CRIME AND PUNISHMENT Review
Raskolnikov, Crime and Punishment's protagonist, is a divided man (his name literally means "split" in Russian). On the one hand, he is an uber-Mensch, an intelluctual who feels entitled to take life into his own hands without regard for the consequences. On the other, he is a compassionate and caring man, trying to protect his sister Dounia and offering a helping hand to an impoverished drunk. Raskolnikov is always at odds with himself, and the two facets of his character are highlighted through Sonia, the moral prostitute, and Svidrigailov, the despicable intellectual. Usually, crime is the most fascinating aspect of a story. Here, the crime is over with rather quickly. Dostoyevsky's true genius is how he paints the character of Raskolnikov post-crime: a tortured soul wrestling with the concept of guilt and what it means to be redeemed.
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT Overview
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE
A few words about Dostoevsky himself may help the English reader to understand his work.
Dostoevsky was the son of a doctor. His parents were very hard-working and deeply religious people, but so poor that they lived with their five children in only two rooms. The father and mother spent their evenings in reading aloud to their children, generally from books of a serious character.
Though always sickly and delicate Dostoevsky came out third in the final examination of the Petersburg school of Engineering. There he had already begun his first work, "Poor Folk."
This story was published by the poet Nekrassov in his review and was received with acclamations. The shy, unknown youth found himself instantly something of a celebrity. A brilliant and successful career seemed to open before him, but those hopes were soon dashed. In 1849 he was arrested.
Though neither by temperament nor conviction a revolutionist, Dostoevsky was one of a little group of young men who met together to read Fourier and Proudhon. He was accused of "taking part in conversations against the censorship, of reading a letter from Byelinsky to Gogol, and of knowing of the intention to set up a printing press." Under Nicholas I. (that "stern and just man," as Maurice Baring calls him) this was enough, and he was condemned to death. After eight months' imprisonment he was with twenty-one others taken out to the Semyonovsky Square to be shot. Writing to his brother Mihail, Dostoevsky says: "They snapped words over our heads, and they made us put on the white shirts worn by persons condemned to death. Thereupon we were bound in threes to stakes, to suffer execution. Being the third in the row, I concluded I had only a few minutes of life before me. I thought of you and your dear ones and I contrived to kiss Plestcheiev and Dourov, who were next to me, and to bid them farewell. Suddenly the troops beat a tattoo, we were unbound, brought back upon the scaffold, and informed that his Majesty had spared us our lives." The sentence was commuted to hard labour.
One of the prisoners, Grigoryev, went mad as soon as he was untied, and never regained his sanity.
The intense suffering of this experience left a lasting stamp on Dostoevsky's mind. Though his religious temper led him in the end to accept every suffering with resignation and to regard it as a blessing in his own case, he constantly recurs to the subject in his writings. He describes the awful agony of the condemned man and insists on the cruelty of inflicting such torture. Then followed four years of penal servitude, spent in the company of common criminals in Siberia, where he began the "Dead House," and some years of service in a disciplinary battalion.
He had shown signs of some obscure nervous disease before his arrest and this now developed into violent attacks of epilepsy, from which he suffered for the rest of his life. The fits occurred three or four times a year and were more frequent in periods of great strain. In 1859 he was allowed to return to Russia. He started a journal--"Vremya," which was forbidden by the Censorship through a misunderstanding. In 1864 he lost his first wife and his brother Mihail. He was in terrible poverty, yet he took upon himself the payment of his brother's debts. He started another journal--"The Epoch," which within a few months was also prohibited. He was weighed down by debt, his brother's family was dependent on him, he was forced to write at heart-breaking speed, and is said never to have corrected his work. The later years of his life were much softened by the tenderness and
devotion of his second wife.
In June 1880 he made his famous speech at the unveiling of the monument to Pushkin in Moscow and he was received with extraordinary demonstrations of love and honour.
A few months later Dostoevsky died.
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT Specifications
Mired in poverty, the student Raskolnikov nevertheless thinks well of himself. Of his pawnbroker he takes a different view, and in deciding to do away with her he sets in motion his own tragic downfall. Dostoyevsky's penetrating novel of an intellectual whose moral compass goes haywire, and the detective who hunts him down for his terrible crime, is a stunning psychological portrait, a thriller and a profound meditation on guilt and retribution.
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Customer Reviews
Misleading - William Blake -
I wanted to get the David Magarshack translation of Crime and Punishment, so went to his page on amazon and clicked on C&P. Among the options offered is a kindle version, but the kindle version is NOT a Magarshack translation. Since the translation is critical to enjoyment of this great novel, I find amazon's options very misleading. All translations are NOT created alike.
Check the Publisher of this book before you buy - Kiwi - Mississauga, Ontario Canada
Crime and Punishment is one great novel. However, we have a bit of misleading marketing going on here. Make sure you're buying the version you think you're buying before you order. "Crime and Punishment" published by General Books LLC is a poor quality scanned in version. If you do the "Look Inside" thing on this book, you'll see the inside of another version of the book, NOT the one you will receive.
To give you a few quotes from the publishers website: "We created your book using OCR software ..... with up to 3,500 characters per page, even one percent can be an annoying number of typos.... After we re-typeset ... your book, the page numbers change so the old index and table of contents no longer work .... we usually remove them. .... Our OCR software can't distinguish between an illustration and a smudge or library stamp so it ignores everything except type. ..... We created your book using a robot who turned and photographed each page. Our robot is 99 percent accurate. But sometimes two pages stick together. And sometimes a page may even be missing from our copy of the book. .....". There's no manual editing whatsover.
You get the general idea. Unfortunately, books published by General Books LLC are named, seemingly intentionally, so that they have reviews associated with much better quality imprints. General Books LLC is an imprint of VDM Published (google them on Wikipedia), which is flooding Amazon with poor quality reprints and, unfortunately, many of them have the reviews associated with the original or with beter quality imprints associated with them.
Seems like it's Caveat Emptor on Amazon these days as Amazon certainly doesn't seem to be doing anything to protect it's customers from this Publisher.
PUBLISHER'S INFLUENCE on LENGTH? - -
I'll be very brief with a fresh idea. First off, the book is a great work of literature and a very good read. I needn't say more in that department as the other 5 star reviews here cover it well.
But my theory is that publishers wanted long novels as being more marketable rather than novellas or short stories. I think that influenced the writing of Dostoyevsky, Joseph Conrad and others. Although extremely well written, my view is that there is some padding in the story here as there also was to an even greater extent in the Brothers Karamazov.
I would be more in favor of "tight story telling".
*** Product Information and Prices Stored: Jul 31, 2010 12:40:05
