Crime and Punishment - Preamble - Fyodor Dostoevsky - Classic - Russian Literature

In this mini-episode, Slava sets the context for understanding Fyodor Dostoevsky's classic, Crime and Punishment.

ABOUT THE BOOK

In the bleak heat of 19th-century St. Petersburg, Rodion Raskolnikov, a brilliant but destitute former student, wanders the streets nursing a dangerous theory. He believes that "extraordinary" men are above the moral law of the masses and have the right—even the duty—to commit crimes for the greater good.

To prove his superiority, Raskolnikov executes a cold-blooded plan to murder an unscrupulous old pawnbroker. The "perfect crime" quickly spirals into a psychological nightmare. Haunted by guilt, paranoia, and the mind games of investigator Porfiry Petrovich, Raskolnikov begins to crumble.

His only hope for redemption lies in Sonya Marmeladov, a young woman forced into hardship who maintains a self-sacrificing faith. As the walls close in, Raskolnikov must choose between a life of mental imprisonment or the path toward spiritual rebirth and confession.


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Slava

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If you’re a reader looking for something deeper or an indie author working on your book, The Side Quest Book Club is for you. We skip the usual book reviews and ratings. Each episode turns fun side quests into real lessons, so you’ll leave not just entertained, but with a better understanding of why storytelling matters.

It's weird that a 160-year-old book can be, man, that feels like somebody wrote it in modern times. It feels very relatable. Well, like I said, it took me 10 tries to get into it, and then doing research, post-reading about all this stuff that we talked about in this preamble, as we're calling it, I was like, oh, this is more than a decent book.

This is a good book. There's a reason why it's a classic, and Dostoevsky didn't just pull it out of his posterior. Hey, SideQuesters.

Today, we're diving into crime and punishment. To understand crime and punishment, you have to understand the author, the time period, and the country, because here's the thing. If you pick up this book cold, without any background, it's tough.

It took me 10 attempts to get through it the first time. Part of it was not understanding the context, and part of it was just bad timing in my life, but once I learned about the author, the time period, and Russia itself, everything clicked. Suddenly, it wasn't just a dense Russian novel.

It became a gripping psychological thriller. This isn't a whodunit murder mystery. We know who did it from page one.

It's a whydunit, claustrophobic plunge into a man's mind as he convinces himself he's above morality, commits a horrific act, and then gets crushed by guilt and conscience. To really get it, we need to set the context, so let me set the stage. The country, the era, the author, the city, and then the book itself.

Most 19th century writers wrote for their own time and their own country. They assumed their readers an intimate knowledge of imperial Russian life and a familiarity with all sorts of details with which modern students of their work cannot easily acquaint themselves. 19th century writers belong to the gentry, a land-owning class, often minor or impoverished branches, but some from higher social strata, reflecting the emerging intelligentsia from non-noble origins.

Tsiyevsky wasn't a semi-retired writer. His life was pure drama, suffering, near death, and redemption that directly fed into his books. Born in 1821, second of seven kids on the grounds of a hospital for the poor in Moscow, his dad was a doctor there, the family had gentry status, but unlike richer writers like Tolstoy or Turgenev, Tsiyevsky came from humbler roots, yet still had good stock, as they say.

Tsiyevsky's paternal ancestors were part of Russian nobility and part of Russian Orthodox Christian heritage. Tsiyevsky's immediate ancestors on his mother's side were merchants. He was introduced to literature and the classics at a very early age.

Aged four, he had more exposure to literature than most. Events like the death of his father and mother, having to fetch his father to attend to a nine-year-old rape victim, shaped him throughout his youth. A prodigious reader informed on philosophy, Tsiyevsky's characters probe emotions that were just being studied then.

His life, trauma, spiritual rebirth, rejection of radical western ideas, for Russia's sacred mission, this all shaped his obsession with guilt, redemption, and suffering's power. Russian literature shifted from the golden age of poetry, 1820s, Pushkin and his contemporaries, through romanticism in the 1830s, to prose realism in the 1840s. Realism fully emerged in the 1840s with an explosion of talent, specifically Dostoevsky's Poor Folk in 1846 and Turgenev's Sportsman Sketches in 1847.

Key traits of Russian realistic fiction are preferences for contemporary Russian settings in life, straightforward functional style, detailed factual descriptions of landscape, dress, physical appearance, and deep human sympathy. Characters are neither simply good nor bad, but deserving of understanding. Serious philosophical engagement with human existence, destiny, and moral questions all encapsulate this era.

