Every decade (or so) I find myself re-reading "Crime & Punishment." The first time, I was 19. I was an English major and it was required reading. I was reading for literary allusions and symbolism and I found myself sympathetic to Raskilnokov and quite in agreement with his central passion--is it a criminal act to kill an elderly person who is no better than a louse, a cockroach, a bunion on the butt of humanity. Think of the things you can do with her money. Donate to charities, help out the afflicted. Lots of people could use with a little axing, or so I thought at the time. I read it again a few years later, a college graduate, a graduate student in psychology to be. Then, I was horrified at the violence and shuddered.
Now I read it again, mostly to satisfy my curiouslty about the detective, whom truth be told, I barely noticed the other two times. Several critics have claimed this guy is the model for Columbo, my favorite TV detective. So now I race through it to find the detective and discern for myself. Once I found him--I can see parallels. Porfiry is shabby, sort of disarming. Quasi-apologetic. Puts himself in a one-down position. He doesn't "Just one more thing," Raskinikov, but he does say, as the latter is dashig away, "A word." Of course it never just is a word. He knows Raskinikov did it. He toys with him, baits him, creates little psychodramas. It reminded me actually of the episode where Columbo knows an architect offed his partner and had the foundation of the new building dug up--to reveal nothing. Then he watched the guy. Now that Columbo has been humiliated and discredited, the architect runs to where he had the body stashed. If he dumps it in now and solders it up, no one will ever be able to get a writ to dig it up again. So Columbo keeps watch at the site. Sure enough, the guy comes back.
This time, the character portrayal, practically a case study, stands out. Is Raskinokov bipolar? Schizophrenic? Schizoaffective--in a manic episode? Schizotypal? Schizoid Personality Disorder? I lean toward bipolar. He seems to have racing thoughts, to have delusions in coincidences, to have some possible thought insertion. But he has moments of clarity and utter logic--he realizes his sister will marry someone whom she doesn't love in order to support the family. He most logically links together what his sister will do with Marmelodov's daughter becoming a prostitute. He tries to help the young drunk girl escape this fate, and then seems to get a little manicky.
Or is it a medical problem. He is cachexic. He seems to have some febrile condition. He may be malnourished. Or it may be porphyria. Some type of encephalogy? I'd love to know what a medical mind makes of it.
Oh, if only hospitals were not manic places on the verge of bedlam. Imagine, a team meeting reading this and presenting it as a new case--everyone putting in their oar of expertise. Instead, well, it is what it is. Patients coming in with Raskinokov's motives--isn't it better to put someone out of their misery? And then shooting them (apparently, axing them would attract more attention).
The other thing I notice now, upon the third time--the "old lady" can't be more than 40. Her younger 1/2 sister is 35. It says much of 1859 St. Petersburg and their life expectancy, I suppose.
The descriptions of the apartments--what we would call SRO's.
The descriptions of it's inhabitants--the fashion of our homeless.
Poverty never goes away. And here, in the US, we no longer fight it as a policy.