multiple points of view

Raskolnikov's internal Siberia

I heard on the CBC radio 2 program Shift recently that Rachmaninoff was always thinking about death and that is why the Dies Irae, the chant used in the requiem mass, is so often a part of his work. In the Dies Irae text, the saved will be delivered and the unsaved damned. Just as watching the adaptation of a Trollope novel enhanced my view of  the antisemitism in Crime and Punishment, the music of Rachmaninoff, in, for example, Isle of the Dead, though written nearly 30 years after Dostoevsky's death, seems the perfect score to that narrative. That and the second piano concerto, so different, but both pieces sad, both passionate. It's what I love about Russian novels and Russian music.

Other notes on C and P, from a writer's point of view. The long passages of dialogue. Seldom a clipped exchange, but veritable speeches as one character unveils himself to another.

The brilliant creation of narrative tension by witholding information. Although Raskolnikov murders the old woman pawnbroker on page 77 of my copy, he is not officially arrested for the crime until page 531. He ends up in Siberia, but the punishment begins almost immediately after the murder as he suffers with doubt, tortures himself with reflection, both attracts and alienates people around him.

I read that Dostoevsky was one of the first writers to employ multiple points of view in a novel and for that I thank him. How narrow a world can appear when seen through only one pair of eyes.

I see, sadly, that the impoverished conditions in which writers live were the same then as now.