Crime and Punishment Part 1 - Fyodor Dostoevsky - Classic Literature - Russian Literature

Kris joins us to discuss another serialized classic. This time it is Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.

RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE EPISODE

Dostoevsky’s "Crime and Punishment": A Reader’s Guide (Cultural Syllabus): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09Q8RRZ7H?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_digi_asin_title_351

Cliff's Notes: https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/c/crime-and-punishment/book-summary

Super Summary (least helpful, but worth consulting): https://www.supersummary.com/crime-and-punishment/summary/?searchId=78e20184-cb8a-4498-8570-a1d06cb38115&searchPosition=1

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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The person in prison happened to kill themselves when they were going to be put on trial, something like that. Just pick a random example. Even when he goes to the police and he's summoned to them because of the debts he owes, he goes to them in the murdered clothes.

And he just stumbles across another axe, like, oh, I guess it's back on. Give me a sign, Lord. Oh, here's an axe.

Coming to you from the Endless Library, where every book is read and every spoiler discussed. Join us as we dig into the lives of fictional people who cannot defend themselves. This is the SideQuest Book Club.

Have you ever thought about murdering someone? Yes. Well, we know that that's true for you, Slava. This book is written by your people, so that's a given.

But no, have you ever been going through life and you're like, man, I just would like to kill that person? Don't tell us in the comments. I don't want to be pulled into court on that. However, if you felt that way, perhaps you should read this book, because it's called Crime and Punishment.

That is what takes place with our main character, Rodan Raskolnikov, who ends up murdering the pawnbroker in town. And we're going to chat about it over the next four episodes. We have a special guest joining us again.

And it's Christopher, one of my best friends that I don't get to see enough. But Chris, happy to have you back on. Well, thank you for having me on again, Jonathan.

Last time I was on, we were going through another serialized book, Dune. Yes. And here we are with the serialized Crime and Punishment.

Yes, that's true. Serial for serial. We can start a new channel and it will just be you and I discussing serial stories while eating cereal.

And they're interesting. They're almost a century apart in when they were published, I think. Well, yeah, around there.

Around the moon and back again. Around the... Oh, I can't... The joke's not going to hit because I can't remember the name of the planet of Dune. Diorum? Diorum.

It's not... You shut your piehole. All right. Anyway, Slava, give us a quick overview of the plot for Crime and Punishment as we get into it.

In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov, an impoverished former student, tests his theory that extraordinary individuals, think Great Man Theory, can transgress moral laws for the sake of humanity by murdering a pawnbroker and her sister. This act shatters him completely. He becomes greatly ill, vacillates between arrogance and guilt, and continually contemplates confession.

His experiences reveal the profound flaws in his theory. His near confession to the police, his unexpected acts of charity following Marmiladov's death, and his fierce protection of his sister Dunia, all directly contradict his notions of moral exceptionalism. Sonia Marmiladov, forced into prostitution to support her family, emerges as his moral counterpart.

Her suffering, unwavering faith, and interpretation of the story of Lazarus compel Raskolnikov to confront the weight of moral responsibility rather than remain ensnared in his abstractions. Under the scrutiny of Porfiry's psychological investigation and Sonia's deep compassion, Raskolnikov not only confesses, but embraces a path toward redemption. Sentenced to Siberia, he embarks on a transformative journey of moral regeneration, guided by Sonia's presence, as he learns to replace his ideological pride with humility and genuine repentance.

And you mentioned Porfiry Petrovich is an intellectual adversary of sorts in this book. Some of these names, I've gotten confused while going through this book, and he is one of them. Right.

So, I got you, as they say. Chris, you're not alone in that. I have gone through this book twice now, first time when I wrote my article that it's the worst book ever written.

I also can't keep everyone's name straight. I also—and Slava, this is a question for you—is the translation where people use first name, last name meant to be that they're using a very proper speech? Is that why that happens? There's two questions here. There's the translation question, but you can tackle Chris's first.

If I can jump in, I know that it's common to have a patronym, which is not the same thing as a middle name, but that's probably the easiest thing you'd probably liken it to. And so, Rogia, Rodan, Raskol—oh, I don't even remember his full name now. He's got four names, basically.

Well, too many names in Russian. He's an easy one. Like, okay, all four of these names is this one person.

So, I have an answer for all of it. I'll kind of answer them out of order. Names.

In dialogue, if somebody is addressing somebody, they'll use the patronymic. First name, patronymic. Or they'll use a diminutive, you know, like a shortened version.

Like, Vyacheslav is my full name. Slava is what you guys know me. That's a diminutive.

So, that's in dialogue. When in the— Wait, wait, wait. What's your real name? Vyacheslav.

Okay. I feel like I don't even know you. My real name is Jonathan.

Right. Yes. My real name is Slava.

That's just a diminutive version of it. So, and there's Stanislav, Yaroslav, another Slav, and Vyacheslav. Those are the, like, the formal, full versions of Slava.

All those guys are called Slava by friends and family. So, when the dialogue is happening in a book, first name and patronymic, that's a formal address. Same thing for the diminutive versions of the name.

When somebody's saying, first name, last name, even if it's in dialogue, it's just referring to a person. That's not necessarily formal. That's just that.

In the text itself, where there's no dialogue, it's just Dostoyevsky writing. That's just a convention. Jonathan, last name, did this.

Then Jonathan, last name, did this. And then Jonathan did this. That's just a mechanic of the writing of this time for Russia.

Now, the name meanings, what Dostoyevsky used is what's called nomen est nomen, which is a Latin phrase meaning the name is, the name is a sign or the name is prophecy. And so the name is a transliteration of a word. So, raskolnikov, it comes from the word to be shattered.

Marmeladov means a sweet marmalade. Uh, all stuff like that. I have some notes on more of the names.

So if you guys bear with me, sweet, many sweet, sweet man. Marmalade. Is that his street name? Um, so, uh, Porfiri Petrovich, the name Porfiri comes for porphoria, meaning purple, a color associated with imperial authority.

Andrei Svidrigalov is a name drawn from historical figure for moral corruption. That's where Dostoyevsky pulls it. His name means, uh, decadence, manipulation, moral ambiguity.

Uh, Marmeladov, again, uh, marmalade, marmalade, all that stuff. Uh, Dunia comes from the word yudoika, meaning goodwill or good judgment. Razumikin means mind.

So Razum is the mind. And where we get the kin, that's just, uh, suffixes of last names. So that's there.

But the thing is that Razumikin, Luzhin, which the I N is also a suffix in Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, last names. Luzhin is puddle. So Luzha is puddle.

So he's puddle man. And that is, you know, that just shows how, how narrow-minded he is and how shallow he is. Because he, you know, the way he's described, he is narrow-minded and shallow and easily offended and all that stuff.

And Rodin, Romanovich, Raskolnikov, that's the full name of that dude. Uh, Rodin, just a name. Romanovich is his father who was Roman.

