“Crime and Punishment” by Fyodor Dostoevsky
They say to be an extraordinary writer, you need to have an extraordinary life. Fyodor Dostoevsky grew up in a poor family, where his parents and their 5 children live in only 2 rooms. The father and mother were very hard working, deeply religious, and they spent most of their evenings reading serious books aloud to their children, an activity that developed Dostoevsky’s passion for books since early age.
Dostoevsky was a sickly and delicate child growing up, a shy boy but with a brilliant ability to write. This ability, and his love of books, landed him into a trouble in 1849 when he was already a grown man, where he got arrested for “taking part in conversations against the censorship, of reading a letter from Byelinsky to Gogol, and of knowing of the intention to set up a printing press.” Something punishable by death under the rule of Tsar Nicholas I. But at the very last minute before the firing squad executed him, the sentence was changed from death to hard labour in Siberia.
This intense experience left a mark on Dostoevsky, and it constantly recurs in the subject of his writings. Especially after his obscure nervous disease developed into violent attacks of epilepsi, which he would suffer for the rest of his life.
And his suffering didn’t stop there. After he was allowed to go back to Russia in 1859, about 5 years later he lost his first wife and brother Mihail, and proceeded to pay his brother’s debt and support his family even though Dostoevsky himself still lives in poverty. This, is when Dostoevsky came up with the idea of Crime and Punishment.
The novel is a brilliant portrayal of the range of negative human emotions, from suffering, to greed, lust, anger, envy, sadness, disappointment, to perhaps the most extreme one: the urge for murder. It gets so real and dark that sometimes it gives me literal eery feeling down to my bones.
It’s astonishing how Dostoevsky can make me feel the suffering of Raskolnikov’s poverty and desperate situation. Can make me see that Raskolnikov’s plan – to murder one evil pawnbroker, steal her money, and use them for several good deeds – actually sounds sensible. Can make me feel as if I’m the one who has just killed the pawnbroker lady, with all these weird guilty feeling sensations throughout the period when I’m reading the book.
And the way Dostoevsky construct the development of the story after the murder, that’s a testament to his maestro ability. I was made to wish that the murder never happened, because firstly Raskolnikov didn’t do everything that he planned to do (aka steal all of the pawnbroker’s money) so his main incentive wasn’t even collected because he got so distraught after committing the murder, and thus the murder was for nothing. Secondly, the mental agony of murdering another human being was insane, where Raskolnikov became ill afterwards due to feeling a tremendous sense of guilt.
Meanwhile, look at how life turns out to be for him, without the murder and stolen money. Oh, but now we (as in Raskolnikov and the readers) have to bear the burden of hiding the truth, not to mention the total paranoia of anyone finding out about it.
This is the genius of Dostoevsky, where he could make the reader feel the regret and all the emotional struggles throughout. That is, until the feeling of relieve after Raskolnikov eventually admitted to the murder and get sentenced for it. What an absolute wreckage of an emotional journey it has been, what a brilliant book.
THE CHAOS THEORY 