Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky

It’s critical when you pick up a classic like Crime and Punishment – first published in 1866 – that you understand where the author was coming from. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s intense, painful and complicated life is summarized very briefly on the inside cover of the 1982 Bantam Book edition of the 472-page novel. Born in 1821 in Moscow, he was the son of an abusive alcoholic army surgeon who was ultimately murdered by his own serfs. Tired of the elder man’s brutality, they drowned him in vodka by pouring the toxic liquid down his throat.
Fyodor became nationally famous immediately following publication of his first novel Poor Folk in 1846, but three years later he was thrown into prison for subversion against Tsar Nicholas I, where he received the chastening “silent treatment” by everyone around him – even by the guards in “velvet soled boots” – for eight long months.
     Most horrifyingly, he was eventually brought before a firing squad at his own open grave a mere moments before his sentence was commuted. He spent the next four years in hard labour in Siberia, where he developed epilepsy.
     As if these experiences weren’t enough to put the man in one of Russia’s infamous asylums, or madhouses, for the rest of his life, there was a lot more. Dostoevsky also overcame destitution, emotional instability and compulsive gambling. After joining forces with his stenographer and lovemate Anna Snitkina, whom he married in 1867, he was able to finish his internationally acclaimed masterworks, including Crime and Punishment, The Idiot (1869), The Possessed (1872) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880).
     The first of these great novels – translated from Russian in the 1920s or 1930s by the controversial English translator Constance Garnett (“if I don’t understand a Russian word I just skip over it”) – traces the adult life of the brilliant Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, a desperately poor former student, “hopelessly” indebted to his St. Petersburg landlady. Egotistical in the extreme, he decides to murder and rob a wretched pawnbroker, Aloyna Ivanovna, not so he can pay off his debts or return to school, but to delve into his psychopathic conscience and study his own convoluted theory that very smart men are above the law.
     The well-planned murder turns into a double killing by necessity, after which Raskolnikov almost naturally becomes sick with fever for days on end. From there, the detailed page-turner gets more interesting. He receives a long letter from his widowed mother, Pulcheria Alexandrovna, excitedly relating how his beloved and adoring sister Dunya is about to marry Luzhin, a well off government official, and how they will all move to the same city.
     The plot grows and thickens, as Raskolnikov’s paranoia increases and, like a moth to a flame, he flirts dangerously with getting caught by the police. The reader is enthralled by Raskolnikov’s bizarre thoughts and behaviour following his heinous acts, including his ability to prove the treachery in Luzhin’s heart. Raskolnikov demonstrates, paradoxically, how selfless and generous he can be when he pays entirely for a funeral – using money sent from his destitute mother – for a recent acquaintance, an incorrigible drunk who abused his sick wife and large poverty-stricken family.
     And, like all Russian novels of the time, Crime and Punishment is a story of redemption. The murderous hero is offered true, undying love. Will he accept it? The answer will keep the reader nail-biting to the very last page.

As with most books on Lynne Like's, you can get this on Amazon.ca.