Book Clubbing with the Samovar Society: Crime & Punishment

We three brave members of The Samovar Society have been meeting this summer to read and discuss Dostoyevsky's classic Crime and Punishment.

Following the novel’s original publication in parts in 1866, we chew over sections with sandwiches and soda at our local eatery.

Right now, we are plunging into the final sections: the double homicide crime has been committed (ax murder of a local senior citizen, a pawn broker, and her younger sister); there is absolutely no doubt who did it (Raskolnikov, the handsome, starving, confused college dropout). Yet questions remain: why did Raskonikov carry out such a cold blooded, heartless, pre-mediated act? Had the poverty and suffering of his fellow St Petersburg neighbors – the impoverished serfs, the child prostitutes, the tubercular women raising families in warren like tenements, the rampant alcoholism of the poor– lead him to rebel against society? Or does Raskonikov just want to see if he is a kind of superman – above the common morality and law of the herd?

What will be his punishment, if any? Are there extenuating circumstances? Will the St. Petersburg police track him down or will Raskolnikov’s conscience be his downfall? Will his downfall actually be his salvation?

Sound familiar? It should. Dostoyevsky's tormented characters, philosophical and moral conundrums, urban angst, and social questions are still with us. Take a look at some of the C&P’s descendants.

Read the shorter, more illustrated version in Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment: a Graphic Novel by Alain Korkos. The story has been moved to our modern era, but otherwise the plot is basically the same. Perhaps a bit more graphic.

Mystery writer Stuart M. Kaminsky has taken the St Petersburg police detective in Crime and Punishment, Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov, and created an entire series of crime novels based on Porfiry – but transposed to 20th/21st century Russia with the detective based in Moscow.

Kaminsky's Inspector Rostnikov novel A Cold Red Sunrise received the 1989 Edgar Award for Best Novel. The series begins with the 1981 publication of Rostnikov's Corpse and has continued for 20 years. The latest is A Whisper to the Living (2010)

Although Dostoevsky is the subject a vast critical commentary, studied and admired by academia, and enormously influential – there has been some that poke a bit of fun at the great man. Nabokov, a fellow Russian, skewered Dostoevsky – that “melodramatic mystic” he called him– in his satirical novel Despair. Even referring to Dostoevsky’s masterpiece, as “Slime & Crime.”

On a more serious note, Coetzee’s historical novel The Master of Petersburg imagines Dostoevsky embroiled with a 19th century Russian revolutionary organization, the People's Vengeance, when he returns to the city to settle the affairs of his recently deceased stepson. The plot thickens from there.

And if you are truly fascinated by the life and times of Dostoevsky, then you can spend some of your time (months probably) with Joseph Franks’ monumental five volume biography: Dostoevsky: the Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1849; Dostoevsky: the Years of ordeal, 1850-1859; Dostoevsky: the Stir of Liberation, 1860-1865; Dostoevsky: the Miraculous Years, 1865-1871, and Dostoevsky: the Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881. Or read the condensed one volume version (2,500 pages reduced to a mere 959 page): Dostoevsky: a Writer in his Time.

Finally, you might like to know what Virginia Woolf thought on the subject of Dostoevsky:

'The novels of Dostoevsky are seething whirlpools, gyrating sandstorms, waterspouts which hiss and boil and suck us in. They are composed purely and wholly of the stuff of the soul. Against our wills we are drawn in, whirled round, blinded, suffocated, and at the same time filled with a giddy rapture. Out of Shakespeare there is no more exciting reading.'

- Karen S.