Readers Place

Patricia Highsmith interview/review

The critical reception of Crime and Punishment was enthusiastic, if a little stunned. There was much discussion about the novel’s overwhelming power – readers were shocked by Dostoevsky’s gruesome descriptions and enthralled by his use of dramatic tension.

For more than a century, critics have argued about the book’s message: is it a political novel? a tale of morality? a psychological study? a religious epic? As always with great literature, interpretations are often more revealing of the critic than of the text.

Whatever Dostoevsky’s purpose: in Raskolnikov Dostoevsky has created a man who is singular yet universal – someone with whom we can sympathise, empathise and pity – a compelling portrait of human suffering that will endure throughout the ages.

‘Dostoevsky is the only psychologist from whom I have anything to learn’ Friedrich Nietzsche

‘Dostoevsky gives me more than any scientist, more than Gauss’ Albert Einstein

‘Russia’s evil genius’ Maxim Gorky

‘Dostoevsky wrote of the unconscious as if it were conscious; that is in reality the reason why his characters seem “pathological”, while they are only visualised more clearly than any other figures in imaginative literature… He was in the rank in which we set Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe’ Edwin Muir

Patricia Highsmith was a highly individual writer, unable to make concessions to market forces, pursuing a career unparalleled among contemporaries which often baffled readers and critics.

Writing of psychopaths and killers, taking the reader into their minds and worlds, she tapped into the mystery genre, but pushed things to the very borders of expectation, civility and reason – even of humanity. Her work was deeply transgressive not only of received wisdom, prescribed behaviour and social attitudes, but also of conventional notions of fiction.

Despite early recognition thanks to the Hitchcock film of Strangers on a Train , Highsmith was unappreciated in the United States for the entire length of her career. She achieved greater critical acclaim in Europe, where she lived for much of her adult life.

In 1957 Highsmith won the coveted French Grand Prix de Littérature Policière and in 1964 was awarded the Silver Dagger by the British Crime Writers Association. Recently there has been renewed interest in Highsmith’s work, thanks in part to Anthony Minghella’s film adaptation of The Talented Mr Ripley in 1999 and she has finally gained recognition in the States – not only as a master of the suspense genre, but as a literary author of rare talent.

‘ Ripley’s Game is beautifully written, its attraction lying in the unpretentious simplicity of the Highsmith prose both as it takes us through the seduction of an ordinary decent man and – which is what Ripley admirers will most enjoy – the mental processes of a psychopathic anti-hero who ensnares him’ Anthony Price

‘ Ripley’s Game reintroduces Tom Ripley, with his charm, culture, mischief, weakness for money, and a true decency… Highsmith constructs her plot with masterly finesse’ Daily Telegraph

‘To call Patricia Highsmith a thriller writer is true but not the whole truth: her books have stylistic texture, psychological depth, mesmeric readability’ Sunday Time

‘Patricia Highsmith is a writer who has created a world of her own – a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger’ Graham Greene

AUTHOR INTERVIEWS

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky left three full notebooks of material pertinent to Crime and Punishment . These have been published under the title The Notebooks for Crime and Punishment , edited and translated by Edward Wasiolek. Dostoevsky began work on this novel in the summer of 1865.

In September Dostoevsky wrote a letter to M. N. Katkov, the editor of The Russian Messenger , attempting to persuade him to accept the novel and to publish it in his journal. To show Katkov that the new novel was suitable for publication in a conservative journal, Dostoevsky outlined its content and idea as follows:

The idea of the novel cannot, as far as I can see, contradict the tenor of your journal; in fact, the very opposite is true. The novel is a psychological account of a crime. A young man of middle-class origin who is living in dire need is expelled from the university. From superficial and weak thinking, having been influenced by certain ‘unfinished’ ideas in the air, he decides to get himself out of a difficult situation quickly by killing an old woman, a usurer and widow of a government servant.

The old woman is crazy, deaf, sick, greedy, and evil. She charges scandalous rates of interest, devours the well-being of others, and, having reduced her younger sister to the state of a servant, oppresses her with work. She is good for nothing. ‘Why does she live?’ ‘Is she useful to anyone at all?’

These and other questions carry the young man’s mind astray. He decides to kill and rob her so as to make his mother, who is living in the provinces, happy; to save his sister from the libidinous importunities of the head of the estate where she is serving as a lady’s companion; and then to finish his studies, go abroad and be for the rest of his life honest, firm, and unflinching in fulfilling his humanitarian duty toward mankind.

This would, according to him, ‘make up for the crime’, if one can call this act a crime, which is committed against an old, deaf, crazy, evil, sick woman, who does not know why she is living and who would perhaps die in a month anyway.

Despite the fact that such crimes are usually done with great difficulty because criminals always leave rather obvious clues and leave much to chance, which almost always betrays them, he is able to commit his crime, completely by chance, quickly and successfully. After this, a month passes before events come to a definite climax. There is not, nor can there be, any suspicion of him.

After the act the psychological process of the crime unfolds. Questions which he cannot resolve well up in the murderer; feelings he had not foreseen or suspected torment his heart. God’s truth and earthly law take their toll, and he feels forced at last to give himself up. He is forced even if it means dying in prison, so that he may once again be part of the people.

The feeling of separation and isolation from mankind, nature, and the law of truth take their toll. The criminal decides to accept suffering so as to redeem his deed. But it is difficult for me to explain in full my thinking.

Crime and Punishment

Patricia Highsmith

Patricia Highsmith rarely gave interviews. ‘I only know it takes weeks to recover, as if one had been in a car accident,’ she wrote in 1967. ‘I think J. D. Salinger is correct in granting no interviews, and in making no speeches.’ She was a lifelong diarist, however, and in these we learn that she fantasised that her neighbours had psychological problems and murderous personalities behind their facades of normality, a theme she would explore extensively in her novels.

Highsmith discovered Karl Menninger’s The Human Mind at the age of eight and was immediately fascinated by his case studies of patients afflicted with various mental disorders like pyromania and schizophrenia. She was hugely influenced by the writing of Dostoevsky.

In Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction , she wrote: ‘But the beauty of the suspense genre is that a writer can write profound thoughts and have some sections without physical action if he wishes to, because the framework is an essentially lively story. Crime and Punishment is a splendid example of this. In fact, I think most of Dostoevsky’s books would be called suspense books, were they being published today. But he would be asked to cut, because of production costs.’ Her thoughts on the nature of evil were influenced by Dostoevsky, as well as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.