And then Raskolnikov, that's what the nomen est omen comes in. He's shattered. He's shattered in half or torn in half, like cracked in half, if you will.

All that stuff. So those, I think that answered all your questions. I feel like I didn't even read the book.

I feel like I'm learning. I didn't know your name. Uh, so our friendship has to start over.

The clock starts at zero. I didn't know the names of these people. So.

The reread the book. Yeah. Josh, let's just cancel the episode.

We're just going to reread the book first. So the puddle, the puddle guy, uh, what was his name again? Luzhin. Luzhin.

That's the fiance, right? Yes. That's the fiance. Okay.

I just want to make sure. So you didn't read the book either. Yeah.

Hey guys, welcome to side quest where we don't read the book. We just talk about it. Let's begin.

It can be a challenging book to get started. I know you'd said that it took you the first time you read it, like 10 or 11 tries. Yeah, exactly.

You actually got into it. Um, when I first got into it, I was immediately suckered in, but this time rereading it preparation for this, I actually found it difficult to start like the first two chapters. They're very, they're very slow in getting you into it, but as it continues on, I actually find it really difficult to put the books down once, once it gets going.

Well, for this podcast, yeah, for this podcast, this was the third time I read it and I already knew what's coming. So it's a little less, dare I say, enjoyable. It's not that I didn't enjoy it, but that first time when I was convicted to finish it, it also grabbed me.

And I finished it, like I said, in a week. The second time was just for pure enjoyment with a little bit more understanding of Russia in the 1860s and all the turmoil and upheaval, social, political, philosophical, and religious that was going on. That made me understand the book even more.

So it's a, it's a strange book. You have to be in the right headspace, I think, to enjoy it. Your sense of enjoyment is a weird one.

If you pick this book up to enjoy yourself. Have you forgotten where I'm from? Oh yeah, we're not friends. Let me, let me, let me tell you who I am.

I'm Slava, also known as Vyacheslav, and my family came from the Soviet Union. That's what you want me to think. The accent's fake.

The name's fake. He's actually just named, he's a guy named Tony who works at a local pizza shop. I used to work at a pizza shop.

I know. That's where the joke comes in. Ah, there it is.

The first time I read this book, it was recommended actually by Christopher to read it. I think you had just finished it and you were like, oh man, this is a difficult book, but you should give it a shot. And I hated every minute of it.

It was slow. I don't resonate with characters who have trouble making actionable decisions. And now I understand that that's Dostoevsky's point here is that there's a suffering of the mind.

There's a spiritual suffering. Now that I've been given a 45-minute preamble and I learned that my friend's name is not his real name, it just took 10 years to get here, to figure out how the first book really sucked, or the first time I read it really sucked. But I had an interesting thought in an article that I read, and there's another video about that on our channel if you want to check it out.

But the premise of the article I wrote was the reason I hated the book itself was actually from a personality point of view, where my personality conflicts so much with the way the character functions that it makes me, for lack of a word, squeamish and uncomfortable, where I'm like, why don't you just kill yourself? Because I just can't tolerate you anymore. So, you know, I mean, he thought about it. Raskolnikov thought about it.

So I'm just trying to support him. So in other words, you think that he's a drain on society? How utilitarian of you. You would have fit in right with the intelligentsia.

You would have fit in. I'm working my way up to the bourgeoisie. I'm climbing the ladder, baby.

We're just the proletariat over here. One surf at a time. I'll bring him the heads.

This first chapter, if I remember it, though, it starts off. Is he still in his Garrett, his apartment, or is he already outside of the pawnbroker kind of doing a trial run for what he's been fantasizing about? I think he is in his apartment. Well, Garrett is a better word for it, which means, I guess, closet, the size of a closet.

So he's in his Garrett, and he is alienated. He's lonely. He avoids human contact.

I'm looking at my notes here. His poverty and squalid living conditions depress him so much that he has fallen behind in his studies. He's half starved.

He hasn't eaten almost nothing for two days. He dreads some unspeakable, excuse me, unspecified act, which he's about to perform. So he's talking about headspaces and being the right ones or wrong ones.

He's in a messed up headspace. And that apartment that he wakes up in is, I would say, a symbol. He lives in a tiny, dark apartment that he hates, a dilapidated, filthy place that symbolizes his headspace, literally his mind, and walls him off from the world.

Because all his little traversing that he does, even when he wants to go to Razumikin, he hates being outside. He thinks people are looking at him. He observes others in their misery, and that depresses him even more.

And if I'm going to crawl up my own butt here, in the literary sense, his apartment expresses his self-loathing. Raskolnikov, at some level, does not believe he deserves a good life. And so he self-inflicts a lot of pain.

And his living condition, his leaving school, not eating, not washing, sleeping in his clothes, all that is self-punishment. It's like a self-flagellation, almost, in my mind. And obviously, I didn't pull that directly out of my posterior.

I read other commentators, but I agree with them. I've added just a little caveat to that. But I've heard commentators, and we'll put this in the description, there's a primer.

There's two primers, that if you want to understand this book. And I got the majority of those ideas, the ones I just outlined from them. I have a question, actually, for all three of you.

And maybe, Josh, you could answer this first. Is when you started this book, did you know what the book was about the first time you started it? Or did you kind of wander in a little bit blind as to what was going to be happening? Because I feel like that could influence how you take in the first chapter. Because there's allusions to, oh, he's going to go and commit this murder.

But they don't say it explicitly. Well, he's going there to do this kind of trial run. So it's like, what is he doing here? Did you know that that's what was happening? So the first time I read the book, it was for a class in college.

It was a class that had an enormous amount of reading that we had to do. I don't think that we had to read the whole, the entire book of Crime and Punishment. And I went in blind.

I didn't know anything about the book. And I probably didn't read all the required reading for it. For class assignments, I know how that feels.

Exactly, yeah. And this was, again, it took me multiple times to get into it. When I really got into it, I did know what it was about.

That was a good question. The very first time, I didn't. But after a little while, I mean, I did know what it was about.

I didn't when you told me to read it. I knew that it's a popular book. But I literally know zero about it.

And whatever you told me, I probably forgot. Because I was wondering how that would influence starting the book for people, if they know or don't know what it's about. Because they spend a lot of time kind of in Raskolnikov's point of view of things, and not necessarily being explicit about everything that he's thinking or doing.

Yeah, for me, when it was pitched to me, the guy pitching it to me got some facts wrong. I was told that it's a lonely student that murders his landlady. And goes on some kind of spiritual journey.

That's spiritual journey. Nice. And he doesn't murder his landlady.

He murders a pawnbroker. And he goes on a journey of sorts. Yeah, for sure.

It's wrong, but not wrong enough to maybe be misleading. It's funny that you say that murders the landlady, because that was the impression that I had also. It's because of the names.

It's because of the names. We, as Americans, don't understand the names of Russian people. I don't even know your name.

So it's very normal for us to go, oh, these sound like the four same people. And it's like, no, well, they're four separate people. Because the first time I read it, I also thought, oh, well, he murdered his landlady.

