense of morality.

Crime And Punishment Book Review: Dive Into Your Next Adventure

The Web of Characters and Their Struggles

On the periphery of Raskolnikov’s central journey are a cast of characters grappling with their own challenges. From the cunning investigator Porfiry Petrovich to the pure-hearted Sonia, each individual plays a crucial role in unraveling the complexities of guilt, redemption, and human connection in Dostoevsky’s masterpiece.

For instance, Porfiry Petrovich’s relentless pursuit of the truth adds a layer of tension to Raskolnikov’s unraveling psyche, while Sonia’s unwavering faith challenges his cynical worldview, offering a glimmer of hope and redemption in the darkest moments of the narrative.

Themes and Symbols

The moral dilemmas of crime.

Unlike many other novels, “Crime and Punishment” examines deep into the moral dilemmas faced by the protagonist, Raskolnikov. The book explores the internal struggle between what is considered right and wrong, as Raskolnikov wrestles with his justification for committing a crime.

The Search for Redemption

With a heavy emphasis on the theme of redemption, “Crime and Punishment” takes readers on a journey of self-discovery and atonement. Through Raskolnikov’s tribulations, the novel explores the idea that redemption is possible, even after committing the most heinous acts.

Symbols such as the axe used in the crime and the yellow walls of the apartment where the protagonist lives provide deeper insight into the psyche of the characters and the themes of the novel.

Critical Analysis

Dostoevsky’s narrative technique.

Not just a story about crime and punishment, Dostoevsky’s narrative technique in “Crime and Punishment” is noteworthy. The way he explores into the psyche of the protagonist, Raskolnikov, and explores his inner turmoil and moral dilemmas is masterful. The alternating perspectives and intense introspection make this novel a gripping read.

The Book’s Place in Modern Thought

Any discussion of modern thought would be incomplete without mentioning “Crime and Punishment.” Dostoevsky’s exploration of morality, ethics, and the consequences of one’s actions resonates deeply with contemporary readers. The themes of guilt, redemption, and human nature are as relevant today as they were when the book was first published.

Analysis: Dostoevsky’s masterpiece continues to be a seminal work in literature, challenging readers to confront their own beliefs and values. Its exploration of the human condition and the complexities of morality ensures its enduring relevance in modern thought.

Books like “Crime and Punishment” force us to question our own moral compass and consider the consequences of our actions. The novel serves as a powerful reminder of the importance of ethics and the impact of our choices on ourselves and others.

Personal Reflections

What makes “crime and punishment” timeless.

After immersing myself in the world of “Crime and Punishment,” it is clear to see why this classic novel has stood the test of time. One cannot help but be captivated by the moral dilemmas and psychological depth portrayed in the story. The themes of guilt, redemption, and the consequences of our actions are universal and continue to resonate with readers across generations.

The Novel’s Impact on Readers

Any reader exploring into “Crime and Punishment” cannot escape the profound impact it leaves on their psyche. The complex character of Raskolnikov forces us to confront our own morality and challenges us to question the boundaries of right and wrong. The exploration of human nature and the consequences of one’s choices linger in the mind long after the final page is turned.

Timeless in its exploration of moral dilemmas and the complexities of human nature, “Crime and Punishment” continues to provoke thought and introspection among readers. The novel’s ability to examine into the darkest corners of the human psyche and confront the consequences of our actions is both profound and unsettling . It serves as a powerful reminder of the fragility of our moral compass and the weight of our choices.

In summarization, “Crime and Punishment” is a gripping and thought-provoking novel that examines deep into the psyche of its complex characters. Dostoevsky’s writing style, filled with intense emotions and moral dilemmas, keeps readers engaged from start to finish. The inner turmoil and struggles of Raskolnikov make us question our own beliefs about morality and justice. Overall, this classic novel is a must-read for anyone looking for a profound exploration of guilt, redemption, and the human condition.

Q: What is Crime and Punishment about?

