Fyodor Dostoyevsky has been enjoying a strange renaissance on social media these past few years with people recommending his books, even though I’m quite certain these people aren’t reading them and nor are their largely consumer audiences. Because if they actually read his books, I sincerely doubt even half of them would be recommending them - his books are utterly terrible!
But they are considered “classic” literature and have never, and will likely never, be out of print. So there must be something to them right - especially his most famous work, Crime and Punishment? I honestly don’t know - I think this book was godawful and, if this wasn’t such a famous staple of the literary canon, I wouldn’t have bothered trudging all the way through it. And yet I see glowing reviews for this novel across the board - what on earth is everyone reading?!
Though the book is nearly 160 years old and the premise - a young man commits double murder and is psychologically tortured by his act in the following pages - is well-known, I don’t think you can properly review this novel without mentioning “spoilers”, despite these details not spoiling anything as this isn’t that type of book. But I’ll do it here anyway to those who care: SPOILERS hereon out.
My Penguin Classics edition - the 2014 Oliver Ready translation - is 658 pages + notes. And boy does it feel it. It takes Rodion “Rodya” Romanovich Raskolnikov (these Russian names) nearly 100 pages to commit the act of murdering a moneylender and her simple-minded sister with an axe. That’s bad enough - because up to that point all we see is Raskolnikov suffering from poverty and meeting a drunk, whose family will later unfortunately figure largely in the book - but then barely anything happens in the remaining 500+ pages.
Because the real story is actually two, unconnected storylines: said drunk’s death and its impact on his impoverished family and Raskolnikov objecting to his sister’s impending marriage - for money - to someone she doesn’t love.
You can work in “crime” and “punishment” into both of the above so you can say this is a novel about those general themes and not the principal crime of the double murder, but that’s a crummy choice by Dostoyevsky because the double murder is the only interesting storyline here. To focus so much on the other, less famous storylines makes for an unrelentingly dreary read.
What is there to say about the drunk’s death and the impoverished family? Only that poverty sucks and how miserable life is without money. What is there to say about marrying for money? Only that it’s bad and how miserable it is to have one’s life governed so by money. Hundreds of pages to underline the bleeding obvious.
Not that the double murder storyline is much better - that’s how bad a writer Dostoyevsky is. The police investigation bumbles along like a farce with the lead investigator droning on in the most absurd, pages-long soliloquies. Either everyone in 19th century Russia spoke to each other this way - lecturing one another for 20 minutes at a time - or Dostoyevsky has no clue how to write even semi-realistic dialogue.
Raskolnikov is brought in for questioning a few times over the course of the novel and it’s implied that the lead investigator knows he’s the culprit, but instead they end up arresting the wrong person who admits to it for no reason (forced confession via torture perhaps?). It takes the entire length of the book for Raskolnikov to tell the police that he’s the one who did it. It’s the least compelling crime story you’ll ever read.
But the psychology - the brilliant insights - that’s what makes this novel stand out, right?! Raskolnikov falls ill after the murders - that’s basically it. What’s insightful about that? He goes into a trance-like state during the murders, but that’s hardly an imaginative stretch and I’m sure most people could draw similar conclusions if you asked them to think of the state of mind of a murderer. I saw nothing here to convince me of this novel’s supposed brilliant psychological portrait of a murderer.
Instead it turns out that Raskolnikov - who robbed the moneylender after the deed but stashed everything away without spending it, so he didn’t even kill for money, really - chose murder because he “wanted to become a Napoleon” (p.498), ie. an alpha male with no regard for human lives in the pursuit of his own wants.
Maybe this is part of why Dostoyevsky is suddenly relevant in the social media age - with pathetic male figures like Andrew Tate who espouse their own brand of laughable masculinity, Dostoyevsky shows the negative consequences of pursuing this almost cartoonishly-masculine self-image? Maybe - but probably not (I suspect the real reason is because Dostoyevsky is short-hand for “intellectual” and people want to appear that way online). Also: the motivation is another statement of the bleeding obvious - of course it’s bad to behave monomaniacally!!
The policeman also mentions to Raskolnikov during one of his interviews that Raskolnikov had an essay recently published about “the psychological condition of a criminal during the entire course of a crime”, which is a bit like if OJ had written “If I Did It” before he actually did what he did.
And while, again, it underlines how incompetent the police are in this novel - that the murderer literally had an essay on murdering published before he did the murders, and they still didn’t arrest him or, at the very least, investigate him further - it does highlight one of the few interesting things Dostoyevsky does in the novel, which is include some post-modern winks to the reader, years before even modernism began.
Raskolnikov’s essay on “the psychological condition of a criminal during the entire course of a crime” is ostensibly what Dostoyevsky is doing with his novel - wink self-awareness self-referential wink. Raskolnikov also notes, several times during the novel, that he feels that his actions are contrived, like he’s a character in a novel, which is almost fourth wall breaking (but also might be part of the alleged psychological portrait, in that the murderer is going through an out-of-body/dissociative experience).
And speaking of characters in a novel, none of the characters in this are any good. Raskolnikov is a dull, irritating man and remains so for the entirety of the overlong novel. Sonya, his love interest, is the whore with the heart of gold - which maybe wasn’t as stereotypical as it is today but certainly wasn’t original even back then. There’s the best friend who witters on without purpose, the whore’s mother who does the same, his mother and sister who wring their hands the whole time, some rich dude who sexually harassed the sister and blows his brains out for no reason at the end (maybe he got sick of the book too and couldn’t wait any longer for it to end?), some other rich dude who doesn’t blow his brains out - they all stink as a cast and don’t stand out as great literary characters.
So much time is wasted on these dreary characters to no real end - you could excise everything but the double murder storyline and see no difference in the overall story. The story is a flat-liner for the entire book interspersed very occasionally with the most minor of blips (the murder itself, the other few times actual conflict emerged) and its message of religious salvation is a tedious one. A psychological novel that provides no insight into psychology, Crime and Punishment is an immensely exhausting and unrewarding chore to get through - quite why it’s so widely celebrated continues to escape me.
Dostoyevsky is such a weak writer. His sentences are rambling and ineffective, inducing in the reader nothing more than a languid torpor, his characterisation is weak, his dialogue is awful, he has no sense of pacing in his storytelling, his plotting is feeble, his messaging is clunky - reading his prose is an awkward, immediately forgettable and (I can’t emphasise this enough) consistently BORING experience.
Maybe people genuinely do love this book and don’t have the same problems with the writing that I did, but I encourage anyone not to thoughtlessly give any book labelled “classic” a high rating, if they didn’t enjoy it. Don’t be someone who reads a classic and feels like they have to say it’s good for fear of being called stupid or whatever. “Classic” just means it’s old - it doesn’t mean it’s automatically good or that you aren’t allowed a dissenting opinion. You can say whatever you like but it’s best to think about what you’ve read and provide an honest overview of your thoughts, even if it goes against the prevailing opinion.
I’m glad I read Crime and Punishment for no other reason than to say that I did - which I suspect is the main reason most people read this book (although I did want to see for myself what it was like) - but it certainly was a punishing read.
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