Fyodor and Katie

A couple of weeks ago, Katie, a waitress at my local bar, approached me.

“You read a lot of books. Have you read Crime and Punishment?” she said.

“I’ve read it a couple of times.”

“May I borrow the book if you still have it?”

“Of course, I’ll bring it tomorrow.”

I gave her the book the next day.

“I’ll have it back to you in a couple of days,” she said.

“Take as long as you like.”

I saw Katie the following week at the bar.

“How’s the book going?” I said.

“I read the first page and started crying. I have not picked it up since.”

“Don’t hurt yourself. You are supposed to derive some enjoyment or pleasure from it even though it does portray some disturbing and unpleasant things.”

I did not bother to ask her exactly what made her cry after the first page. This weekend I have become curious about it. Not having the book, I went to Gutenberg.org to read the first couple of pages of the Constance Garnett translation. The opening lines are disturbing, but they are not lines to make me cry.

It has me thinking about the power Dostoevsky has had over me since I first started reading him. He has always excessively excited and confused me. I first read Dostoevsky when I took a literature class on his works in college. We read The Double, Notes from Underground, The Idiot, The Possessed, Crime and Punishment, and The Brothers Karamazov during the semester. I loved reading him and enjoyed the course, but I recall the agitation accompanying it. He made me wrestle with politics, religion, philosophy, poverty, redemption, alcoholism, family strife, and mental disease in a way no other writer had.

I reread some of his books over the past thirty plus years. My emotional reaction to his writing remained the same. It’s like his temporal lobe epilepsy translated itself to my mind from his writing. I don’t mind. I want fiction to move my emotions. Loss and coping matter to me.

I was sitting at the bar one day when Katie was working. She was talking about her current boyfriend, who is a student and poor. She remarked he often does not have enough money to take the bus to see her. She was planning on dumping him, not because he was poor, but because he didn’t seem to care. I think it hurt her to say it.

Raskolnikov was a poor student. Dostoevsky explains in the opening pages of Crime and Punishment the squalor in which he lived. I wonder if that is what made her cry.

I guess I’ll have to ask her. I need to know.