I was eighteen when I first read Crime & Punishment. It was the end of my freshman year of college and over the course of the last two semesters I had been introduced to a constant stream of new novels, authors and genres in and outside the classroom, accelerating me from an avid reader to a voracious one. Dostoevsky loomed large over a lot of the writers I loved at the time: particularly Hemingway and Kerouac. Crime & Punishment had already long been on my radar as a weighty Russian tome and one of the great works of world literature. So I was surprised by Bantam's pocket sized volume translated by Constance Garnett, which on scanning the first few pages, had the stiffly sophisticated tone I'd come to expect from 19th century novels and a compulsive readability presented in its breathless opening pages. Plus, it was on sale for something like five bucks, so what the hell.
That first reading of Crime & Punishment proved to be one of the most important literary experiences of my life. I read rapturously over the course of a few summer days, carrying the book about in a back pocket, and finished it around 6 am one morning. It seemed to me everything that a really great novel should be: entertaining, thought provoking, beautiful. A year of intro philosophy classes had convinced me I was some kind of original thinker, or at least a conscientious atheist. But Dostoevsky's take on spiritualism and religion gave me real pause; and despite a year's worth of railing against organized religion as the bane of all existence, the image of the murderer and prostitute reading the story of Lazarus together proved enormously powerful. In the end Crime & Punishment didn't convert me or bring me back to any kind of religious doctrine, but it did have a huge impact on the way I thought about fiction and viewed the world - a sensation I'm always looking for in books, but only a small handful have ever successfully accomplished.
So reading Crime & Punishment proved to be a pretty good idea, and much to my delight it seemed a fairly universal notion amongst my undergraduate peers. I can't think of many other books that have been read by so many people I've encountered and, maybe more astonishing, were deeply moved by it. Of course, there's always the stray dissenter. Vladimir Nabokov famously didn't think much of Dostoevsky, but then, he didn't like music either, so there's little accounting for taste.
For whatever reason, Dostoevsky started coming up in a lot of recent conversations, and it occurred to me that it had almost been a decade since my first and only read of Crime & Punishment. I've become well acquainted with a good deal of Dostoevsky's subsequent work, along with the writings of his fellow countrymen, so I knew it was vital to pick up the translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky and, having become addicted to my Kindle Paperwhite, downloaded the e-book so I could recreate the read-on-the-go experience should the book sweep me up a second time.
To be honest, I was a little worried how well Crime & Punishment would stand up ten years later. After all, tastes change, and in the past I have been dismayed by how radically my opinion of a fondly recollected novel can take a turn for the worse on rereading. But from the opening description of Raskolnikov descending from his crappy little apartment into the streets of St. Petersburg I was hooked all over again.
But while I found all the major plot points and characters had stuck in my brain through the years, I was surprised how much smaller the novel's scale seemed; sort of like visiting a house that seemed enormous as a kid but shrunk in scale on visiting as an adult. In his introduction, Richard Pevear explains that Dostoevsky built the novel with the structure of theater in mind. I doubt I would have made this astute observation on my own, and yet it became the unavoidable lens I reread the novel through.
Crime & Punishment takes place in a very hermetic universe of small dingy rooms, chance encounters, rapid action, and philosophically loaded dialogue; making it a heavy but never dense reading experience. This philosophical bent tends to be the most common point of complaint amongst critics. Novels with a metaphysical agenda are often populated by flat characters who act as little more than mouthpieces for the author. Rascolnikov, in particular, is much more an idea than a person, whose true crime is his modern intellectual arrogance rather than the murder which derives from his hubris. But Dostoevsky populates his novel with a supporting cast that creates an incredibly rich illustration of 19th century poverty, as well as the existential comedy and despair that would color the coming century. Again, the Pevear introduction relates how Crime & Punishment grew out of an earlier novel, The Drunks, which Dostoevsky had been struggling with. It's the vestiges of this previous novel that are, for my money, the most fascinating aspects of Crime & Punishment, and reminiscent of another 19th century master, Charles Dickens.
Like a Dickens novel, Crime & Punishment contains enormously entertaining murder plot and, with the added philosophical heft, it's easy to understand why the novel is so appealing to undergrads. The aforementioned Dostoesky hater, Vladimir Nabokov, believed that a serious reader is, in fact, a rereader. For a long time I've found myself almost panicked by the overabundance of books I want and feel the need to read, and disregarding a few exceptions which I've obsessed over, I have never defined myself as much of a rereader. But this second look at Crime & Punishment has definitely changed how I'll choose to read in the future. There's a magic that comes with reading Dostoevsky, and I cannot recommend the experience or reliving the experience enough.
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![Crime and Punishment: A Novel in Six Parts with Epilogue (Vintage Classics) by [Fyodor Dostoevsky, Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41Xaaq+guQL._SY346_.jpg)
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Top reviews from other countries
"Bomber"
unprepared for just how much I would enjoy this renewed and fresh experience of Crime and Punishment
Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on September 30, 2014
Ron Peters
Great translation, good on a Kindle
Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on September 13, 2014
