Tuesday 19 July 2016

C & P by Dostoevsky


For some time I have been paused at the door of the old pawnbroker’s flat in a tenement in St.Petersburg. I am afraid to knock knowing what must happen. I am going to let myself in to an ‘immersive narrative experience’ of sheer horror and unscheduled mayhem. Using both sides of his hatchet, poll and blade, Rodion Romanovitch Roskolnikov will despatch the sisters and run off with some trinkets. With feverish cunning he will bury them under a rock. There are no gamemaster alternatives to the hideous unfolding of this crime, there is no winning ticket in a lottery, Sonia does not establish a glittering salon and Dostoevsky does not find a good barber and give up staring into the human soul with those mad eyes.

Having knocked at the door and found myself slipping in the gore I am grateful for the absence of that cliche of blunt instrument slaughter, brain matter. No porridge, no gruel only the blood staining his sock through yawning boots. The brimless hat of tramp farce is noted by a passer by, ‘German hatter’ shouted after him but having murdered the powers of darkness cover him in broad daylight.

He appears to have gotten away with it. Now read on:

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