I’m interested to know if this novel is the precursor to genre books, specifically crime and noir novels. There are a lot of tropes here: hooker with the heart of gold, damsels pulling guns, dark and stormy nights, crime (obviously), and a sly and perhaps corrupt detective.

At least the style of pages and pages and full chapters of monologues never really caught on. While fascinating, it can be tedious to.

I love how even in 1866 everyone knew tobacco was bad for you and made you sick. Even in Tolstoy’s ‘The Cossacks’, the Cossacks themselves hated smoking and wouldn’t allow it in their huts and they complained about Russian officers who all stank up the place.

I’m glad I don’t smoke anymore but if I were Raskolnikov, I’d start. Everyone knows his secret. He will unravel and everyone knows it.

Dostoyevsky must have had intimate knowledge with death because the way he can kill off a character is almost a little too real.

This far in and I’m still struggling with exactly what I should wrap my brain around. The novel is far too literary to be taking literal, so what specific themes should I be focusing on? Damnation? Guilt? Suspicion and paranoia? Crime and/or punishment?

“… they can’t convict a man on what they have against me.”

I wonder how many soviets read this without any irony?

The funeral dinner and the 100 Ruble note was a comedy and tragedy all rolled into one without ever once being funny or sad. Dostoyevsky would have been onto something truly great had he given his characters more dimension. The allegation of theft for the 100 rubles was quite wonderful, however.

Dostoyevsky is at his best when he sets his characters to oppose each other in a cat and mouse game. The interrogation, for example, was actually fun to read.

But when he sets out to moralize and preach, when he’s not being suspicious but rather ‘in control’, he becomes rather dull.

Then again, perhaps that is the entire point. Madness is more fun than the social norms, at least for the madman anyway.

What sets Tolstoy apart from Dostoyevsky is that Tolstoy didn’t ever have to force his stories to go in the direction he wanted. Intellectual, philosophical, historical and social discussions arose naturally and as part of the narrative (except during the narration of War and Peace).

Here, however, we have a very ‘modern’ novel with lots to say and not enough art to always say it. It’s not bad, but it’s unnatural

What if the after-life is nothing more than a single, cramped, dirty room filled with spiders?

Raskolnikov has got to be dead and he’s reliving his life as a hell, right?

I mean, who else has all these people just walking into his room cramped, dirty room and telling them about the after-life?

St. Petersburg must have some bad parts of town, but this is just out of the question a bad part. It’s Dante bad.

I’m probably wrong, but there is a sense I keep getting that none of the characters in the book (other than Raskolnikov) are real. It feels like all these people inhabit his deranged mind somehow.

And there’s something about the landlord, like she’s a demon that’s always watching him but just out of sight. It’s creepy.

At times it’s downright uncomfortable to read this book. It’s amazing like that.

It’s unsettling to think that a person who does us a good deed could also be someone who recently split open the skull of an old Jewish pawnbroker with an ax.

Worse still, how would we know if we are mad enough to do it ourselves? Could at any moment we become obsessed with the thought of a terrible crime and then do it?

I wonder if this is what death row inmates think about?

There’s a great expressionist painting from 1912 by the German Erich Heckel called ‘Two Men At A Table’. While the painting has nothing to do with the events of the novel, it does capture the claustrophobia of delusion that’s the theme of the novel.

Everything is in disorientation. The city is hot and stinking even at night. Every room is cramped and workmen clean blood stains from the floor.

Terrifying.

One of my favorite novels is Dos Passos’ ‘Manhattan Transfer’. That book was structured very much like (then) modern art – it was disjointed, characters melted in and out of the story, there was not a single, strong narrative but rather a mood to the story. It was jazz.

This book feels like the first notes of that modern movement. This could almost be a stage play too; it’s hardly a novel.

It’s engrossing.

I’ve never been more disturbed by reading a passage in a book than the beating of the horse.

Once I began to realize the we are seeing the world through the eyes and mind of someone slowly becoming more deranged and delusional did I manage to get a grasp of how to approach this book.

The shifts in time are interesting too as parts of this read like a later confession; nicely disorienting.

Dostoevsky’s ability to create a wonderful set of characters is impressive. Almost as impressive as how he’s able to be so incredibly depressing.

I’m not sure even I’ll be able to get through this.

Maybe once I figure out what the hell is going on and where the story is going.

But the characters sure are good.