The Books: “Crime and Punishment” (Fyodor Dostoevsky)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

Crime and Punishment – by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

As per usual, I always get a little bit nervous when I realize that one of my favorite books is next on the shelf. How to talk about it? Without, like, sounding, uhm, stupid and, like, inarticulate? How can I discuss Crime and Punishment in any normal way? How can I not just SHOUT: “THIS BOOK FREAKIN’ ROCKS.” Which it does. I’ve written before – if you have any curiosity at all about the criminal mind, about psychopaths and sociopaths – and what it is actually like to be them … then you really have got to read the book. No “crime library” is complete without it. It’s like an excavation of a human mind. Or … surgery or something. Surgery on someone’s psyche. I never get over this book. And I’ve read it a couple times – it’s a workout, to read – I have to gear up for it. And each time I read it, I find myself getting caught up in it – and caught up in Dostoevsky’s brilliant trap: I do not want Raskolnikov to succeed. Because he is planning a senseless murder and you can soooo feel his madness in how Dostoevsky methodically and painstakingly describes his thought process. I don’t want him to succeed – and yet I feel for him. Tremendously. And when the investigation begins – when the “punishment’ phase begins … and the inspectors are starting to narrow in on Raskolnikov – I have an odd feeling of urgency and nervousness. Like, in spite of the fact that I know he should be caught … I am somehow on “his side”. (Really good thriller movies do that, too – if they have an awesome villain. Even if you hate the villain’s actions, somehow you find yourself on the villain’s side).

And as far as I’m concerned – the ending of the book – and how it all comes out – the possibility of redemption – is one of the most difficult and healing things about it. It elevates it. From a great crime story (THE great crime story) to a work of almost divine healing energy. I remember the first time I read it – and it was years ago – and the ending made me want to cry – I got this hot sensation in my throat, my eyes burned – it was such a painful glimpse: yet beautiful too. Evil burning itself out. If there is a chance for Raskolnikov to be forgiven … then we all have a chance. Dostoevsky (as always) does not take the easy way out.

And there is a reason that I was “rooting” for Raskolnikov – in that weird uncomfortable way. Because he is redeemable. We are all redeemable. Dostoevsky wrote from the dregs of the earth, he wrote from within the muck – the forgotten throngs – the bitter aggrieved Travis Bickles of the world. What does it do to someone’s psyche – to someone’s outlook – to be hated and scorned from the day you are born? To have no chance? Dostoevsky doesn’t let society off the hook, of course. That’s one of his main points. But he also doesn’t hang it all up on society. Raskolnikov is mad. He must be punished. And he will be.

But then what??

Dostoevsky is one of our greatest and most human writers – because to him, he always asks: Then what????

This book shows that there is an undeniable logic in madness. And that there are no easy answers.

Here’s the frenzied part of the book where Raskolnikov is trying to keep to his plan. And that’s the thing: I read this, and part of my brain disconnects from it … observing: “Wow. He so shouldn’t go thru with this.” But then another part of my brain is thinking, along with Raskolnikov: “He has to get GOING! He can’t be late!!!!” Meaning: late for the murder. I am implicated by the book, because it makes me think such things as: “He can’t be late for the murder!!!” That’s the genius of it.

Note the kind of creepy omniscent narrator inserting itself here and there. “We may note, in passing …” You can tell that even though Raskolnikov is in the full frenzy of his murderous impulse … the writing itself is looking back on it. It FEELS like a crime report, is basically what I’m trying to say.

There’s an arrogance in Raskolnikov. The arrogance of madness and a feeling of superiority. Reminds me of Leopold & Loeb … how they truly felt they were ABOVE being caught … they were “supermen” … they would be able to murder someone and first of all, have no emotional response to the murder – and also, to be so smart, smarter than other criminals who were just MORONS – and never be caught. But then, ha ha, frickin’ Leopold leaves his GLASSES at the crime scene. Because, wow, whaddya know … you DO get panicked when you murder someone, you DO have an emotional response to killling … and you DO get discombobbled. And of course, the glasses were found … and led the investigators right to Leopold’s door.

