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Program Title
Credits Producer: Jonathan Powell Director: Michael Barlow Intro CRIME AND PUNISHMENT/Episode 1/Intro by Alistair Cooke Good evening, I'm Alistair Cooke. We begin tonight a four-part dramatization of a novel that put Dostoyevsky--after twenty years of on-again off-again writing--in the forefront of Russian literature. It is, of course, Crime and Punishment. Now those twenty years were as different as could be from the familiar pattern of the young man who goes to college, takes a creative writing course, marries, and sets himself up as a professional author. It was quite different with Dostoyevsky. He was born in 1821, the son of an army doctor and a Moscow merchant's daughter. At sixteen after his mother had died, he went into the Army Engineering College in St. Petersburg. He was a good engineer but had a miserable three years there and consoled himself with anaesthetic doses of Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, Balzac, Goethe, and Dickens—especially Dickens. He began to get depressed by city poverty and to be impressed by the stoicism of the peasant. His own peasants had murdered his father because they could no longer stand his brutality. Dostoyevsky resigned his army commission and wrote his first novel, which was called Poor Folks. It was instantly acclaimed and he wrote four more. He became a Utopian Socialist, renounced all claims to his father's estate, but disposed of a lump-sum settlement in two nights of gambling. For much of his life, he was a genuine pathological gambler. He once said, It's not winning. It's the game. He then began to write inflammatory pamphlets printed on illegal presses. He also began to have convulsions that were later diagnosed as epilepsy. He made a public speech demanding an end to censorship and to serfdom. He was arrested, sentenced to death, but finally was handed a reprieve only on the execution ground itself. The Emperor commuted his sentence to four years at hard labor to be followed by Army service as a private. So in chains he went to Siberia. And after four years he was back in the Army. His epilepsy became too much for the Army, and he was released. Still in his early thirties, he returned to St. Petersburg and began to turn from his Socialism to a personal Obsession: the conflict between the free will of the individual and his submission to God--if there was a God. He'd been amazed in Siberia at the will-power, at the seeming self-sufficiency of the murderers he lived with. And out of that came Crime and Punishment. He brewed it in him for fifteen years and he sat down to write it at the time when his brother had died, leaving his sister-in-law impoverished. He himself was also in debt and he was hounded by creditors and police inspectors, moneylenders and pawnbrokers, and by a general panic in the Russian economy. Now Dostoyevsky himself set up the theme of the novel in a letter he wrote to his publisher: It is to be a psychological account of a crime. The action is contemporary, this year 1865. A young man, Raskolnikov, from a petit bourgeois background has been expelled from the university and is living in extreme poverty. Lacking seriousness and stability in his mental make-up he'd given himself over to certain strange ideas in the air at the time. He determines to escape from his vile situation at one stroke: to murder an old woman who lends money for interest and with that money to bring happiness to his mother in the provinces and to deliver his sister, a companion in a landowner's family, from the lascivious attentions of the head of the house.
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