But then later in the book, the first read-through, I was like, oh, you feel like an idiot. Like, oh, the whole time that they've been talking about it, he murdered the pawnbroker, which makes more sense, but also doesn't make sense. Because how are you going to pawn stuff off? There's nobody else in town.

So how are you going to get money for the stuff you stole? That's the point, to get rid of her. So there's no need for her anymore. People are still poor.

Not if you rob the pawnbroker, which he fumbles to extraordinary lengths. So bad. There's like 1,500 rubles, which is like 10 lifetimes of salary for him.

He misses that and gets some trinkets. He grabs a gold watch and a ring or something. Yeah.

And he loses the earrings as he's hiding in the painted room. So we should all go commit a crime together so that we can prove him wrong. Right, guys? I'm pretty sure in the immediate chapter before that, he goes on about how, god, all of these criminals, they're so terrible at what they do.

They lack the resolve and the will to be able to carry it out and see it through. I'm better than all of that. 100%.

And then he does the same thing. Yeah, his hubris stood out to me more so this time around than it did the first time, I think. Where he's just like, I could absolutely commit a crime and no one will ever catch me.

And then he's like, second-guessing himself. Like, did I do that normal? Is this person winking at me? Is that what you relate with? No, it's part of the book. Did you read the book? Ah, I did.

Three times. So going back to chapter one, chapter two here, when I'm starting to read it, I'm reading Raskolnikov and I'm thinking, man, this guy's a degenerate. He can't seem to make ends meet.

Now, granted, I, again, learned something in Slava's preamble of how poor people really were. So my opinions and commentary make me sound like a jack wagon because I'm calling a poor person a degenerate who can't make ends meet. He's a recluse, which causes us to distrust all people, causes him to distrust all people and believe all of his own grandiose thoughts.

Because I don't know if this is a real thought. I don't know if people understand this, but psychologically, part of relationships, part of friendships are actually to help us temper our thoughts in society together, right? Like if Slava comes to me and goes, hey, I actually think I can be the czar of Russia. I'm going to go, okay, well, that's an interesting thought.

What have you been smoking? First off. Secondly, you need to chill. And we temper each other in society to have the society that we want within reason.

Things fall apart if you take them too far. And also we have today's common society, right? But you're supposed to be in relationship with humans on purpose to say, hey, Slava, I think I want to kill my landlady or the pawnbroker. And you go, I'm glad you shared that with me.

Let's go for a walk. That's a dumb idea. Your whole future's at stake.

You're going to leave your wife behind. Don't do these things. And we temper each other.

In chapter five, there's a student talking to a police officer, going the same ideas. And his friend, the police officer and the student is like, why do you have these crazy ideas? If you think all of this stuff, you should do it yourself. It's like, well, I'm not going to do it myself.

No. And so, yeah, you have an example of that. Yeah.

And that's what kind of pushes him too, because he's inside his head. He has this premonition, we'll call it for lack of a better term. He's going to do something horrible.

He doesn't really like the pawnbroker. And upon hearing this conversation with the student and the policeman, he begins to get inside his own head in all the wrong ways. And he's like, yeah, maybe there is a reason to do this.

And maybe great men, the great man theory, the ubermensch, like there are measures to be taken by these men, and they should be given a free pass to do what is necessary, even to the point of violence, to rid the people like the pawnbroker, to get rid of people like the pawnbroker who, in his mind, and she does kind of, lives in other people's suffering. Because she charges a lot of interest, undercuts people, gives them less for the items than they're actually worth in the pawnbroking system. So she's not like a good person.

Her stepsister, or her half-sister, she abuses her, works her to death. For some reason, she's constantly pregnant. Well, we know why she's constantly pregnant.

Shut up, Jonathan. But she's constantly pregnant. And this poor pregnant woman is constantly being berated by her sister.

And Sorena Skolnikov said, yeah, I am this better man. I am oppressed, and I am lonely, and degenerate, and without means, because of people like the pawnbroker. And therefore, I will take it upon myself to get rid of her.

But constantly pregnant, but doesn't have any children, it brings up something that I was thinking constantly while I was reading through this book this time around, was that how reliable are our narrators or descriptions of different things, be it the letter from the mother, or at that conversation in the bar, or Mameladov's ramblings about his own history? I think it's written in the intention that we just take it as this is 100% the truth. But I didn't this time through, because these seem like realistic enough portrayals of people. And we know people spin nonsense to either big themselves up or put themselves down in everything which way.

Yeah, I think, oh, how do I say this? What you're reading it, what you see as an unreliable narrative, and maybe this is a distinction without a difference. I think the people for Dostoevsky's writing this, this is what the people really believe. And it's not what Dostoevsky's trying to tell us, right? And I think you get that.

But this is what people really believe. Raskolnikov is really like this. Mameladov is really like the way he is.

Sonia, I think, and Dunia, the sister and Mameladov's daughter, are the only ones that are not unreliable in their assessment of the world. They're the only ones that are true believers, if you will, to whatever worldview they happen to hold in the book. So I think not believing what Raskolnikov says, not believing his mother.

And we get hints of that in the letter, where even he picks up on it. Why would she say that? And he makes assumptions about illusion because of that. And we find out that those assumptions are right.

So in that case, he's not unreliable. In almost everything else, he's very much unreliable. Yeah.

Well, I want to circle back a second to your comment, Slava, about Raskolnikov gets this idea that he needs to commit this crime because he sees these signs, these symbols, right? But we get foreshadowing. We get a prophecy, if you will, in chapter two, where we get a full story of a man who was drunk. His daughter became a whore to make ends meet.

And then he got himself together. He saw the better treatment that he got at home. And then he defected and took one last set of money from his daughter.

And he just left, right? He went to the tavern. And now he's having this Raskolnikov walk him home. And he's like a clear example of the life and the time, almost as a juxtaposition of Raskolnikov, that is going to happen, right? Where it's like, hey, he was down and out.

He decided, I'm going to pull up my bootstraps. I'm going to actually do something. He did something.

He liked the results of his actions and then just slipped back into it. It almost seemed, I don't know if it was intentional, but I don't dare say an intentional self-sabotage of like, I'm used to being in this terrible place. Hey, I got the taste of something good.

Nah, let's just throw it all away. That's because freedom's terrifying. When you see someone get out of an abusive relationship and they start to flourish, a lot of times these people run back because they're like, well, this other thing, I deserve it.

It's not just that you have to get out of the circumstances. You actually have to break the mindset. We talk about this semi-regularly on the podcast where it's like worldview and things, but it's also mindset where you need to understand how to not just get out of the circumstances, which is important.

You have to do that, but then you have to sober up your mind too. If the story took a turn and Raskolnikov was removed from his situation and he got to move to a different town, he got a job, whatever, he'd still commit a crime, probably. What do you think, Josh? Yeah.