He graduated as a military engineer, but quit to write full-time. His first big hit, Poor Folk in 1845, made him famous overnight. Then disaster struck.

In 1849, arrested for joining the Petrovsky circle, a group discussing radical socialist ideas, he was locked in prison for months, condemned to death, and subjected to a mock execution. He was tied to a post, facing a firing squad, only for a messenger to arrive at the last second with a commutation from Tsar Nicholas. Instead of death, he had four years of hard labor in the Siberian prison camp.

Surrounded by brutal criminals, and sometimes even more brutal guards, then he spent more years in exile as a soldier. This broke him and remade him. He rejected the radical western ideas he flirted with and embraced a deeper faith in Russian orthodoxy and the sacred mission of the Russian people.

Suffering for him became the path to spiritual rebirth, a core theme in Crime and Punishment. Back in St. Petersburg by 1859, he threw himself into writing and debates. Crime and Punishment, published in 1886, critiques the very radical ideologies that nearly killed him.

Russia in the mid-1800s, a mess of contradictions. Russia was always playing catch-up with Europe socially, politically, and industrially. The Tsars pushed back against change to hold power, and their rigid cultural identity didn't help.

Reforms under Tsar Nicholas II, like emancipating the Serbs in 1861, were a double-edged sword. They aimed to modernize, but sparked unrest, inequality, and eventually fueled the 1917 Revolution. Autocratic Empire under the Tsars, 1712 to 1917, had 85 percent of the population under serfdom, basically slaves tied to the land.

There were huge class divides, the royals, the intelligentsia, a tiny bourgeoisie class, and masses of peasants. The 1860s. Oppressive censorship, but also heated debates.

There was a big split between the westernizers, those who sought to emulate Europe and the rule of law, versus the slalophiles, who thought Russia's unique path through orthodoxy and peasant traditions would lead it forward. Both sides wanted free speech and ending of serfdom, but radicals went further. Nihilism, positivism, and socialism.

Turgenev, a contemporary of Dostoevsky, coined nihilism in his book, Fathers and Sons, arguing to demolish the old and build the new. However, as historians point out, the designation nihilism was a misnomer, as the radical Russian youth were far from believing in nothing. They placed great hope in the power of natural science to improve human life, and were driven by a concern for those less privileged.

Journals were the battlegrounds. Thick monthlies mixing literature and politics, and Dostoevsky even ran his own, promoting panchenevesto, rooting in Russian soil, bridging the educated elite and the so-called regular people. In short, it supported the complete emancipation of serfs, stressed a strong desire to return to the idealized past of Russian history, and opposed Europeanization.

They also advocated a complete rejection of nihilist classical liberal of that time, and Marxist movements as Dostoevsky saw them. This is the intellectual climate Raskolnikov breeds, radical ideas clashing with conscience. The novel is set in St. Petersburg, Russia's glittering capital, but Dostoevsky shows the filthy underbelly, overcrowded slums, drunks and prostitutes, and poverty.

A useful general reference is Yutakhin's concise encyclopedia of Russia, covering many aspects of Russia and Russian life. The entries are condensed and easily accessible, and can provide a good introduction for many topics. Crime and punishment gains much of its power by dramatizing Raskolnikov's alienation and search for identity.

On leave from university, Raskolnikov commits a murder that nearly defies explanation, but ultimately is motivated by ideas prevailing in the intellectual climate. These ideas clash with Raskolnikov's inmost heart, his conscience. To engage readers both cognitively and emotionally, Dostoevsky devises an innovative narrative strategy that stages the collision between Raskolnikov's reason and feeling, his rationality and moral emotion.

We know Raskolnikov is a murderer, but some of us want him to get away, maybe, at least initially. A final note on the city. When Dostoevsky wrote Crime and Punishment, his setting, St. Petersburg, was the capital of Russia and the country's administrative and cultural center.

However, the city presented in the novel is not one of lavish households and important buildings. Instead, Dostoevsky focuses on its dark underbelly, filled with petty criminals, prostitutes, and alcoholics caught in the cycles of degradation and reflecting the filthy morality of the world. Raskolnikov navigates the city without thinking.

He takes long, aimless walks because his poverty prevents him from being anywhere comfortable. Those places tend to cost money. The chaotic, cluttered streets he sees echo the chaotic, cluttered thoughts that plague his mind.

