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Lance

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Lance is Currently Reading

Lance is currently reading

Crime and Punishment

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

bookshelves: russia, crime, novel, favorites, reviewed, petersons-recommendations, trubys-recommendations, currently-reading

Reading for the 3rd time

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Lance said: " Though I had first encountered Dostoevsky in high school, the first time I truly began to appreciate him was when I read this novel as a sophomore in college. With the benefit of more historical and intellectual context, professors and classmates wit Though I had first encountered Dostoevsky in high school, the first time I truly began to appreciate him was when I read this novel as a sophomore in college. With the benefit of more historical and intellectual context, professors and classmates with whom to discuss the book, and a less limited pool of life experience to draw on, I was thrilled to find the genuine understanding that had eluded me earlier.

With that said, there was still a great deal that I did not understand or appreciate. The copy that I just reread is the same one that I read for my college class and it has all the overreaching annotations from that time. Before college, I would have considered writing in the margins of a book an act of blasphemy, but by the time I reached my sophomore year of college, I wildly overcompensated for my previous timidity. Among the many embarrassments etched there, I realized, as I read my old notes, that, because we read Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil shortly before reading Crime and Punishment, I had conflated the order in which we read the two books with the order in which they were written in my mind. A glance at the publication dates would have quickly corrected this: In reality, Crime and Punishment was published in 1866, while Beyond Good and Evil did not appear until 1886. In addition to this embarrassing error, I also remembered misreading Dostoevsky in a more substantive way.

I read Raskolnikov’s vainglorious rants about the Napoleonic man who oversteps social boundaries to make a new law for humankind, and mistakenly thought—for all the esteem in which I held the novel— that there was something charmingly naïve about it in comparison to the uncompromising utterance of similar values in Nietzsche’s philosophy. There was something about Raskolnikov’s conversion back to Christianity through the saintly example of the whore with a heart of gold that I found moving but idealistic to a fault. Indeed, there was a lot about Dostoevsky that I found myself holding at arm’s length because he was so out of step with many of the other authors that I was reading at that time. He was shamelessly patriotic, devout and mystical, all of which clashed with the mostly cosmopolitan multicultural and agnostic spirit that was so fashionable at my little liberal arts college. While I was moved by the sheer strength of Dostoevsky’s conviction, I found myself inwardly smiling in condescension at it.

It’s so strange to read this book nine years later, having been dealt a few hard knocks after college and also having read a great deal more of Nietzsche, whose works I have been reading in tandem with Dostoevsky’s over the last year and a half. That quick glance at the publication dates that I couldn’t be bothered to take in college would have informed me that, rather than Dostoevsky taking Nietzsche’s idea of the ubermensch and rendering, through his novel, a movingly defiant but naïve denial of such individuals, almost the exact inverse is true. Though Dostoevsky was of course dealing with many of the same themes that Nietzsche addressed in his philosophy, Dostoevsky never actually read, and was therefore never influenced by Nietzsche. The inverse, however, is true. As I read more of Nietzsche, I encountered his many odes to Dostoevsky scattered throughout his books, including his famous tip of that hat in Twilight of the Idols, where he referred to the Russian novelist as “the only psychologist, incidentally, from whom I had something to learn.”

In addition to understanding Nietzsche’s relationship to Dostoevsky better than I did in college, I also understand more about Dostoevsky in general, having since worked my way up to Crime and Punishment after moving chronologically through several of his earlier books, as well as Joseph Frank’s biography recounting the events in Dostoevsky’s life that formed those books. Having done that now, I can’t help but shake my head at the presumptuous 20-year-old who dared think that he knew more than Dostoevsky about the dark side of human nature. If there was anyone who was not naïve about that, it was Dostoevsky, as I now know all to well. I, of course, knew in college that Dostoevsky had been sent to Siberia for his liberal activities as a young man and had done hard labor. Even this knowledge failed to make much impact on me at the time. I knew in the airiest and most abstract sense possible that it must have been rough to spend one’s prison sentence in a place like Siberia, but at that time I had not read Frank’s The Years of Ordeal—volume 2 in his Dostoevsky biography in which he describes Dostoevsky’s time at hard labor—nor had I read Notes from a Dead House, Dostoevsky’s fictionalized but largely faithful dramatization of those years and of the people with whom he interacted in the prison.

