Probably my favourite novella! Here are some of the lines I adored:
“Thus it happened that the illustrious gallery of chess champions, including amProbably my favourite novella! Here are some of the lines I adored:
“Thus it happened that the illustrious gallery of chess champions, including among their number the most varied types of superior intellect—philosophers, mathematicians, people whose natural talents were computational, imaginative, often creative—was for the first time invaded by a total outsider to the intellectual world, a dull, taciturn peasant lad, from whom even the craftiest newspapermen were never able to coax a single word of any journalistic value.�
”All my life I have been passionately interested in monomaniacs of any kind, people carried away by a single idea. The more one limits oneself, the closer one is to the infinite; these people, as unworldly as they seem, burrow like termites into their own particular material to construct, in miniature, a strange and utterly individual image of the world.�
“But is it not already an insult to call chess anything so narrow as a game?Is it not also a science, an art, hovering between these categories like Muhammad’s coffin between heaven and earth, a unique yoking of opposites, ancient and yet eternally new, mechanically constituted and yet an activity of the imagination alone, limited to a fixed geometric area but unlimited in its permutations, constantly evolving and yet sterile, a cogitation producing nothing, a mathematics calculating nothing, an art without an artwork, an architecture without substance and yet demonstrably more durable in its essence and actual form than all books and works, the only game that belongs to all peoples and all eras, while no one knows what god put it on earth to deaden boredom, sharpen the mind, and fortify the spirit? Where does it begin, where does it end?�
“Yet how difficult, how impossible it is to imagine the life of an intellectually active person who reduces the world to a shuttle between black and white, who seeks fulfillment in a mere to-and-fro, forward-and-back of thirty-two pieces, someone for whom a new opening that allows the knight to be advanced instead of the pawn is in itself a great accomplishment and a meager little piece of immortality in a corner of a chess book—someone, someone with a brain in his head, who, without going mad, continues over and over for ten, twenty, thirty, forty years to devote all the force of his thought to the ridiculous end of cornering a wooden king on a wooden board!�
“For, as is well known, nothing on earth puts more pressure on the human mind than nothing.�
“I possessed in these one hundred fifty tournament games a marvelous weapon against the oppressive monotony of my environs and my existence.�
Crime and punishment expresses the psyche of a murderer in a fascinating and raw way, as well as many intriguing social, philosophical, moral, an4.75�
Crime and punishment expresses the psyche of a murderer in a fascinating and raw way, as well as many intriguing social, philosophical, moral, and even religious narrations. this is one of the books which focuses more on the characters; the main character Raskolnikov suffers as he lives through poverty in Russia. He has a theory that there are extraordinary people who are above the law and may commit crimes, and believes he is amongst them.
Raskolnikov’s guilt after murdering heavily affected me and my mood (despite me not having murdered anyone), because Dostoevsky did an incredible job conveying his suffering. The other characters: Sonia, Dounia, Razumihin, etc. also have interesting character development as well as back stories. Many parts made it difficult to put down the book, as the suspense was insane.
I only have 1 problem which may be a very personal one—there were many parts that were incredibly long and boring: such as Marmeldov’s backstory. Personally, reading 10 pages worth of his backstory was unbearable. These parts made it difficult to read the book, and just made me less interested in the book and Raskolnikov’s journey, and made me take way longer to finish the book. ...more
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