It's going back to the religious undertones of it. It's easy to get the Israelites out of Egypt. It's hard to get the Egypt out of the Israelites.

It's completely that mindset that needs to shift. I mean, we all experience that. You can move places and think that your problems are going to change if you move.

Environment does make a difference, I think. Absolutely. It is so much more important is that mindset and what you're bringing into that new place.

Did you guys have any other observations in the early chapters of part one at the moment? I thought it was interesting. I guess it kind of piggybacks off of that is that he kept on doing these small things as almost like an attempt to proactively pay penance or something. It's like, I'm going to do this horrible thing.

Let me do all of these little nice things. Then he would get angry at himself for doing them, whether it's leave money at Marmoladov's house, and then he leaves like, why did I do that? I should go back and get there. No, it would be an embarrassment if I went back and got there.

I'll just leave it, whatever. And examples like that, whether it's the woman on the street. I had somewhere I was going with that.

Including when the cop takes the girl who was poisoned or poisoned herself, takes his money to get her somewhere, and she ends up walking away himself. And the cop follows her, but he was still like, oh, well, he didn't call a carriage. And that was my last five kopecks or whatever the hell he gave him.

So he constantly oscillates between this guy who thinks he's the extraordinary person. And it's his right and duty, more so duty, to do this horrible crime. And then there's a guy who helps out a drunk, leaves money for the drunk's family, all that stuff.

And for those who don't know, like the extraordinary man or the great man theory, the ubermensch, the Cliff Snow's version of that is around this time, there was the idea that came out that there are great men whose duty it is to take their country, their community, the world into the next epoch of flourishing, of advancement, to bring about utopia. And sometimes what that requires is harsh measures, destruction, and violence. And that's exactly what Raskolnikov does.

Even in the conversations we talked about in the preamble, and maybe a little bit earlier, in those serialized monthlies that Crime and Punishment and other novels came out, there was also journals, the equivalent of current journals, discussing opinion pieces. Periodicals. Yeah, some people in the intelligentsia circles thought that the way we get rid of the imperial class and get us some more freedom, and the way we free the serfs, because serfdom is horrible, we do have to sacrifice the serfs.

People will have to die for this. For the greater good, blood has to be shed. I'm so glad we can sacrifice the bottom rung of society to make sure that I can get another box of Cheez-Its.

Yeah. So the great man theory is individual and a bit corporate. But in essence, it is, there are great men who should be giving carte blanche to do what is necessary to fix the ills of the world.

And again, that's just Cliff's Notes version. There are books and journals written on it that goes into much detail. Bottom line, that's what it is.

I think I read it comes from like Hegel. Yes. Right? Nothing happens in a vacuum.

So Hegel got it from somewhere else. But yeah, a lot of people point to him as the originator of this. And for our purposes, let's go with Hegel.

But it was brewing around this time in Europe and Russia all, you know, because of the things going on. Yeah. Moving on in the story, there's a note that I wrote down for chapter six where Raskolnikov thinks of something like killing the woman.

He has this sort of like, I'll call it a fever dream. Right. He found it and then he's like, oh, I find it vile.

Right. And then he has this spiritual moment at the pub listening to someone describe the thought that he had. Right.

And he read it as a sign. Oh, you know what? Maybe I really need to do this thing. And the author gives us this real moment that we've almost all experienced.

Clear moments of planting seeds of ideas from the spiritual realm to reality. Right. This same moment is a trolley card problem of who gets to choose whose life is spared versus whose life is spent.

And so these elements of the story also remind me of, as I was reading it, Name of the Wind, where Kvothe goes to borrow money from Devi, this copper hawk, this copper shark. And he feels kind of oppressed at the cost of doing this thing. And he also has these moments where he's wandering aimlessly without mind, without town, without active thought.

And he's like, oh, I don't know how I got to these places. And so it's interesting to me that there are authors who describe this well, because it's also something that I believe that we've all experienced, where if you've ever been driving and then you're like, oh, how did I get home? And you just like, you kind of blank, right? You're just like, I'm not drunk. I haven't been drinking.

But like, you left works, things are on your mind. And you're just like, oh, right turn, left turn down the road. How did I get home? And you just like, your mind blanks.

And so there's these snippets, these moments in the story that Dostoevsky describes that I don't see a lot of modern authors describing anymore, the mindless walking and aimless fitness. The thing that stood out more to me, though, is going back to my first point, is like these clear moments of planting seeds that then blossom into action for humans. And I realize that the world is less, the Western world is less attuned, less sensitive to spiritual things these days.

But that always stands out to me. It's like, oh, hey, you didn't act on this thing for no reason. It came from somewhere.

Like, I like the way that it was worded in the at least the translation I was going through, the coincidence of seeing his internal thoughts externalized into the world around him. But the way it was describing it, I think from his perspective, is that almost like, is this God giving me a mandate that this is God's blessing telling me to do this thing? But it's like, well, it doesn't say that. So is it actually the devil trying to sway you into doing this? Even this happens in Job, the book of Job in the Bible, too.

It's like, well, God did this thing. And it's like, there's two forces. Like, so, you know, you chalk everything up to one being, and then you end up swaying people's minds because like, well, God killed this person.

God told me to do this thing. And then we have the Crusades and things like that, where it's like, well, God mandated this. So it's cool.

We're good. And for Dostoevsky, lest we forget, like a traditionalist, a Christian, what he's saying here is this is, and he wouldn't have this framework necessarily. He would say this is the antithesis to Christianity.

This is what secular and progressive, the progressives of his time, what they are teaching is so radical and so anti-Christian, so anti-Russian, and destructive, and you should avoid these things. So Raskolnikov, goodness, Dostoevsky is painting a picture. He's answering, I think, your question in some way, Chris, this is the way that is anti-God.

God does not demand this. God demands something more from the Russian soul. And yes, we're currently suffering, but through that suffering, as we, I'm putting words into Dostoevsky's mind, I'm putting in Christianese in it, which I hate, but it's going to serve this purpose.

As we walk this path, as we suffer through and act humbly before God, our people, with our traditions, our soil, our Russian soul, will make it out of the rut or whatever horrible situation we're in. And that's why then the book, Raskolnikov has the worldview that he has, because he's passed, he matured from the radical ideas that he had. And the influences, the student, the policeman, his own stupid thoughts that he let run amok, all of that was the wrong way, according to Dostoevsky.

On that specific scene too, I remembered thinking, it was rather amusing to me that this student spewing this radical ideology is talking to a police officer, was what I understood. And that he was just standing there silently, listening to this kid, just rambles, man, we gotta kill this woman. This woman's terrible.

And he's just standing there, he's like, hmm. Something about the way it was worded and the pacing of the whole thing, I just found that whole thing amusing. Just trying in my mind to imagine somebody in a bar talking to a police officer who's off duty about murdering somebody.

Yeah, on a Saturday night, having a drink. It was funny, because I pictured them on a street corner, having a coffee or something like that. And then the officer in my mind has a cigar in his mouth.

