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Any man who knows his own self worth does not actively want to be a small cog in this world, but how he becomes an individual man cannot be achieved on impulse or by irrational actions. That’s my overall impression of Crime and Punishment by the great Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky. A novel of such immense brevity, that has been reviewed and pondered over countless times. I am but one of thousands of men who have read this treasure and took away something permanent from it.
The protagonist Rodion Raskolnikov is an intelligent and sensitive young man, and his story is testament to what intelligent and sensitive men can do if they are not given the opportunities in life that they truly deserve. Raskolnikov is poor, and it is poor men who are given the hardships by God, left to face the cruel and harsh realities of a world indifferent to their needs. The poor man has to dispense with his naivety and innocence quickly in life.
Raskolnikov’s actions, a brutal murder of an old money lender is in the extreme of course, but as my imagination erupted when reading this tale, dare I say it, I can see why he did it. Forgive me, but in my experiences of facing some harsh realities, there is nothing that even the most morally stoic of men won’t do when pushed to extremes. However, unlike poor Raskolnikov, a situation never arose where such a beast in me emerged, and these brutalities became normalised thoughts. My saving grace was understanding the value of friendship, not in the contemporary superficial sense of course, but in the age old manner of deep rooted, loving friendships, where everything is shared. For Raskolnikov he was left to his own devices, a reluctant lone wolf thanks to his crippling shyness, which allowed this psychotic folly to germinate and become reality.
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“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.” With this quote, you could instantly feel a certain contempt for Raskolnikov, looking upon him as a pompous and bombastic little man, who destroyed a life for his own pleasure. However, from the beginning, I developed an immense empathy for him, because it’s obvious Raskolnikov needed a strong male force to guide him, to make sure he handled his psychological fragility with care, so he could then become the man he so desperately deserved to be. Alas it was this lack of a father figure that inevitably lead to his undoing.
After the murder, Raskolnikov has to become calculating to keep himself from being immediately caught and thrown into prison. This is a crucial time, as my empathy could have easily been snuffed out for him, but Raskolnikov’s natural goodness emerged once more from the miasma, he slowly revealed his crimes to the detective Porfiry Petrovitch, which inventively leads him to come clean and face the consequences.
In the end, Satan’s grip on Raskolnikov’s heart was not as strong as he thought, the entire book was a great tussle between good and evil that lurks within a fragile man’s heart. Satan thankfully did not have the last laugh here. As he serves his sentence in the hellish surroundings of a Siberian prison, his guardian angel Sonya, a prostitute who despite her immoral profession is a good and Godly woman, gives Raskolnikov a strength and contentment that no one else in this world has ever given him before, she is an eternal reminder that by confessing he has done the right thing. His punishment may be harsh, but he sees a light at the end of the tunnel, thanks to the love and loyalty of this radiant seraph.
It was the Devil who created this drama for Raskolnikov, but it was God who gave him the strength to pull himself together. ‘Crime and Punishment’ resides in the upper-echelons of literary greats for a reason, and although there is too much to delve into and dissect in one sitting, it is essentially an exploration of man’s dark impulses, and the consequences, spiritually, psychologically and physically that occur when we act upon them, with the spiritual and psychological consequences far outweighing anything physical.