Punishing Crime

I can remember the first time that I read Crime and Punishment. It was the summer of my senior year in High School and I was a very bored little lad. Having read through all of the summer reading assignments I was now relegated to playing video games, doing yard work, and getting badgered by my mother to "get a real job." (No, wait. Actually, that was only this summer.) Around the second video game that I had played through once, I began to realize how boring it was getting. I needed a new hobby, so I decided that I would go and get a book that I could read for the summer.

On the shelf downstairs, in my father's study, was a book that I had heard about, but had never read. I am refering of course to Crime and Punishment, the classic novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I had heard a lot from many of my "anti-intellectual" friends about how "boring and mundane" this book was. (Of course they did not use the word mundane, as they were "anti-intellectuals"). Nether the less, I decided that I, in all my intellectualism would be able to tackle this book and understand all of it's profound intricacies.

I picked up the book and started reading. The story of a college student who rationalized murder, and his route into the deepest bowels of guilt, murder, coverups, and hell itself intrigued me. For the first four chapters that is. After I had finished discovering that he had committed the climactic murder within the first four chapters, I began to lose interest. Then came the names. . .

If any of you aren't familiar with Crime and punishment, it is a Russian novel, with Russian names and Russian places. Naturally, being a person well versed in the English language, I did not understand the Russian elements of the book well. Why did all of the names end in "y"? Who exactly were all of these characters and why did I keep mixing them up? I would get to a part where a new character would be introduced, but still think the new character was the last character introduced. Quite obviously, this frustrated me to no end and I ended up putting the book back on the shelf, after only finishing four chapters.

One year later, I now have had the opportunity to brush the dust off of the book and begin reading it all over. This time the reading is slightly easier and far more pleasurable. I am beginning to understand the genius of Dostoevsky and why he has been proclaimed a literary genius. The deep and intrinsic story of a man who commits murder and the coinciding guilt, depression, sickness, and ultimately confession is the story of us all. It hits deep in my soul and I cannot wait to finish this book (which I hope to finish by December at the latest.) If not only to say that I, Ben, read through the entirety of the book that is Crime and Punishment.