Before you Read Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky - Book Summary, Analysis, Review

the fame of this book is legendary being placed on the guardians top 100 books of all time penguins readers number 10 book to read of all time one of my favorite authors william faulkner has even taken bits of this book and put it into his novel and to top this all off i usually see this story in one out of every two russian literature class syllabuses rhyme and punishment by fyodor dostoevsky how do we even begin to discuss this i read a question from quora that said why is crime and punishment so great and the number one response the person started off with let me tell you dostoevsky is not great he is far far far better than that today crime and punishment is cited by many around the world including psychologists sociologists anybody looking to study the human condition it takes human nature and explains everything about us and it sets the precedent for literature around the world of how we represent society in it so what are we getting with this story i know that a lot of times even as avid readers or if you're not big into reading you hear about this famed book and you immediately become intimidated but it's super approachable and that's where i want to encourage you that this is worth reading whether you like classic literature or not this could be your first classic literature book you pick up and you would be just fine the story is very approachable it's it's not boring it's exciting there's lots of interesting characters and set pieces it has something for everybody the style is a very approachable literary fiction with maybe a hint of genre fiction a dash of psychological crime thriller and maybe a dash of social critique is it for everybody maybe not we had other literary giants like tolstoy and chekhov that said that it lacked any empathy that it was modest and it really didn't tell that great of a story but i think that you can get something out of it so let's spend some time today about some things that could help enrich your reading experience before starting crime and punishment [Music] welcome to the codex cantina where i am una and i am crypto we go heavy into detail in the books that we read if you are down for literature discussions please consider hitting that subscribe button as for the plan today we're going to be talking about what you're getting with this novel the author and publication info characters in russian terms utilitarianism dostoevsky and you manipulation opposites and the road to remorse and as always we start off with publication information and we're going to go a little heavy-handed here and give you a lot of information about dolce himself because there's so much that you need to know about him as an individual i think to enrich your read through crime and punishment to start off with i think it's important to note that dostoevsky is not an upper elite like many of the other russian authors that we cover here he is going to be considered a lower class or lower upper middle class and so he's going to write what he knows and that's going to be very influential in this story born in 1821 to parents who could not be more opposite but he grew up in a time of serfdom seeing people treated as slaves as lesser than to compare it to maybe what american culture is more familiar with ultimately to the point where the surfs would rise up and actually kill his father which greatly impacted him maybe writing about and i think every single major literature he's created about death or even the murder of a parent i think dostoyevsky spent a lot of his writing career writing what he saw and felt from his fellow man spending most of his time writing out talking against the different classes will get him in a lot of trouble because during this time period you could be jailed for speaking out against the czar and the government and he will actually be thrown in jail in 1849. and he was set to be murdered on december 22nd but literally up to the point where he was about to be killed it was suddenly stopped freedom and life in a sense for dostoevsky freedom in the sense of not being killed he was sent to the gulag to work in the siberia and i think there is where he gets a lot of inspiration for his story sitting there with all these depraved individuals he starts to gather this idea of what does it mean for life to be redeemed and i think he also gets a lot about people at this point in time seeing people wrestle with crimes that they've committed in their life how does that impact them how do they come to terms with it and i think he's writing through those emotions which is what makes this book so relatable is every character is so real so what is crime and punishment it is one young man's journey rhodion romanovich raskolnikov a man being bombarded with ideas from the west extraordinary versus ordinary rational versus impulsive is he a hero is he an anti-hero is he a victim of his environment or does he create the environment himself ultimately it's these decisions in the world that define us and we explore that in this book masterfully through rhodium i do want to point out that this was published a long time ago in 1860 crime and punishment was a serialized novel in 12 different installments in the literary journal the russian messenger so when things are serialized like that you can't just buy it as a book and be done you got to keep coming back each time that the new installment is released so what does that do for his writing so you'll see cliffhangers at the end of every chapter and the parts throughout the story what this does it keeps you coming back every time buying the magazine to want to know this continuation of the story and it also forces dostoevsky to be hyper concentrated on the pacing and how much is put out in each