Dostoevsky illustrates unflinchingly in that novel, how the characters, whom Raskolnikov would later try to imitate in Crime and Punishment, do in fact exist. Dostoevsky dramatizes in awestruck detail the extraordinary physical, mental, and emotional resilience of those people, but he also comments on the contempt with which they held Dostoevsky himself, whose comparatively sheltered life and genteel upbringing cut him off irrevocably from their companionship. Raskolnikov, I can now clearly see, is not meant to deny the existence of people whose natures place them outside of society, but to caution the young, St. Petersburg intellectuals in whom Dostoevsky saw so much of his younger, more naïve, and more radical self. He knew as a more mature man than he was in the 1840’s that he had declared himself the savior of his countrymen before he even properly got to know them. Coming back to this novel after nine years has shown me how naïve many of the opinions I myself held as a younger man. This time, I read about Raskolnikov’s deliverance from high-flown, but naively adopted, ideas to the more meaningful and practical values of forgiveness and redemption with a much more profound twinge of recognition.

Final Score: 10/10 ...more "

Mar 22, 2020 06:21PM · see review

Lance is currently reading

Foundations of the Coptic Language: Volume 1

by Fr Andreas St Macarius

bookshelves: currently-reading

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Aug 24, 2025 12:38PM

Lance is currently reading

Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

by Robert McKee

bookshelves: united-states-and-canada, writing, reviewed, currently-reading

Reading for the 2nd time

read in March 2020

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Lance said: " For the past six years, I have kept my copy of John Truby’s Anatomy of Story almost perpetually at hand, constantly referring back to it and using its suggested exercises to keep track of my novel’s characters, theme, and plot. Truby’s insistence on ...more "

Apr 05, 2020 06:24AM · see review

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Lance’s Quotes

“Why is Melancholy like Honey? Because it is very sweet, and it is culled from Flowers.”
― Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist

tags: melancholy

15 likes

“Companions the creator seeks, not corpses, not herds and believers. Fellow creators the creator seeks -- those who write new values on new tablets. Companions the creator seeks, and fellow harvesters; for everything about him is ripe for the harvest.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

40 likes

“For me, the last few years of the postmodern era have seemed a bit like the way you feel when you're in high school and your parents go on a trip, and you throw a party. You get all your friends over and throw this wild disgusting fabulous party. For a while it's great, free and freeing, parental authority gone and overthrown, a cat's-away-let's-play Dionysian revel. But then time passes and the party gets louder and louder, and you run out of drugs, and nobody's got any money for more drugs, and things get broken and spilled, and there's cigarette burn on the couch, and you're the host and it's your house too, and you gradually start wishing your parents would come back and restore some fucking order in your house. It's not a perfect analogy, but the sense I get of my generation of writers and intellectuals or whatever is that it's 3:00 A.M. and the couch has several burn-holes and somebody's thrown up in the umbrella stand and we're wishing the revel would end. The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. We're kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we're uneasy about the fact that we wish they'd come back--I mean, what's wrong with us? Are we total pussies? Is there something about authority and limits we actually need? And then the uneasiest feeling of all, as we start gradually to realize that parents in fact aren't ever coming back--which means we're going to have to be the parents.”
― David Foster Wallace

106 likes

“Pierre's insanity consisted in the face that he did not wait, as before, for personal reasons, which he called people's merits, in order to love them, but love overflowed his heart, and loving people without reason, he discovered the unquestionable reasons for which it was worth loving them.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

tags: love

18 likes

“There is a commonplace book argument,
Which glibly glides from every vulgar tongue
When any dare a new light to present:
'If you are right, then everybody's wrong.'
Suppose the converse of this precedent
So often urged, so loudly and so long:
'If you are wrong, then everybody's right.'
Was ever everybody yet so quite?”
― George Gordon Byron, Don Juan

4 likes

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