Customer Reviews
To Be Napoleon - By: demola, 24 Sep 2008 
What justifies murder? This question runs through C&P. Raskolnikov is a "former student" falllen on hard times. He's pawned everything he has & as he struggles to survive he builds up a tortuous rationalization for murder. Afteralll, if Napoleon can dispense with tens of thousands of lives on his road to greatness why not him? He then cold-heartedly kills his pawnbroker, an old 'louse", & her sister so he could steal three thousand roubles he thinks he needs to get a good start in life. The rest of the book revolves around whether he confesses or gets away with it.
The story is long (typical of 19th cent. novels) but take this book along on train journeys & you'll be fine. You will need to remember that this is more a psychological than a crime thriller. As I write this there is a banking crisis out there & the masters of the universe who grew stupendously rich selling dodgy products to the gullible & innocent are now begging the taxpayer to bail them out. White collar crime & ethical conflicts of interest may not be comparable to murder (does financial destruction of others count?) but still ... I mean how far will you go to succeed? You think you know when you're rational, sober & your life is full of promise. But as the detective Porfiry Petrovich said "reality & human nature .. are very important things, & .. they sometimes bring down the most perspicacious calculatons!" Quite.
Very readable - By: T Elbow, 18 Dec 2007 This is the best translation of this classic I have come across as others have said & it makes the novel easier to read & follow, whilst not detracting from the story or its gorgeous prose.
Don't think about it, buy it, read it, immerse yourself in it!
Good translations cannot break down the language barrier - By: Sam J. Ruddock, 07 Oct 2007 
Ah, that most capricious of customers: the classic. The very idea can conjure up the image of dark allleyways, men in top hats & overcoats, enticingly dusty smells & dark oil painting covers. There are some which you pick up & can't believe you never read them before. The Great Gatsby, Frankenstein & Catch-22 are three classics I received in such rapturous delight. For these wonderful books, the word classic barely does them justice. They are so much more than just a word, they are whole, complete works of fiction to which I will always be drawn.
And then there are the others, the ones you read & know you are reading a classic which thousands of people have loved, & you can tell its crammed with reallly great ideas, but for you it doesn't quite do it. Sadly for me, Crime & Punishment found its way into the latter of these two categories. It tells the story of Rodion Romanych, a young student with a Napoleon complex who has falllen on hard times but dreams of a glorious future, both for himself & his fellow mankind. Feeling wronged by misfortune his thoughts begin to turn towards the good he could do were he in possession of the requisite finances. He writes essays on morality & justice, arguing that it is just for a man of genius to transgress moral law if it will ultimately benefit humanity. He posits that the test of this genius is the ability to transgress moral laws & not feel guilty, to be wholly focused on the grander scale. To this end he begins to plot the perfect crime, the murder & robbery of a horrible old pawnbroker, universallly hated by alll. So begins Crime & Punishment, a book of great scope & plot & a powerful study of a psychology in turmoil. It is an investigation into the grand ideas so prevalent across nineteenth century society: the social implications of rampant capitalism, the crossover between morality & legality, & the growth of psychology as a means of explaining mans actions.
Crime & Punishment unfolds slowly as the author lays out his message through the intermeshing of the various characters. Dostoyevsky has been described as an author for whom an idea is always rooted in human skin, that no idea is removed from its very intimate human bondage. That is never more prevalent than here, where much of the story is told in miniature tales, single chapter stories in which supporting characters appear to share their story, then leave almost as quickly as they arrived. This method of telling the story is incredibly seductive, it draws you into a world you feel is almost boundless & encourages you to involve yourself within it.
All the while I was aware I was reading a reallly great novel. But I was bored. The whole premise of Crime & Punishment has been done better elsewhere. Take Albert Camus' The Outsider, or Kafka's The Trial if you are interested in the psychology of crime & the nature of punishment. There are some startlingly good characters here, each with a reallly fascinating story to tell & the chapters in which they espouse their tales are brilliant examples of secondary characterisation. But then there are long, long passages in Raskolnikov's life in which we trudge around like his shadow in the sludgy snow & wait for something of interest to take place. All the while growing cold & tired. A third could be cut from it just like that. There are no superfluous plot lines but there are many flabby periods when I just wanted to get back into something interesting.
