“Crime and Punishment” and “Hamlet”
I’ve lately read several Shakespeare plays, and Shakespeare-related books. Imagine my surprise, then, when I found several Hamlet parallels in Crime and Punishment, the book for my book group, one I’d thought would be a departure. Like Hamlet, Raskolnikov veers between mania and depression, hesitates over taking action, and contemplates suicide.
***
Crime and Punishment:
To take a false bank note, and where?–to a banking house, where they do know a hawk from a handsaw–no, I’d get flustered.
Hamlet:
I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw.
***
Crime and Punishment:
“After all, it’s a way out!” he thought, walking slowly and listlessly along the embankment of the canal. “Anyway, I’ll end it because I want to…Is it a way out, though? But what’s the difference! There’ll really be the end?
Hamlet:
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? … To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause…
***
Crime and Punishment:
I noted him, I noted him well.
Hamlet:
I did very well note him.
***
Crime and Punishment:
All in flowers, a girl was lying in it, in [the coffin]…her loose hair…was wet; it was twined with a wreath of roses…The girl was a suicide–by drowning.
Hamlet:
Therewith fantastic garlands did she make…
There, on the pendent boughs her crownet weeds
Clamb’ring to hang, an envious sliver broke;
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook…
but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death…
Drown’d, drown’d.
October 21st, 2008 at 3:55 pm
I shared this with my brother, a Dostoevsky fan, and he pointed out that it very likely was a translator well-versed in Shakespeare.
In his words, “because I’m pretty sure that the alliterative ‘hawk-to-handsaw’ thing doesn’t exist as a Russian idiom …”
it’s interesting to consider; it’s easy for me to forget volumes like these are translated. It reminds me of (yes, a mediocre movie) Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country wherein, Chancellor Gorkon states, “You have not experienced Shakespeare, until you’ve read it in the original Klingon.”
October 22nd, 2008 at 2:07 pm
I’ll have to do more research on this, because I think it does go beyond translation. I can see his point on the hawk/handsaw line and on the “note” line. Yet the entire novel about a man driven to murder, wavering about what is right, verging on madness is more than coincidence, and the character of Razumikhin is Horatio to Raskolnikov’s Hamlet.
November 12th, 2008 at 11:45 pm
Very interesting. I’m glad I’m not the only one who made this connection. I recently acted in Hamlet, and then I started to read this book. I instantly made the connection. I wonder, though, if perhaps Dostoevsky didn’t intend such a connection, but instead it is mere coincidence? There is no doubt a connection between Hamlet and Raskolnikov, but it would be really cool if both Shakespeare and Dostoevsky identified the same aspects of human nature and coincidently both wrote it down. I’m still willing to accept that Dostoevsky was possibly influenced by Hamlet.