To summarise, the story centres on an impoverished former student, who carries out a murder, two murders in fact, imagining that the act would serve some "higher purpose". He is then forced to confront the consequences of his deeds, and to seek redemption.
One of the first things which hit me upon reading the novel was its stark, unflinching and often unsettling portrayal of the wretched social conditions which prevailed at that time, and not just in Russia, let us remember, with injustice everywhere. The struggles which many people endured against adverse economic straits and a cruel system are grippingly detailed.
I loved the style of the language and the writing which the author used, describing almost every move and thought made by the lead character Raskolnikov in particular. One can almost feel like one is there, experiencing the same emotions, being assailed by the same dilemmas and decisions, and sensing the approach of dread and grim reality.
The one feature of Crime And Punishment which surprised me was how cleverly it was put together, and how the supporting and minor characters have considerable depth, inspiring curiosity and enhancing the richness of the tale. The characters overlap and interact in such a way as to make this novel highly cohesive and fluent in its structure. Another thing which struck me was what I perceived to be a relative absence of "philosophizing", especially in the first half of the book.
Further to my identification of the characterisations as a major strength of the novel, I would stress the importance of the attention to detail which the author employs, capturing the fluctuating moods of the participants and the nuanced unfolding of the narrative. A vivid "mind's eye" is engendered, whereby the reader can use the words on the page to paint his or her own pictures. This is how I personally prefer to approach and savour fiction; it is a rewarding means of extracting the most from literature, but it must also be pointed out that the raw material must be there in the first place for the aforementioned process to be genuinely stimulating and invigorating.
As I have intimated above, this work was not quite what I had anticipated, but I make this observation in a positive and complimentary sense. The interest is maintained throughout by the richness of the language, the plausibility of the characters and the moral pull of the subject matter being examined.
Maybe what I am about to say tells as much about me as it does about Dostoyevsky's powers of storytelling, but I found the strength of my social and political perspectives being challenged and roused by the questions which the author managed to pose and evoke through his depiction of the 19th century's inequities. The powerlessness and helplessness of the weak and the poor in the face of the strong, the powerful and the arrogant. At the same time I found myself recognising that things, in many respects, have changed for the better since those days, whilst being conscious of the strains and the flaws which afflict our modern world.
I don't think that the philosophical direction of this work is quite as clear-cut, as straightforward or as unambiguous as many reviews and analyses seem to pronounce. In any event, trying too hard to make clear sense of the story's "messages" and morals may spoil the reader's enjoyment and appreciation of its many other strengths.
I won't give too much away, for the benefit of those who haven't yet read it, but this is a truly affecting, thought-provoking and striking work, which I would recommend to anyone who enjoys challenging and absorbing literature.
