by JENNIFER SZALAI
The truth about Fyodor Dostoevsky has proven as mysterious and inexhaustible as the mysterious characters he has written about, attracting the attention of novelists (Leonid Tsypkin, J.M. Coetzee) and any number of biographers (Joseph Frank and Leonid Grossman). In “Dostoevsky in Love,” published earlier this year, Alex Kristofy compiled genres, quoting lines from Dostoevsky’s novels and trailing them through a trellis from biographical facts.
The infinite review points to something that Dostoevsky himself may have appreciated. As Oliver Reddy notes in the introduction to his brilliant translation of Crime and Punishment, knowing facts is different from knowing a person—a notion that aligns with Dostoevsky’s own objections to focusing on “mere data.”
So Kevin Birmingham set out to offer something more explanatory and immersive in Sinner and Saint. The author of Birmingham’s Most Dangerous Book (2014), which told the story of James Joyce’s “Ulysses”. His new book tells the story of Crime and Punishment, another work of literary innovation, the publication of which marked a turning point for both Dostoevsky and the history of the novel.
“He was entering the greatest phase of his career,” Birmingham wrote, a period that would include “The Idiot,” “Demons,” and “The Brothers Karamazov.” He was also finding a new way to write about self-awareness and self-deception, by producing not a novel of ideas but what Birmingham calls “a novel about the problem of ideas” – an exploration of their formidable power but also their pathetic incompetence, how the most authentic notions are a deviation from the stubborn stubbornness of the world.
Discrimination is necessary. As Birmingham shows, Dostoevsky was not the schematic narrator whose critics made him break, mapping out some of the major ideologies and then deducing the details. It usually starts from parts of a conversation, a person’s voice, a memorable photo. (“Crime and Punishment,” which he initially proposed as a 90-page story that would take only two weeks to complete, quickly spread far beyond that plan.) Part of Birmingham’s intention is to provide appropriate information due to the inspiration given to a novel in 1835 for a trial The “poet-murderer” Pierre Francois Lassigner, about which Dostoevsky learned in 1861, when he and his brother were looking for material for their new literary magazine.
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