Title: Crime and Punishment (1866)
Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
Culture: Russian
Type: Novel
Date Finished: 25th July 2010

The novel Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky is about a Russian university student, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, living in a box-like flat in the midst of the crowded and busy St. Petersburg. Suffering from poverty and no longer being able to pay his university fees, he enters a month long trance of depression, excessive-thinking, black-outs and haziness. He formulates a plan to murder an old, female pawnbroker, who cheats her customers, for her money. He believes by removing this parasitic woman from the universe he is justified in killing her and making better use of her money, often justifying himself by saying he is like Napoleon Bonaparte, killing for a higher purpose, whom he finds out he is the opposite of.

I was thrilled and shocked by the bizarre, almost surrealist scenes of Russian activity that are spread throughout the novel in Raskolnikov’s dreams. Dostoevsky writes these with such calculation and colour, yet makes them appear hazy and out of order, like the surrealist film Un Chien Andalou by Salvador Dali and Louis Bunuel. For example, Raskolnikov falls into a sickness induced sleep in which he dreams of being a child in his home town, walking with his father home from the country. Raskolnikov puts a cross on his infant brother’s grave and kissed the small headstone, moving on with his father and finding a large tavern to be in their way. A cart with a weak nag tied in front of it stood outside, and in a flash of colours and drunkenness a large crowd pours out of the tavern door and stood revelling around the cart, being brought to attention by the cart owner who tells them to get in the back, “"Get in! Come along!" The crowd laughed. "D'you hear she'll gallop!" says the driver. The scene ends with horse being whipped and beaten to death with axes and iron bars, and the little Raskolnikov crying at the horse’s dead body, kissing it on the lips. The rowdiness, lack of sense and sanity of these tavern-dwellers relentlessly murdering a horse, combined with the vagueness of walking home from the country, the macabre aspect of the infant grave-stone kissing boy, the cross, and the flurry of emotion give these types of scenes a strange, beastly sense of natural mysticism mixed with brutality and insanity.

The intensity of this young Russian man, Raskolnikov, both in intellect and spirit, is powerful and draws you in to the strength of this novel, in my opinion. Dostoevsky’s style in the way he presents his characters is remarkable, showing clearly their deep-rooted emotional problems and disposition in the world, as well as their purpose and direction. An example of this is in the beginning of the novel when Raskolnikov is introduced to us as a young ex-university student, living in a small room land-ladied by an old, miserable woman, whom he avoids each time he walks down his stairs. In a beginning scene Raskolnikov goes for a walk through the streets and is described as ignoring every person he passed, self-absorbed in his own thoughts and sufferings, with a high level of anxiety about him, and ruthlessness towards the people of the exterior world, which is based on the corrupt or vague impressions they made upon him as an intellectual. When his maid brings him supper one day, she asks what he is doing: is he working? Is he studying? Only to get the answer that he is thinking. At this response she bursts in to laughter at the absurdity, which opens up to us that Raskolnikov is far too involved in his illusory, romantic suffering, and so wastes his days in his “accursed mind”. The fall into a self-destroying state that Raskolnikov made demonstrates to the reader the belligerency of some human beings, who are so selfish, in my opinion, as to believe their life to be anything other than a beautiful gift.