Dostoevsky clearly meant Crime and Punishment to be a damning attack on the nineteenth-century Russian nihilism, and to warn of the general dangers of industrial progress, a theme which can be found in many nineteenth-century writers (like Thomas Hardy).
I don’t care about any of that.
Fine. A man decides to murder an old woman and take her money, believing that his brush with academic philosophy will insulate him against the natural human guilt that would normally follow. He is wrong, however, and it affects him in a physical way. The police chief is onto him immediately, of course, as he is acting like the Most Guilty Man of the Year, but he has no evidence. The policeman then just sort of follows him around waiting for him to snap.
Like Columbo?
Exactly like Columbo. In fact, the creator of Columbo openly stated that Porfiry Petrovich was the inspiration for the character.
All those Russian books are boring and depressing.
I don’t know what you expect me to do with that information.
What should I say to make people think I’ve read it?
“I still have nightmares about horses being beaten to death.”
What should I avoid saying when trying to convince people I’ve read it?
“I get the crime, but what’s the punishment?”
Should I actually read it?
Yes. Even if you don’t agree with the political angle (and very few people these days will), it works as a psychological study of guilt. There is also an element of tension in watching the cop turn the screws on this poor fool while he blunders around his life. Remember that no one had heard of detective novels in 1860.
It’s violent and depressing in parts, but if you’ve read Game of Thrones and you think Crime and Punishment is too violent and depressing, you should present yourself to the relevant authorities at first light.
“Much on earth is hidden from us; but to make up for that we have been given a precious mystic sense of our living bond with the other world, with the higher heavenly world, and the roots of our thoughts and feelings are not here but in other worlds. That is why the philosophers say that we cannot understand the reality of things on earth. God took seeds from different worlds and sowed them on this earth, and His garden grew up and everything came up that could come up. But what grows lives and is alive only through the feeling of its contact with other mysterious worlds. If that feeling grows weak or is destroyed in you, the heavenly growth will die away in you. Then you will be indifferent to life and even grow to hate it. That’s what I think.”
—Father Zossima from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karazamov, trans. by Constance Garnett (New York: New American Library, 1957).
Wisdom gathered in our Spring 1984 Issue on Hierarchy, available in our online store here.
“To be astonished at everything, of course, is silly, while to be astonished at nothing is much more handsome, and for some reason is recognized as good form. But surely it’s not like that in reality. In my opinion, it’s much sillier to be astonished at nothing than to be astonished at everything. And what’s more: to be astonished at nothing is almost the same thing as to respect nothing. And a silly man is not capable of showing respect.”
“It wasn’t the New World that mattered…Columbus died almost without seeing it; and not really knowing what he had discovered. It’s life that matters, nothing but life — the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself, at all.”
The Idiot is one of Dostoyevsky’s most tragic novels I’ve read so far. While in Crime and Punishment we observe the…
People speak sometimes about the “bestial” cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.
The face two very sane and also coincidentally heterosexual men make when Gogol puts them in a death game to be the first to escape Meursault, while having injected a poison that’ll kill them in like 30 mins!!
Aries: “Demons have faith, but they tremble.” Taurus: “What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.” Gemini: “I want to talk about everything with at least one person as I talk about things with myself.” Cancer:“To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise.” Leo: “I think the devil doesn’t exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.” Virgo: “How can a man of consciousness have the slightest respect for himself?” Libra: “The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.“ Scorpio: “Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.” Sagittarius: “To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s.” Capricorn:“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.” Aquarius:“You’re like an angel, nothing touches you.” Pisces: “My brother used to ask the birds to forgive him; that sounds senseless but it is right; for all is like the ocean, all things flow and touch each other; a disturbance in one place is felt at the other end of the world.”
