Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment

One of the most striking facts about the recent Oslo massacre and bombing by an extremist 32-year-old Norwegian was the sheer amount of pre-meditation that went into the grisly act.

There is somehow an unsettling notion that all of these senseless deaths could have been prevented had all the facts been considered ahead of time.

If Dostoevsky were to have written his masterpiece Crime and Punishment in the 21st century, Fyodor Mikhailovich - himself accused of a crime and sent to a firing squad in Siberia - would surely have reversed the plot line of the story. The inspector Porfiry would surely have detected Raskolnikov hours - if not days - before his murder of the old pawnbroker in her St. Petersburg apartment. Instead of Raskolnikov slowly but surely submitting to the guilt and terror of having commited the crime after the fact, he would have surely posted his Nietzschean superman manifesto online -- and maybe even tweeted about it -- a few hours beforehand. Without a single violent act being committed, the police authorities would have initiated his arrest and put his eventual Siberian exile into motion. But at what cost to the moral fabric of society?

The “man of action” is straightforward and goes after what he desires. People envy him

for this simple reason. I found out there is a good side and a bad side to being a man of action by studying the life of Mr. Razumikhin. He is the idea of the man of action come to life and provides the perfect study in the pros and cons of leading such a straightforward lifestyle.

Porfiry is the attorney investigating the murders of Alyona and Lizaveta, and is a bit of a mystery. We don't really know him outside of his professional capacity. He's related to Razumihin, but that doesn't give us much to go on as far as his character is concerned.

In Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky uses the character of Sonia Marmeladov, whose first name means wisdom, not solely to illustrate God's mercy toward a fallen woman but to have her redeem both herself and Raskolnikov through God's mercy.

He shows us that even the lowliest of the lowly lost are loved by the Father, and by their sufferings gain merit.

But the capacity to enjoy is impossible without the capacity to suffer; and the faculty of enjoyment is one with that of pain. Whosoever does not suffer does not enjoy, just as whosoever is insensible to cold is insensible to heat.

Not by way of reason, but only by way of love and suffering, do we come to the living God, the human God.

[Raskolnikov] had to tell her [Sonia] who had killed Lizaveta. He knew the terrible suffering it would be to him and, as it were, brushed away the thought of it. (5.4.1) Raskolnikov knows that confessing, the act of speaking his crimes, causes him to suffer – yet, he can't stop doing it. He needs to tell. The suffering of telling is less than the suffering of not telling.

[Raskolnikov:] "They say it is necessary for me to suffer! What's the object of these senseless sufferings? Shall I know any better what they are for, when I am crushed by hardships and idiocy, and weak as an old man after twenty years' penal servitude?" (6.8.75) Here Raskolnikov is questioning the high premium everybody places on suffering as he debates whether or not to turn himself in, and submit to prison. Also notice that he thinks he'll get at least twenty years in prison, but he only gets eight.

“Moral Skepticism” names a diverse collection of views that deny or raise doubts about various roles of reason in morality. Different versions of moral skepticism deny or doubt moral knowledge, justified moral belief, moral truth, moral facts or properties, and reasons to be moral.

Alienation is a powerful feeling of isolation and loneliness, and stems from a variety of causes. Alienation may occur in response to certain events or situations in society or in one's personal life. Examples of events that may lead to an individual's feeling of alienation include the loss of a charismatic group leader, or the discovery that a person who served as a role model has serious shortcomings.

The best example of this is that its lead character, Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov, is not a realistic villain, but an archetype- and really a symbol. The sound of his name connotes his being a rascal or rapscallion, and in Russian raskolnik even means to be divided, or schismatic. His swings between guilt and mendacious evil are better seen as devices serving the drama of the narrative than as any true portrait of a sociopath- be it a modern serial killer, a gangster, or any other form.

Crime and Punishment also portrays the dilemma of the Russian intellectual in the nineteenth-century. Dostoyevsky shows how Raskolnikov is corrupted by moral scepticism. The novel exposes the bankruptcy of intellectual or ideological arguments which lack moral concern or compassion.

Existentialism was a philosophy born out of the Angst of post-war Europe, out of a loss of faith in the ideals of progress, reason and science which had led to Dresden and Auschwitz. If not only God, but reason and objective value are dead, then man is abandoned in an absurd and alien world. The philosophy for man in this “age of distress” must be a subjective, personal one. A person’s remaining hope is to return to his “inner self”, and to live in whatever ways he feels are true to that self. The hero for this age, the existentialist hero, lives totally free from the constraints of discredited traditions, and commits himself unreservedly to the demands of his inner, authentic being.

An odd lost day. I see no sense in it. It reveals nothing, not a single sign. The spies are sleeping, mouths full of water. Winter has come, so much like fall, and things are as fruit after the frostthrown against the ground. Winter has come, so much like fall. Wheels slip right onto axles, as they did Long ago, but where are they rolling to?