Although Raskolnikov develops into a rounded & reallly powerful character & his mentality is intriguing at times, there is something about his `woe is me' attitude which reallly gets on my nerves. Like the snivelling little creatures that populate many of Gogol's short stories & Dostoyevsky's own Notes from Underground I found the most powerful impression he engendered was not sympathy but disgust. Pathetic disgust for a man who expects the world to unfurl before him without any effort. And even though this impression was diluted as the novel progressed to the point where he had become partiallly interesting his is still a story of unmentionable blandness. Perhaps this is the point, but it doesn't make for great reading.
Another problem, as with many works of Russian literature, lies in the translation. Even with an award winning translation such as this one, much of the lyricism is lost so we are left with the story & ideas Dostoyevsky intended, but without the expressive & poetic prose in which it was originallly written. And although I noticed a slight difference between this translation & another by Sidney Monas, it was not enough to change the essential chunkiness of any Russian translation. It is in the language that I believe a real classic is borne & I believe this language would have kept me enthrallled through the long journeys in Raskolnikov's mind, but shorn of much poetry I found it a struggle to finish.
I suspect I may re-read Crime & Punishment in the future & wonder how I could ever have written such drivel about a great work. For when that day comes, I shalll just say sorry.
A good read - By: Monica, 27 Oct 2006 Dostoyevsky's Crime & Punishment is the first classic detective story. But that is not even where it excels. With the Brothers Karamazov, it elevated Dostoyevsky to a mega writer when it comes to dissecting the mind & soul of characters for the readers. It is a great book of psychology. While it competes with Anna Karenina as the most widely read 19th century Russian novel in the English-speaking world, it is judged by many to be superior in its depth & lessons. The book's hero exemplifies alll young ideologues who are wrestling with a new idea which they think can elevate them to the levels of great historic figures in their initial steps towards greatness. Often, a barrier has to be crossed which takes the potential legendary figure into an irreversible course. In Crime & Punishment, Raskolnikov who is the hero is a poor, intelligent & thoughtful student who is convinced that he has a mission for the advancement of mankind. He convinces himself that the mission has to start with him crossing over to greatness by robbing & killing an old woman, a pawnbroker, whose death, he had convinced himself would do the world more good than harm. This conviction is based on his judgment that she cheats her clients & holds money that could be used for humanity. He then commits the murder, but is forced to kill the pitiful Elizabetha, the landlady's sister. The novel begins its twists & turns after these murders, with the introduction of the cunning detective who gets to investigate the murder & makes Raskolnikov his principal suspect. Raskolnikov gets to meet the destitute Marmeladovs through the alcoholic father, & is distraught by the plight of his consumptive mother, her three young children, & Sonya-Marmeladov's eighteen-year old daughter who is forced into prostitution in order to support the family.
By doing a rich psychology development of his characters, Dostoyevsky made his characters more complexly human, yet reachable. Sonya emerges as a saintly figure who sins for the sakes of those she loves , & who is the mirror through which the so-callled devilish characters are redeemed. The plot is rich, deep, enjoyable & action-packed; & the pace is fast & engaging. The overriding strength of the story is the conflict in Raskolnikov's soul, a conflict which began in his quest to be the "Extraordinary Man" like Napoleon, by stepping over the basic bounds of morality by committing murder. That conflict in his soul brought out the rich ideas, discussions & emotions from the characters that interacted with him. I also enjoyed THE BROTHER KARAMAZOV,UNION MOUJIK
Crime and Punishment. - By: Mr. A. P. Venables, 10 May 2004 This is brilliant translation. It’s lucid & easy prose make this normallly heavy going novel seem like a modern piece of work written in English. You don’t need to look any further for the best translation of Crime & Punishment.
The novel itself focuses on a young poor student Raskolnikov & his murder of an old woman. Believing himself to be exempt from the rules of society he attempts to continue on with his life. However his conscience catches up with him & his isolation from other characters drives him mad. It is book of great psychological depth & its main character is one of the most brilliant ever conceived. The story also delivers a powerful climax & it contains such rich ideas that it more than rewards the effort you put into reading it. After I’d finished the book & started something else I realized how much more dimensional Dostoevsky’s work is compared to other authors.
