Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky honestly felt exhausting in the best and worst way. The part that really stayed with me was the crime itself. When Raskolnikov actually does it, I just sat there like what was he even thinking? It didn’t feel like some grand, powerful moment. It felt messy and rushed, moreover, wrong. His whole “extraordinary man” theory sounds almost convincing first, but in that moment, it just collapses. He doesn’t seem extraordinary at all—just scared, unstable, and very human. And then the aftermath hits. That’s what made the book hard to read. Not because of the violence, but because of what comes after. He doesn’t get away with it in any real sense. He just lives with it. And watching him spiral like that, overthinking everything, isolating himself, getting irritated, confused. It felt suffocating. It’s like his mind won’t let him rest for even a second.
What I kept thinking while reading was that he tried so hard to convince himself that morality doesn’t matter, that some people can go beyond it. But clearly, it does matter. Because the second he crosses that line, everything inside him starts falling apart. It’s almost like without that sense of right and wrong, he has nothing stable left. No peace, no clarity, nothing. Just noise in his head.And then there’s Sonia. I think she was the only part of the story that felt calm. Not happy, not perfect, just calm. She doesn’t argue with him the way others do, she doesn’t try to outthink him, she just stays. And that somehow affects him more than anything else. Their connection didn’t feel dramatic, but it felt real. Like for the first time, he wasn’t completely alone inside his own head.
I don’t think this is the kind of book you “enjoy” in a simple way. It’s heavy, and sometimes frustrating, and very, very intense. But it stays with you. Especially that idea, that you can try to ignore your moral values all you want, but the moment you lose them, you kind of lose yourself too.
