If someone had asked me, a month, ago, whether I'd read Crime and Punishment, I'd have sworn up, down, sideways, and seven ways from Sunday that I had done so. And I would confidently have specified the date: during the early 1950s, when anyone who read anything at all knew that "existence preceded essence" and that the grandfather of existentialism was Fyodor Dostoevsky. Who, in those days, would have confessed to ignorance about Raskolnikov, his heady jumbled philosophy, the murder, the remorse? We were all striving to be Alienated Youth, and Raskolnikov was the king of alienation -- a hundred times more alienated than the runner-up, James Dean.
I've just finished reading Crime and Punishment, and I have a confession to make. I didn't remember the plot, the characters, or the outcome. Not the picture of louche, impoverished, oppressive St. Petersburg. Nothing except the mellifluous name: Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov. Come to think of it, I didn't remember the Rodion or the Romanovich either. Just the Raskolnikov part.
Did I read the novel back there in the fifties? If I did, is my memory now so flimsy and porous that I've lost everything? Did I pretend to have read the novel? Or was it so much spoken of that I absorbed it without effort. Whatever the facts, I certainly managed to fool myself.
Crime and Punishment is an exceedingly vivid piece of writing. I think that the trampling of Marmeladov and the suicide of Svidraigalov are such brilliantly written scenes that they could not possibly slip my mind. How could I lose track of the pathetic waif Sonya, her dreadful occuption, or her lunatic stepmother? The grand generous gestures, the poverty, the overwrought emotions, the flaunting of propriety.
It's a thrilling, iconoclastic novel -- painful, and not fun for the morally squeamish. It's absolutely unforgettable.
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