Episode #219 ... Dostoevsky - Crime and Punishment

Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. So today, we're talking about Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. And while there's no substitute for reading the actual book, you know, sitting down, giving yourself the gift of feeling the characters, putting yourself in the experience directly, Being that this is a philosophy podcast, we can talk about some of the philosophical themes Dostoevsky definitely had in mind as he was writing this book. See, to know about the deepening of Russian nihilism at the time, the rise of what you could call eventually the narcissism of modernity, To know about the crisis of faith that many people are encountering across the world. Well, this is some philosophical context that can be easily missed if you're taking a purely literary approach to the book. And, you know, take it from me. The last thing you wanna be in this world is simply a librarian. You wanna be a philosopher librarian. That's the life goal you should be aiming for. Anyway, that said, the main character we're gonna be talking about today is one of the most memorable, relatable characters and maybe all of classic literature. It's a young man by the name of Rodion Raskolnikov or just Raskolnikov for short. Now on the surface, the book kinda masquerades as being about this guy Raskolnikov, where he takes an ax, murders two innocent people, and then deals with the personal and legal fallout of doing something like that. That's what the book masquerades as. But part of what makes this book such a work of brilliance from Dostoevsky is that the murder is actually a secondary thing to the main point of the book form. There's a sense in which the book could have been about a lot of different things, but a double murder for Dostoevsky is gonna be an absolutely perfect site to explore the contradictions of Russian nihilism when taken to their natural ends as consequences in the real world. You know, it's been said that the true drama of Crime and Punishment is actually the complexity of the internal experience of Raskolnikov and him coming to terms slowly and painfully with the true reasons why he committed these murders in the first place, that he's been lying to himself for a very long time, and that the consequences of a brutal murder like this shakes him awake. It shows him his true relationship to his own existence or to god if you're Dostoevsky. Or if you wanted to describe it in terms of what we've been talking about lately on this podcast, it makes him aware of this more immediate relational network that we are always already a part of. We'll get into all of it, but I wanna make sure right here at the start that we avoid one pretty popular mistake to make about this book and about Raskolnikov as a character. You know, a lot of people will say what it is I'm about to …