Suç ve Ceza (Crime and Punishment)

Careful: this gives away the plot and the ending of the book.

I started reading while waiting for the murder, and I was surprised: it is over early. Everything else takes place afterward.

The setup

Raskolnikov is a former law student. He dropped out for lack of money, lives in a coffin-like room in Petersburg, cannot pay his rent, goes days without eating.

He pawns things with a woman who lends money. She is stingy, harsh, someone who crushes everyone. Raskolnikov plans to kill her.

He kills her. But his plan goes wrong: the pawnbroker's harmless sister Lizaveta unexpectedly walks into the apartment, and he kills her too. This second murder is the most important detail in the book, because it fits no justification.

He hides the money he took under a stone and never touches it again.

Afterward

He runs a fever and lies in bed for days. He thinks everyone in the street knows. Then he starts doing things that will give him away:

• He goes back to the scene, rings the bell, asks about the bloodstain on the wall.
• He brings the subject up himself with a police officer.
• He tells the examining magistrate Porfiry about the article he wrote on crime.
• He confesses to Sonya when there is no need at all.

From the outside it is irrational. From the inside it is perfectly logical, and Dostoevsky manages to make it logical.

The sentence that held me was this: what he is hiding tires him more than what he hid.

Scaling it down

I am not talking about murder, of course. But the mechanism is familiar.

An unopened envelope. An unanswered message. A phone call postponed for three weeks. The thing left undone takes two minutes, but carrying it takes weeks and it grows a little every day.

As long as the envelope sits on the desk, what is inside it grows. When you open it, it usually turns out small, and the energy you spent until then does not come back.

Raskolnikov's confession at the end is usually read as a victory of conscience. It did not feel that way to me. It felt like putting down what he could no longer carry, and that is more believable.

The theory part

The murder has a justification, and the justification is disturbing.

Raskolnikov has written an article: people are divided into two. Ordinary ones have to obey the rules. Extraordinary ones, those who can bring something new, may break the rules if necessary. Napoleon is the example.

So the real question is not the victim. It is about himself: which one am I?

The answer comes immediately, and the answer is "ordinary." He understands this from the first blood: he trembles, vomits, hides. The rest of the book is living with that answer.

These sections are the most debated part of the book and I was not fully convinced. The theory looks like a justification invented afterward. But maybe that is exactly what Dostoevsky is saying: people find a philosophy for what they did afterward, and they come to believe in that philosophy themselves.

Porfiry

The best character in the book, I think, is the examining magistrate.

He has no evidence. He cannot arrest Raskolnikov. Instead he talks with him: he mentions his article, pays compliments, drops barbs, then changes the subject. He slowly crushes the man psychologically.

These scenes are more a cat and mouse game than a detective story, and the tension of the book lives there. In the end Porfiry tells him directly: "You killed her." And does not arrest him. He waits for him to come himself, because he knows he will.

I split in two over Sonya

Dostoevsky's solution is Sonya.

A young woman pushed into prostitution to support her family. Raskolnikov confesses to her and Sonya does not judge, does not run away, does not go to the police. She says "go and tell," then follows him all the way to Siberia.

I believe this: carrying something alone doubles its weight, and the only thing in the book that works is really someone listening.

What I do not believe is turning this into a formula for salvation. The religious resolution in the last chapter felt to me as if it did not come from the novel itself; as if it were pasted on from outside.

Many people count this ending as the peak of the book. I find it the weakest spot, and I know I am in the minority on this.

What I did not expect: it is funny

Nobody had told me this book was entertaining. I had put it off for years, assuming it would be gloomy.

Marmeladov's talk in the tavern is a tragedy but also pitifully ridiculous at the same time: he tells how he ruined his daughter and feels sorry for himself as he tells it.

His mother and sister come to Petersburg and the whole household is thrown into confusion. His sister's suitor Luzhin is the most irritating and the funniest character in the book: he praises himself in every sentence.

Svidrigailov is something else. Like Raskolnikov's dark twin: he has done the same things but never felt remorse. The most frightening figure in the book, and his suicide is told quietly.

Petersburg

The city is almost a character.

A hot, crowded, smelly summer. Staircases, courtyards, taverns. Raskolnikov walks constantly and the city squeezes him.

It is no accident that his room is compared to a coffin. Dostoevsky uses the outside as an extension of the inner state and does it without ever explaining.

While reading

Eight hundred pages, and the first two hundred are the slowest. The murder comes early but the feverish period after it is long.

Once the Porfiry scenes begin, it becomes hard to put down.

It suits reading chapter by chapter; each chapter is built around a scene and ends within itself.