Another gift from my dear friend Emma, back in high school. On her note to me about the book, she wrote, “This is a serious Russian novel that I hope you enjoy reading!” I did, in fact, enjoy it.

Read: October 30 – November 3, 2023

Audience: Adult
Book contains: murder, guilt, mental illness

Purchase a copy from Amazon.ca

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Hard to Get Into; Enjoyed it by the End

Struggling student Rodian Romanovitch Raskolnikov has sunk into a deep depression. He’s pawned his last valuables to a nasty, rich old lady and, after great deliberation, has it in his mind to murder the woman and rob her. In the aftermath, he is stricken with guilt, and suffers greatly by his actions.

This book wouldn’t be one that I see myself getting, classic or not. In university, I had to use a partial of another of Dostoevsky’s work, Notes from Underground, in a design project, but Crime and Punishment was never on my radar until a friend gave it to me. I had to give it a try. As I mention above, it was hard to get into. I really didn’t like Rodian Romanovitch as a character all that much; it was very hard to connect to him and be sympathetic, especially with how careless he was with money and possessions—life in general, really. I didn’t care what happened to him.

I listened along to the version translated by Constance Garnett, which was read by a narrator for Librivox and uploaded to Spotify by Great Audiobooks.

This book was written in third person, and mainly follows Rodian, called Rodya by family and close friends. It is split into six parts, and there is an epilogue at the end. Each part has around six to eight chapters.

At the beginning of the book, I had no love for the main character. He’s a failed university student, deep in debt with no job. He’s depressed, I suppose, which is why he quit his job and didn’t get another one, but I hate how careless he is with money. His mother and sister, in poverty themselves, send him money despite the strain it puts upon them, and he’s pawned off his last valuables, but instead of using the money to get himself back on his feet, he’s walking around giving it away. It really grated on my nerves. Later on, I was able to care more about what happened to him, but only because of the care of the characters around him as he slowly sinks into madness after his crime in part one of the novel.

Rodya isn’t particularly close with anyone, as he pushes many people away, but there are those who don’t leave his side. There’s his mother and sister; his sister is agreeing to marry a rich man so as to save her family from poverty, which Rodya doesn’t approve of. He has a friend named Dmitri Prokofich Razumikhin—though everyone calls him Razumikhin—who takes care of him while he’s in a delusional fever. There’s also Sofya, a girl Rodya meets later on in the story, and several members of the police force. It’s these characters that helped me grow to like Rodya a little more.

The book is well-written, though at times it rambles quite a bit into topics I didn’t understand. I haven’t read much Russian work, but I hear that this book is one of the main examples of it. There was a lot of existential talk, about whether crime is real or imagined, about what makes something morally wrong to do. It was all quite interesting—interesting enough to hold me in the story even though I didn’t like the characters all that much. I found myself, while not caring about what happened to the main character, still eager to know more about what happened.

This book is definitely not for everyone, but those who enjoy discussion of ethics, a bit of mystery, and a reverse who-dunnit? would really like this book, I think. I recommend it to those who like lengthy books, as well, because this one dragged on quite a bit at times, and takes some real patience to get through.

Related Reviews:

Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens