I really don't remember much of Crime and Punishment, read so long ago in my senior year of high school I think... at the time I was also being tested on The Red Badge of Courage and The Ilyad and Hamlet and Treasure Island, all at the same time! so I only remember thinking how Crime and Punishment was in some way like Edgar Allen Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart... and I'm not 100% sure where I was going with that...
I'll have to read it again.
in a way though, I guess you could say that TBK is my first real exposure to Dostoevsky. they say TBK is crowning achievement. he certainly is very skilled at novel-building... though, I've never read a story where the author addresses the reader in the same way. as if the author is telling you the story over a cup of tea or something: and so this character said this and you should have heard what was going on in that character's head which of course lead to the incredibly unexpected turn of events that I'll get to in the next chapter...
I don't know if that is trademark of only Dostoevsky, or 19th century writers, or Russian novelists... it works well though...
and yes he goes on about religion and the eternal questions of man, etc, which might get a little tedious seeing as how it could easily turn into philosophical drivel, but he has such passion and wit about him (or his characters do, I should say) and that draws me in even further. I don't know if it is my limited understanding of the Russian people, because obviously I've not been there yet and the Russian friends I had in college never sat me down and painted a picture for me, but knowing the history and from the literature I read, it does not seem at all uncommon for Russians to be long-suffering and yet passionate, intellectual and realistic and yet have a profound respect for the mysterious, strong and proud and yet just as eagerly generous and mild.
maybe I read too many novels.
maybe indeed it's just these idealized characters who are like that. well but I'm like that; I have that fugue in me. that is part of my interminable amorphousness, going from one side of the duality to the other, encompassing both extremes, often expressing them both at the same time or in sequence, and since there are of course more than two sides to things (don't know why people tend to think in terms of just duality), actually running the gamut of the entire spectrum, as I strive to express who I am and find out where the truth really lies. fuguing probably only means that when I use the word.
and yes I said maybe I read too many novels. ;) that sounded entirely too dramatic but hopefully you get the idea.
hmmm maybe I could blame it on being pisces or water element. or a Chinese fire dragon. or the fact that I'm both. lots of steam there lol. well I'm being rather silly now...
anyway I can follow these brothers, I know what it's like to talk like that or feel like that (to some extent--- I've never become a monk or fallen in love with the same person as my father!) and so that is one reason that I enjoyed the book.
but the characters are so very real (the men more than the women, but he is a male author and he actually did very well by not overstepping bounds there), the plot is fantastically complicated, the setting is real enough to me although ironically I kept having to remind myself that it was Russia and winter. the side stories or sub-stories are just as interesting and revealing as the main story. one of the reasons the characters are so real is that he worked himself into the story, in a way: the father is also named Fyodor, the servant Paul (Smerdyakov) is epileptic (like Dostoevsky), Dmitry (Mitya) faces hard labor in Siberia (as Dostoevsky actually *did*), Ivan is the realist that Dostoevsky was in his early life, Alexei (Alyosha) is the more religous person that Dostoevsky turned out to be later in life, etc... and the court scene, brief as it is (meaning, only one day? that is truly foreign lol) is ever so much more realistic than some I've read and certainly the outcome is more true (specifically thinking of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, where the plot just magically resolves itself the way the author wanted it to...) bravo all around!
I give it a 5.
it does help *Immensely* to know the history of that period (1890's) because this is the backdrop to the story, since it is a realistic portrayal of the times. you can get by without it, but it wouldn't have meant as much to me that way... I'd have missed too much...
and yes he is rather long-winded about some things, but in an engaging way. I have to quote some passages since I liked them so much:
"What I said was pretty stupid, but..." [Alyosha]
"Yes, that 'but' is just the thing!" Ivan cried. "I want you to know, novice, that absurdity is very much needed on this earth of ours. Indeed, the whole universe is founded on absurdity, and, perhaps, without absurdity there would be nothing at all..." - 293
I tell you, the old doctor who could cure you of every illness has all but vanished and you find nothing but specialists these days, and they even advertise in the newspapers. If you have something the matter with your nose, for instance, they'll send you to Paris, where, they say, is the foremost nose specialist in Europe. So you go to Paris. The specialist looks inside your nose and announces: "Well, all right, I'll take care of your right nostril, but I really don't handle left nostrils; for that you'll have to go to Vienna where there's a great left-nostril specialist. He'll look into it when we've finished here." -771
"But now we are either horrified at what we see or we pretend we are horrified, while in reality we relish the spectacle, as connoiseeurs of strong and ecentric sensations that rouse us from our cynical and lazy apathy; or else we are like little children who wave off frightening apparitions, bury their faces in their pillows, and wait until the frightening phantoms are gone, so that they can quickly forget them in their games and cheerful laughter." -- 836
[this last passage, spoken by the prosecutor, was belittled by the defense... but I think it has a lot of truth in it even today. I don't think it really applied to the case as much as the prosecutor thought, but it strikes me because of a personal issue.... and it is not as simple as that, there are not only the two or three sides to it--- cruelly enjoying the problem, hiding fearfully from the problem, or standing up bravely to the problem---but really people tend to act much like that when faced with a tough situation. blatant, uncaring, indifferent apathy is second only to pretend-everything-is-great denial which is its own kind of apathy because the problem is right there to see and people choose to ignore its existence. actually Doing Something about a problem seems to require a herculean bravado, or that's what people would have you think.]
and I'm sure that's all you want to hear about that.
okay, one more now to lighten the mood again:
"I'd greatly appreciate it, Kartashov, if you'd spare us your asinine remarks when no one has asked your opinion, or, for that matter, is even aware that you exist!" Kolya snapped at the boy, who turned beet-red but did not dare to answer. --- 933
yeah, you were probably thinking something much the same when I started to get up on my soapbox a couple of lines before lol.
again, I liked it... I'd like to study it again later. maybe on subsequent readings I could get a little more scholarly in my remarks/interpretations. but I just wanted to read it innocently at least once.
oh and in the back of the book, you know where the publishers conveniently list other books you can order, they mentioned The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gillman. I read that ages and ages ago, as a short story in the back of my... sophomore year? junior year?... high school literature book. it made quite an impression... at one point I jokingly wrote a story (long gone) involving a ship named The Yellow Wallpaper lol. I have to track down that book and see if I still like it after all this time...
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