installment to be kind of a cohesive and compelling story that you don't have long sections that drone on at all done with publication let's move on to characters and russian terms what makes this novel so remarkable is the characters each character can represent a philosophical idea an economic status a new western idea these are incredibly rich but you don't have to actually know all of them what we want to do is give you just a couple of ideas a couple of things to kind of latch on to to enrich your experience if it wasn't already obvious or if you don't have a large background in russian literature so a couple of key names rhodium romanovich roscondakoff ruskolnik meaning schizomatic this is interesting because it's not just a break in a typical schism you'll have to remember at the time there's a lot of break from the russian orthodox church people moving towards an atheistic way of life at this point in time but we're not quite there yet we don't have the russian revolution in the 20th century that will push atheism into the forefront of the russian consciousness this is still a very very heavy christian society but he uses this to kind of divide raskolnikov right we have reason verse compassion we have ordinary versus extraordinary you'll find that he is going to be torn constantly between two polar ends and we'll go more into that in the future up next we have sophia semyonova marmaladov in greek if you didn't know sophia actually means wisdom and she's going to kind of act as the moral compass to the story guiding rodian rominovic to the moralistic end of of one side on the other hand we have a man just typically referred to as marmalade off which if you didn't know marmalade typically just means fruit jelly and this is the man that is leaving the the for me lifestyle if i want to drink if i want to have something that's pleasurable i'm going to go out and do that kind of like a fruit candy just a self-indulgence thing and the next character that's really important is dmitry razumihin resume means intellect and this is going to be the friend that is constantly looking on the bright and positive side for raskolnikov always overlooking maybe some of the shadier or questionable things of the character he's kind of being the overly optimistic individual for the novel some quick russian terms that we'd like to cover the first term i'm gonna go over is yellow card and prostitution in the story they will refer to the quote yellow card so what does this actually mean in rush of the time period the government would issue ids that would legalize prostitution and allow women to sell themselves so while still questionably a moral activity it was a legal thing in russia at the time so what is the purpose of this is to pit the morality of the people of their family's needs and their class so an example is you have dunya and sonia both use men to different ends and survival and money but they go about it in very different moralistic ways and then you also have dunya versus roskonikov where they're both from the same environments but they will look at life through different key aspects and you're gonna see that dostoevsky constantly pits two ideas against each other life over death morality versus legality he's constantly exploring with two different options and what may be frustrating for people newer to literature is he's not giving you the answers of which one's correct most of the time he's instead letting you the reader say where do my moralistic standards end and how do i judge people that cross that line and that brings us back to one thing that was very important to the story is the christian state of the time period in russia so do to reiterate one more time they're choosing life over death and that's a major theme for the story so for future talks we're going to touch on some of these elements but i really want to make sure that readers know what utilitarianism is before jumping into this because sometimes people will apply their own moral standards but not understand how a utilitarianist may look at a situation so in the late 18th early 19th century we saw a lot of interest in utilitarianism defined as how do you maximize the happiness or pleasure experienced for the most amount of affected individuals so this is not like hedonism where i'm just trying to maximize my pleasure if my pleasure causes hundreds of people displeasure utilitarianism would say what's best for people impacted by this immediate decision and a hundred people's happiness over weighs one person's happiness in this mentality so let's apply it this way crypto imagine i have one apple in one hand and five apples in the other hand you can only save one group which group are you going to save five apples that makes sense it's the most amount of apples saved now let's pretend there's a system applied to this decision okay you can either save one penny or you can save five pennies now you as a person what would you choose five pennies that's easy but now if instead you have to destroy one group well now that's going to bring a little bit of a question because particularly in the united states of america destroying money defacing money is illegal so if you had to destroy one group is it better to destroy one penny or better to destroy five pennies both of them could get you in trouble yeah probably go with one penny now the lesser of two evils so what about when we add morals to the picture the question is the trolley problem a trolley is heading down a track and let's pretend at the end of this track is one person you can push that one person out of the way and save them but the trolley will crash killing the five people on the trolley or you can jump on the trolley stop the trolley but not in time and accidentally kill the one person on the track do you save the one person or do you save the five