"Crime and Punishment" by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Intense.

That sums it up, especially when reading alone late into the night. The forces of madness slowly creeps into the mind as silently as the plague, almost becoming real. I fell asleep reading the part where Rodya deliriously asks for his socks. I woke up around 3am only to find myself fully-dressed, stumbled about my room looking for my CU ID, and heard myself say, "Where's my socks?" For just a split-second, in the bleak fluorescent light of my dorm room, I thought I was in Rodya's grimy St. Petersburg room, and that I might have clubbed an old widow to death, and split her half-sister's skull in half. For the briefest of moments, I had entered Rodya's subconscious.

True story. But to regain my sanity, I sauntered down the hall to find a friend who--from reading Crime and Punishment as well--was in a similar state of morbid despondency, or as Joseph Conrad would probably say, a "brooding gloom" (Heart of Darkness).

The point is, these Russian (and Polish) authors really know how to get into your head. The collective emotions of Russia in the late 1800s, coupled with social tensions introduced by the Industrial Revolution and movement towards modernity, came to fruition in these powerful works of literature by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Solzhenitsyn, and the likes. The inescapable filth of the citys' roads, and utter loss of moral judgment in individuals, create an altogether grim depiction of human nature: murder, prostitution, bankruptcy, alcoholism, domestic violence, and so on.

There is too much to talk about in Crime and Punishment, I feel like I won't be able to do it justice in so such a short post. I'm slightly delirious and rather exhausted right now, I'm positive I've gone mad already. But if I were to pick one thing that stuck out to me, it would be the strong parallels with Notes from the Underground. The Underground Man is essentially identical to Raskolnikov; they are both immensely spiteful characters. They are very rational people, but their hyperrationality has come to border the irrational. They are neurotic. In other words, they can function as normal human beings, but there is a glaring emotional imbalance. After committing his crime, Raskolnikov is repeatedly described as a "hypochondriac," he easily faints, and his health in general deteriorates. Since Notes preceded Crime and Punishment, there are similar themes of power and control. Both men seek control and power. Raskolnikov, for example, terrorizes Sonya and his family, and likens himself to Napoleon. When Porfiry questions him, Raskolnikov thinks he is control when he thinks he doesn''t fall for a trap Porfiry had set for him; he's also paranoid.

So of the numerous themes in Crime and Punishment, power and control are two themes that really stood out to me.