Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment - reading experience
After a long time I read an English fiction novel, that too a timeless classic , Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. I do not intend to write any review of the book which must have been reviewed umpteen number of times during all these 150 years since the book was written. I stopped reading english fiction long time back i e about 20 years back since I got married.Though I did have all of Dostoyevsky's work in Kindle edition, I did not venture into reading them as it failed to kindle my interest somehow.
Only recently I got hold of printed version of Crime and Punishment during the corona lock down period which came as a blessing for all kinds of reading to many of us. I really felt overwhelmed by the popularity of the book before starting to read.
I feel that the events that unfolded before me through the book will linger in my memory permanently and that could well be the experience of any one who read the book. Even the translator's preface which gives a life account of the author is enough to delve us straight into the contents. When we read that Dostoyevsky escaped being shot at the last moment as his death sentence was commuted by King Nicholas, we would get goosebumps for sure. I felt that the author's tragic, sickly and poverty ridden life contributed immensely to his talent as a creator of many timeless classic works. This proves that you need to live extraordinary life to do extraordinary things.
An exhaustive and detailed analysis of a murder crime and the human dilemma
experienced by the protagonist Raskolnikov is the story in the novel. The poverty and human suffering and meaninglessness of human lives (nihilism) are also discussed in detail. The theme and the treatment of the same is still being recreated in many books, plays and movies.
The author vividly brings out the emotional bonding within family in Russia in those days. The final departure scenes between the mother and Raskolnikov and between sister Dounia and Raskolnikov have such a narrative that will bring tears even to a stone hearted mind. Who says
that western mind doesn't have family values? I think East or West - bonding is the same for human relationships within the family whether through love or by blood.
As the protagonist of the story is also a part time writer of sort, the earlier days of writing and printing as a profession got a mention in the book. What really caught my attention was the mention of a book about women titled " Are women human beings". Those were the days in Russia that woman and lowly class people were traded like commodities and women of those times
were yet to be considered as human beings at all. Though serfdom was prohibited by a law, the practice of serfdom was still in vogue in some places.
The human justice system has got evolved from coarse, crude system in the primitive times to the present modern criminal justice system. At every stage of development of the system, no one could deny the effective contribution of human conscience. This book seems to be discussing the aspects of human conscience at the individual level as well its connection to the overall social mileu. Within the novel itself the topic is discussed at the intellectual level between characters.
As we discussed earlier, the author's real life experiences at the hands of law enforcing authorities of the times would have influenced the topic of discussion a lot. There are views that these conversations in the literary works of geniuses like Dostoyevsky take it to next level the subject of discussion, That is the reach of such writings in the evolving of human mind.
As I read through the protagonist's defence and justification of killings like in the case of Napoleon, Mohamed and many others in the history who killed many number of people in the larger interests of humanity, I was thinking that the author was also in a way responsible for later day violence in Russia in the name of Communism. But I changed this perception as absurd as that could not have influenced the communists who anyway justified all killings to Marxian dogmatic perception.
I conclude this part by saying that the impact of reading a novel of this calibre is exceptionally profound on the minds of a reader and will require more than one reading to fully grasp nuances of style of story telling aspects which I would say, am yet to fully comprehend. I want to make somefurther attempts to share some of my views in the near future in later parts, if possible.
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