A: Crime and Punishment is a novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky that follows the story of a young man, Raskolnikov, who commits a murder and grapples with his guilt and the moral implications of his actions.

Q: What makes Crime and Punishment a classic novel?

A: Crime and Punishment is considered a classic because of its deep exploration of human psychology, morality, and the consequences of one’s actions. It researchs into themes of guilt, redemption, and the complexities of the human mind.

Q: Why should I read Crime and Punishment?

A: Reading Crime and Punishment offers valuable insights into the human condition, ethics, and the consequences of our choices. It is a thought-provoking and profound work of literature that continues to resonate with readers today.

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Crime and Punishment By Fyodor Dostoevsky

Rating: superb.

First Published: 1866 Translated by: Constance Garnett Illustrated by: Benjamin Kopman Pages: 493

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky is a literature “classic” that is generally considered to be one of the greatest novels of all time. It’s a Russian novel that was originally published in 1866 so modern readers may worry that this novel could be too foreign or too out of date to be relevant or engaging today. I’m here to tell you that you needn’t worry about these concerns. This is a fascinating, original, crime thriller that is one of the most satisfying novels I’ve read.

The originality of this crime thriller is demonstrated right near the beginning when the protagonist, Raskolnikov commits the crime of murder. Eliminating the “who done it” mystery and having the protagonist be obviously guilty from the start seems to be the opposite of what would make a good crime thriller. But Dostoevsky creates a gripping psychological drama which gradually unfolds multiple layers of interactions between a cast of diverse characters. The mysteries become “Why did he do it?”, “Will he be caught?”, and “What will happen to the other main characters?”

What really stands out in Crime and Punishment is the depth of human psychology that Dostoevsky taps from his characters along with a consistent high tension and pacing that doesn’t let up. The characters are not one dimensional or divided neatly into good and bad guys. Dostoevky explores their motivations, desires, and fears. He even probes their subconscious thoughts through dreams and unintentional slips of the tongue. The tension reaches the highest pitch when Raskolnikov meets the detective Porifory and they engage in serious psychological battles for the ultimate in high stakes. These battles are deadly tests that will keep you on the edge of your seat. The psychology that Dostoevsky explores is incredible when you consider that this was written before most modern psychology was developed. Freud and Jung were not even published yet.

Dostoevsky explores some heavy themes in Crime and Punishment including the obvious themes expressed in the title. He also explores the idea of the “superman” described by Jung and the Machievellian concept of “do the ends justify the means?” He investigates sin, sinners, and saints and points out the gulf between upper and lower classes. But you needn’t worry about this novel becoming dry and boring. The first 100 pages or so may be a little slow as Dostoevsky lays the groundwork for the novel but the remainder of the novel is a high tension psychological drama. Sometimes the novel verges on excessive melodrama but somehow Dostoevsky manages to maintain a sense of realism.

Book Review: Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment is a literary masterpiece that delves into the depths of the human psyche, exploring themes of morality, guilt, and redemption through the harrowing journey of its protagonist, Rodion Raskolnikov. Set in the grimy, oppressive streets of St. Petersburg, this novel captivates readers with its intense narrative and profound philosophical insights.

At the heart of Crime and Punishment is the story of Raskolnikov, a destitute ex-student who concocts a plan to murder an unscrupulous pawnbroker, Alyona Ivanovna, rationalizing that the world would be better off without her. His rationale is a twisted utilitarianism: he believes that killing her will free him to perform greater good in the world. However, the act of murder plunges him into a torturous psychological battle, unraveling his mind as he grapples with guilt, paranoia, and the moral implications of his actions. The plot thickens as Raskolnikov’s mental state deteriorates, leading to a series of encounters with various characters that further complicate his internal and external conflicts.