so again five is going to be the logical choice for the utilitarians right now here's the problem is that when you add a system onto it so in the same way that when you uh when we're talking about the apples or the change you add the government and it's wrong to destroy any money at all it's the government says don't say that don't destroy any money just completely stay out of it well now when you talk about morals okay here's an interesting change imagine a trolley is careening down towards a cliff and there's a switch at the bottom of the bridge underneath you okay the only way you can activate that switch is if you push an innocent bystander onto the switch so you'll have killed that one person to have saved the trolley or you can not push and kill that one person but then that inactively kind of kills those five people on that train we have a much more difficult and different response from people surveyed as to what's the right answer here because in this choice you're actually killing someone you're defacing money you're defacing life in this situation this is the question that dostoyevsky is going to constantly pit at you in the story is when is it no longer right to do what's best for everyone utilitarianism when there's moralistic or standards put on that causes you to cause certain evils or certain acts that are deemed illegal or morally wrong for you to commit to achieve that that happiness for more people so it takes us to raskolnikov does he commit this crime and save multiple people suffering at the hands of the pawn broker well even then you get a pushback from the pawnbroker who talks about she is taking advantage of these people and getting large sums of money but it's okay because at the end of the day she's going to give the extra money to a monastery so yes you have characters like lujan and srividgelov that are going to be offering money throughout the entire story and is constantly being pitted against utilitarianism the the societal standards one person's decisions impacts more than just themselves and we see that throughout this whole cost benefit complex scenario that that dostoevsky has woven together and called crime and punishment dostoevsky is manipulating you the entire time and it's interesting because we have third person narration over raskolnikov so we don't get his inner monologue directly we have kind of an interpretation of it and in a sense raskolnikov doesn't share the full story with you i think that's a key point that a lot of readers miss you don't have you the full thoughts of raskolnikov and as a part of what you get is actions and output but you don't always have the full truth as to why he's doing some of these things and we talked about this before and i've mentioned it before that some people don't have an internal monologue there's a famous russian psychologist that suggested that external conversations can become internalized even propose that a lot of our internal speech will be highly abbreviated and will have a lot of admissions so this instantly sets up our narration of not necessarily being an unreliable narrator but it's definitely an incomplete narrator with what he shares with us we have quotes like i want to attempt a thing like that and am frightened by these trifles and later on he talks about its trifles that matter and then he says trifles don't matter he's constantly going back and forth but what does he mean by i'm going to an attempt a thing like that he is purposely omitting some of his monologue to us as the reader so he can't even admit it to himself what does that say about him as an individual and i think this leads some readers to frustration we are meant to guess at what that omission is throughout this whole book you are playing the role of a detective through this whole thing you know what his crime is you were there at the scene but you don't know why and i don't know if raskolnikov knows why either and i think this is a journey to figure out why and you're going to see lots of reasons thrown at you as to very plausible reasons as to why he may or may not have committed this crime and with that i think the book takes a lot of events and it asks the readers and it asks a lot of it the readers what is wrong with this or what is going on and this can frustrate a lot of readers because you're like well that's wrong and that's wrong but i don't believe you because of this you're already in his game at this point in time dostoyevsky has already tricked you into playing the game where does my moral boundary end and where do i believe there's societal or other moral boundaries that a character may or may not be crossing and when do they become evil versus when are they just a good person that did an evil act my advice is to pay attention that every time somebody does something wrong what are your morals and your interpretation of that event and that's what a lot of great literature will do is allow you to unlock maybe some borders that you didn't know existed or where or never even considered where do i start and stop in some of these complex situations society is incredibly complex and constantly shifting and that's what dostoevsky does is he keeps adding information sometimes into events to change your understanding and maybe or maybe not change what your view is on what the correct or incorrect thing was for a person to do in that situation moving on to our next topic and i think one of the keys to really unlocking the true potential of this story is understanding how dostoevsky is using opposites throughout the entirety of the story and these subtle nuances that add so much flavor to the story so as we touched on briefly in the biography section his father was an army doctor and his mother was the caring nurturer caregiver couldn't be more opposites in how they were and i think this drove a