But it was the arrogance, in the first place … the belief that there was such a thing as a “perfect crime” …

Raskolnikov, below, seems to believe that at some point – his calculations and his planning will stop … and he will then move forward, inevitably, still himself, still with his brain working – and go and do the deed. He fears thoughtlessness, he fears the frenzy of murder – because that’s when criminals get sloppy. But – to his horror – he finds that he cannot stop the obsessive planning, and going over and over and over all the probabilities in his mind beforehand … That he keeps thinking and planning … and he wonders if it will ever stop … and if he will not only be able to go thru with it, but believe in it beforehand ….

Brilliant psychological observations. The need of criminals and psychopaths to believe they are smarter than ordinary mortals … that they are above certain things. So when the house of cards start tumbling – the sense of inferiority is enraging – way more than it would be to a regular person who knows he is NOT a “superman intellect”.

EXCERPT FROM
Crime and Punishment – by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

He still had the most important thing to do – to steal the axe from the kitchen. That the deed must be done with an axe he had decided long ago. He had also a pocket pruning-knife, but he could not rely on the knife and still less on his own strength, and so resolved finally on the axe. We may note, in passing, one peculiarity in regard to all the final resolutions taken by him in the matter; they had one strange characteristic; the more final they were, the more hideous and the more absurd they at once became in his eyes. In spite of all his agonising inward struggle, he never for a single instant all that time could believe in the carrying out of his plans.

And, indeed, if it had ever happened that everything to the least point could have been considered and finally settled, and no uncertainty of any kind had remained, he would, it seems, have renounced it all as something absurd, monstrous and impossible. But a whole mass of unsettled points and uncertainties remained. As for getting the axe, that trifling business cost him no anxiety, for nothing could be easier. Nastasya was continually out of the house, especially in the evenings; she would run in to the neighbours or to a shop, and always left the door ajar. It was the one thing that landlady was always scolding her about. And so, when the time came, he would only have to go quietly into the kitchen and take the axe, and an hour later (when everything was over) go in and put it back again. But there were doubtful points. Supposing he returned an hour later to put it back, and Nastasya had come back and was on the spot. He would of course have to go by and wait till she went out again. But supposing she were in the meantime to miss the axe, look for it, make any outcry – that would mean suspicion or at least grounds for suspicion.

But those were all trifles which he had not even begun to consider, and indeed he had no time. He was th inking of the chief point, and put off trifling details, until he could believe in it all. But that seemed utterly unattainable. So it seemed to himself at least. He could not imagine, for instance, that he would sometimes leave off thinking, get up and simply go there … Even his late experiment (i.e., his visit with the object of a final survey of the place) was simply an attempt at an experiment, far from being the real thing, as though one should say, “Come, let us go and try it – why dream about it?” – and at once he had broken down and had run away cursing, in a frenzy with himself. Meanwhile it would seem, as regards the moral question, that his analysis was complete; his casuistry had become keen as a rzor, and he could not find rational objections in himself, and doggedly, slavishly sought arguments in all directions, fumbling for them, as though someone were forcing and drawing him to it.

At first – long before indeed – he had been much occupied with one question; why almost all crimes are so badly concealed and so easily detected, and why almost all criminals leave such obvious traces? He had come gradfually to many different and curious conclusions, and in his opinion the chief reason lay not so much in the material impoosibility of concealing the crime as in the criminal himself. Almost every criminal is subject to a failure of will and reasoning power by a childish and phenomenal heedlessness, at the very instant when prudence and caution are most essential. It was his conviction that this eclipse of reason and failure of will-power attacked a man like a disease developed gradually and reached its highest point just before the perpetration of the crime and for longer or shorter time after, according to the individual case, and then passed off like any other disease. The quetions whether the disease gives rise to the crime, or whether the crime from its own peculiar nature is always accompanied by something of the nature of disease, he did not yet feel able to decide.

