Book Review! Crime and Punishment

The first time I picked up this book, I was either a junior or senior in high school.  And I loved it.

Of course, I didn’t read the whole thing in high school.  I read the first section, out of more than a handful of sections. This go around, I read the whole thing.  I have several conclusions.

A) This book is not one that a typical high school student will be able to comprehend.  I was a pretty bright teenager, but there was no hope for me to have either the attention span or the life knowledge necessary to actually understand and appreciate the meaning behind a huge part of the book.   Nor would it have been interesting to me– or any other high school student, in my opinion.  Yet, I liked it enough then to put it on my life list of Things to Do: Finish Crime and Punishment.   So I did.

B) After getting through the part that I had read once as a child, I began to realize why I hadn’t finished it.  It was not all that interesting, and frankly Fyodor Dostoevsky is rather long-winded.  And he added a significant amount of unnecessary dialogue.

C) However… the premise of this book IS entirely interesting.  A young student, Raskolnikov, thinks outside of the box.  He writes an article for a magazine that he believes will never be published.  The article is a philosophical theory that there are two kinds of people: the ordinary and the extraordinary.  And he justifies any action performed by the extraordinary, up to and including murder, as a means to an end.  Therefore if an extraordinary thinker were to need to eliminate obstacles before them, it would be right to murder any number of these “obstacles” in order to further the overall path of human kind.   Unfortunately, this student believed himself to possibly be one of the extraordinary.  Yet, could he, himself, justify murder?  Could he commit a crime as heinous as this and remain without guilt upon his conscience?  Pride in himself forced him to find out.

This is a tale of psychological unrest.  Having finally reached the end, I was fascinated by the picture painted of the psyches of the characters involved.  After all, this is a book that examines only the psychological.   I might read it again.  When I’m much, much older.