Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment": A Reader's Guide

by Deborah A. Martinsen

Overview

Crime and Punishment: A Reader’s Guide focuses on narrative strategy, psychology, and ideology. Martinsen demonstrates how Dostoevsky first plunges the reader into Raskolnikov’s fevered brain, creating sympathy for him, and she explains why most readers root for him to get away from the scene of the crime. Dostoevsky subsequently provides outsider perspectives on Raskolnikov’s thinking, effecting a conversion in reader sympathy. By examining the multiple justifications for murder Raskolnikov gives as he confesses to Sonya, Dostoevsky debunks rationality-based theories. Finally, the question of why Raskolnikov and others, including the reader, focus on the murder of the pawnbroker and forget the unintended murder of Lizaveta reveals a narrative strategy based on shame and guilt.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644697849
Publisher:	Academic Studies Press
Publication date:	02/22/2022
Series:	Cultural Syllabus
Pages:	134
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.29(d)

About the Author

Deborah A. Martinsen was Associate Dean of Alumni Education and Adjunct Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature, Columbia University. Past president of the International Dostoevsky Society and former executive secretary of the North American Dostoevsky Society, Martinsen is the author of Surprised by Shame: Dostoevsky’s Liars and Narrative Exposure (Ohio, 2003) and co-editor of Dostoevsky in Context (Oxford, 2015).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Historical Introduction

2. Overview

3. Parts One and Two: Getting Away with Murder

4. Parts Three to Five: In and Out of Raskolnikov’s Mind

5. Part Six: Last Meetings and Epilogue

Appendix 1: Illustrations and Maps

Appendix 2: Crime and Punishment Chronology

Appendix 3: Contemporary Critical Reactions

Appendix 4: Chronology of Dostoevsky’s Life

Bibliography

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Dr. Deborah Martinsen serves her readers a copious feast of insights into Crime and Punishment, a psychological detective novel in which tormented Raskolnikov commits two grisly murders. Her book resonates not just with literary scholars, but also with general readers of all levels. Moreover, it offers invaluable suggestions for teachers seeking dynamic class discussions. In her razor-sharp analysis, Martinsen covers the novel’s narrative strategy, psychology, and ideology. She shows how Dostoevsky uses narrative to immerse readers in the perpetrator’s psyche and explores the psychological facets, which expose a tempestuous battle between heart and intellect. In delving into the protagonist’s justifications for murder and his shame, she unearths ideologies percolating amongst the intelligentsia of the time. But this new book accomplishes more: it proves that a novel set in 1860’s Russia can speak to contemporary audiences and even reverberate with today’s internet-connected populace.”


—Amy D. Ronner, PhD, JD, Law Professor Emeritus

“Deborah Martinsen brings to this lucid and evenhanded guide all her strengths as a Dostoevsky scholar, but especially her longstanding interest in the intricacies of shame. The reader expects Raskolnikov to feel guilt, which at least follows a well-defined script of remorse, repentance, and expiation. Instead we get a successful murderer ashamed of himself. His temptation was the power of ideas and theories; his mistake is a fraudulent pursuit of autonomy. Martinsen pulls every person in the novel into this struggle to transform Raskolnikov’s shame into responsibility and then into rapture. She asks all the right questions, but only guides the reader toward possible answers, giving nothing away.”

—Caryl Emerson, Princeton University

“Deborah Martinsen’s elegant Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment: A Reader’s Guide has much to offer both first-time and long-time readers of this challenging and starkly relevant novel about a debt-ridden student who succumbs to the ideas in the air, ideas which resemble viruses in their ability to infect. In her spare, concise, clear prose Martinsen unpacks the complexities of the novel and vastly deepens our understanding of it. This work bristles with original insights while also making sophisticated use of a wide range of past and more current work. Her book will become the go-to companion for readers of Crime and Punishment for decades to come.”

—Robin Feuer Miller, Edytha Macy Gross Professor of Humanities, Brandeis University

“With her useful background information, deft structural overview, dazzlingly illuminating close analysis, helpful charts, and well-chosen bibliography, Deborah Martinsen has written that rarest of all books, one that can help not only students and general readers new to Dostoevsky, but also teachers and experienced Dostoevsky scholars. Her writing is clear and elegant, utterly unjargonated, yet profoundly insightful. Pedagogically sophisticated, it leaves the way open for its readers’ own interpretations.”

—William Mills Todd III, Harry Tuchman Levin Professor of Literature, Emeritus, Harvard University

Editorial Reviews

In this extraordinary book, distinguished scholar Deborah Martinsen draws upon a lifetime of scholarship in Dostoevsky studies, narrative theory, and ethics, as well as decades of classroom teaching, to craft a riveting, efficient introduction to Dostoevsky’s great novel. Accessible, insightful, deceptively slight in size, A Reader’s Guide will offer something new to readers at all stages of their Dostoevsky journey: seasoned experts, teachers, students, and curious newcomers. … A great teacher and scholar lives on in the ideas [Martinsen] shares, the conversations she inspires, and the example she sets. From this book we learn fresh, bracing new ways of reading a text that we may have mistakenly thought that we fully understood. More importantly, we are inspired by this communication from an intellectual at the top of her game and by the guidance it offers as we seek to live ethical lives in our own thinking, writing and teaching.”

— Carol Apollonio, Dostoevsky Studies (2022: Vol. 25)

“Deborah Martinsen’s Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment: A Reader’s Guide is a slim but erudite volume for readers and teachers of the 1866 novel. Martinsen synthesizes here the wisdom and experience of decades reading, discussing, analyzing, and teaching the novel… Her insights on characterization, emotion, and the subconscious are carefully and thoughtfully embedded in her analysis of Crime and Punishment. Rather than allowing that analysis to provide all the answers, however, she focuses on the questions that it raises. This gives Dostoevsky’s reader, using the Guide, agency in their path through the text. … Martinsen, a brilliant editor and interlocutor who brought Dostoevsky scholars together in conversation, has brought these connections to bear throughout the Guide, in mentions of others’ work in the text, the work’s careful footnotes, her overview of contemporary scholarship, and, finally, its considered bibliography. Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment: A Reader’s Guide is a project Martinsen saw to completion during the final months of her life and it is truly a gift for all teachers and readers of Dostoevsky’s novel.”

— Katherine Bowers, University of British Columbia, Russian Review (October 2022: Vol. 81, No. 4)

“The complexity of Dostoevsky’s writing is… explored in a readable and rigorous manner in Deborah Martinsen’s Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment: A Reader’s Guide. Martinsen’s book follows the plot of Crime and Punishment, revealing the themes and issues explored, the multiple echoes throughout the novel and the various perspectives open to the characters. … Martinsen’s precise analysis deftly avoids any suggestion of a simplistic resolution to the novel’s complexity.”

— Llewellyn Brown, Forum for Modern Language Studies

“A posthumous release by one of this generation’s foremost experts on Fedor Dostoevskii, Dostoevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’: A Reader’s Guide by Deborah Martinsen is every bit as erudite as its author…Surprisingly, before this volume, there had been no comprehensive reader’s guide to Crime and Punishment, save for readings and analyses that appear as parts of larger works. An exquisite resource and teaching aid, every page of this guide is packed with detailed analysis, citing major research to date. It is written for general readers but also provides tips and suggestions for teaching the novel. The information presented is for the most part known to researchers, yet even the most seasoned reader of Dostoevskii will find the guide useful, whether as a refresher course or convenient reference tool.”

— Lonny Harrison, Slavic Review

From the Publisher