When he reached these conclusions, he decided hat in his own case there could not be such a morbid reaction, that his reason and will would remain unimpaired at the time of carrying out his design, for the single reason that his design was “not a crime ….” We will omit all the process by means of which he arrived at this last conclusion; we have run too far ahead already … We may add only that the practical, purely material difficulties of the affair occupied a secondary position in his mind. “One has but to keep all one’s will-power and reason to deal wtih them, and they will all be overcome at the time when once one has familiarised oneself with the minutest details of the business …” But this preparation had never been begun. His final decisions were what he came to trust least, and when the hour struck, it all came to pass quite differently, as it were accidentally and unexpectedly.

One trifling circumstance upset his calculations before he had even left the staircase. When he reached the landlady’s kitchen, the door of which was open as usual, he glanced cautiously in to see whether, in Nastasya’s absence, the landlady herself was there, or if not, whether the door to her own room was closed, so that she might not peep out when he went in for the axe. But what was his amazement when he suddenly saw that Nastasya was not only at home in the kitchen, but was occupied there, taking linen out of a basket and hanging it on a line. Seeing him, she left off hanging the clothes, turned to him and stared at him all the time he was passing. He He turned away his eyes, and walked past as though he noticed nothing. But it was the end of everything; he had not the axe! He was overwhelmed.

“What made me think,” he reflected, as he went under the gateway. “What made me think that she would be sure not to be at home at that moment? Why, why, why did I assume this so certainly?”

He was crushed and even humiliated. He could have laughed at himself in his anger … A dull animal rage boiled within him.

He stood hesitating in the gateway. To go into the street, to go a walk for appearance’ sake was revolting; to go back to his room, even more revolting. “And what a chance I have lost for ever!” he muttered, standing aimlessly in the gateway, just opposite the porter’s little dark room, which was also open. Suddenly he strated. From the porter’s room, two paces away from him, something shining under the bench to the right caught his eyes … He looked about him – nobody. He approached the room on tiptoe, went down two steps into it and in a faint voice called the porter. “Yes, not at home! Somewhere near though, in the yard, for the door is wide open.” He dashed to the axe (it was an axe) and pulled it out from under the bench, where it lay between two chunks of wood; at once, before going out, he made it fast in the noose, he thrust both hands into his pockets and went out of the room; no one had noticed him! “When reason fails, the devil helps!” he thought with a strange grin. This chance raised his spirits extraordinarily.

He walked along quietly and sedately, without hurry, to avoid awakening suspicion. He scarcely looked at the passersby, tried to escape looking at their faces at all, and to be as little noticeable as possible. Suddenly he thought of his hat. “Good heavens! I had th emoney the day before yesterday and did not get a cap to wear instead!” A curse rose from the bottom of his soul.

Glancing out of the corner of his eye into a shop, he saw by a clock on the wall that it was ten minutes past seven. He had to make haste and at the same time to go some way round, so as to approach the house from the other side …

When he had happened to imagine all this beforehand, he had sometimes thought that he would be very much afraid. But he was not very much afraid now, was not afraid at all, indeed. His mind was even occupied by irrelevant matters, but by nothing for long. As he passed the Yusupov garden, he was deeply absorbed in considering the building of great fountains, and of their refreshing effect on the atmosphere in all the squares. By degrees he passed to the conviction that if the summer garden were extended to the field of Mars, and perhaps joined to the garden of the Mihailovsky Palace, it would be a splendid thing and a great benefit to the town. Then he was interested in the question why in all great towns men are not simply driven by necessity, but in some peculiar way inclined to live in those parts of the town where there are no gardens nor fountains; where there are most dirt and smell and all sorts of nastiness. Then his own walks through the Hay Market came back to his mind, and for a moment he waked up to reality. “What nonsense!” he thought, “better to think of nothing at all!”