Raskolnikov, a young, intelligent student from the provinces, is driven close to insanity by his miserable city life. Thus, St. Petersburg becomes a physical representation of his suffering. Raskolnikov's St. Petersburg is filled with prejudice, inequality, and poverty.

Confused and anxious figures stumble through the streets, unable to make sense of their environment. St. Petersburg is never the right temperature, never smells right, has constant deafening and terrifying noises, and generally seems inhospitable to human life. So much so that one of the few passers-by Raskolnikov notices during his preambulations is a woman trying to commit suicide.

Yet people are drawn to the city, which, despite its stresses, represents the only way to move upward. Raskolnikov and Azumkin's university is there, as are opportunities for men like Porfiry and, of course, women like Sonia. The city's duality symbolizes the cycles and conflicts that plague every character.

Dostoevsky died in February 1881. His funeral drew thousands. Even his critics, both philosophical and artistic, agree that the one thing he did understand was the psychological implications of radicalism.

it you think about today you can get your car you can go to the grocery store these people are living in poverty where they're trying to have and i don't know the exact um money denomination rubles translation well no no i was gonna say it's rubles but it's like there's copex there's rubles like which one of them is like a penny versus a dollar right like i don't know those denominations is the coin and rubles is the paper money okay so rubles was more than copex yes okay good to know but my point stands like they're scraping by and even today you could just get a credit card and live off of that until it maxes out right like there's just it's a very different time to be alive especially for russia too russia has at this point is behind europe and has been behind europe for hundreds of years and the slaw files don't like that but they see a different way forward the westernizers they're looking at the french revolution they're looking at the english revolution and they're looking to european writers and they're saying that's what we need we need a revolution like that because 1800s russia still has serfs and the gentry and there's this middle class of the intelligentsia the bourgeoisie they see a need to change that because russia is behind like and that goes to what you're talking about because forget cars and credit cards yes you know a poor person quote unquote in england is way better off than a poor person in russia at this point their lives are drastically different so i'm going to say this back to you you just confirm what i've heard to put it in more modern words russia realizes they're behind the times and they're trying to play catch up on a global scale at this stage is that fair yeah a certain class of people yes okay some like it the way it is people you know the the people at the top class yeah yeah they like it even alexander's reforms which included the ending of serfdom it included a trial by jury included representation at local governmental levels all that was great but it forced urbanization on a country that was let's just say 200 years behind the times and all of a sudden you do have cities like saint petersburg you do have these urban centers but only a few people can take advantage of what that affords the rest of them are raskolnikov to some degree so raskolnikov is the every man in the story yeah well his life his his status in life let's put it that way his status in life is pretty uh pretty common for most people in russia because you got to understand 85 percent of the population of serfs are serfs were serfs then they get emancipated then these urban centers open up and that is a double-edged sword yeah it's like it's a required change to make progress however the transition nobody ever focuses on the transition period the transition period is going to be bloody messy people are going to die people are not going to like it it's it's a lot of that stuff yeah and that was embraced by raskolnikov the extraordinary man theory or the great man theory the ubermensch the people saw the the status of their lives they saw their new lot and it doesn't look that different than their old lot and they're like well there has to be extraordinary men willing to do whatever it takes to take russia forward for some of them it was bloody revolution yeah and that's what dostoevsky argues against because when he gets arrested he sees the brutality of both sides and he sees the the folly of violent upheavals and then he embraces traditionalism which sees that christianity specifically russian orthodox christianity which is just greek orthodoxy he sees that the russian soul the russian ground russian traditions traditionalism as the way forward and he understands or he thinks he understands that all of it is suffering and russia is supposed to suffer to get through whatever this thing is that he's seen and living through to get through to a better future suffering will be involved and any shortcuts through violent upheavals he believes it's only uh detrimental to russia's future okay on the other end you have people of the same class the middle and upper classes you got the intelligentsia you got the bourgeoisie who are business owners merchants and there's you know strata and there too they're looking at this even as people who have the means to survive the former and the current lot as i just mentioned they're looking at this saying this is still not good enough we need what europe has and this is even after alexander's reforms alexander's seconds reforms so for some of them they want to use the serfs as the bludgeon against the uh the imperial you know family and they see that well they see what we just talked about i just talked about a few seconds ago that the great men must take great strides and extraordinary measures to get russia out of where it is that we have alexander to seconds reforms it brought about urbanization it ended serfdom which 85 of the population were serfs it created um representative governments in the local sections or whatever you know regions now they had they had local voted in representation they also had