Crime and Punishment

[Dr T]

Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment (translated by Constance Garnett) was a book that I read in the last couple weeks. I rated it as one of my all time favorites. I was chastised by Pammy for telling too much of the Scarlet Letter in her sarcastic way so I don’t know how much I should say in this post. I’ll talk a little about it and see if anybody writes anything else about it. In Pammy’s defense, I did write a lot in my OP of that last book and maybe I was behind books too much and missed human interaction so I wrote too much. I’ll try not to do that this time but I might have a hard time because it was packed with interesting things to discuss. I was a rather large book and I got confused with the names sometimes and have to go back and figure out who was who so it made sense in my mind.

It may sound a bit odd that I liked this book as much as I did because of what the book was about. This book was set St. Petersburg, Russia. The first thing that struck me was the difficulty of living in poverty and the morality people could wrestle with when they live in squalor. I found the lengths someone could go and the inner workings of justification in somebody’s mind when faced when they decide to practice something against their personal ethics. Perhaps it was more about my own interaction with the book that intrigued me because I kept putting myself in Raskolnikov’s shoes and he did what he did and it made my mouth dry each step of the way. Raskolnikov was indigent, felt ashamed and went back and forth with guilt. It was a great psychological thriller that kept the pages turning when I put the Scarlet Letter down and read this book instead. It was a murder mystery (sort of) even though it wasn’t a mystery to me because I was reading it ( ) The old lady, a pawn brother, who he traded goods for money (Rubles) was the unfortunate person along with her sister. I did not particularly enjoy the murder, it rather sickened me, but I found it interesting how somebody could go through with it and the resultant psychological consequences. The rest of the book was full of other characters like his friends, acquaintances, the police, his mother, sister, her fiancé and others that come in and out in the book. I do not want to say more about it than I didn’t particularly enjoy the ending of the book in it’s prologue because he spent a lot of time writing a fine book and made me care for some characters and would have liked to see more of how they made out in life. I know Dostoyevsly spent time in Siberia and that was likely fresh on his mind when writing this book and therefore must have been a large part of how he viewed criminal consequences in his backdrop in this book. I’d be happy to talk more about this book if anybody is interested. Please let me know.

Thanks.