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Originally Posted by Bookpossum
It's a long time since I read Crime and Punishment but I keep being reminded of it - all the internal anguish and near hysteria perhaps. Am I imagining it, or have others noticed it too?
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I'm about 50% through the book. Like Bookworm_Girl, I've had the advantage of the Penguin edition with its excellent introduction by Allan W. Simmons.
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The novel’s engagement with Russian history is fundamental to its aims. Its first audience read it against the backdrop of the failed 1905 Revolution and in the shadow of the impulses that would take shape as the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Despite Conrad’s protestations that Dostoievsky was ‘too Russian for me’, and that Russian literature generally was ‘repugnant to me hereditarily and individually ’ ( Collected Letters, vol. V, p. 70, vol. VII, p. 615), critics have long discerned the influence of Crime and Punishment (1866) on this work. Although such influence is notoriously difficult to prove, one can see how the idea of turning the Russian master against himself might have appealed to Conrad, and one contemporary reviewer of the novel went so far as to claim that it ‘helps us to understand Turgeniev and Dostoievsky with great clearness’.
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The periodic changes from the first-person viewpoint of the narrator, who is the English Teacher of Languages,to an omniscient viewpoint keeps pulling me out of the story to wonder how the narrator could know so much.
What I am most enjoying about the book is the view of Russia and the discussion of the nature of revolutions. Here is an interesting quote:
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"The last thing I want to tell you is this: in a real revolution— not a simple dynastic change or a mere reform of institutions—in a real revolution the best characters do not come to the front. A violent revolution falls into the hands of narrow-minded fanatics and of tyrannical hypocrites at first. Afterwards comes the turn of all the pretentious intellectual failures of the time. Such are the chiefs and the leaders. You will notice that I have left out the mere rogues. The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement— but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims : the victims of disgust, of disenchantment— often of remorse. Hopes grotesquely betrayed, ideals caricatured—that is the definition of revolutionary success. There have been in every revolution hearts broken by such successes."
Conrad, Joseph (2007-08-02). Under Western Eyes (Penguin Classics) (Kindle Locations 2751-2752). Penguin Books Ltd.
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