And he's just like, oh yeah, yes, I'm a good killer. She's kind of running the town, isn't she? He's the bourgeoisie. Yeah.

That's why he's got a cigar. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But it is comical.

Like, the society at the time had to be just kind of wild where you could talk to a police officer and go, well, you know, I think we should kill this person because it'd be better for our town. Oh, okay. Noted.

And he just goes along his day. Oh, they had just finished playing a game of billiards and were drinking tea. Yes, that's the setting.

Drinking tea. Yeah. But before that, I know we kind of skipped past it, was the dream or nightmare he had, the nightmare of him, of this guy killing a mayor.

And I didn't know necessarily what to make of that, but I remembered it just... Other than it being just, you know, a sign of his, you know... Delirium. His mental descent. Yeah.

But I remembered just the prose going from sentence to sentence through that. It was disturbing in a gripping way of just like you're... I don't know. It was very unsettling, but very well done.

So to be honest, like the dream didn't really... I barely remember that part of the book, going through that part of the book. The part that really stood out to me, aside from like the murder itself, in this section that we're talking about, was the letter from the mother. So I'm hoping that we could at least say at least something about that.

But yeah, to be honest... I have some thoughts on that too. So yeah, I'd go right ahead. I really just didn't remember the dream until we were going through the... So going through like the cliff notes and like this summary.

It is very... I mean, reading through that, it is very strange. And yeah, I may just go to like... I don't know. Just where his mental state is at.

I don't remember the settings around, like how he went into the dream or out of the dream. But I very strongly remember, and having a mental picture the first time going through the book, of the guy just like endlessly swinging an axe down and killing his horse. And the fact that then after that, it stops.

Everyone's cheering him on and egging him on to do it. He does it. And then everyone's just like, what the hell did you do? But they're all cheering him on.

And then he does that. And then they're all just like, what the... I think the phrase that said, you're certainly not a Christian or something like that, I think was one of the pieces of dialogue that they interjected in there. I don't know necessarily to make of it.

I know that it probably symbolizes something in a religious context that I'm just not familiar with. But it stood out to me. I mean, with the murder of the pawnbroker, it's like, okay, there are people that all agree that this pawnbroker needs to be killed.

But then it's like, then after the fact... Is the pawnbroker the horse pulling the one horse carriage? I don't know. Maybe there's a connection there. I think the context from what I remember is he seemed to be ill, right? Just going into... He hasn't been eating, he's been a recluse.

And I think that stems from what Slava was saying about his self-imposed isolation and him punishing himself. Yeah, through the whole first part one, he is getting sicker and sicker and sicker up into the front of part two. On the point you just brought up, Chris, in his isolation, I have a question for the group.

Have you guys ever, A, isolated yourself in a similar... I'm going to use quotes, right? Similar fashion. Because I have. It was like 2010 to 2012.

It was literally a little bit before you and I became friends, Chris. And when I did that, I recall the pride that grew. It's almost like pride grows in isolation because nothing is tamping it down.

There's no comparison. Yeah. There's no outside influence from friends or family that are keeping you in check and keeping you mentally sane.

Yeah, it's just, I'm oppressed. I'm bigger and better than everyone. They're dumb.

I know better than they do. I forget who it was that had said it, but that's one of the... Some famous person said, one of the purposes of society is to keep the individual sane or something like that. Oh, you should look up that quote because that's a great quote.

I would love to know who said that. Horribly misquoting it and probably blown out of proportion, but I remember that. It stuck with me.

Christopher, credited for the quote, Wayne Gretzky. Wayne Gretzky. What'd you say? The purpose of society is to keep the individual sane? Something like that, yeah.

Christopher, Wayne Gretzky. Or I guess it'd be Wayne Gretzky, Christopher, right? Quoting Wayne Gretzky. So as you guys were talking, I looked up that Primer, Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, a reader's guide.

Also a link in the description. Raskolnikov's Dream of the Mayor, Part 1. I'm reading what the author says. In Chapter 5, engenders the reader's sympathy for him.

We quickly realize Raskolnikov identifies with two of the dream's major figures, young Raskolnikov and the peasant, Mikolka. More slowly, we note his identification with the mayor. So for these people, they broke it up into a few different levels.

There's a psychological level. Raskolnikov recognizes his identification with not just his younger side, but also with Mikolka. Lord, he exclaims.

Can it be, can it be that I will really take an ax and hit her in the head? Then there's a thematic level. Mikolka represents the materialistic utilitarian ideology that Dostoevsky tries to rail against. The sociopolitical level of his dream, the author says Mikolka's repeated explanations that the mayor is my goods, not only asserts his rights as possessor, but also reminds Dostoevsky's readers that until five years earlier, serfs had been possessions.

And then there's the other two levels is the metaphysical level, which means reality, what we believe reality is. Mikolka's choice of the word dobro, goods, reminds readers of existential choices. To do good, yes, or evil.

And then finally, the moral level, young Raskolnikov's identification with the mayor can be seen as adult Raskolnikov's sympathy for victims of social injustice. And that's what pushes him to kill this woman because as he's listening to the student, going back to that for just one second, the student and the policeman, he sees it as a sign to get rid of something that he sees is utterly bad. Someone that he sees is utterly bad, objectively in his mind, bad for society.

Something you said about identifying with the mayor that I hadn't thought about and one of the things that you've been talking a lot about is serfdom in that time in Russia. It's like, I didn't think of that because the guy Mikolka says several times, like, my property, my property as he's killing it. I didn't think of that.

So I've actually got something else to think about more. That's interesting. Yeah, and I also heard, read another commentary and they went meta.

They said that often, and they use quotes from the book, but they said that often people in distress have really vivid and horrific dreams and Raskolnikov in this moment is distressed. Let's just put it lightly. Facts.

But Josh, you want to talk about the letter. This is a good place to move on. Are you enjoying today's side quest? Make sure that you're subscribed so you never miss an episode.

We're available on YouTube and all major platforms so that you can listen to us anywhere. Now, back to the show. Yeah, I mean, well, it's just interesting to me and just like this time period where you can't, you know, communicate like we do today with texts, right? Or emails.

It's like you send letters to people and it also then just like carries a lot more meaning. Like the letter when I was like, you know, going through this section, it's like it reminded me of like a long text that I would get from my mom and like honestly roll my eyes at. Like why is she sending me this incredibly long text, right? But the reality is like the communication that we have today just like doesn't bear as much meaning as like that communication then that you have to like really think through what you're sending, what you're saying.

And yeah, like the text that I would get would be like include a lot of information that you really don't need to have in there, right? And so, I don't know, that whole thing was just very interesting to me. Yeah, I understand that completely because it costs money, which they don't have. It costs paper, which costs money that they don't really have.

And they have to, you know, squeeze as much as they can on whatever it was, like two pages. And even to your point, the eye-rolling thing, which makes Raskolnikov mad too. Like why is she telling me this? But he goes into a different headspace and he's like, oh, she must be telling this because of this, this, this, this, and this.