lot in terms of dostoevsky's view of opposites of being pulled towards one thing or the other and that's how he sets up all of the scenes in this book and characters you don't have to understand or know what the new generation is you don't have to understand nihilism though it will greatly improve your understanding of but he will constantly and you will inherently understand either this or this those are the two options that are constantly being presented at every scene in this book and what does that come down to it comes down to the raskolnik the divide that characters and people face in life and we see this recurring theme throughout the entirety of the book how many painters are there two at the crime scene how many sisters were there there was two how many crimes were committed there there were two and there's even subtleties such as marmalade off's speech at the bar he constantly repeats himself twice and why does raskolnikov even go into the bar when he doesn't drink raskolnikov is fatalistically drawn to these twos throughout the entire novel he surrounds himself by people that talk in twos by people who travel in twos he does things twice raskolnikov cannot avoid being drawn to these situations and i think this two represents almost uh white and black and then if you meld these together you get gray and the entirety of this story is in gray and you have these polar opposites pulling you in both directions all the time of these two different views and you are always choosing between them and that says something about you as we live in gray we live with these choices so the last thing i want to talk about is the road to remorse people that maybe are familiar with maybe people who have gone through very tragic or intense things understand that remorse doesn't happen immediately rok skolnikov does something very bad and he commits a crime and he's going to spend his punishment on this earth suffering almost as a purgatory of self-doubt and questions as to why did he commit this crime this is the driving force behind the story as rus skolnikov is going to almost go through like kind of like five stages of despair or recovery if you will so yes the first step is going to be denial yes and he's not going to just say that he didn't do the crime he's going to be struggling with what what compelled me to do this am i guilty am i am i a victim of these circumstances i had to do this and it's almost denying responsibility for what the crime was and that will lead him into the next thing which will be anger where he's constantly snapping at his friends he's really strangely just passing out in bushes left and right yes and as the time passes and we get further and further from the crime he's going to start bargaining and try to weasel his way out of things yeah and he'll use money to try and buy off some of the grief from his crimes he's trying to buy public and societal utilitarianism good almost to offset perhaps some bad that he's some bad great bad that he did yeah and so we then kind of have like the salvation but depression starts seeping into him for the crime right and that's when he's you know sleeping for days on end he's spacing out he's delirious he's losing his mind and then we get to the final stage which is going to be acceptance i guess some critics are questioning the coherency of the ending for me the epilogue is indispensable but i think that's probably where i see more of the acceptance and finality that's given in this novel agreed dislike or like the epilogue i think that it does give a nice conclusion to how a real life story would unfold and i think this is part of the brilliance of his time in prison his time of about to be murdered and instead given life and allowed to express his ideas through novels we see just an incredibly complex understanding of dostoevsky understanding people at the lowest and highest points of their life of understanding the value of having something of gaining something it's really incredible the human experience and range of emotions that he's able to cover in this novel and i think that's why that it is so regarded all these years later and continually used as a teachable piece for the human condition so is this a novel ultimately based on truth and how we find it is it a novel that explains how maybe punishment impacts us when we avoid the truth what is the truth to one man in a decision of ultimately gray area with black and white poles that one can never reach that will be up to you please check out this book it is one that is definitely worth a read in terms of next steps we will have a more spoiler discussion coming out soon but we wanted to offer this as kind of a way to look at these choices and understand why are we struggling through these things why do some humans face this way and how can we accept and understand maybe why they're facing those things it's it's a really great way to explore the human condition thank you for joining us on this before you read series journey we'll have another video on this where we'll go into our spoiler talks and have a lot more in-depth analysis of the story itself you're down for literature discussions like that we post videos every monday and thursday with a bonus video on tuesday when we can hit that subscribe button to join us una out peace

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Keywords: Books Discussions, Book Analysis, Book Summary, Literature, BookTube, Book Review, Plot Summary, Explained, Interpretation, Book Chat, Reviews by Men, Literary Fiction, fyodor dostoevsky, Constance Garnett, Pevear and Volohonsky, Crime and Punishment, Utilitarianism, Nihilism, Opposites, Schism, Best Classic to Start With, Why You Should Read Crime and Punisbment

Id: wVJDI8sWJMk

Length: 22min 57sec (1377 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 03 2020