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| Edition: | Collector's Library (Hardcover) |
| Author: | Fyodor Dostoevsky |
| Published: | August 2010 |
| Pages: | 734 |
| ISBN 10: | 190463334X |
| New: | $11.01 (2) |
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The novel portrays the murder of a miserly, aged pawnbroker and her younger sister by a destitute Saint Petersburg student named Raskolnikov, and the emotional, mental, and physical effects that follow.
After falling ill with fever and lying bedridden for days, Raskolnikov is overcome with paranoia and begins to imagine that everyone he meets suspects him of the murder; the knowledge of his crime eventually drives him mad. However, he falls in love with the prostitute Sonya along the way. Dostoevsky uses this relationship as an allegory of God's love for fallen humanity—and the redemptive power of that love—but only after Raskolnikov has confessed to the murder and been sent to imprisonment in Siberia.
Apart from Raskolnikov's fate, the novel, with its long and diverse list of characters, deals with themes including charity, family life, atheism, alcoholism, and revolutionary activity, with Dostoevsky highly critical of contemporary Russian society. Although Dostoevsky rejected socialism, the novel also appears to be critical of the capitalism that was making its way into Russian society at that time.
Raskolnikov believed that he was a "super-human," that he could justifiably perform what society considered a despicable act—the killing of the pawn broker—if it led to his being able to do more good through the act. Throughout the book there are examples: he mentions Napoleon many times, thinking that for all the blood he spilled, he did good. Raskolnikov believed that he could transcend this moral boundary by killing the money lender, gaining her money, and using it to do good. He argued that had Isaac Newton or Johannes Kepler had to kill one or even a hundred men in order to enlighten humanity with their laws and ideas, it would be worth it. Thus he is thrown into a moral existential confusion over the death of the pawnbroker's sister. Never at any time in the novel is he repentant over the death of the pawnbroker.
Raskolnikov's real punishment is not the labour camp he is condemned to, but the torment he endures throughout the novel. This torment manifests itself in the aforementioned paranoia, as well as his progressive realization that he is not a "super-human", as he could not cope with what he had done. His confessing to the prostitute, not his turning himself in, is the means to end his suffering.