It gets all conspiratorial. Now, like I said earlier, some of it's true about Luzhin, but he gets very conspiratorial and it throws him farther down the hole than he's in. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, and I think that just goes back to like him being a recluse and not being part of society and like bouncing off these ideas that he's had. Yeah, and I've seen this personally. Like my mom was a recluse and the conspiracies she's had and probably has right now about certain people, you know, conspiring against her, I've seen this.

And it was because she pulled herself away from society, especially after my dad's death. She reclused herself. And then when she would have moments of clarity and try to, you know, go out in the world, she would find cults or people that were not good for her.

She would join, she joined two cults and then she would quickly realize, I mean like weeks into it, not like a year later when she's like sacrificing a goat in the woods. She would be like a week or two into it. She's like, nah, this is not right.

And for the right reasons, she would remove herself, but then she would go into being a recluse and then the people that did mean her good, she would push away. So I've seen her skull in the gulf in a 45-year-old woman at that moment in time. Well, I think a lot of the characterizations of different people are very realistic and believable.

Like I can very easily imagine people and some of them real people I've met in real life. And this letter that he gets from his mother doesn't remind me of my mother, but it makes me think of, you know, aunts and family friends of an older generation. Yep, very true.

In some not flattering ways, but also in some cute and endearing ways too. But his mother writes about her and Dunja having like secret notions about possibly he might be like an assistant or an apprentice or something for Luzhin and join his practice or something like that. And I was like, that's an extremely presumptuous thing to say to her skull in the gulf.

And I thought I was like, I've actually had something similar situation where I'd had a uncle say like, hey, talk to this guy about a job. I go and talk to him and realize, oh, I'm talking to you. We have completely different ideas about why we're having a conversation here.

Well, this is not a job interview, like I thought. And so like, yeah, I see a lot of the real world in this and in, yeah, a lot of not nice ways. We are all Fedor Dostoevsky at some juncture, I guess.

Yeah, yeah. I remember as I was reading the book, specifically the letter portion of it this time and just maybe this is coming full circle to what Josh said, like, man, this is a long letter. This is such a long letter.

And I thought of text too. I'm like, man, if they had an iPhone, this would have been maybe seven texts, with four sentences each. But this was a tightly written two page in the margins, seven font size scribbles.

But yeah, people back then, this is the only way they could talk. And they wrote a letter ahead of their trip, hoping that he would get it ahead of their trip, which was going to be precluded, for lack of a better term, by illusion was going to go and meet him. And just the time frame that people, the time frames that people had were so different.

Because illusion even says later, when he finally meets her, it's going to go, I even waited a couple of days to get you, to make sure you read the letter and got used to the idea of me coming and marrying your daughter, paraphrasing your daughter, your sister, paraphrasing. So the whole timeline, internal timeline in the character's heads, how they view time is so much different than what we're used to too. Well, they had to plan ahead, but that was normal life, right? Like, okay, I know that in March, we're going to do, we're going to go travel to see Raskolnikov.

I know that Lucian's going down there at the end of February, which really means that I need to write a letter this week to try and get it there, sort of before Lucian does. Well, I think that it's like a week difference. I know that the passage of time is a little fuzzy.

I think part one takes place over like just one or two days and then he's sick for somewhere between three to six days. I'm not sure how long he's sick for, but, and then it's, once again, everything's tightly compacted to just a couple of days. Yep.

I think it's a week to 10 days and I'm getting, my memory's fuzzy on it, even though I just read it this week. The Razumkin and the other guy, when they're talking to the landlady and the two, not headmasters, but the guys who fix things up, they're, yeah. I keep, I confuse, again, with confusing names.

There's Zametov and Zasimov. Yeah. I forget which one's which.

They're like caretakers. That's the word that's used. Yeah.

But close enough. When his friend, Razumkin, has explained to them why he's on the couch looking up at the ceiling and then looking at the wallflowers on the wallpaper, they said, oh, he's been sick. And I thought it said about 10 days.

And then three days he was delusional, then he came back and then he went back into his delirium. In any case, he's been sick for at least a week. And so that's that timeframe.

And then the timeframe between him and Confession, I think is a couple of weeks because he goes back and forth and Porfiry and him have this mental duel for a while. And then, you know, him and Sonia talk and Sonia is reading to him the story of Lazarus. And I think it's not until a day or two after that, if I'm remembering correctly.

Somebody can correct us in the comments. Only then does he go and confess. Do they have confession in the Orthodox tradition? They do.

Like they do in Catholicism? Yeah. Okay. It looks a little bit different than what we imagine as Catholic confession does.

But yes, the idea of confession as a sacrament and as you go into a priest and receiving some sort of absolution does exist in Orthodoxy. I mean, so speaking of Confession, I mean, the act that we're talking about is the murder of the pawnbroker. I don't know, what were your thoughts going through that chapter and that sequence of the actual murder itself? Well, the first time I read the book, I was just real blind, right? Not sure what's going on.

I think I mentioned like five minutes ago-ish that I thought he murdered the landlady because I just don't understand how Russian names work. And then halfway through the book, again, on the first read-through, I was like, oh, it was the pawnbroker, not the landlady. Okay, well, that makes a little more sense why he was stealing things that were previously pawned because I was like, maybe the landlady is also the pawnbroker.

Maybe they're the same person. But I didn't know that it was going to happen because to riff off of Chris's question earlier, I didn't know what the book was really about. I just kind of went in blind.

Nobody gave me a preamble or a precursor, either about Russia, about the book, or about Dostoevsky. I was just like, I know that this is a really well-loved book and I want to try to read the classics. And that's when I went on my journey of hating this book forever.

People often miss is there's two murders. There's one that's planned and one with the blunt edge of the axe and then the unplanned one with the sharp edge of the axe. So you have a predatory victim, then you have a meek victim.

So there's like four things, two dichotomies if you want to get technical about it going on. So he plans one murder, beats her blunt end of the axe, and then in his fumblings, he realizes, oh, somebody's walking in. Oh, it's the sister.

And he just puts the sharp end of the axe right through her skull. And then he starts worrying about blood spatter, which is, I guess he's watched 48 hours or CSI or whatever the show is. Dexter, Dexter.

No, yeah, he got his cue from Dexter. Did he rip the pocket out back when he was at home after the fact or did he rip his pocket out while the act? After, after the fact. I don't want to jump too far ahead though.

Yeah, yeah. And he keeps scrubbing like blood, the blood, what he sees as blood spatter, which probably is blood spatter, but he's very worried about blood spatter. Which also more than him being a careful murderer, that's his paranoia, obviously.

Well, he also probably owns one shirt. So it's not like he can put on a different shirt and go, I was wearing blue yesterday. He's got one shirt.

I thought the wording did a really good job of showing not just his paranoia, but just like it was completely losing his mind and freaking out over everything. And I think that's like beyond paranoia. But like, he goes and leaves there at the end of chapter six.