Dostoevsky’s exploration of guilt and redemption is unparalleled. Raskolnikov’s internal conflict is palpable, capturing the reader’s attention as he oscillates between justification and remorse. The novel examines the consequences of transgressing moral boundaries and the inescapable nature of guilt. Raskolnikov’s mental torment is depicted with such intensity that readers cannot help but feel his anguish. The narrative is also a profound commentary on the socio-economic conditions of 19th-century Russia. Poverty, desperation, and the stark divide between the classes are vividly portrayed, providing a backdrop that enhances the novel’s existential questions. Dostoevsky raises critical questions about justice and the morality of actions taken in the name of survival or a perceived greater good. Additionally, Dostoevsky delves into the concept of nihilism, which was gaining traction in Russia during his time. Raskolnikov’s belief in his right to transgress moral laws for a higher purpose reflects the growing disillusionment with traditional values. His journey towards realizing the flaws in this philosophy is both a personal and societal commentary.

Dostoevsky’s characters are richly developed, each contributing to the novel’s exploration of human nature. Raskolnikov is a complex character, at once sympathetic and repulsive, whose journey from hubris to humility is compelling. His intellectual arrogance and subsequent emotional unraveling are portrayed with a rawness that makes his psychological struggle deeply relatable. Supporting characters, such as the self-sacrificing Sonia Marmeladov, who becomes Raskolnikov’s spiritual guide, and the shrewd detective Porfiry Petrovich, who subtly corners Raskolnikov, are equally well-crafted and integral to the story. Sonia, with her own burdens and unwavering faith, embodies redemption and contrasts sharply with Raskolnikov’s tormented skepticism. Porfiry, on the other hand, represents the inevitable moral reckoning that Raskolnikov faces. Other notable characters include Razumikhin, Raskolnikov’s loyal friend who provides a glimpse of a life that balances intellect and compassion, and Raskolnikov’s mother and sister, whose suffering underscores the personal cost of his actions. Each character serves to deepen the reader’s understanding of Raskolnikov’s internal and external battles.

Dostoevsky’s prose, translated beautifully by various translators over the years, is both dense and lyrical, reflecting the tumultuous emotions and philosophical musings of the characters. The narrative is deeply introspective, often delving into long passages of Raskolnikov’s thoughts, which can be challenging but ultimately rewarding for readers who appreciate psychological depth. The use of third-person omniscient narration allows Dostoevsky to explore the inner workings of multiple characters, adding layers of complexity to the story. The novel’s pacing is deliberate, mirroring Raskolnikov’s psychological unraveling. The detailed descriptions of St. Petersburg’s oppressive environment contribute to the novel’s somber tone, making the city almost a character in itself. Dostoevsky’s ability to blend philosophical discourse with a compelling narrative ensures that the reader is constantly engaged, even during the most introspective sections.

Crime and Punishment is not just a novel; it is a psychological and philosophical journey that has left a lasting impact on literature. Its influence can be seen in the works of countless authors and in the genre of psychological fiction. Dostoevsky’s ability to humanize the criminal and probe the darkest corners of the human soul ensures that this novel remains a timeless study of morality and human frailty. The novel’s exploration of existentialism and moral dilemmas resonates with readers even today. Its portrayal of the struggle between good and evil within a single individual is a theme that continues to be relevant in contemporary discussions of ethics and human nature. The psychological depth and philosophical inquiries posed in Crime and Punishment have cemented its place as a cornerstone of world literature.

Reading Crime and Punishment is an intense, thought-provoking experience. Dostoevsky’s masterful storytelling and profound philosophical inquiries make it a must-read for anyone interested in literature that challenges and expands their understanding of human nature. Despite the heavy themes, the novel ultimately offers a message of hope and redemption, making it a deeply rewarding read. For those willing to engage with its complexities, Crime and Punishment provides a rich and unforgettable exploration of the human condition.

Book Review: Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Other Laws Subject-wise Law Notes
August 18, 2020

“A hundred suspicions don’t make a proof.”