true jury uh trial by jury that's what alexander brought in and all his reforms which were like a complete 180 of nicholas is the first who was um czar before him and he's the guy who did the mock execution for the socialists for uh the saskia was with and he just he was just with their heads basically uh all that changed with alexander the second but we have the problems that we have in 1860s russia and the middle class intelligentsia which is technically upper class and we have the bourgeoisie the authors who are part of the bourgeoisie in the gentry class they're looking at it and going this is still not good we need what europe has and they're specifically looking at the french revolution russians of this class were francophiles during this time and during i sorry during that time period i know it can be sometimes difficult to imagine a time period that we weren't alive in we can think back to you know if we use our imagination we can somewhat envision when our parents our father was alive what life was like then you get to think about your grandparents it gets a bit fuzzy before the grandparents you don't have any connection to that time period 1886 when this book was published is one year after the american civil war so for somebody an american like myself and i believe uh everyone else here is like trying to find something to connect to is like okay this is what was going on in our part of the world we just finished the american civil war which had you know a big fight about slavery and stuff like that you mentioned reforms and that russia's still you know they're all still serfs at this time too so looking to the rest of the world like hey this stuff's going on elsewhere you mentioned france but having a connection to what's going on in america that helped me place this in a time setting to think about what was going on here that's kind of what i was getting at earlier is like it's so far removed from where we're at today i think you i think you said it better than i did i i didn't realize until you made your comment um you i think you told me that before the show as well some time ago where it's like hey this happened a year after the civil war and it's like okay that's that's worlds apart i i you know read a western or think about the oregon trail and think okay this stuff just it's so far removed it feels like fantasy that's a 140 i'm doing bad at math right now is that 140 years ago 150 or so 60 160 yeah it's a it's a while ago i mean josh what about you like do you do you comprehend this are you a big history buff i love history um so this stuff is fascinating to me but it is very difficult to like put yourself in that um environment and really understand like what um how people are living um so i completely agree like it's it is just so foreign the fact that it is so far away i mean i can i do think that you can kind of look at like what like is going on in the world today to kind of get uh somewhat of a good understanding like um just like what we've seen in american politics over the last uh several years um and uh just like drastic changes right and like how disruptive that can be um and so like this is also just like it seems like a very similar uh time period right where i may not understand like their system and like how they're living but like i can understand that like that uh drastic change that they may be going through and even if it is like um you know the previous system is is really leaving behind people that change is just very disruptive yeah it it certainly is serfdom is also something that it's just hard to comprehend like debtors prisons serfdom um i believe that i've talked about this before on the show but like i just was going over my finances because i'm prepping taxes whatever and i'm 18 years into a student loan debt that i literally can't get out from under that's criminal let me tell you why it's criminal uh which is why even though i believe uh previously i wrote uh that dostoevsky's crime and punishment was the worst book ever written i do resonate with friskonikoff at least a little bit because i believe that this loan is criminal and i am oppressed by the world because they charge me interest every day and then any interest that's not paid by the end of the month becomes new a new loan and so the new loan is then charged interest every day and if you extrapolate that because percentages and and um interest rates are exponential it like i borrowed 50 grand back in 2007 as an 18 year old whatever you know kid going to film school and it's 2025 and i can't get out from under the sun i can't buy a house to provide for my wife and i like it's criminal it's literally criminal refining doesn't work because their percentages are just too competitive it's awful it's literally the worst so raskolnikov i get you well i actually think that there's a lot of stuff about him that a lot of people can identify with in a scary and sometimes depressing and concerning way sometimes i know totally um you'd mentioned that like going earlier all of the different things that had gone through in his life i thought it was interesting that he would write the story then from a perspective of somebody whom he maybe was a past version of himself before going to prison or you know it's somebody that's like this is not the right way and that he would make that person the prime the you know the our protagonist our main character who we view the story through and that's exactly right yeah and yet make him completely relatable you know when i first went through this book i listened to the audiobook while i was um during the covid lockdowns and you know i was working 60 hours a week and you know have and was going through this like there's a lot yeah you know like university educated person not engaged in what they went to study they're at a dead end thing just like and having no social connection with anybody yeah it's not good yeah it's rough uh it's it's weird that 160 year old book or at least it feels weird it's this disconnect right like 160 year old book can be man that feels like somebody wrote it modern times it feels very relatable well for us for dostoevsky he's born on the grounds where his dad is a doctor but the grounds are a hospital are a hospital for the poor so he sees this