On Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I've read plenty of 'essential' works of literature, some even very old Russian ones that made me think and also moved me to my core. The greatest novels achieve both, they reach you through the mind and the heart. One of those novels was Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground. Another was Tolstoy's The Life and Death of Ivan Illyich. Crime and Punishment did the former, but not the latter. 

Why is it important for a work of literature to make you think and move you at the same time? Because there are aspects of life that we understand with our heads, and aspects of life that we can only understand viscerally, in our gut. The things we understand with our hearts are undeniably more true to life's experience, and therefore more meaningful. Crime and Punishment is a plodding episodic psychological novel filled with Russian formality, stilted dialogue and repressed melodrama but virtually no action except the initial crime. Raskolnikov's murder of a pawnbroker is coldblooded and impulsive, a desperate act that appears to be utterly ill-fated from the outset. The act strikes you as being so obviously misguided and out of the blue, which is perplexing since the perpetrator is a law student and portrayed initially as thoughtful and caring. I suppose this speaks to how desperate he is to rid himself of the guilt of feeling responsible for the support of his mother and sister who have sacrificed for his chance at success. But besides always being 'in a fever', the novel didn't succeed for me in conveying his desperation with any kind of emotional authenticity. The rest of the novel focuses largely on Raskolnikov's descent into madness, which my translation refers to as 'monomania' (a type manic single-mindedness according to my dictionary) and his making pronouncements of self-justification, which didn't seem very convincing to me. Yes, the novel raises some interesting questions, most famously, if, in the absence of God, moral determinants can reside solely in personal choice ("To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.") About half way through there's an intriguing cat and mouse game between Raskolnikov and the principle police investigator who is a compelling chap with an oddly appealing demeanor. But most of the time the novel is a series of linked set pieces in which the characters confront each other and relate in awkward ways - my mind kept imagining the way actors in silent movies acted. One particularly painful (in the sense of weirdly awkward) scene has Raskolnikov confessing his crime to Sonya, a young girl who turned to prostitution to support her family. There is an uncomfortable pedophilic undercurrent to their exchange, even as she is meant to be Raskolnikov's confessor. Ultimately art has to make you care, after all, that's what it's for, and in a story this means to care for the protagonist and his dilemma. The problem with Raskolnikov is that he is so unrepentant for his actions, there is no dilemma, he just seems frantic, so the reader is kept at a distance. If you don't care about the characters because they all seem like stand-ins for philosophy and social commentary ie. a sister forced by circumstance to marry an unscrupulous rich man, the drunkard who leaves his family destitute, the impoverished daughter who must turn to prostitution etc. you are left feeling in the end like finishing the novel was akin to doing your homework - at least you can say you've done the job. I must say though, Dostoevesky really nails what I'm talking about in the novel's Epilogue when an imprisoned Raskolnikov finally begins to see the light: "Life had stepped into the place of theory and something quite different would work itself out in his mind." Now that would be a novel I'd like to read, but alas, as he says in the very last lines, that's the subject of another story.