What kind of society breeds a murderer? Is suffering necessary for salvation? Does the law really provide justice, or just an illusion of justice? What happens to a society where the justice system is not trusted? These questions form the central themes of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s timeless classic, Crime and Punishment . It is a book that every person aspiring to be a lawyer should read, not only because the novel is unparalleled in its psychological depth, but it is also a reflection of jurisprudence in a society. Crime and Punishment has made legal contributions outside the world of fiction, which must be appreciated and analysed.

The protagonist of Crime and Punishment is Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, a law student living in abject poverty in Saint Petersburg. He lives in a rented attic, rarely eats and is on the verge of being forced to leave his legal education due to paucity of money. He is extremely intelligent and also handsome, devoted to his family consisting of his mother and sister. Letters from his mother reveal that his sister named Dunya is going to enter into a loveless marriage with a tyrannical man in order to save his family from destitution and enable Raskolnikov to finish his education. Raskolnikov is distraught at this prospect, he does not want his lovely sister to have a wedlock where she is altruistically prostituting herself. He walks to the house of a pawnbroker, Alyona Ivanovna to pawn away a watch, the last of his belongings. Thereafter, he begins to plot her murder. Alyona Ivanovna has been painted in a negative light in the novel, she is a cantankerous old lady resented by the entire neighbourhood. She is cruel, deceitful and has enslaved her own dim-witted niece named Lizaveta, who she physically beats. The pawnbroker is unscrupulous and selfish, she also cheats the poor people out of their money. A reader of crime and punishment will slowly begin to hate this character. Raskolnikov rationalizes his reasons for killing Alyona Ivanovna. He would be ridding the world of a horrible soul, freeing the captive niece, take her wealth and with that save his sister from a loveless marriage, his friend Marmeladov from doom and finish law school. In chapter VII, Raskolnikov commits the premeditated murder of Alyona Ivanovna, slaying her with an axe. He also has to spontaneously kill Lizaveta who accidentally walks in to see her aunt lying in a pool of blood and Raskolnikov holding the blood-stained axe. What follows is the downward psychological spiral of the protagonist and his rational reasons for committing the murder not coming to fruition.

The novel is not a murder mystery, as the readers know Raskolnikov is the murderer, the question that keeps the reader on tenterhooks is whether or not will Raskolnikov be imprisoned. This is where the question of law comes in because evidence, which is sufficiently against him cannot put Raskolnikov behind bars. The law requires a confession to the crime, which means Raskolnikov has to willingly confess to the twin murders for a successful conviction. Extracting the confession becomes the responsibility of Porfiry Petrovich, the examining magistrate. It might seem absurd to base a criminal conviction solely on the basis of the confession of the accused, but this was actually the legal requirement in Russia when Crime and Punishment was published. Crime and Punishment is a reflection of reality of law, it reflects the broken legal system of 1860s Russia.

Dostoyevsky was not a lawyer, but he spent four years in a Siberian labour camp. His juridical conscience is rooted in this personal experience. The character of Raskolnikov created by Dostoyevsky , mirrors the author himself. Raskolnikov is a singular figment of fiction, yet there is a universal empathy for the character. As a reader, one may not relate to his actions, but the suffering caused by the actions is very much relatable. The murder, which is only devoted a few pages in the novel, is only a means to an end. The murder sets up the stage for the law to dance upon. Raskolnikov echoes the ideas of the German philosopher, Hegel who concluded that if the end is noble, then whatever means used to reach that noble end are justified (Burnham, 1231). And since the end is noble, the law should not punish the one indulging in the illicit means. This creates the conflict of morality and law. It also poses the question, how to determine what act constitutes a crime? A crime is always an act that the society deems unacceptable. But as societies evolve, so do the definitions of crime. And the society also consists of individuals possessing radical notions such as being above the law. What’s important is not the existence of such individuals in a society, but the existence of a society where such individuals are born and bred. Law for such individuals like Raskolnikov is an illusion.

