> [!summary] Progressive Summary > This book helps us understand the milieu in which Dostoevsky wrote. Lots of wonderful details of Russian society at the time. # Structured Notes ## Definitions ## Chapter Summaries ### Intro: A Bloody Enigma > **Crime and Punishment is a novel about the trouble with ideas**. It is not a novel of ideas. It does not showcase or allegorize philosophical positions for readers to consider. It is not primarily the drama of a young man wrestling with ideologies. Nor is it the story of redemption from misguided thoughts and actions—the notion that Raskolnikov repents and finds God is one of the things that nearly everyone gets wrong about Crime and Punishment. The trouble with ideas is the way they interact with everything else that’s human about us, things that have nothing to do with reason or evidence or theory. Dostoevsky’s novel is about how ideas inspire and deceive, how they coil themselves around sadness and feed on bitter fruit. It is about how easily ideas spread and mutate, how they vanish, only to reappear in unlikely places, how they serve many masters, how they can be hammered into new shapes or harden into stone, how they are aroused by love and washed by great rains and flowing rivers. It is about how ideas change us and how they make us more of who we already are. It is about how ideas can do many of these things at once, or different things to different people, or the same thing to everyone around you. I wonder if I am becoming someone troubled with ideas, and whether reading Dostoevsky is a corrective, a way to remind myself of the danger of getting too caught up with them. --- Russia was not an easy place to be a writer. Literacy rate was about 15 percent. Publishers had to set high prices to survive. A novel could cost half an average bureaucrat's monthly salary. One solution was to aggregate readers through subscriptions to monthly journals. Each issue contained installments of many different novels, bundled together with non-fiction essays and translations of non-Russian writers. If a reader didn't care for a certain story, there was always something else that might appeal. Each issue was hundreds of pages, and were called "thick" journals. By the 1840s, the market was controlled by a handful of publishers who often exploited their writers. --- ### Belinsky The most influential critic was Vissarion Belinsky. He was the first Russian to devote his entire career to literary criticism. He wrote with passion and fervor. He was a proponent of gritty realism, praising Gogol's *Dead Souls*. He was concerned that Russia did not have a literary tradition to rival that of France, Germany or England. He discovered Dostoevsky's *Poor Folk* in 1845. The story is legendary. Dostoevsky had passed a copy of the novel to his former flatmate Grigorovich, who read it together with the poet Nekrasov that same evening. Each took turns reading from it until four in the morning, at which point they went straight back to Dostoevsky and told him that they would give it to Belinsky. Belinsky was ecstatic. He told Dostoevsky, "To you, an artist, the truth has been revealed and proclaimed; it has come to you as a gift. So cherish your gift, remain faithful to it, and be a great writer.” Belinsky started feeding Dostoevsky socialist ideas, introducing him to thinkers such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. He introduced atheism to him. --- Russians have five words to describe an aristocratic spendthrift. Part of what makes Dostoevsky's stories compelling are the depths of depravity to which his characters can sink, often after going through a manic-depressive rollercoaster. For instance, in Crime and Punishment, the character Marmeladov loses his job, then gets it back, earning the respect and reverence of his family, and then just as quickly steals the key to his step-wife's trunk, spends all his salary on drinking, and then goes to his daughter Sonya and asks her for her last bit of money, which she has been forced to earn through prostitution, and proceeds to drink all of that up. # Quotes