I’ve often heard reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace compared to running a marathon. Well, I’ve never had the pleasure of either (if, indeed, either is a pleasure). But I did knock one Russian classic off the list recently: Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. And, if I had to use a running metaphor, I suspect it would be something like a literary 10K:
This was my third or fourth stab at it. Previous efforts had brought me no further than the end of Part One (there are, for those of you unfamiliar, six parts and a brief epilogue). Though I’m proud to have finished it, I can’t say that it has been one of my favorite novels. I’d like to write out what I think about it in detail before I forget, but I’ll save that for my offline journal. In short, though, the hard part, for me, is that Dostoyevsky can’t seem to decide whether he’d prefer to write a novel or a religious tract. His characters are, in many places, overtly allegorical. And I didn’t find, in Crime and Punishment, the sort of philosophical and/or psychological depth that is so often associated with Dostoyevsky.
This isn’t my first novel by Dostoyevsky. I’ve also read (and enjoyed) Notes from Underground. But it was my first stab at one of his longer works. And I think I’ll take my time before diving into any of his others. My love/hate relationship with this book sparked an interesting (and ongoing) debate with a friend of mine about the value of reading the classics. My strategy is to balance out classics with more contemporary fare. So the next book in line is Graham Swift’s latest, The Light of Day.
