There’s a witty scene in a Woody Allen movie where he says: ”I took a speed-read course and read ‘War & Peace’ in twenty minutes. It involves Russia”. I’m sure that if he had been forced to read the equally important and famous classic by Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky he would have put it something like this: “I read ‘Crime & Punishment’ in twenty minutes. It involves murder.” Even though I personally think it is always a good time to discuss this forever contemporary and ever breathtaking masterpiece today there is in fact a real motivation behind such a discussion. Last week первый канал [the first channel] started airing the TV series based on the book with the same name and last year the respected and almost classical already writer Борис Акунин [Boris Akunin] published his project in two volumes called «Ф. М.» [F. M.]. The foundation for his novel is an abrupt discovery of an unknown first version of “Crime & Punishment”, which is not yet known to the science of philology and humanity and therefore worth millions and millions of dollars. It triggers a string of murders and unexpected twists in our modern day Moscow as well as takes us bit by bit through the “first” version of the classic piece, with not Raskolnikov as the main character but with Porphyry Petrovich, the investigator, instead. It is rather a fascinating take on the well-known tale but lacks both stylistic and inspirational grips in the parts that take place in the 21st century. To say anything more, like for example that instead of Raskolnikov it turns out that Svidrigaylov is the murderer, would be ruining the whole experience for anyone intended on reading it.

Maybe some are scratching their heads now and mumbling to themselves: “Now what was it about again?”

The story is simple – in Saint Petersburg lives a young, poor, tall, good-looking former student named Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov from the provincial town of Ryazan. He kills a money-lender with an axe because of certain convictions. Apart from these convictions he is forced to kill her younger sister Lizaveta, too, after she walks in on him. At the same time his incredibly good-looking younger sister Dunja is getting married to the older but still handsome Pjotr Petrovich Luzhin and has moved from the province to him in Saint Petersburg with her mother, Pulheriya Alexandrovna, who has still kept her youth’s beauty intact. On their arrival to the capital their fate is irrevocably linked with the tall, strong and good-looking Dmitry Prokofevich Razumihin, a friend of Raskolnikov’s who is currently taking care of the latter. After the murder Raskolnikov began to suffer from fevers and, as the not so attractive doctor put it, might be going out of his mind. Simultaneously, in another part of the capital, an old drunk, a certain Marmeladov, with whom Raskolnikov made friends in a seedy bar a couple of days before, dies and leaves four children and a wife behind. The oldest of these children, the sixteen year old blonde, petite and not so very beautiful but still cute Sonya has as of late been supporting the family as a prostitute. The other three children are still little and live in the hallway that their mother, the starved and crazy but nevertheless good-looking Katerina Ivanova rents as a room. All of the sudden Svidrigaylov arrives to the capital, perhaps the only ugly character in the whole bunch, the former employer of Dunja who once offered to elope with her abroad, despite being married at the time. Now that his wife is dead – and her death is of the suspicious kind – he offers Dunja a large sum of money and, as does Raskolnikov, wants to prevent her from marrying Pjotr Petrovich Luzhin. And as if the plot wasn’t thick enough Svidrigaylov rents the room next to Sonya’s and is listening through the wall when Raskolnikov drops in and compels the pretty fallen woman to read the resurrection of Lazarus out loud to him. Before leaving Raskolnikov promises her he will come back tomorrow and then tell her who killed Lizaveta. Because in case some readers might have been thinking “gosh, there aren’t enough interlinked characters in this!” it turns out that not only were Sonya and Lizaveta friends, but they used to study the Bible together. This is the moment when Porphyry Petrovich, the not unattractive but not that attractive either investigator of the murder, gets into the story and has a long talk with Raskolnikov about a certain article that the latter wrote about his convictions and published a few months earlier.

And now things start to get serious. Now the reader, in case the reader hasn’t understood it yet, understands that this is not your average novel about a handful of good-looking poor folks getting mixed up in the “wrong crowd” [i.e. Saint Petersburg], but a deep psychological work written in Dostoevsky’s revolutionizing method of polyphony. Polyphony is to blame for every single of those 700 academic works written about him and his novels during the past 10 years [not to say to blame for all the millions of academic works written about him and his novels in the past 150 years]. Polyphony is when author and characters are equal. Polyphony is when a character speaks about himself in his own voice and you get the feeling that the author has no control whatsoever over what he is saying and would really prefer to shut him up and go on with the story but can’t because of polyphony. Polyphony is what makes some people unable to stand anything that Dostoevsky has ever written except for perhaps «Белые ночи» [White Nights] and then only because that one is sentimental and sweet and not so damn on your nerves and under your skin as, for example, «Идиот» [The Idiot]. In the end of that novel, when the main character gets shipped of to the hospital, you yourself feel like that might not be such a bad thing to do in order to rest after this occurrence. Once again, polyphony is at fault. Polyphony is rather a common thing in modern literature nowadays, even though no one has of yet managed to do it as smoothly and fanatically and realistically and with so many good-looking characters as the great Mr. D.

When it comes to “Crime & Punishment” I cannot hide my own convictions. I tattooed the name of Raskolnikov onto my skin at the age of 19 when I lived in Siberia. It is written right under the tattoo of a mouse, with a pierced ear and a bow in its tail, which I made when I turned 18. I didn’t name my mouse Raskolnikov because I think he was right, as one tender Russian boy once asked me, but as symbol. Not only a symbol for my favorite book and my favorite writer and my favorite literature [Russian], but of literature in general. Literature is both my ultimate passion and my ultimate profession. When I read this novel at the age of 17 in Swedish it made an impression on my person that was impossible to revoke. After finishing the epilogue I decided that my life was to be spent solely and purely following in the footsteps of the great Mr. D. I was going to move to Russia and learn Russian and then study his works and become a professor of Russian literature in order to spread the love.

Which is pretty much what I did and what I’m still doing.