I "read" Crime and Punishment on audiobook on my commutes up and down from Durham (in order to avoid a second catastrophically high ticket [incidentally, I didn't end up having to pay the first one, which is just about the luckiest break I've ever had]). Crime and Punishment was a terrible choice for lent--lent is difficult and depressing enough without spending 24 hours inside the head of a murderer teetering on madness. (This reminds me of my mother who used to fast, but never prayed while she was fasting: "God said to fast and pray--He didn't say we had to do both at the same time.")After I was only four hours into Crime and Punishment, I stopped at a gas station to get swedish fish. I was so messed up from only four hours of listening that I was pretty sure I was the worst human being alive and that I was going to rob the convenience store.
Oh my goodness, though--the Epilogue, or maybe it's just the last 10 minutes--are as profound and filled with grace as anything I've ever experienced. Literally five minutes after I finished the 25 hours, I went to confession (I figured I would want that after feeling as dirty and terrible as I did throughout the book). However, the ending is such a wonderful experience of love and healing that piling confession on top of that was really amazing, but for a different reason than I had anticipated.
Crime and Punishment, even when it was depressing, was one of, if not the most, profound works I've ever "read." Dostoevsky's exploration of the relationship between theory and practice (and his undermining of the theory through an experience of the practice) seems to me to be exactly what art is supposed to do--to call "us to the things of this world," as Wallace Stevens says about love. Perhaps it's only because after 24 and a half hours of depressingness, even a decrease in the amount of depression feels like ecstatic happiness (this is true, right?--the man who is forgiven much, loves much), but the ending feels like pure bliss.
This book is genius.
2 comments:
I will never read that book again, for exactly the reasons you describe. But you're right, the ending is incredibly beautiful.
Loved this post. I am still in the midst of rereading it. Though I am kind of upset that you mistook my man Richard Wilbur for, er, my other man Wallace Stevens. Hm, I have a lot of men.
Post a Comment