It's a Crime if You Don't Read Dostoevsky

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)