Episode #219 ... Dostoevsky - Crime and Punishment

hello everyone I'm Steven West this is philosophies this so today we're talking about doki's Crime and Punishment and while there's no substitute for reading the actual book you know sitting down giving yourself the gift of feeling the characters putting yourself in the experience directly being that this is a philosophy podcast we can talk about some of the philosophical themes Doki definitely had in mind as he was writing this book see to know about the deepening of Russian nihilism at the time the rise of what you could call eventually the narcissism of modernity to know about the crisis of faith that many people are encountering across the world well this is some philosophical contexts that can be easily missed if you were taking a purely literary approach to the book and you know take it from me the last thing you want to be in this world is simply a librarian you want to be a philosopher librarian that's the life goal you should be aiming for anyway that's said the main character we're going to be talking about today is one of the most memorable relatable characters and maybe all of classic literature it's a young man by the name of rodion raskolnikov or just rol nikov for short now on the surface the book kind of masquerades as being about this guy raskolnikov where he takes an Axe Murders two innocent people and then deals with the personal and legal Fallout of doing something like that that's what the book masquerades as but part of what makes this book such a work of Brilliance from doeski is that the murder is actually a secondary thing to the main point of the book for him there's a sense in which the book could have been about a lot of different things but a double murder for Doki is going to be an absolutely perfect s to explore the contradictions of Russian nihilism when taken to their natural ends as consequences in the real world you know it's been said the true drama of crime and punishment is actually the complexity of the internal experience of raskolnikov and him coming to terms slowly and painfully with the true reasons why he committed these murders in the first place that he's been lying to himself for a very long time and that the consequences of a brutal ...