I first read Crime and Punishment in high
school and again some time later but I had forgotten a lot of the details. This book can be very thought-provoking. Its shows so clearly and convincingly how a
person can get wrong ideas in their head and brood on them and get
arrogant about them and then actually do them. What a mess was
Raskolnikov! An utter mess. It seems the author even in those days (mid-1800s) was worried about the
Godless nihilism taking over the universities, and saw how prideful
young students, otherwise quite sane, could experiment on it, taking it
to grave limits. But then, he shows how this will never do, how we know
in our hearts there are some right and wrong absolutes, how rebelling
against God and His goodness just because you dare to could end up
driving a person crazy. I like how even though Raskolnikov does the
legal right thing turning himself in days after he committed the
horrendous crime of murdering two woman with an axe (most all of the
book takes place within nine days), it takes him another year in Siberia
to actually repent or have any real change of heart. He was that
indoctrinated and arrogant and angry. I’m sure this book is not popular
these days. It is all about right and wrong, sin and repentance.
Here are some highlights:
p 450 when comfort is preached as the aim of life
p 471 Nothing in the world is harder than speaking the truth and nothing easier than flattery.
p 538 (the other convicts fear him because he doesn’t believe in God)
p 538-9 The dream described here sounds like in C. S. Lewis’s The
Abolition of Man—it’s happening now! A strange new plague of microbes
endowed with intelligence and will attacks almost everyone. People
affected did not know how to judge and couldn’t agree what to consider
evil and what good, whom to blame and whom to justify. Men killed each
other in a sort of senseless spite. . . Men met in groups, agreed on
something, swore to keep together, but at once began on something quite
different from what they had proposed. Only a few men could be saved in
the whole world.
P 541 Wasn’t everything now bound to be changed? (Because he learned to love something–Sonia)
