Brains ... I Need Brains ...

Crime and Punishment

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Penguin Classics

Never have I purported to be the sharpest tool in the shed, but this is one classic that definitely went over my head. Here's the basic plot: Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, a depressed, really bright, but slightly mad former law student commits a random murder at the beginning of the novel. If you can look past the murder, he seems to be a fairly decent guy -- he wants to do right by his family, shares his meager funds with others less "fortunate" than he, and even falls for and is eventually redeemed by his love for Sonya, a young woman who is forced into prostitution to support her parents and siblings.

After the murder-- which happens in the first few chapters -- the rest of the novel deals with the Raskolnikov's inner struggle and how he copes with the psychological ramifications of what he has done. My problem with the book is that I don't get what motivated him to kill the old woman in the first place. I put the question to my friend Victor (an educated man and a lover of Russian literature) and his response was to quote a lyric from Cash's Folsom Prison Blues -- "I shot a man in Reno/Just to watch him die."

Um, okay, but that doesn't really get me any closer to the "why" of it. I'm going to be honest here -- I thought Rodion was a bit of a nihilist. And then I thought he had read too much Nietzsche (only sort of kidding.) And then I wondered if he was a plain ol' sociopath. Jury is still out. I'm meeting Victor for lunch on Sunday. Maybe he can help me make sense of it all. Four greasy kopecks out of five.