Law tends to discredit the motive behind a crime. Stealing a loaf of bread to feed a starving man is still considered as theft by law. So, killing of Alyona Ivanovna, irrespective of her wretched character and cruelty, would still be punishable homicide. Raskolnikov’s decision to murder is also based on the idea of the ‘extraordinary’ man. In 1865, a book called The Life of Julius Caesar was made available in Russian which finds mention in the novel (Burnham, 1230). As Porfiry Petrovich, the magistrate investigating Raskolnikov explained, “people are divided into two classes, ‘ordinary’ and the ‘extraordinary’. The ordinary ones must live in submission and have no right to transgress the laws, because, you see, they are ordinary. And the extraordinary have the right to commit any crime and break every kind of law just because they’re extraordinary” (Dostoyevsky, 219). The idea that some people are above the law, hence untouchable has existed for a long time. Although it is said that everyone is equal before the law, in reality the equality becomes a fiction. Justice is often inaccessible to the poor, for women justice is filtered through the lens of patriarchy and for those with power it becomes possible to evade justice.

As stated earlier, at the time when Crime and Punishment was published, conviction depended upon confession. The question is why? To understand why, it is important to delve into the existing legal realities of that time. Russia was a monarchy under the reign of Peter the Great when Crime and Punishment was published (Burnham,1232). Peter the Great stripped the judges of the power of adjudication (Burnham,1232). There was no real power given to judges to decide a case and provide justice. Instead, a complicated system of evidence was created, where as for a conviction sovershennye doka zatel’stva, meaning complete proof, was required(Burnham,1232). A complete proof was recognized by the court in the form of a confession given by the accused to a judicial officer. This forms an element of thrill in the novel with Porfiry Petrovich devising novel ways in order to ensure that Raskolnikov confesses. This also shows that Russian society mistrusted the judges, whose cardinal role is that of impartiality. As history unfolded, this society where justice was not unprejudiced, ultimately paved the path for Russian revolution and the abolition of monarchy.

Crime and Punishment portrays the transformation of the protagonist Raskolnikov. Murder, which he thought would solve all his problems, rips his soul apart. He is tormented, anguished and longing for love. Ultimately, he does confess, not from the fear of punishment but for the peace of penitence. The reader does not get to see what happens to Raskolnikov after all his suffering and salvation. The ending feels poignantly hopeful yet incomplete. Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote the quintessential crime novel, but one cannot simply skim through this masterpiece, as it does evoke questions regarding the nature of law, morality and finally the objective of punishment.

Bibliography

Burnham, William, and Feodor Dostoevsky. “The Legal Context and Contributions of Dostoyevsky ‘Crime and Punishment.’” Michigan Law Review , vol. 100, no. 6, 2002, p.1227., doi:10.2307/1290440.

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment . Modern Library, 1950.

Author Details: Aadya Malik is a student at Jindal Global Law School, O.P. Jindal University.

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Crime and Punishment (Dover Thrift Editions: Classic Novels) Paperback – August 22, 2001

Purchase options and add-ons.

Print length 430 pages
Language English
Publisher Dover Publications
Publication date August 22, 2001
Reading age 18 years and up
Dimensions 5.2 x 1.2 x 8.2 inches
ISBN-10 0486415872
ISBN-13 978-0486415871
Lexile measure 900L
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From the publisher, with his sympathetic portrayals of the downtrodden of 19th-century russian society, dostoyevsky exercised immense influence on modern writers..

Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky Dover Thrift Editions Classic Novels

“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.”

“We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.”

One of the supreme masterpieces of world literature

Crime and punishment catapulted fyodor dostoyevsky to the forefront of russian writers and into the ranks of the world's greatest novelists..

Supreme masterpiece recounts in feverish, compelling tones the story of Raskolnikov, an impoverished student tormented by his own thoughts after he brutally murders an old woman. Overwhelmed afterwards by guilt and terror, Raskolnikov confesses and goes to prison. There he realizes that happiness and redemption can only be achieved through suffering.