poverty he sees the poor as a kid and then one event that we don't have time to get into but i mentioned early on is he was told by somebody who discovered a nine-year-old rape victim so he's pulled into this and says hey you need to go get your dad and so he has to go get his dad and he is put into a very strict school military school and i think this is after the death of his uh both of his parents um or maybe in between uh the memories fuzzy but he's put into this very strict military school he can't find his way he's called the dreamer and he's kind of aloof in some sense he's not really into his studies he then uh graduates and decides to write full-time he starts to write and he becomes an instant you know sensation his book poor folk goes to the stratosphere and because of all those experiences and the death of his father let me put this uh a parenthetical here the death of his father we don't know if it was a stroke or the his serfs killed him like there's debates uh a lot of people just go with what the neighbor said that he was murdered by his serfs which he was being attacked or assaulted and that led to the stroke anyway that's dostoevsky's world view now not worldview this is dostoevsky view of the world he sees all the suffering and he gets pulled into the the radicals and he begins to read poetry with them he said they sit around they talk about how to fix the world then he gets arrested and the mock execution and then in prison uh in siberia for four years then in the exile under compulsory military service then he comes back then he becomes a journalist and he starts writing in these monthly journals and discussing all this and processing and the books of the time the journals of the time they serialized novels so they serialized these fictional stories which under the oppression and censorship had to talk about things without really talking about them and then he begins to realize that his former life and what he thought would be the answer to the suffering that he saw as a child isn't exactly the answer and part of it is his conservatism his traditionalism his christianity so it's not just you know he came to this realization or this epiphany there's always this history uh i think his his uncles were priests or something too uh so his history informs them that hey this radical idea is not good but what makes him unique is he doesn't go to the far right what we would call it his traditionalism is tempered because he's with the critiques he has about the left radicals he also has against the right radicals so that what makes Dostoevsky despite what his critics might say about him artistically that you know he lacks talent there or one historian said he didn't know what he didn't know and his writings are all trash so he actually knows more than his critics give him credit for sure yeah but that's the nature of critics right like they don't um uh his traditionalism grounds him as you say from you know going off into a different radical extreme yeah yeah that's that's something we should we should definitely talk about i guess it's more of a question to maybe aid with the transition do you want to talk about anything with the book in general before getting into the plot now like outside of history and not at the plot but like i know there's a lot of notes about like names and stuff and i know i think both josh both josh and i had similar comments about getting the names yeah stuff sometimes like hey what the hell is a marmulada and i'll say well yeah it's a jam he's actually the one one of the few i didn't get confused there we go did you say that that's that's a jam marmalade is like a jam yeah it's not a marmalade jam as like of course marmalade yeah there it is yeah that is all super informative slava stuff that i think had i been given that information on my first read through when i wrote my article that this is the worst book ever written uh maybe i would have appreciated it more i didn't i also think i was in a weird spot so to echo what christopher talked about um when you read a book for the first time your current life circumstances certainly play a role in how the flavor of the book is tasted and yeah i think that that's a topic for another time but it's certainly a relevant topic because um there are books that i've read that like really inspired me at the time and then there are books like this where i'm like life was shit and uh this book is shit so yeah well like i said it took me 10 tries to get into it because i mean i knew enough about russian life and culture i would hope so to at least appreciate the artistry of the book right um but i didn't know enough of the history of what would have been my great-grandparents history in russia and every time i got to the poor whores being beaten in the eye i was like i can't take this book and it's not because i was squeamish i was just like i i don't know where this is going and i i it was 10 times at least between 9 and 11 times that i tried to pick up this book and when i was in new york going through some horrible shit and jonathan knows a little bit about that i finally sat down and read it and i think i read it in a week and i was like oh okay this is a decent book and then doing research uh post reading about all this stuff that we talked about and this preamble as we're calling it i was like oh this is more than a decent book this is a good book right there's a reason why it's a classic and dostoevsky didn't just pull it out of his posterior because they weren't writing fiction like you and i think of fiction like brandon sanderson or steven king or name your author that we've covered there was a message hidden in this book to discuss things that maybe weren't supposed to be discussed and then to actually make a claim make a worldview claim um so yeah yeah absolutely and we can get into that in the uh in the full episode so be sure to subscribe because that episode comes out very soon and we'll see you there i have a favor to ask you if you like what we're doing the simplest way to support the show is to hit subscribe in return we'll keep leveling up and we'll listen to your feedback and read authors that you suggest and of course we'll take side quests along the way thank you for joining us and we'll see you next time