Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I first read Crime and Punishment a decade ago as an impressionable young man, and to put it quite bluntly, I hated it. At first I blamed the translation for being as dry and unlively as a cheap vodka, and I was annoyed by the constant use of 'scrivener.' However, subsequent research has shown that it was in fact the very same David McDuff translation as my new volume. What's more, on the reread there was no sign of 'scrivener' anywhere. Whether through some drastic revisions to the text, the vagaries of memory, the inexorable changes wrought upon taste over time, or a combination of the three, my opinion has been altered and I now agree with the plaudits placing it as one of the finest works of literature. The novel follows Raskolnikov, a destitute ex student who commits a premeditated murder and robbery in a state of feverish and depressive mania. I found myself unconscionably drawn along by Raskolnikov's pseudo-intellectual motivations behind the crime, he likens his pawnbroker victim to a loathsome old parasitic louse and himself as a Napoleon where all things are permitted. His subsequent remorse, which also becomes the reader's, is masterfully and naturally developed by Dostoyevsky over the course of the book as he comes face to face with his own cowardice and wretchedness. 

The world of 1860s St Petersburg is compellingly, if grotesquely realised as a heaving, immoral metropolis reeking of suffocating slaked lime, where the stink of drinking dens spills out onto thoroughfares crowded by ragged, half-crazed people, bawdy street performers, drunken child prostitutes, and the men that prey upon them. This dystopian environment, redolent of a Hieronymus Bosch hellscape, coupled with the radical political mindset then in fashion amongst the intellegentsia, creates a perfect backdrop for the events of the novel. It is easy to be bludgeoned into despair by the sheer morbidity of the plot and the extreme poverty of its characters, so much so that one can overlook its darkly comic elements, a mistake I made in my first reading. The shambolic funeral feast towards the end of the book is a brilliant example of squalid absurdism that devolves into an hysterical denouement. Villains such as the devious and controlling Luzhin is as realistic as any modern day social swindler, whilst the ghoulish Svidrigailov operates on the other side of the spectrum as a larger-than-life lecher and paedophile. My nightly readings of the book became highly anticipated occasions, but there is not space in this review to highlight everything I loved about it and why it has become my most radical literary u-turn to date.

Rating: 4/5