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Publisher ‏ : ‎ Dover Publications; Reprint edition (August 22, 2001)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 430 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0486415872
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0486415871
Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up
Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 900L
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 11.8 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.2 x 1.2 x 8.2 inches
#19 in History & Criticism of Russian & Soviet Literature
#1,613 in Classic Literature & Fiction
#4,204 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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COMMENTS

Crime and Punishment Review: Artistic Excellence
4.7. Crime and Punishment Review: Artistic Excellence. ' Crime and Punishment' is a supreme feat of artistic excellence. It raised the standard for literature to involve incorporating the most realistic descriptions of the characters in a physical and psychological sense. It is a proper thriller that transports us cleanly into the early ...
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fyodor Dostoevsky, David McDuff (Translator), Joseph Frank (Introduction) 4.27. 911,428 ratings37,104 reviews. 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 ...
Crime and Punishment
Boris Akunin, Thriller and Crime Writer. " Crime and Punishment is probably Dostoevsky's most conventional novel. It's effectively a sort of literary crime novel, and is in some ways quite typical of its time. It's got a fascinating structure, where a full 80% of the novel comes after he's committed the crime but before he reaches the ...
REVIEW: Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
One of the most influential novels of the nineteenth century, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment tells the tragic story of Raskolnikov—a talented former student whose warped philosophical outlook drives him to commit murder. Surprised by his sense of guilt and terrified of the consequences of his actions, Raskolnikov wanders through the slums of pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg ...
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
The bare bones of that story, of course, are those of Crime and Punishment, published in 1866, when Dostoyevsky was well on the road from young democrat to middle-aged reactionary: thus the importance of confession, nursed along by the naughty lady of the night with the heart of gold, and thus Dostoyevsky's digs at liberal-inclined ...
Book Review: Fyodor Dostoevsky's Classic 'Crime and Punishment'
It was impossible not to think of Madoff while reading Fyodor Dostoevsky's very sad, frequently insightful, and ultimately unputdownable classic, Crime and Punishment. Early on in what from now ...
Crime and Punishment Book Review
Crime and Punishment is a convoluted and surprisingly fast pace devolution into madness and murder. Dostoevsky, in the vein of the Russian novelists who came before him, concentrates on the big questions of morality and social justice but not in an abstract way. The story starts in the action, Raskolnikov working out the finer details of ...
The Lockdown Lessons of "Crime and Punishment"
At the end of "Crime and Punishment," which was completed in 1866, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's hero, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, has a dream that so closely reflects the roilings of our own ...
Crime and Punishment: Full Book Analysis
Full Book Analysis. By closely examining the internal conflicts of its protagonist, Raskolnikov, the novel Crime and Punishment explores themes of guilt and redemption. Using a third-person omniscient narrator, Dostoyevsky is able to delve deeply into Raskolnikov's troubled psychology, presenting Raskolnikov's thoughts, emotions, and ...
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Book title: ' Crime and Punishment .'. Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky. Publication Date: Published serially in 1866 in The Russian Messenger. Published in book form in 1867. Literary Period: Russian Imperial period. Point of View: Third-person perspective. Genre: Philosophical novel, Crime novel, Detective novel. Setting: 19th Century Russia.
Crime and Punishment Themes and Analysis
The theme of Alienation is a prominent one in ' Crime and Punishment '. Raskolnikov's alienation from society as a result of his haughty ideals, as well as his overpowering guilt as a result of his murders, is one of the plot points that move the book. Raskolnikov's ideas separate him from most of the rest of humanity in theory and ...
The Sinner and the Saint review
F or many in the west, Fyodor Dostoevsky is the most "Russian" of Russian authors. His work teems with holy fools, holy prostitutes, nihilists and revolutionaries. Crime and Punishment, his ...
Book Review: Crime and Punishment