It's when him going through and he's even like freaking out about like, oh, the maid is in the room that the axe is in. I can't get that. And then he just like immediately gives up.

Like, oh, I've lost the opportunity on this one, this one thing. I can now never, ever in the future, ever. This murder is never going to happen now.

Yeah. And then he just stumbles across another axe. Like, oh, I guess it's back on.

Right? Give me a sign, Lord. Oh, here's an axe. But I think even way back in chapter one, when he was doing the dress rehearsal, he's like, it must be done with an axe.

Yeah. Or is that, it's like, yeah. But is there, is there symbolism there at all from Dostoevsky? Or is it just like, it's just a plot point? I haven't found any commentary on that.

I think it's a plot point. I think the commentary that I again, pulled out of the reader's guide here is that the dichotomy between the two victims and the two edges of the, or sides of the axe that he uses. Because he goes into a lot of detail about talking about how like, he fashions a sling.

Yeah. To like go stitched into the seam of his coat. So it like hang right there.

So no one will. Yeah. And he has this lucid moment.

You can see it. He's lucid when he goes like, I just can't walk around with an axe. People look at me funny.

I must fashion a lucid look. It's like, yes, yes. You disheveled and crazy looking.

Walking around with an axe, even in Russia in 1864. Might be weird. Might be weird.

The point about him having like a German style hat or something too that everyone, that like it really stands out. Yeah. And everyone's going to notice.

He's like, I should have gotten another one. Ah, whatever. Because I think when he was a student, he had some means.

And so he dressed probably in a good way, a proper way, or maybe middle-class way, whatever it is, whatever way. He wouldn't stand out too much. But now that he hasn't been eating and sleeping well, and he's disheveled and hasn't bathed, and his clothes are tattered, whatever that German hat was, it's definitely now an eyesore.

And he stands out more than your usual poor person. Because there's poor people here, but they seem to like, want to take care of themselves. He didn't remind me a lot of comments on it.

He's like, oh my gosh, I ruined my uniform. Like he makes a point to say that beyond me being a drunk piece of shit, I'm also like not kept right. But Raskolnikov's like, eh, I don't fucking care.

It must be a Russian thing. Caring about how you dress? I don't think this is necessarily a one-to-one, but it makes me think of like, if you were to see a difference between a homeless person versus somebody who is in a tuxedo, but the tuxedo is completely shredded. One of those will stand out.

And that's an extreme example. Yeah, no, no, that's a good point. But I know you'd mentioned symbolism too.

And I know it came up when he was leaving to go do the murder about how there are 13 steps like on the staircase up to his room. And that just immediately cued me in like, oh, that's the superstitious kind of culture, which seems very fitting and immediately locked in on that superstitious nature. It's not the autism? That would be... Well, it struck me as a cultural thing, not an individual thing.

Oh, okay. All right, cool. Got it, got it.

So he commits a murder, part one ends, and then he gets sick, right? Like he's bedridden. People are like, oh, he's been delirious. What's going on with him? I thought the tension of him leaving though, because this comes up as a big part in part two, is the tension of him leaving and this whole drawn out thing about these two guys outside.

And one was like, oh, I'm studying to be a detective or something. Notice how the door... And he's just right there. And I don't know if you want to include this or not, but there was a... I think I came across it last year sometime.

There was a short animation or like a story animatic somebody had made, I think for a class project, that's on YouTube, on the YouTube channel Glitter Sticks, where they animate this last sequence of him leaving his Garrett, going, killing the woman, then going back. Oh, share that with us. You might drop a link.

I can drop a link to that. Do it. And we'll take a look at that.

Besides the moments with the guy calling, I am studying to be a detective, blah, blah, blah. And he actually points out real things. The frame of mind that Raskolnikov is in, he... It's almost delirium that he sets into.

It's terror in not only... But not... See, here's the thing. I was about to say in the murder, but not in the murder. It's terror in how he f***ed everything up.

It's his own negligence and incompetence that he's terrified at. Not necessarily that he murdered Ivanovna, which is the bad guy. So he murdered the person that needed to be murdered and gotten rid of.

He also casually, somewhat casually after he gets his, whereabouts and realizes, oh, I can't cower here with an axe. I must kill Lizaveta. He does it.

He doesn't really think twice about it. It's not like, oh, this is an unfortunate consequence of what I just did. His delirium and anxiety surround his negligence of planning and how he just fumbles everything.

And then later, jump in just a few sections ahead where it's revealed that there was 1500 rubles. And like we've said already, he got away with like a pittance of the booty. It's just like, okay.

Yeah. So a couple of copacks and calls it a day. Even when he goes to the police and he's summoned to them because of the debts he owes, he goes to them in the murdered clothes, the clothes that he's freaking out about that have blood stains.

I told you he owns one shirt. I know. But the fact that he has to do that.

To the police station. Which he thinks is because he's getting caught. But no, it's just about an IOU for not paying his rent.

But he continues to lose his mind. Like I have it here in my notes. The trivial reality of rent dispute collapses into horror when he overhears talk of the murder and faints.

But then when he leaves, he's like, ah, yeah, I'm good. So he does all this weird stuff when he's on his fainting couch at home. He gets up.

He has an emotional response to something that he sits back down. Then, you know, he screams out. And then he, all of a sudden, he gets a very interesting, not very interesting.

He gets a very particular interest in the murders. He starts talking about the details and asking about the details. And so he is literally less comical.

There's like two sides of him. And none of them, it's not like a good and a bad. He's just split in between himself.

And whatever good there is, like, you know, the horse reaction and the dream and Mara Miladov and his desire to save his sister from what he thinks is a horrible marriage to Sonya, to everything. It's sprinkled throughout both identities. But they're both, in my opinion, this is totally Slava.

Both identities that he's split on are crazy to me. They're not one. It's not like, oh, this is the good side of Raskolnikov.

This is the bad side. There's a good little thing sprinkled, but he's just a disheveled crazy person, you know, to use lay terms. Yeah.

So remind me what Razumikin's name means. The mind. Razum means mind.

And kin is just a suffix. So it's if it was like, if a town was called Mindville, you know, like vill is a suffix for towns. Sometimes.

So the same thing for the last name. So Razumikin being his brother, because there's this familial, you know, they're friends, right? But like, he's like, oh, brother, you know, this, that, and the other. He is supposed to, you correct me if I'm wrong here in my reading of the book, be bringing him back to sobriety, bringing him, like helping him keep a clear mind, because he's always very willing to go, oh, brother, I'll go do that.

I'll go read that right now. Yeah. I'll go check it out.

Yo, yo. And almost his conscience. Is that fair? A little bit? Not explicitly.

I think more so than that, although that's part of it. He is, because the word Razum, right? He's the one who's clear headed, who's thinking straight, despite him being in a similar situation with no money and a former student and kind of poor and disheveled. He's thinking straight about his situation and responding in the best way possible for what he has available to him.

