Crime doesn't pay (Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky)

Member Name: nlingwood

Product:	Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Date:	14/08/00 (38 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Powerful characters and story

Disadvantages: Keep the prozac handy

A powerful story of guilt and repentance. Obsessed by a theory of greatness, impoverished student Raskolnikov decides to test his ideas. Believing that, to be great, he must rise above petty concerns and morality, he plots a crime to test his strength to stand outside the masses.

Dostoyevsky describes St Petersburg in the nineteenth century, a city where poverty and desperation abound. Those Raskolnikov encounters are sacrificing their pride and hopes in the struggle to survive, but his ambition is to prove superiority to their weakness and vulnerability. But he is unable to resist the desperate need of one desperate family, and their daughter Sonia sees the guilt he carries from his experimental crime.

The redemption offered by the book is about acceptance. Raskolvikov's real punishment is his guilt and deception; his eventual confession and sentence to a prison camp are a kind of penance. Dostoyevsky shows humane tormented characters who must seek their own answers to the world.

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