Crime and Punishment remains the single most widely known Russian novel as well as one of the greatest works in world literature. It is first and foremost a fascinating detective novel, but one in which we know from the very beginning who committed the heinous crime. It focuses on the mental anguish and moral dilemmasContinue reading "Book Review: Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky"
The Best One-Star Reviews of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment
It's also a seminal crime novel: a sprawling, ambitious work of existential angst composed of transgressions, detectives, fugitives, and investigations. It's the kind of book around which there is an agreement of worth. Still, it has dissenters, most famously Nabokov but also many, many people on Amazon. We've gathered up 25 of our ...
Crime And Punishment Book Review
Another significant aspect of Dostoevsky's influence is his ability to address the dark aspects of human nature and society, such as crime and punishment, with unflinching honesty and profound philosophical depth.. Plot Synopsis. Set in 19th-century St. Petersburg, "Crime and Punishment" tells the story of Rodion Raskolnikov, a destitute former student who formulates a plan to murder a ...
Crime and Punishment By Fyodor Dostoevsky Book Review
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky is a literature "classic" that is generally considered to be one of the greatest novels of all time. It's a Russian novel that was originally published in 1866 so modern readers may worry that this novel could be too foreign or too out of date to be relevant or engaging today.
Crime and Punishment
Crime and Punishment (pre-reform Russian: Преступленіе и наказаніе; post-reform Russian: Преступление и наказание, romanized: Prestupleniye i nakazaniye, IPA: [prʲɪstʊˈplʲenʲɪje ɪ nəkɐˈzanʲɪje]) is a novel by the Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky.It was first published in the literary journal The Russian Messenger in twelve monthly ...
Crime and Punishment
Crime and Punishment, novel by Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky, first published in 1866.His first masterpiece, the novel is a psychological analysis of the poor former student Raskolnikov, whose theory that he is an extraordinary person able to take on the spiritual responsibility of using evil means to achieve humanitarian ends leads him to murder.
Crime and Punishment. Reading Dostoevsky for the first time
Crime and Punishment is about the tortured genius, except Dostoevsky turns the fascination with 'tortured geniuses' completely on its head. Its protagonist, Raskolnikov, is a troubled student ...
Book Review: Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment is a literary masterpiece that delves into the depths of the human psyche, exploring themes of morality, guilt, and redemption through the harrowing journey of its protagonist, Rodion Raskolnikov. Set in the grimy, oppressive streets of St. Petersburg, this novel captivates readers with its intense narrative and profound philosophical insights.…
Book Review: Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Crime and Punishment is a reflection of reality of law, it reflects the broken legal system of 1860s Russia. Dostoyevsky was not a lawyer, but he spent four years in a Siberian labour camp. His juridical conscience is rooted in this personal experience. The character of Raskolnikov created by Dostoyevsky , mirrors the author himself.
Crime and Punishment (Dover Thrift Editions: Classic Novels)
The Amazon Book Review Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. ... Crime and Punishment catapulted Fyodor Dostoyevsky to the forefront of Russian writers and into the ranks of the world's greatest novelists. ... His major works include Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), Demons (1872) and The Brothers ...
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Crime and Punishment Credits: John Bickers, Dagny and David Widger Language: English: LoC Class: PG: Language and Literatures: Slavic (including Russian), Languages and Literature: Subject: Detective and mystery stories Subject: Psychological fiction Subject: Saint Petersburg (Russia) -- Fiction Subject: Murder -- Fiction Subject
Crime & Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fyodor Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment" is a literary masterpiece that delves into the profound psychological and moral complexities of its characters against the gritty backdrop of 19th-century St. Petersburg. The novel follows the tormented and impoverished former student, Rodion Raskolnikov, who grapples with the idea of committing a ...
What Is Fyodor Dostoevsky's 'Crime And Punishment': Cited During Relief
Fyodor Dostoevsky's book "Crime and Punishment" delves into the depths of a man named Raskolnikov's mind. A poor former student named Raskolnikov develops the theory that some exceptional people are above the moral laws set by society. According to him, these exceptional people are entitled to commit crimes if is for the common good. ...