Fyodor and Albert

 My initial inklings that Crime and Punishment had a bit in common with L'Etranger are, I find, supported by much on the subject on the internet. It is suggested into the bargain that La Chute owes a debt to Notes from the Underground. 

But it's as much of a contrast as a comparison. Raskolnikov has many reasons all mixed up together for his murdering whereas Mersault, the whole point is, has absolutely none. Dostoevsky was a Christian where Camus was an atheist and one of his many points seems to be that when people are no longer god-fearing but entirely egotistical, they and their theories go unchecked.

That certainly appears to be prescient in the Age of Trump, Boris, Putin et al but, as it was very reasonably sold to me this afternoon, it's not as if we didn't have tyrants during those church-dominated times, too.

The 'punishment' part hardly justifies its half of the title in Crime and Punishment, being no more than a dozen pages of Epilogue so perhaps the punishment is more than the ostensible prison sentence and perhaps being the complex human being, torn between Nietzschean ego and a hankering after moral righteousness, that Raskolnikov is is more than enough punishment in itself.

I don't know. Please don't say that in your undergraduate essays unless you find it corroborated by a more reliable source. I'm not going to be a Dostoevesky scholar. I only wanted to know what it was all about and be able to say I've, finally, read him. I'd take Saint Albert Camus ahead of him any day on the understanding that the sainthood is ironic, like all such honours look like after any sort of scrutiny.

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There's only one thing worse than honours and that is coveting them but not being given them, as Not Lady Nadine Dorries of Nowhere would surely attest.

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Coming soon, in a very early mid-season break in the Autumn music season,

Yuja Wang's Rachmaninov,

Sean O'Brien, Otherwise (Dare-Gale Press),

Katya Hoyer, Beyond the Wall  

and, booked in for late October, Errollyn Wallen at Wigmore Hall

in what is shaping up as best it can to be an Autumn worth having. 

 

Despite the fact that DGBooks Radio and Wireless are up and about, the BBC have not been in touch to offer me either Radio 2 or Radio 3 but large organizations move slowly and have the turning circle of an oil tanker rather than that of a Mini Metro. I know from having worked in one. They don't really like reform or improvement, they prefer to give the appearance of being in favour of it while remaining at best no better than they were ten years ago.

However, I'd still keep the BBC if all my other seven Desert Island items were washed away by a tidal wave, which is increasingly likely these days, even if Times Radio has signed up much of the best available talk talent and Michael Portillo, Amber Rudd and Giles Coren with his own show have been dispensed with.

They were rubbish.