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Crime and Punishment

Thoughts

Highlights

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This, too, is a prison of sorts: not the prison of Pushkin’s military autocracy, nor the bureaucratic nightmare of Gogol, but the false freedom of those torn from their roots, left with nothing but words and borrowed ideas. πŸ”—

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rebarbative πŸ”—

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sophistry πŸ”—

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β€˜Crime and Punishment is focused on the solution of an enigma: the mystery of Raskolnikov’s motivation.’9 We may wonder, though, whether this β€˜enigma’ is not itself a decoy planted by this most devious of writers. πŸ”—

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casuistry πŸ”—

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bathos πŸ”—

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Dostoyevsky shows how a man who feels as if he is not alive and not truly capable of affecting reality will affect it for precisely that reason – and with catastrophic results. In his own estranged perception, not only is his sense of his own reality attenuated, so too is his sense of the reality of his fellow human beings, of the boundaries between separate lives. The eerie astonishment that overcomes Raskolnikov throughout his crime is the eeriness of a dead man meeting and muffling life. πŸ”—

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polyphony πŸ”—

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caustically πŸ”—

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Etymologically, a crime in Russian is a β€˜stepping-over’ (pre-stuplenie), a transgression. To feel alive and free, every person must β€˜step over’ their conscience and the limits imposed on them by themselves and by others. In this sense, everyone has their crime to commit; or, as a certain cynic tells Raskolnikov, everyone has their β€˜steps to take’. Punishment, too, can be measured in steps – all the way to Siberia – but it must be imposed by another to be meaningful. πŸ”—

Part 1

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he had somehow, without even meaning to, grown used to perceiving his β€˜hideous’ dream as an actual venture, while still not believing his own intentions. πŸ”—