Fyodor Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment
 |
| Cover: Vasily Perov, Dostoevsky (oil on canvas, 1872) |
WHENEVER I
read Dostoevsky, I always imagine the protagonists to look like this painting.
There is something very haunted about the author’s look in this painting and
the colours – all the greys and browns – really capture the essence of his
writings for me. This is the first time however, that I have embarked on
reading one of Dostoevsky’s longer works.
What really struck me initially was the difference in the
pacing of the story. Whereas in The
Double and Notes from the Underground
the narrative dives straight into the intense psychological structure of the
characters, in Crime and Punishment
Dostoevsky takes his time at first, building up a picture of the City and its
inhabitants.
The
heat in the street was terrible: and the airlessness, the bustle, the
plaster, the scaffolding, the bricks and the dust all around him, and that
special Petersburg stench, so familiar to everyone who is unable to get out
of town during the summer...
- Crime and Punishment, Part 1, Chapter 1
|
The effect of this is alienation for
the reader. Certainly, even if one considers that Dostoevsky was thinking of
readers in Petersburg when he wrote the novel, the kind of poverty-stricken,
despicable settings he describes would not have been one familiar to readers of
novels – unless I’m very much mistaken. My lack of research here is backed up
by Dostoevsky’s constant quibbles about how backwards Russia was compared to
Europe.
Dostoevsky’s
Raskolnikov is portrayed as a thoroughly dislikeable man throughout the novel. He
too alienates his friends, tries to leave his family and murders two people.
The latter fact is besides the point because what I really feel he was trying
to do with this novel was to create a dynamic where as the reader tries to find
out not whodunit, but why did he do it?
There
is always something worryingly relatable about Dostoevsky’s characters - a
vague feeling that one can identify with some of even the basest aspects of his
protagonists. This is naturally helped along by the fact that his characters
are so multifaceted and psychologically developed that one can’t help finding
relatable aspects due to their sheer depth. In this way, Notes from the Underground, which probably portrays the most awful
of men, serves as a kind of warning, something that says: Do not go this far.
Crime and Punishment seems a bit harsher
than that. It seems to be saying that the reader is already like that. For all his irritatable and entirely unfriendly
conduct throughout the novel, we are told at the beginning that his disposition
had only been over the last few months and in the Epilogue, we are told that he
has previously helped children out of burning houses and helped consumptive
students. When, during the novel we see Raskolnikov doing good deeds and then
thinking about taking them back – taking back money he gives away, or thinking
a young woman’s troubles in the street are none of his business – we, the
reader look down on his bad acts. But then at the end, when we realise that his
murder was merely an aberration and his suffering relating to that was part of
it, then we realise that all the other flaws and faults of Raskolnikov – his weak
disposition, his indecisiveness about niceties etc. – are ours too.
Crime and
Punishment also provides a few interesting snippets of philosophy put into the
mouths of various characters. There is a lot of talk about various fashionable
ideas and it would seem that generally these are looked down upon, especially
in that they seem to be moving away from traditional Christian values. But
then, the other aspect of this is that they don’t seem to meet with the lives
of the general populace:
“Poverty is not a
vice, that’s a true saying. Yet I know too that drunkenness is not a virtue,
and that that’s even truer. But destitution, dear sir, destitution is a vice.
In poverty you may still retain your innate nobility of soul, but in
destitution – never – no-one. For destitution a man is not chased out of human
society with a stick, he is swept out with a broom…”
- Crime and Punishment, Part 1, Chapter 2
|
Here we hear Marmelodov lamenting the
state of the poverty stricken lives of his fellow Russians. The idea of
Utilitarianism that comes into play with some of the minor characters,
especially the Commune idea that one is talking about seem completely in
opposition to what Marmelodov experiences.
No comments:
Post a Comment