CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, THE BEST NOVEL OF ALL TIME

This sublime novel by Dostoyevsky is a triumph of human intelligence. The epitome of human power and intelligence, capable of working wonders with words. A work of art.

I immerse myself in its pages and see myself portrayed within them, where alcohol is present (there are chapters that could have been written while intoxicated, but I don't think Don Teodoro drank. He was epileptic), betrayal, sex, cuckoldry, beautiful girls who die of consumption, attachment to money—Dostoyevsky was a gambler.

White slavery and the seduction of girls who lose their virginity one crazy night.

What is it all about? What's all this about?

In a dialectical way, the great Russian writer drew a compendium of the vices of the Russia of his time. Without acrimony. With a half-smile of understanding, knowing that the issue is unsolvable.

It always was, is, and will be this way until the end of time.

In the face of this marvel, such a work of art, I don't understand the Russophobia and the diabolical slanders hurled against the only constitutionally Christian country left in the world.

I read "Crime and Punishment" on these sweet spring days of June, listening to the cuckoo's song and the chirping of sparrows perching in the orchard to gorge themselves on yellow medlars. There are tons of them this year.

Or I go for a walk around my town; the bars and taverns are packed with old men playing tute and young women in bloom who follow the same path along the sidewalks, showing off their mile-long legs and overflowing busts.

Life, despite everything, is beautiful.

This is the conclusion one reaches when one discovers the philosophy of the author of "The Brothers Karamazov."

There are times when it seems God hides and Satan raises his horned head: wars, disasters, infamies, political whoredom, ministers who reach into the grave, go on an orgy at a spa in Sigüenza, and become cannon fodder for the oceanic programs of Anarosa and its cronies. The morning news, the crime report, the bran. We must fatten the pigs.

Beneath this is a Spain at peace that gets up at six in the morning to go to work, students burning the midnight oil before exams, and old men playing cards or smoking a cigar, enjoying the last days of their old age on a terrace in Villafranca or Cudillero.

Raskolnikov is a failed student.

Sometimes he seems crazy, but he's full of common sense. He lives on the sting of his saintly mother's pension, forcing her to come to Petersburg by selling her provincial estate to marry her daughter off to a wealthy man who wasn't a wealthy man at all, but a crook.

One of the most pathetic and well-defined characters is Marmelod, a ministry official who takes to drinking, is fired from his job, and one day dies under the wheel of a hackney carriage. At the feet of the horses.

He spent his wages on vodka, leaving his wife and three young children in misery.

However, his eldest daughter, Sonia, hounds the streets of the imperial city to support her family.

This street vendor, a kind-hearted Magdalene, not only brings bread to her family but also becomes Raskolnikov's saving grace.

He falls in love with her and marries her, accompanying him to his gulag in Siberia when he is sentenced to eight years in prison for the murder of the old usurer Iliona and her sister Lizabeta.

What was the motive for the crime?

Raskolnikov embraced the concept that there are human beings so despicable that they don't deserve to be alive because of their ugliness, their handicaps, the sordidness of their lives.

However, on the path to redemption, and thanks to Sonia, the murderer, who doesn't kill her to steal because he's not a professional killer, but out of racist hatred, realizes his mistake (this was the idea Hitler was considering for the primordial Aryan race).

For the Nazis, we are not only Jews but also half of humanity, those who don't offer incense to Apollo or exhibit hedonistic bodies, leftover material (lichnii chiloviek, leftover people), and embrace the meaning of Christian life, for which this dogma of love, tolerance, and forgiveness is one of its cornerstones.

There is also a place in paradise for the sick and the crippled.

The protagonist didn't understand this until he met Sonia, a whore, the love of his life.

Raskolnikov believed that one cannot be happy without a new pair of boots.

Sometimes it's better to walk barefoot. If your eye offends you, tear it out.

06/06/2025