title: Crime and Punishment by: Dostoyevsky, Fyodor published: 1866 read: 2022-03 preview

You may know that the book is about a student in Petersburg who decides to kill someone, and that happens to lead to two killings. But that is only the entourage of the story: I won’t spoil it for you. That’s anyway not so important, but it is in line with the reason for the murders. He is a literature, philosophy, politics student, and wants to prove a point about right and wrong, about good and bad. How bad is not always bad, and some people are “above the law”, almost. The current war is a good point in case, actually. Good and bad is relative, depending on who you are.

I am tempted to say, the book is very Russian; shows a lot about Russian culture (back then). Who am I to judge, of course, having only been in Petersburg for a few days and not knowing the country at all! Then again, of course, by definition the book is that.

I enjoyed reading it, or more, I enjoyed having read it. Sometimes a bit too despondent; the women a bit too literary, too similar: self-sacrifice, suffering, yet strong. Very gender-structured. Not bad, but also a bit dimensionless from a 1.5 century later standpoint. (Am I allowed to criticise such an author? Probably no.) Of course, the main protagonist of the novel, Raskolnikov, also demonstrates well that life is not a picnic.

But the book made me more interested in the background of the story, and of course of the author. So the recent book Kevin Birmingham, The sinner and the saint came in handy.