Crime And Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Audio CD
Published 1991 by Audio Adventures (first published 1866)

“Life had stepped into the place of theory
and something quite different would work itself out in his mind.” (Epilogue)

Raskolnikov is born in Dostoevsky’s mind and he’ll become the image of the modern hero (or the post-modern hero).
Beyond the Romantic hero, where individual thoughts (forgetting faiths, religions, etc.) leads toward winning results;
Raskolnikov’s character is beyond the will of power, beyond the good and the evil, he is looking for life without theories.

Crime and Punishment’s alchemy: Dostoevsky gathers together his characters to create a scene where people, like chemical substances, react involving a transformation.

Crime and Punishment reflects the classical elements: Earth, Water, Air, and Fire.
An idea: Raskolnikov is the image of the Earth; Sonia suggests Water; Razumihkin Air; and Crime Fire.

Crime working as Fire is an element that destroy, change, and it’s the root of a new life.

Razumihkin is the element who brings freshness to the other characters, and works like the air intruding in a stifling room.
Sonia suggests water , more heavy than air. Like Razumihkin Sonia brings cleanness, and works like the water of a river carrying Raskolnikov towards a new life (as before, without theories).
Raskolnikov reminds Earth: Dostoevsky was an adherent to the current ‘pocvennicestvo’ (a word coming from ‘pocva’, which means soil or earth). The main idea of pocvennicestvo was the bond between pocva / earth and Russian people; a bond with the return to popular principles rooted in the soil.

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