Review by pupaebug - Crime and Punishment

pupaebug 's review for:

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

5.0

challenging dark emotional hopeful reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

the structure of this book took some getting used to. because it picked up quite a bit in the second half and i didn't want to put it down. but in the first half it was a lot of exposition and i wished i had paid more attention to two seemingly unimportant tangents in the beginning because they became the entire plot of the book. but once i got used to that, i really really enjoyed reading this and actually enjoyed the different tangents the characters would go on.

i really loved how every single character, even the side characters, were representative of something in this book, something different from raskolnikov's own perspective. from

sonya

, who raskolnikov sees as in a position similar to him but has found her own way of repenting, to

svidrigailov

, who is possibly the true transgressor of the story, who is completely despicable in every way but embodies what raskolnikov described initially as a superior man.

this book was sufficiently stressful and really really sad at times, especially with respect to

the horse dream at the beginning and then the way that dream kinda manifested with both katerina ivanovna and pulcheria alexandrovna towards the end of the book and just how pervasive poverty was among all the characters

. the cat and mouse chase between raskolnikov and

porfiry petrovich

was really fun and entertaining, if stressful. but i was most surprised by the amount of love in this book.

raskolnikov, despite being a really selfish person, had so many people who loved him and wanted the best for him. not just his family but razumikhin, sonya, even zossimov and nastasya who testified for him, and even porfiry who genuinely liked him and saw a possibility of redemption in him. razumikhin, dunya, and sonya loved him so much that they went to siberia for him. among all of the sadness in this book, i feel like the compassion of other people really stood out and that pleasantly surprised me

Content Warnings