This is a famous classic, but a famous classic that most people haven’t read.
Fjodor Dostojewski is one of the biggest names in Russian Literature, and his first big novel was published in 1866 as a multi-part newspaper series. Despite this (as the multi-part newspaper format demands a thrilling ride to be successful) the published-book-version meets with a general (mis)conception as being dreary, slow, and boring, and very hard to read.

Well. It isn’t.
Instead, it is surprisingly energetic and insightful, with likeable characters, and I believe that the west has to thank Dostojewski for a famous and popular TV-criminalist.

Let’s start with the plot.

The plot

Crime and Punishment follows a critical episode in the life of one student, or former student, called Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikow, who kind of survives in Saint Petersburg, the then-capital of Tsarist Russia. Raskolnikow struggles with a terrible lack of money, as many students do even today. But in his case he is deep in the hole. He has not paid the rent for his small room (where the only reason he is not kicked out is that he used to make heart-eyes at the owner’s daughter, who has since passed away after a sickness), but the landlady lets the once charming young intellectual stay for memory’s and emotion’s sake.

Raskolnikow’s sister and mother also struggle with money, or a lack of it, as does his friend Dmitri Prokofjewich Rasumichin, and basically everyone far and wide. People struggle to scrape together a couple of coins to make it to the next day — something that Raskolnikow is particularly bad at. He can’t hold on to any amount of money if his life depends on it, and it does. Although he meets a guy called Marmeladow who is even worse than he when it comes to budgeting.

Well, Raskolnikow has to get his house in order, and he decides to do it by murdering an old hag who profits from being a pawnbroker sucking dry all the desperate people around her.

He makes a smarter than average plan — and then goes ahead and makes many of the mistakes of common criminals that he has just ridiculed as particularly dumb errors.

He is not cut out to be a master criminal, that much is clear. But he still tries to evade the law as the dragnet slowly closes around him.

And at the same time he struggles with growing remorse .. and also growing closer to people.

The characters

It is no wonder the book is so famous: it is quite a gripping crime novel told from the perspective of the criminal, which was probably not a very common perspective in 1866. It casts a sharp and pretty unflattering spotlight at the social situation in the pre-revolutionary Russia. (No less than 50 years before that revolution, even!) And it presents the readers with a set of lifelike, three-dimensional characters that lend life to the abstract concept of “Russia in the 1800s”.

Weirder is that so few people have actually read such an interesting and even thrilling book, mistakenly believing it to be boring.

The main character — definitely not hero, more an anti-hero, and, not to forget: the murderer — is Raskolnikow, who runs through life under terrible pressure: Poverty made him lose touch and fellowship with the citizens around him. He feels far removed from them, separate, different, more intellectual, with more acute emotions than the common pleb, with deep thoughts and specific theories about morality. Because he could no longer pay the university he had to drop out, and he has not told his family. His mother still supports him and his sister has to work to get the necessary funds, but they all do it because they love him; while he, narcissistically, thinks himself almost a different life form from them. He loves them as his family, especially his dear sister, and yet: there is something keeping him apart from humanity.

Rasumichin, Raskolnikow’s friend and fellow student, also struggling, also currently on pause, etc, is vastly different. He has a positive outlook and applies his energy to earning money rather than moping and sulking. He is smart and always makes plans.

Both of them have in common that they are quite generous.

Awdotja / Dunja, Raskolnikow’s sister

Sofia Semjonowa Marmeladowa, the daughter of the alcoholic Marmeladow

And the antagonists:

Porfirij Petrowich, the criminalist on Raskolnikow’s heels. In the late 20th century his archetype was best known as “Inspector Columbo”.

Swidrigailow, Dunja’s former employer who has tried to get into her, let us call it “good graces”, then became widower after his wife found out about his designs.

Lushin, a most terrible creature and Dunja’s former fiancé. But he is not even the worst.

Poverty. Poverty is everywhere. And that is the worst.

What is the meaning of this?

Crime and Punishment follows one main plot — the murder — and multiple side plots, but all of them can be tied together with one root cause for everything bad that’s going on: poverty. That people are dirt poor allows monstrous people like Lushin to thrive on the back of those who need a bite to eat, and it allows careless people like Swidrigailow to run roughshod over weaker ones. The people hope that the Tsar will do something at some point, because he is the “father of the nation”, isn’t he? But the Tsar doesn’t ever show up in the book, which is securely grounded in gritty realism.

People are forced to go into prostitution and crime, or extort each other, or go into debt-slavery, and not only in Russia: There is one sequence where the situation in London is mentioned and it is every bit as desperate for the lower classes as it is in Saint Petersburg.

Once again, this is 1866, and it is already clear as day that this cannot go on. Something has got to change.

This book was a warning that was not heard, or at least not heard enough, in the world of the 19th century. And it deserves its status as a classic because the issues that it describes are less widespread in the north at least, but they are not gone, so they are still relevant to us today.

This is not a happy book, but it is much easier to read than people say. Plus, it has a Rasumichin in it; and the world needs a couple more Rasumichins.

.

Photo by KATRIN BOLOVTSOVA on http://www.pexels.com