📚 Finished reading Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky.
This is the book that has been acclaimed by some as the one of the first ever psychological thrillers, but I feel has also gathered a somewhat off-putting reputation as being difficult to read. Which I don’t think is deserved at all, at least not the translation I read. If you have any interest in it, be bold, give it a go.
We follow the life of young Rodion Raskolnikov, who lives a life of seemingly at least somewhat self-chosen poverty in Moscow. He’s something of an over-thinker, a philosopher of some kind. And so we find him pondering on whether or not he would be justified in murdering a mean old pawn-broker who has been less than generous to him and others in times of need in order to steal her money.
It’s no spoiler to say that between deciding that her life is immoral and overdosing on the writings of Hegel et al to the extent of considering himself as a candidate Great Man of History he manages to convince himself that it’s a reasonable, and perhaps even moral, thing to do.
…all men are divided into ‘ordinary’ and ‘extraordinary.’ Ordinary men have to live in submission, have no right to transgress the law, because, don’t you see, they are ordinary. But extraordinary men have a right to commit any crime and to transgress the law in any way, just because they are extraordinary.
This all goes down near the start of the novel. It doesn’t go quite to plan of course.
In what follows we watch him trying to come to terms with what he did and to deal with what will come next. He spirals down through life-threatening maladies, both physical and mental. The police are poking around, his family do their best to care for him but sometimes in ways he cannot abide, ways that will put them at too much risk even whilst he cannot find a single nice word to say to them.
As the noose of suspicion tightens we see his mind whirl between the possibilities of confessing all - perhaps the mental torment would at least end? - versus fleeing, leaving everyone who loves him behind - but what right has he to be loved? - vs the satisfaction - or is it delusion? - of getting one over on whomsoever he sees as his enemy at the time, interlaced with some contemporary politics and philosophical thinking
The frantic, frenetic, paranoid mind of a man who deluded himself into doing something he has no idea how to get away from, or even if he really wants to get away from it, makes for a compulsive reading experience.