parresia

reason to read

Crime and Punishment

For those of you who have yet to read Crime and Punishment perhaps these words will inspire you.

...but the true sign of genius is the ability to begin from the tensions and problems of one's own world, wherever and whenever it may be, or from one's personal experiences, and use these for creations that never lose their ability to speak to the future because they illuminate certain permanent aspects of the human condition. Such creators, as William Blake wrote, possess the capacity "To see a World in a Grain of Sand/And a Heaven in a Wild Flower." Out of the acute social instability and rather jejune radical doctrines of Russia in the 1860s (judged, that is, against any larger philosophical horizon), Dostoyevsky managed to produce the greatest depiction of a conscience in conflict with itself since Macbeth. So long as the injunction "Thou shalt not kill" continues to be a part of the Judeo-Christian moral code, Raskolnikov's anguish will speak directly to the sensibility of any reader who intuitively believes with Sonia that human life is (or ought to be) sacred. The confrontations between Sonia and Raskolnikov, which dramatize, with such agonizing sublimity, the clash between the ideals of love and justice, raise some of he deepest issues of a Western culture whose double heritage derives from both Greco-Roman civilization and Christian faith. Such passages soar to the heights that can only be compared with Aeshylus's Eumenides, Sophicles's Antigone, or Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, in their tragic grasp of the most profound moral-philosophical dilemmas.
~~Joseph Frank, taken from the Introduction to the Bantam Classic print of Crime and Punishment