Dostoevsky has never been my favorite “Russian giant”of the 19th century.   I enjoyed The Double, disliked The Gambler, and read Crime and Punishment with little enthusiasm.  At 19 I wrote in my diary of Crime and Punishment:  “the most depressing book I’ve ever read.”

This summer I am rereading Crime and Punishment, which seems to be everybody’s favorite Dostoyevsky. I am finding it absorbing but not quite my kind of book. That’s because Raskolnikov, the protagonist, is the most irritating character in Russian literature – no, the most irritating character in all of literature. He is a murderer not by temperament, but by intellectual philosophy.  And it is difficult to identify with or entirely understand that philosophy.

Raskolnikov is neither a Nihilist nor an anarchist. He commits a double murder, intending to kill an exploitive pawnbroker, but also killing her innocent sister, who returns to the apartment before he leaves. In the introduction, David McDuff explores Raskolnikov’s philosophy and lays out the tenets in intellectual language.

Because of his existence on a historical plane as a psycho-social and moral-intellectual type, as a part of the fabric of the time in which he lives, Raskolnikov is able to speak to the collective human reality in all of us.  Just as each person contains a tyrant, a Napoleon (or, in a twentieth-century perspective, a Hitler or a Stalin. so each contains a suffering victim. The tyrant’s crime is punished by that suffering, which alone can redeem it.

Raskolnikov himself is less clear than McDuff, and indeed the philosophy seems to be revised a bit during the course of the book . In one section, Raskolnikov meditates on two kinds of people.  The majority are interchangeable and are there mainly to reproduce. They are punished (unjustly) by jail or torture for their crimes.  Then there are the superior people, the agents of historical change, the extraordinary characters like Julius Caesar and Napoleon (his favorite), who pay for their crimes by personal suffering and guilt. Raskolnikov seems to consider himself one of the latter.

David McDuff’s translation (Penguin) is beautifully-written, lively, fast-paced, and sometimes funny.  The supporting characters are ntriguing and often endearing:  There is Raskolnikov’s lively, often drunk friend, Razumikhin, who lightens up the narrative considerably with his jokes and his insistence on nursing Raskolnikov when he has a full nervous breakdown after the murder. There is also Marmeladov, a good-natured, charming drunk who tells the story in a bar to Raskolnikov of how his alcoholism has ruined his family, and yet he can’t stop drinking. After he dies in an accident, Raskolnikov gives all his money to Marmeladov’s wife and daughters. Then there is his own family, who have come to the city because of his sister’s engagement. His anxious mother, Pulkheria Aleksandrovna , is appalled to see her son living in poverty, and his sister, Dunya, quarrels with him over her decision to marry a pompous older man.  He says he will never see her again if she marries him.

I’m halfway through, and haven’t gotten to the part where Sonya, a prostitute and a devout Chrsitian, accompanies him to Siberia, if I remember correctly.

I’ll write about the second half later. Meanwhile, Happy Summer Reading!