The List #6: A Novel Forged in Suffering

It Will Change Your Life

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What do we mean when we say a book changed our lives? Many works of art have left their mark on me. There are movies that shaped me when I was young. Paintings and sculptures that have become as much a part of my inner imagery as the faces of people I’ve known and loved. But for me, there is something about reading — reading a book especially — that makes me feel I have experienced a true melding of another mind with my own. And that experience can reshape the way you see the world.

I first read Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1866 novel Crime and Punishment when I was 19 years old. I was in university then, and post-modern moral relativism was just making its way into classroom lectures. I had no faith, and so I had no argument against the idea that the moral order was a human construct wholly founded on human interests and desires. But when I finished Crime and Punishment, I knew that idea was wrong. I didn’t realize it then, but the trajectory of my life had been turned toward God.

Dostoevsky was in his mid-40’s when he wrote the book. In his youth, he had been drawn into a radical St. Petersburg discussion group. Denounced and arrested, he and his comrades were brought before a firing squad. Only at the last minute were their death sentences commuted by the Tsar. Dostoevsky was then sentenced to four years’ hard labor in Siberia with a term of forced military service after that. It was through suffering that he found faith.

Ten years after his release, he was widowed, sick, harried by the government, addicted to gambling, and broke. Desperate for money, he was forced into the humiliating position of having to offer his latest story idea to a publisher who despised him. He said he planned to write about a young man “of the new generation,” who falls under the sway of “certain strange, ‘unfinished’ ideas.”

The protagonist of the novel is named Rodion Raskolnikov. Expelled from law school, he lives in poverty in a small St. Petersburg flat. He is a man of natural decency, but he is sinking into a feverish depression. He comes to believe that a great man has “the inner right to decide in his own conscience to overstep… certain obstacles.”

In keeping with that philosophy, he decides to commit a murder.

The novel is dense and full of probing psychological insight. But it also contains a scene of violence and suspense worthy of Alfred Hitchcock, a love story that will touch your heart, and a police investigation that is the model for virtually every cop show on television.

There are lighter and more entertaining novels to read, but there is no other work that will so steel your soul against the death-riddled blandishments of post-modern philosophy. Crime and Punishment might take some effort, but it is well worth it.

I recommend the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation (pictured).