Power of Literature

In a world faced with loneliness, profits and othering, literature helps us to connect, to empathise and to have compassion

- Chinki Sinha

“That’s just the point: an honest and sensitive man opens his heart, and the man of business goes on eating—and then he eats you up.” 

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

IT was in my grandfather’s old house in Arrah in Bihar that I first read Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky as a young girl. I remember the rooms were lined with bookshelves that contained in them entire universes. In those days, there wasn’t much to do. My grandfather, a student of literature, read out poems in the light of the lantern in the evenings. He would talk about the memory that foreshadowed Dostoevsky’s most famous character’s future moments.

Rodion Raskolnikov and his father had witnessed a crowd brutally killing a mule that was too weak to pull a wagon. “But by now the poor boy is beside himself. With a shout he plunges through the crowd into the sorrel, embraces her dead, bloodstained muzzle, and he kisses her, kisses her on the eyes, on the mouth…,” my grandfather read out.

This is the flashback Raskolnikov has before he kills Alyona Ivanovna. Crime and Punishment is a novel that is also about the effects society can have on those who come from a disadvantaged state in the context of class and mental health. In 1866, when the novel was published, 19th century Russia was a transition period—from medieval traditions to Westernisation. It was a time of struggle, of change and of conflict. There was violence and Dostoevsky’s novel was a true representation of the times and the people. He also used time itself as a narrative tool to let readers into Raskolnikov’s feverish mind.