Crime and Punishment (Enriched Classics) | Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Crime and Punishment (Enriched Classics) | Fyodor Dostoyevsky | Dostoyevski at his best unfortunately this translation did him no favors.

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Crime and Punishme...

	Crime and Punishment (Enriched Classics) Fyodor Dostoyevsky Pocket, 2004 - 704 pages average customer review:based on 464 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Gripping!

Dostoyevsky has an amazing way of forcing the audience to ponder the philosophical notions of this situation and not those only of civil law.

Dostoyevski at his best unfortunately this translation did him no favors.

Truly one of the greatest books of all time. This is definately something that is useful in almost everyday life. The struggle between the grand and the ordinary is something that most of us can relate to on an individual level. The translation left a little to be desired but do not hesitate to read this work you will be glad that you did.

You may love the muzhik without becoming overwrought and sentimental

This review is a spoiler, so don't read it if you don't know how the book ends! But I want to focus on the ending--Tolstoy famously remarked of it that "once you start it, you immediately know how it will end." And he was serious. And this sheds a great deal of light on this work and how it fits in with some of Dostoevsky's other masterpieces, such as the more restrained and better crafted Brothers Karamazov.

Understanding Dostoevsky without Tolstoy is like understanding Levi-Strauss without Sartre. They were the two poles between which Russian literature was arraigned. They are treated as a binary opposition: the abstract vs. the concrete, the philosophical vs. the historical, the intellect vs. the soul, the symbolic vs. the sentimental.

So how did Tolstoy know how it would end? Because the core of C&P, as Tolstoy understood, was a Slavophilic call for a "return"--perhaps not a return to the land, but a return to orthodox Christian concepts and basic moral orderings. Since there is a cross-roads, one might as well kneel there. There is nothing else.

So Tolstoy understood that once a crime has been committed, it ineluctably pushes the plot towards discovery, recognition and repentance. To have a plot break away from this would be either grasping for cheap effects or the grossest immorality, and no truly great Russian writer, no matter how philosophically inclined, could follow either of these paths.

And yes, that does necessarily imply something sentimental. Because we are--as Dostoevsky beautifully says in The Brothers Karamazov--simple. ("As a general rule, people, even the wicked, are much more naive and simple-hearted than we suppose. And we ourselves are, too.") Getting to the core of the matter will unveil simplicity--philosophy can get us to the point of throwing away false complications, but it cannot forever distract us from the fundamental simplicity of the opposition: right/sin.

And yet, that is what most of us do--we use abstraction and symbolism to hold these simple truths at bay. When, like Raskolnikov, we find ourselves alone with our thoughts too much, these thoughts can seem more important than the simple issues of human life. Dwelling in a room in which he could reach out and touch opposite walls with each hand, the only expanse in which his soul could dwell was that of abstraction. (I know this feeling well, from living in a tent [see my review!] that was just about the size of his room, and with a substantially lower ceiling.) But no matter how you let your fancy fly, the chickens of violence always come home to roost.

Perhaps because Dostoevsky was the one prone to symbolism, to craftiness as opposed to the rude directness that sometimes was the guiding impulse of Tolstoy's almost histrionic philosophizing, this admission of the fundamental Christian simplicity is truly moving. Dostoevsky is often considered a precursor of the existentialists but for very trivial reasons (e.g., serious mood swing issues). But one must see him as pursuing themes very similar to those of his rough contemporary Kierkegaard--can we free ourselves of excessive formal thinking and focus on the core issues of sin and repentance?

I think the answer in both cases is actually no. Kierkegaard himself certainly couldn't [see my review!], and Dostoevsky was in some ways more of a ethnocentrist than Tolstoy. But more importantly, his characters only become in harmony with the world when they have some sort of lobotomy, not an enlightenment. He lacks the true sense of the emotional nature of repentance--something that occurs in humans who are by nature limited in their capacity to feel and comprehend--that we see in Tolstoy.

I admit to being unusually interested in these themes. I've spent a long time repenting for a crime, even though it was, in the scheme of things, a minor one. No old ladies chopped, just some stretched--okay, false--testimony. But the reason for the crime was even more immoral than the crime itself. Too cowardly to just leave someone who loved me, I thought of an elaborate scheme to get her to reject me as too bothersome to put up with. Just the kind of thing Kierkegaard would do.

Instead I found her, like Sonya in C&P, clinging to me all the harder and shaming me with her decency, loyalty, and simplicity. And it is the character of Sonya that I find most perplexing. Her dogged insistence and her "sancta simplicitas" sometimes make her seem foolish (in contrast to the "wonderfulness" of Alyosha in the Brothers Karamazov, to whom she is often compared). She is friends with one of Raskolnikov's victims, Lizaveta, who is borderline retarded. (Here is also helps to compare to the Lizaveta in the Brothers Karamazov to get insight on what Dostoevsky is thinking.) It seems that there aren't too many viable options between stupid and bad. It's too Groucho Marx, but Raskolnikov on his way to Siberia must have wondered, "OK, I love you and you love me and that can be a form of redemption, or, maybe, it just means you are irredeemably stupid." [45]

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Crime and Punishment

One of my children needed this book for a summer reading project. I was happy I could search Amazon by ISBN to find it. It arrived in a timely manner and was reasonably priced. I'm sure the rest of the family will enjoy reading it as well.

reviews: 1, page 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

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