Novel+ Review: Crime and Punishment

            It took me over 27 years to read my first Dostoevsky novel. Literally. The reasons for this delay were multiple.

Reason 1: I’ve just never really connected with The Russkies, just never gotten into Russian history, art, music, film, boxers:

Or lit. No Tolstoy. No Chekov. No Gorky. No Nabokov. One book of Bulgakov’s (Master and Margarita). OK, so I do love me some Lenin:



But... that’s because Lenin’s a bad-a$$.
            Reason 2: I’ve never really ID’d with the people who claim to love Russian literature. This doesn’t mean that I haven’t found such people engaging, interesting, and friend-worthy (you know who you are), merely that I’ve never wanted to become them, like, I’ve never seen the broody, scarf-wearing, smoking, pale guy scoffing at his fellows and said, “Yes! I wan’t to be like him!”

This is the same reason why I previously avoided things like Deleuze, Country Music/Nascar, and Harry Potter. (Recently, I did overcome my Deleuze aversion and am now one of the obnoxious a’holes I previously loathed; don’t expect the same Country Music//Nascar! ‘Arry Potta’, on the other hand...)

So what the he!! happened to me and my prejudices? Well, per usual, a bunch of crap out of my control.

First, a guy gifted me a copy of Crime and Punishment a few months back.

Second, I reread a David Foster Wallace article about Dostoevsky/Joseph Frank (“Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky”).

And third, I started reading Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment for myself.

            What did I find? Humor. Moral seriousness. A willingness to both sympathize and not sympathize with Them That Think They’re Better than the rest of their fellows. Characters so lively I couldn’t forget them if I wanted to (if only I could remember their names!!! Porfiry?!?). A story both well crafted and unwieldy and deeply in touch with the issues of its time.

All of which is to say that in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment I found a novel that was both the kind of novel I love to read and the kind I hope to write. And there’s no higher praise I can give a book.

            I do, however, think C & P could’ve used a solid, like, 200-page edit. Just sayin’...