In the Wilderness. Sigrid Undset. Daniel Deronda. The Rainbow. Martin Chuzzlewit. The Poor Clare. Elizabeth Gaskell. The Lion in Winter. James Goldman. Washington Square. Les Miserables.
The Scarlet Letter. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Lord of the Flies: Casebook Edition. William Golding. Prague Stories. Lawrence Durrell. Great Expectations Movie Tie-In. Related Articles. Everyone became anxious, and no one understood anyone else; each thought the truth was contained in himself alone, and suffered looking at others, beat his breast, wept, and wrung his hands.
They did not know whom or how to judge, could not agree on what to regard as evil, what as good. They did not know whom to accuse, whom to vindicate. What is this passage doing there, a few pages before the novel concludes? Recall what leads up to the dream. Petersburg and depends on handouts from his mother and sister. Is it really money that he wants? His motives are less mercenary than, one might say, experimental.
Great men like Napoleon, he believes, commit all sorts of crimes in their ascent to power; once they have attained eminence, they are hailed as benefactors to mankind, and no one holds them responsible for their early deeds. Could he be such a man? In the days after the crime, Raskolnikov vacillates between exhilaration and fits of guilty behavior, spilling his soul in dreams and hallucinations.
As she waits for him in a nearby village, he falls ill and has that feverish dream. For us, the dream poses a teasing question: Is it just a morbidly eccentric summation of the novel, or is it also an unwitting prediction of where we are going? Dostoyevsky was a genius obsessed with social disintegration in his own time. I took the course again in , writing a long report on the experience. In the fall of , at the border of old age—I was seventy-six—I began taking it for the third time, and for entirely selfish reasons.
The students had arrived in New York the previous fall from a wide range of places and backgrounds, and now they had returned to them, scattering across the country, and the globe—to the Bronx, to Charlottesville, to southern Florida, to Sacramento, to Shanghai. My wife and I stayed where we were, in our apartment, a couple of subway stops south of the university, sequestered, empty of purpose, waiting for something to happen. I loitered in the kitchen in front of a small TV screen, like a supplicant awaiting favor from his sovereign.
Ritual, the religious say, expresses spiritual necessity. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, instead of making my way across College Walk and up the stairs to a seminar room in Hamilton Hall, I logged on to our class from home.
The greetings at the beginning of each class were like sighs—not defeated, exactly, but wan. Professor Dames is a compact man in his late forties, with dark, deep-set eyes and a touch of dark mustache and dark beard around the edge of his jaw. He has been teaching Lit Hum, on and off, for two decades. At the beginning of the class, his face shadowed by two glaring windows on either side of him, he would struggle for a moment with Zoom.
But his voice broke through the murk. Nick Dames led the students through close readings of individual passages, linking them back, by the end of class, to the structure of the entire book. He is also a historicist, and has done extensive work on the social background of literature. He wanted us to know that nineteenth-century Petersburg—which Dostoyevsky miraculously rendered both as a real city and as a malevolent fantasy—was an impressive disaster.
SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook. Summary Read our full plot summary and analysis of Crime and Punishment , scene by scene break-downs, and more. Characters See a complete list of the characters in Crime and Punishment and in-depth analyses of Raskolnikov, Sonya, Dunya, and Svidrigailov. Literary Devices Here's where you'll find analysis of the literary devices in Crime and Punishment , from the major themes to motifs, symbols, and more.
Marmeladov, for abandoning his family? Luzhin for exploiting Dunya? Svidrigailov for murdering his wife? Sonya for prostituting herself? The greedy pawnbroker whom Roskolnikov murdered? Or, to turn the question around: Who among us is not a criminal? Who among us has not attempted to impose his or her will on the natural order? Compelled, ultimately, to confess his crime—and the confession scene is the only incident in which Roskolnikov actually admits to the crime—we feel that Roskolnikov has suffered sufficiently.
Indeed, the epilogue with its abbreviated pace and narrative distance feels like a reprieve for the reader as well as for the criminal. Finally, in Siberia, Roskolnikov has found space. The public reception of Crime and Punishment was enthusiastic—if a little stunned. A tale of morality?
A psychological study? A religious epic? As Peter McDuff points out in his Introduction to the Penguin Classics edition, interpretations may be more revealing of the critic than of the text. In Roskolnikov, Dostoyevsky has created a man who is singular yet universal. He is someone with whom we can sympathize, empathize, and pity, even if we cannot relate to his actions.
He is a character we will remember forever, and whose story will echo throughout history. Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky was born in at a Moscow hospital where his father was employed as a doctor. The family was poor, but their descent from 17th-century nobility entitled them to own land and serfs. Fyodor was the second of eight children.
Together they attended secondary schools in Moscow, then the military academy in St. Petersburg, followed by service in the Russian army. Dostoyevsky broadened his education by reading extensively in an attempt to sharpen his literary skills. He also began a tortured acquaintance with Turgenev, which was to continue throughout his life. His first novel, Poor Folk , was published in This tale of a young clerk who falls haplessly in love with a woman he cannot possess led the literary lion Victor Belinsky to proclaim Dostoyevsky as the next Gogol.
Petersburg literary society had begun—but his celebrity status was quickly overshadowed by his somewhat obnoxious behavior. Eventually, Dostoyevsky found another group to join, this time a circle of intellectual socialists run by Mikhail Petrashevsky. In he and the rest of the Petrashevsky group were arrested for subversion. Dostoyevsky was imprisoned at the Peter and Paul Fortress where he and others were subject to a mock execution—an understandably traumatic experience which seems to have triggered an epileptic condition that would plague Dostoyevsky throughout his life.
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