While Raskolnikov screws the pooch repeatedly, like the horse. He screws the pooch to death. The dead pooch.

The dead pooch. Something to bring forward from part one into part two, something that was mentioned kind of offhand when between the maid, I forgot what her name was, but the maid and Raskolnikov before he reads the letter about like he's all moping and he says something about he wants to get a fortune all at once and uses that to kind of justify why he does what he does. After Raskolnikov's gone to the police station, he goes and visits Razumikhin really briefly.

And he's all excited about seeing his friend who's not mentally there at all. And he goes and weaves this giant tale about like translating a whole bunch of nonsense and making a good bit of money doing that and tries to get his friend, you know, to come in along with him and get involved in that. And so like there are opportunities, even if they're not the most reputable, because I don't think even the police station, you know, going off of some of the history you're talking about, about the intelligentsia and stuff, like the police officers seem like and the administrators, they're like really angry about these students and these authors are like ruining St. Petersburg or something like that.

But like that there are ways that he could be making money and actually applying himself and he's not doing that. Isn't that always the case though, in terms of life where, and I feel like that's even more prominent today. You know, it's rarer than it should be, but there's like, I remember reading a story a couple of years ago of a homeless man who taught himself to code.

He taught himself the program and then like was able to make decent money by going to the library. Homeless guy, right? So if like he can do it, I'm making him the new bar. There's really no excuse.

People have phones, they have the internet. It's like you really can kind of make your own way. Now that doesn't mean that you'll get the opportunity to win a billion dollars or you'll win the lottery or something like that.

But like you can take yourself from the rung that you're at and go two, three rungs up and like that's normal. Like that's available. Like you just have to make the opportunities for yourself.

But bringing it back in with Razumik and when he's recovering and he's back up, you know, in his room and he's discussing the murder and it's told to us in a kind of recapitulation way because it's serialized. So it's kind of doubles as the, oh, this is what happened last time. But also like it shows that he's actually really smart because he says like the painter is innocent.

All of this stuff is way too convenient. The painter's being framed for the murder after the police had tried framing the other two people that were outside the door when Raskolnikov was locked in there and how the police don't really have something but they're just like fitting evidence to meet whoever they happen to have in custody which sounds like a believable thing. You know, somebody who wants to get, I want this, this is a problem.

I need the problem to go away. It doesn't need to be solved and justice done. The problem just needs to not exist.

So here's a scapegoat. We're gonna move on. But like he then theorizes about what the, how the murder was actually done.

And like to a T exactly describes what Raskolnikov had done. And of course he freaks out about it but they just write it off to, oh, he's sick. The person in prison happened to kill themselves when they were gonna be put on trial.

Right. Something like that. Pick a random example, you know, not that that would have happened in today's world.

Just a random dig John or Jeff, right? Yep. Jeff Smith, if you will. On his own little Island.

Just a lowly little banker. But not to, I don't know. There was that section though.

I guess that jumped out to me. I don't necessarily want to read the whole section but at the end of his resume and like retelling that stuff, he's going on and retelling the story as it was told to him. Like, why did you run away from Dushkins? Because I was awfully frightened.

What were you frightened of? That I should be accused. How could you be a frightened if you felt free from guilt? Now Zasimov, you may not believe me. That question was put to me literally in those words.

I know it for a fact. It was repeated to me exactly. What do you say to that? Well, anyway, there's the evidence.

I'm not talking about the evidence now. I'm talking about that question of their own idea of themselves. Talking about the police.

That statement, you know, their own, the question of their own idea of themselves. I mean, isn't that what this is about? Like the whole book is about, right? Raskolnikov and his idea of himself being the ubermensch, being the greater man. And it's this thing that I think Dostoevsky does a good job of repurposing the question to us through a setting of characters, a series of characters throughout the story.

But as we wind down here for this episode, covering parts one and part two, basically, I have one final question that I have remembered a couple of times, but kept forgetting to ask the experts here. What was the breakdown for the serial release? Is each chapter one of the serials that was released for the story? Or was it by part? Or does that question make sense? How was it released? I'm sure we can look it up. Originally.

But I don't know. I would imagine by parts. Because these were- I'm not sure a guess with no evidence.

That would be my guess too. Josh, what's your guess? Since we're all taking guesses here. You know, I think it's just like- Well, I would guess by part.

But just like we do today with episodes, it's like a new part dropped every week. You know? Yeah. Stay tuned next week.

It makes sense by parts because each part has chapters. So each chapter is kind of like a section of the episodes. Like we have an episode we talk about in the intro.

We talk about the author. And then we might talk about the history of the book. Depending on the episode, depending on the book, it kind of varies here in SideQuest.

Then we talk about the themes. Then we maybe jump into some of the chapter plot points. So those are all the chapters, if you will.

And then part two as well. Part two and so on. All right.

Well, maybe someone can verify that real quick. Well, I think that works well too for the writing structure because I think each part, the last chapter, ends on some monumental moment of happening. Obviously, part one, the last chapter, is the murder and him passing out.

I didn't finish part two in time for this. So I don't know off the top of my head of how part two finished, but I could- It appeared in 12 installments according to Gemini. And Gemini tells me it got this from Wikipedia and the Ohio State University.

So pulling from those two sources, 12 installments. It's Ohio. Probably each part was split in half.

Yeah. Interesting. That makes sense.

And it was monthly installments. Oh, that makes sense. It was a year-long story.

Yeah, exactly. Oh, cool. Interesting.

Now, timeline-wise, Josh, did Christmas Carol come out just after it finished? Crime and Punishment finishes and then Dickens writes a Christmas Carol, right? Something like that. Is that the timeline? Yeah, I think so. It's not that long after.

Do a quick fact check for me. What are the years? Because I think Christmas Carol is like 1903 or something, 1907. No.

Literally just had this. Literally in the 1800s. I think it's 1862.

Not two as in two, but 1860s also that Dickens writes. I'm just here to ask the questions, boys. Oh, you're a couple decades the wrong way, I think.

40s? 1880s? Yeah, 1843 for Christmas Carol. Okay, that makes sense. Oh, so it's the opposite.

Yeah. Much closer to the Count of Monte Cristo than... When did that come out? 40... Oh, I don't... Let me look. That's another classic I'd like to tackle.

1844 to 1846. Well, if you have another serial... Is that a serial? It is. Is it really? Yep.

Christos is going to join us for the serial books, I guess. We'll get that on the schedule, hopefully for next year. Let's see if we can get the author on too.

That's funnier than you're giving it credit for, but thanks. Because the author's dead. Well, Dusty obviously couldn't make it.

So hopefully Dumas will have some free time. Yes. Well, thank you for joining us today on part one of Crime and Punishment.

Be sure to tune in next time where we cover part... Well, we don't cover part two. Join us for part two of our part two, covering parts three and four. Because if it wanted it to be simple, it's not.

It's just going to be confusing. So join us then. Hit subscribe so you never miss an episode, and we'll see you next time.

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