The struggle to find time to read in between looking after a new baby continues, and some might say it’s probably not best to take on a big slab of dead Russian when your reading takes place in snatched moments on tube trains, but I’m so glad I did.
I have always thought of Crime and Punishment with a little wince of guilt, as I based part of the dissertation for my degree on the Raskolnikov character without actually having read the original text, so I’d avoided it until now as I was worried that I might have been completely mistaken in my borrowed analysis, so it was with an increasing sense of relief that I turned the pages and discovered a tight, stifling portrait of a man struggling with depression and guilt at having failed to live up to his own opinion of himself.
Morality is a malleable thing for the great figures of history, so it’s fine for some people to have murdered and stolen in the story of their lives, as they fit into the story of the world. Raskolnikov studies those figures but finds himself wanting as we meet him in his squalid little room, his studies abandoned and rotting in the corner, and his crime, the murder and burglary of a money-lender and her grand-daughter, can’t be excused.
As we go on his mental illness becomes the sharp focus of the book and I’d come to think of it purely in terms of this picture of a mind in trouble, so I was completely thrown when it spins on its heel and becomes a murder mystery a few hundred pages in. It’s still far from being a 19th century Rebus of St Petersburg but the crime and its detection, investigation and punishment all come into the centre of the narrative for the last section of the book, saving it from being a fascinating but rather too single-minded book about the madness of one man and turning it into a horrible vision of a society full of poverty, class struggle, the class system, misogyny, manners and the morality that might or might not apply to people and their deeds.
The claustrophobia felt by the characters and the sudden lurch from squinting vision of one miserable life to gaping view of a miserable city left me feeling a bit sick. Excellent book, I really can’t recommend it highly enough.
A note on the book itself as a physical object: I bought this in a Penguin edition printed on recycled paper with a bright green cover. Although it seemed like a great idea at the time the pages wrinkled and warped as I read and the text didn’t stand out as sharply as it could have against the dull beige background. For a shorter book that would only be read once, and quickly, it could work, but for something of this stature that I’d like to return to, pay the extra pound and get a better quality version.
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Comments
One Comment so far. Leave a comment below.I completely agree with your recommendation of this book, I couldn’t put it down. However, Raskolnikov killed Alyona (the pawn broker) and Lizaveta, who was Alyona’s sister, not her daughter. Cheers!