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Crime and Punishment Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Oliver Ready
Penguin, pp.702, £8.99, ISBN: 9780141192802
Subscribers to this periodical, while Mark Amory has been literary editor, must often have felt they were enjoying an incomparable feast. Even The Spectator at its best, however, could not quite rival the periodical the Russian Herald (Russkii Vestnik ) under the editorship of M.N. Katkov. This phenomenal editor, in the year 1866, secured serial publication of the two giants of Russian fiction. Tolstoy had been slow in giving Katkov enough material for continuous serial publication of War and Peace . To fill the gap, Katkov enlisted Dostoevsky. Readers could enjoy episodes from War and Peace in the spring numbers of the magazine. Then in May, they could start Crime and Punishment .
Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, who never met (Tolstoy refused a meeting), had parallel and deeply contrasting visions and careers. Tolstoy paints a huge canvas which appears to be more objectively real than reality itself. Dostoevsky, instinctively distrustful of any attempt to portray a thing-in-itself, is the ultimate subjectivist. The contrast is vividly demonstrated by the differences between the two great novels. War and Peace is the story of a national awakening, and the spiritual regeneration which occurred to Russia, and to several key figures in the novel, during the invasion of 1812. Napoleon is cut down to size in the book, made insignificant compared with the great elemental forces of fate: God, winter, Russia.
Raskolnikov, the murderous student of Dostoevsky's novel, has interiorised Napoleon, made him his pattern to live and to die. Raskolnikov did not set out to conquer worlds, but he is a Napoleonist in the sense of believing that geniuses (he is one, naturally) are above the morality which governs the lives of lesser mortals. To prove this to...