Comment by stevenwoo
17 hours ago
One thing is a lot of common television/movie tropes are instantly recognizable in one form or another in there, the murder in Crime and Punishment is a series of coincidences and lucky timing for him to initially get away with it that would not be out of place in modern thriller or comedy. I had the same issue with the names so I took notes and bookmarked the Wikipedia page for the books to refresh my memory of whom was whom until it stuck. Audiobooks (most of the russian classics are free from my local library)help a lot with the pronunciation if one is like the writer and pattern matches names - hearing them a few times initially is very helpful. Side note - not a sea person but only from audiobooks learned i didn’t know how to pronounce English words boatswain, gunwale and forecastle.
What disginguishes Dostoevsky is his attention to detail and this unusual ability to describe someone inside and out with a voice that finds some sort of intrinsic fascination with the person no matter how dark, dingy, flawed, or just plain strange they are. It's like he withholds judgement without being clinical. His writing is peppered with these sketches, filled with insight, and it's not just a still-life - he manages to weave in these character studies with action and interaction. Most of us look out and see a lawn, boring and inert. He looks out and sees a lawn comprised of individual blades of grass, growing in soil of a specific kind, some weeds, cut some time ago, insects striving and fighting and dying and reproducing, the effects of weather and sun and shade making microclimates from which whole communities of life escape from or to....if there is anything to learn from him it is his gorgeous attention to details that we know are there but have long since ceased bothering to note.
Awareness. He learned it when he was (as he thought) about to be executed.
As he wrote to his brother the same day:
"When I look back into the past and think how much time has been wasted, how much of it wasted in delusions, mistakes, idleness, in the inability to live; how little I cherished it, how many times I sinned against my heart and my soul — my heart bleeds. Life is a gift, life is happiness, every minute could have been a century of happiness. Si jeunesse savait!"
Crime and Punishment is a bona fide detective story / crime novel, and can be enjoyed as such.
One of my professors, so long ago that I can't remember which*, said it was not a who-dun-it but a why-dun-it.
The murder scene is so vivid that it's easy to forget how the long middle of the novel is the cat-and-mouse game between him and the detective whose name I forget.
* I think I remembered. Thank you Roman! https://www.dignitymemorial.com/en-ca/obituaries/calgary-ab/...
Porfiry Petrovich