Crime and Punishment

 Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Constance Garnett, 484 pages

"...a fantastic, gloomy business, a modern case, an incident of to-day when the heart of man is troubled, when the phrase is quoted that 'blood renews,' when comfort is preached as the aim of life.  Here we have bookish dreams, a heart unhinged by theories.  Here we see resolution in the first stage, but resolution of a special kind: he resolved to do it like jumping over a precipice or from a bell tower and his legs shook as he went to the crime."

It is difficult to imagine a better description of Crime and Punishment than that which Dostoevsky offers through the voice of one of his own characters, especially as the form - a prolonged monologue - is how much of the novel's action unfolds.  Raskolnikov is a failed student languishing in late nineteenth century St Petersburg, possessed by the notion that he can, by a single decisive act, break totally with the past and enter a realm of absolute freedom.  What he slowly and painfully discovers is that that realm is found in an entirely different direction, at the end of a radically different path, than he imagined.

It is difficult to say anything new about Crime and Punishment.  Obviously, it is not for everyone.  It is dreary and disorienting and merciless towards the reader.  Just as obviously, it is a work of genius, an incredible artistic achievement as well as an antidote to much of the existentialist sophistry that followed in its wake.