Crime and Punishment
How to talk about Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866) when the plot is complicated, the ideas complex, and so much has been said already? I started reading the novel in 2024 and carried it with me for the first hundred kilometres of the Camino de Santiago walk in Spain, only to leave it behind in an albergue in Pamplona. I hadn’t read a word, and it was weighing down my light backpack. I bought a fresh copy back in Sydney at the end of 2024 and finished reading it in the first half of 2025. In other words, my memory of the book is already fragmented, and I have no intention of revising. What has stayed with me in these circumstances is all I promise to write about. At the heart of the book is the characterisation of Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov – a student in St Petersburg, who has stopped attending university and is living in poverty. He has an overactive mind, and a high intelligence alienates him from most people and threatens to derail his acceptance of s...