The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece, by Kevin Birmingham
An outstanding book with venial flaws
This is overall a great book that undoubtedly lived up to its grand and initially dauntingly niche-oriented premises. Yes, quite a number of human has read or read about Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, or at least have heard of his classic Crime and Punishment, the autobiographical short novel Notes from a Dead House, and (hopefully) be amazed at Dostoevsky’s unique and immortal reflection on the illogical, nihilist shadow that resides within each and every individual, but very few would go beyond reading his work and try to undertake the task of understanding Dostoevsky’s very own mind. The question of what and what-then is findable within Crime and Punishment itself, but not how and why. By answering those two questions, Kevin Birmingham has done a splendid job introducing to us the vast, numerous and varied factors that played into the creation of Dostoevsky’s famous work, all while not shying at all away from delving into some abstract discussions that worked mostly throughout the book except at one chapter, where the pages were prolonged with rather needless discussion and rhetoric in an attempt to put two and two together that were already quite obvious to readers without explanation.
On the one side of the scale is our spotlighted Dostoevsky, who is, as Birmingham implicitly portrays through facts and founded deduction, a bad person. Dostoevsky gambles, drinks, smokes, and plunged deep into political affairs involving secret gatherings and secret radical frats (which eventually led to uprooting this kind of life), doing all so by sucking blood from his brother, his relatives, and his father’s heritage as a nobleman. He engaged in these frivolous activities and dangerous political movements, while tsar Nicholas II was trying to militarize the whole country and strike his iron fist down onto any baseless, free-roaming, intelligently educated radicals (especially those who could and dared to read and write). The story of how these two individuals, a literateur and a tsar, eventually met at the ground of execution (by shooting) of the former, is written in smooth-flowing paragraphs by Birmingham and reads nothing like a typical biographical book that examines the author’s life with a microscope trudging into every little notable detail. The first section, which contains the semi-biography of Dostoevsky, and a historical, panoramic tour on Russian politics and social life, came to me as strikingly vivid, well-paced and organized. Intermittently broke into the section is the narrative on the life of our second protagonist, Pierre-François Lacenaire. Lacenaire was just like Dostoevsky — his father was rich, early childhood was good, and he enjoyed a plethora of artistic endeavors such as composing poems, writing prose, drafting essays, and more. However, while Dostoevsky started his suffering as being forced into a militaristic boarding school featuring strict ranking system, cold showers every morning and a desert of good books, Lacenaire simply had his life turned upside down — his father’s death revealed that his family was in fact bordering on bankruptcy, and Lacenaire could not but slip down the drain by finally committing crime. Later in the book, we find him adopting an illy twisted form of radical philosophy not unlike those that once were discussed in the secret reading club sessions Dostoevsky has participated, and those that he later resolutely combated with his Crime and Punishment. How did Lacenaire, a real-life anima of everything Dostoevsky was trying to write about, came into Dostoevsky’s world? Birmingham took us to look at the life inside prison Dostoevsky had, after escaping from being shot by the tsar’s mercy, which belled the drastic change of Dostoevsky’s life. How the prison, the people inside the prison, the stories buried in these people, all changed Dostoevsky, took up a large part of the book in the middle, and were diligently yet considerably shown to us readers, not told, which is very good and satisfying.
Then, after all the preparation, foreshadowing, and foundation-building, we found Dostoevsky gambling in France again, bracing his illogical, irresponsible and incomprehensible immoral side yet again, after being pardoned by the tsar (to which he felt “unprecedented gratefulness and a need to be a good human and contribute to the world with literature”). He lost a lot of money, then won again, became rich, and lost all money again, which confounded him into dire situations: he was trapped in the hotel he resided, broke, with no one answering his plea for help. Some situations were not all results of his own volition: his wife died, and then shortly after, his brother. He took up his brother’s debt for all those years of help he received and the magazine they tried to run together, vremya. He was left with no choice but to take an outright scam of a deal, which demanded a novel on cruel time condition, or he would have to give up seven years of his future literary authorship. What happened in the end? We know he wrote Crime and Punishment, but Kevin Birmingham made sure, that reading about Dostoevsky’s nirvana before that book’s fruition was extremely exhilarating and breath-taking. When talking about the book Crime and Punishment itself, Kevin Birmingham auspiciously brought us directly onto a guided tour of conflicting psychologies, oceans of creative ideas, materialistic hindrances, Dostoevsky’s luck with his second wife, and of course not forgetting about Lacenaire — his heinous crime and his even more heinous yet universally alarming philosophy. However, Lacenaire, being used by Birmingham as a anchor to further shed light onto everything Crime and Punishment was trying to portray fell short, in terms of examination into his characters. And in the second half of the book, Lacenaire’s usefulness as a comparison and example of the anti-radical, the horribly self-convinced righteous founded by nihilism and twisted denial of basic morality, was outshined by the direct discussion of Crime and Punishment’s protagonist, Raskolnikov as well as Dostoevsky’s own thought processes.
If there is one other thing more or less unsatisfying about this book, it was the ending. The ending gave me the impression that there were something more to say, but to say is to risk dragging onto things not related to Crime and Punishment. This unfortunate dilemma arguably results from Kevin Birmingham’s ambitious length on the detail of Dostoevsky’s love story with his second wife, Anna Grigoryevna Dostoevskaya. The rationale behind the articulation of their love life on the last part of the book has its merits, as it shed some more light on the personal-affair context of creating Crime and Punishment, but this sudden shift from the aforementioned historical panorama on tsar Nicholas I and II era Russian social and political philosophy ultimately resulted in this abruptly ended line of narrative. Should there be an better execution of telling this part, I felt that the book would had a better ending.
Summary
Mr. Birmingham, an outstanding fellow at Harvard University, threaded the whole book together with his extraordinary mastery of narrative skills and his illustrious control of pacing. The topic is niche, yet Birmingham made it accessible and broad enough at the same time for both casual readers and die-hard Dostoevsky readers to enjoy. A few very nuanced difficulties in dealing with the nature of this book’s theme has resulted in a number of shortcomings in this book, but those could be easily overlooked.
A great book for everybody, and in my opinion a great introduction to Dostoevsky (without needing to push someone into reading his work with zero knowledge). Has inspired me to think about much philosophical stuff — nihilism, radicalism, socialism, human behavior, modern society’s moral standards and many more. If Kevin Birmingham finishes another book in the near future, it would be an instant purchase from me.
