I got a bit of a blast from the past this week when I received a copy of The Birch Spring 2015, which contains an essay I wrote in the fall of 2012.

Nabokov dismissed Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment for its redemption scene (“the crack” in the novel), in which Sonya, forced into prostitution, reads the Bible to Raskolnikov, Dostoevsky’s madman-murderer-protagonist. Reduced to that, the section is pretty cliché (even then), and Nabokov describes it as “long-winded, terribly sentimental, and badly written.”

I figured I couldn’t miss an opportunity to defend one of my favorite novels, so I did a close reading (p. 50) of the chapter. I was particularly enamoured of Bakhtin’s polyphonic theory at the time, so I pulled apart the various discourses juxtaposed by Dostoevsky and – well, if you’re still reading, you might as well just read it yourself.