|
Crime and Punishment (Преступление и наказание) is a novel written in 1866 by Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Along with War and Peace, this novel is amongst the best known and most influential Russian novels of all time. The novel gives expression to Dostoevsky's existentialist views.
The novel portrays the carefully planned murder of a miserly, aged pawnbroker by a destitute Saint Petersburg student named Raskolnikov, followed by the emotional, mental, and physical effects of that action.
After falling ill with fever and lying bedridden for days, Raskolnikov is overcome with paranoia and begins to imagine that everyone he meets suspects him of the murder; the knowledge of his crime eventually drives him mad. Along the way, however, he meets the prostitute Sofya Semyonovna, with whom he falls in love. Dostoevsky uses this relationship as an allegory of God's love for fallen humanity, and that love's redemptive power: but only after Raskolnikov has confessed to the murder and been sent to imprisonment in Siberia.
Apart from Raskolnikov's fate, the novel, with its long and diverse list of characters, deals with themes including charity, family life, atheism, alcoholism, and Russian revolutionary activity, with Dostoevsky highly critical of contemporary Russian society. Although Dostoevsky rejected socialism, the novel also appears to be critical of the capitalism that was making its way into Russian society at that time.
Raskolnikov believed that he was a "superhuman," that he could justifiably perform a scrofulous act—the killing of the money lender—if it led to him being able to do a lot of good. Throughout the book there are examples: he mentions Napoleon many times, thinking that for all the blood he spilled, he did good. Raskolnikov believed that he could transcend this moral boundary by killing the money lender, gaining her money, and using it to do good. He argued that had Newton or Galileo had to kill one or even a hundred men in order to enlighten humanity with their laws and ideas, it would be worth it.
Raskolnikov's real punishment is not the labour camp he is condemmed to, but the torment he endures throughout the novel. This torment manifests itself in the aforementioned paranoia, as well as his progressive belief that he is not a "superhuman", as he could not cope with what he had done.
See also: Russian literature
Movie versions
There have been literally dozens of film adaptions of the novel. Some of the best-known are:
- Crime and Punishment (1935, starring Peter Lorre, Edward Arnold and Marian Marsh)
- Преступление и наказание (USSR, 1969, starring Georgi Taratorkin, Tatyana Bedova, Victoria Fyodorova) [1] (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064839/)
- Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment (1998, a TV movie starring Patrick Dempsey, Ben Kingsley and Julie Delpy)
- Crime and Punishment in Suburbia (2000, an adaptation set in modern America and "loosely based" on the novel)
- Crime and Punishment (2002, starring Crispin Glover, Vanessa Redgrave and John Hurt)
- El Maquinista (2004, English Title The Machinist, starring Christian Bale, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Aitana Sánchez-Gijón)
External links
|
