If you wanna be a psuedo intellectual like me, and youve accidentally found yourself at a snooty party with fancy people higher up on the social ladder than you there may be times when you feel out of your conversational depth. Its a great tool to have some pretntious bullshit of your own that you can pull out of your back pocket at the drop of a hat.
So I wanna talk about Fydor Dostoyevskys Crime and Punishment. It’s legit one of my favourite novels and is a true classic of russian literature. A masterpeice. A book that will change your life. Read at the wrong time, like as an arrogant and cocksure 19 year old know-it-all whos all confidence no competence and you’ll spend the next six days sitting in your pants eating cold spaghetti hoops from a tin peering deep into your own soul while simultaneously pondering the very meaningless of your existence.
Read it at the right time though, I dunno lets say October 1918… and you may just find yourself joining a revolution.
So i’ve got a 1951 copy of Classics Illustrated Issue number 89, again from the legends at Archive.org and like a cultural marxist mastermind I’ve generated this bullshit pretext of a “comic review” to hide my evil brainwashing and communist propaganda like a youtube algorithm friendly trojan horse.
The story follows another arrogant and cocksure 19 year old know-it-all: Raskilinokiov and despite his own delusions of grandeur and inflated self worth he too is all confidence no competence. A poor and unemployed student, who can barely afford to eat and has just sold all his ps2 games to gamestation to buy ramen or you know whatever the russian equivelent of that is…
He’s behind on his rent in a pre-sovied union tsarist russia St Petersburg. Its depressingly dickensian and people are dying in the streets of starvation while Tsar Nocilas the X between starting wars is up there in the palace living the life of luxury fucking partying his ass off with Rasputin. Soiler alert. Things diont go well for the russian royal family…
So raskilonikov is at his wits end and with the land lady saying that shes gonna call the cops on him over his debts he decides that using his superior intellect he will kill the wrinkly old gamestation bitch and take all the money and the games for himself. And get away with it. Hes a very clever guy and the cops are obviously so dumb. Nobody is as smart as me. I mean Raskilinonikov…
Her sister walks in. Thats a problem. The perfect crime doesnt have witnesses. So sorry sis, you dead too. Problem solved. Unfortunate but necessary. Apparently. But as you might expect in real life doing a murder probably doesnt feel all that good and now somebody is knocking the door. This is just the beginning of his problems.
Its a bold openiong. Thats like less than the first 8th of the book . Usually a murder thriller type thing the whole premise is “can we work out whodunnit?” like a Usual Suspects or something but dostoyevsky flipped the script. We know all along who does the murder and we get to watch this epic Light vs L level intellectual showdown between Raskilonikov and the corrupt St Petersburg Police. You spent the whole book on edge, will he be caught? Will he get away with it? You’ll have to read it to find out Comrade.
When Raskilonikov starts having a nervous breakdown under the stress and guilt of his actions it is very easy to identify with. Dostoyevsky does a good job of keeping you on side, like that every action the character takes is justifiable. Its incredible well written and portrays a true human experience. Regardless of your race or gender you can indentify with the ideas and themes in the book – because you know what guilt feels like. We all know what feelings feel like – unless youre some kind of psycho robot killer man in which case you will also indentify with Raskilonikov.
On top of the moral questioning and self reflection Crime and Punishment brings to the reader it also does an incredible job of selling to you just how poor the conditions were under the Russian Empire and you can feel the dirt and the grime. The whole setting builds into the character and the story.
When you try to condense hundreds of pages of prose into a 50 comic book it can be difficult. The its like Karate and Kung fu or something. They’re both martial arts but theyre different skills. Rhythm, Pacing, page turns, monologues, dialogues, trialogues and polyogues the rules are all different yet the team who put this together did a good job. Its a strong adaptation.
Sure, it dropped two entire subplots almost entirely and in the process of tightening the story we lose a lot of the time pondering existential questions and moral conundrums and shit. But what it does do is give you enough of the meat and the feeling of the original that you could easily pretend at a party to that depressed goth chick that youve read the actual book. And then youll remember why youre not invited to parties.
