Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)

The turning point of my reading career

In the youthful exuberance of our teenage years, with all its ups and downs, the mood swings, and our search for a productive outlet of our energies, as also our imagination, it only needs the faintest touch from the right kind of an author, for those suitably inclined, to be sent on an entirely different and profound trajectory, as far as their reading habits and choices are concerned.

Dostoyevsky is one such writer.

I clearly remember the day I had bought Crime and Punishment, and I think what led me to the book was my recollection of a reference to it in Babe : Pig in the City – a cinematic adaptation of Animal Farm which I had seen a few years earlier.

Crime and Punishment was the first unabridged classic I read, and it was also my introduction to the genre of philosophical fiction; before that I wasn’t even aware that such a combination existed (I was seventeen, what do you expect!) and had been reading the thrillers of John Grisham, Dan Brown and the occasional Jeffrey Archer; in addition to the omnipresent Harry Potter series.

Over the course of the eighteen or so months that I spent in slowly completing the book, I eased into my college studies, and experienced a whole new range of emotions, and probing questions, for the first time in my life. All this while, Crime and Punishment was performing a kind of slow baptism by fire in the background, and completely transformed me as a reader.

Being my first classic, this book was also my introduction to Victorian English (I read Constance Garnett’s 1914 translation) and I just fell in love with the language. Victorian English is often accused of prolix verbiage, of dramatic and extended monologues, and of having a proliferation of words and a profusion of sentences so articulate one will never use them in real life. But I have always found this criticism incorrect on two accounts.

Firstly, it fails to see just how much, and in what degrees, the expectations from literature have changed even within the relatively short time frame of the past hundred and fifty years and the whole point of literature, good literature in any case, is to bring us closer to thoughts, ideas and situations we may never experience in our own lives.

And secondly, this tendency is more on account of our having gotten used to internet lingo and abbreviations in our normal conversations in the twenty-first century, than as an objective criticism of the language in itself.

How has the book affected me? That is impossible to determine, and yet I can observe a few noticeable changes.

I take my time when reading a book as I want to absorb each sentence, each word, each gesture and wave of a hand. The books I read come to life in my mind in vivid detail. Since I am on Earth for only a finite amount of time, and there are just too many books I want to read, I have become an elitist in my book choices and I think it was a natural result of having gained more from this one book than probably all the books I had read until that point, combined.

Additionally, with my to-read list being so excruciatingly long, it is a foregone conclusion that I will almost never try out a new author I know little about. This, unfortunately, automatically deprives me the pleasure of serendipity, but that is a sacrifice I seem willing to make.

Crime and Punishment radically transformed what I came to expect from the written word, as also what I believed were the limits of what could be expressed through this medium. The internal turmoil of the protagonist Rodión Románovich Raskólnikov is beautifully portrayed, as are his frequent bouts of feverish obsession with the crime(s) he has committed. In addition, the portrayal of his crushing poverty, in the backdrop of the depiction of St. Pertersburg of the day, and his interactions with other people provide an extremely enriching reading experience.

I distinctly remember one particular scene where Pyótr Petróvich Lúzhin, a lawyer who is engaged to Raskólnikov’s sister in the beginning of the book, accuses Sónya Marmeládova, the daughter of a drunkard whom Raskólnikov meets in a tavern, and whom circumstances have pushed into prostitution, of stealing a hundred rouble note from him. Katerína Ivánovna Marmeládova, Sónya’s stepmother, rushes to counter Lúzhin’s claim and vouches for Sónya’s innocence. And then, finally, Lúzhin’s roommate Lebeziátnikov enters the scene and counters him, managing to prove the innocence of Sónya with the help of a moving monologue by Raskólnikov.

This scene was spread over five pages and provided me my first experience of, what I can only refer to as, a literary orgasm.

It has been almost a decade since I read Crime and Punishment. I never came around to writing what I felt about the book for it seemed very difficult to express the myriad ways in which the book has affected me and the very fact that I am able to talk so clearly about my feelings associated with the book, even after so much time has passed, is a testament to that.

Dostoyevsky belongs to that certain breed of authors where first impressions are nearly impossible to improve upon. Ayn Rand and Khaled Hosseini are others that come to my mind.

I think in the case of such authors, whichever book a given person picks up first will generally remain their favourite work from that author.

I have read two more books by Dostoyevsky in the intervening years, and they were delights to read. But I doubt I will ever be affected this much again, by any other work by him.

Thank you, Fyodor.