by Fyodor Dostoevsky
It’s been 25 years since I read Crime and Punishment. Most of the plot details escape me today, but I do recall thinking that Fyodor Dostoevsky had written a masterful novel.
This is what I wrote about it in 2000:
“[Crime and Punishment] reminds me a bit of Lolita; whereas Nabokov puts you inside the mind of a pedophile, Dostoevsky puts you inside the head of a murderer — not a very pleasant place to be, in either case. It’s a frequently fascinating place, however, and never more so than when Crime’s killer protagonist is playing cat-and-mouse with his foe, who is a sort of 19th-century, Russian version of Columbo.”
Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, on the other hand, was somewhat disappointing. This might be because the plot concerns (primarily) the squabbles and jealousies of an all-male family: a father and his three sons. I grew up with two older sisters, no brothers. The male interplay in Karamazov felt alien to me.
Of course, there’s more to the novel than the Karamazov family dynamics. There is a murder and subsequent trial. There are lengthy cogitations about Christianity, atheism, and the dual nature of man. Maybe it’s just me, but I am more interested in present-day Russia’s stance on those lofty themes.
I do know that, unlike other 19th-century classics like Anna Karenina, The Count of Monte Cristo, Crime and Punishment, and most anything by Dickens, I did not particularly enjoy this reading experience.
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