Crime and Punishment - Dostoevsky

[Kristel]

Read 2012 and 2015; Crime and Punishment is called a masterpiece of Russian and world literature. The main character is a Raskolnikov, a young, intellect, a student who is perhaps ill or very depressed, no longer going to school, no longer earning any money. He is pondering something that causes him great stress. Then we find that he plans to murder, to murder a ‘principle’. Raskolnikov has a theory and he murders to prove his theory. Then the next several pages deal with the torment that Raskolnikov experiences after the act. Raskolnikov is also a man of noble character in spite of the act of murder. Raskolnikov does not consider his act of murder a crime or feel any guilt but the murder does leave him isolated. He is alone even though he wanders the streets of St. Petersburg and associates with a variety of other characters in the story. The author examines the alienation from the rest of humanity. His friends make every effort to help him but he rejects them and begs to be left alone. The reader sees all the other characters through the delirium of Raskolnifov. There is suspense in this novel. First the suspense to the reader about what is causing Raskolnikov such distress and then once we know, it is will he do it and why. The reader doesn’t find out fully until much later in the story. Once the murder is completed which is early on, then the suspense is what will happen now, will he be caught or perhaps he will commit suicide or maybe he will get by. Raskolnikov is an “enigmatic hero” and we only find out about him slowly as we read through the six parts of the story. Only the epilogue truly reveals the essential characteristics of Raskolnikov’s character. The novel stands as the great antecedent to the twentieth-century literature of alienation represented in figures such as Camus and Beckett.
the first review
Updated.
This is a story of the mental anguish of a young college student who has fallen into depression and dire straights. The story revolves around another family where the father is a drunk, the mother sick with tuberculosis and the stepdaughter has been sent into prostitution to provide for the family. Reskolnikov is a man who has a heart for the down and out and he takes on this family's cause as his own. He also kills an old woman who he does not think has the right to live because she is a pawn broker, never mind that he kills also a young girl who happens to enter the crime scene who did not deserve to die. In the end, he goes to prison in Siberia, Sonja follows him to Siberia and in the end he discovers that he loves her. The sister marries his faithful friend. Pretty much a happy ending all in all.