Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment

Dostoevsky depicts social issues, especially the problem of murder, through an image of people who go through pain. He presents a graphical experience of ones who do not know how to deal with humanity and its problems. Dostoevsky himself does not give a clear solution nor does he leave one with the certainty of faith for an example.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.