#sonya marmeladov

[adobongsiopao]

Jane Eyre 🤝 Sonya Marmeladova

Two women able to forgive and show empathy to the men they love (Mr. Rochester and Raskolnikov) but told them to seek God to gain redemption and take responsibility by telling the truth.

[wretchedvulgarian]

“So you pray very much to God, Sonya?” he asked her.

Sonya was silent; he stood beside her, waiting for an answer.

“And what would I be without God?” she whispered quickly, energetically, glancing at him fleetingly with sudden flashing eyes, and she pressed his hand firmly with her own.

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment (trans. Pevear and Volokhonsky, pp. 323-4)

[possessedbydevils]

My friend gave me a kids ver of cno with illustrations

It's so cute 😭

[deathbypickles]

been over a year since i made this redraw and subsequently forgot about it LOL

[archiveandpunishment]

Black and White Illustrations for Crime and Punishment by Philip Reisman, 1945

[everything-on-red]

ok so i finished my little stylized designs for crime and punishment characters!

top: raskolnikov, sonya, svidrigailov, porfiry, luzhin.

bottom: dunya, razumikhin, lizaveta, alyona, marmeladov, katerina.

i had a lot of fun with little design details, like katerina having a widow’s peak, or making the buttons on dunya’s dress match raskolnikov’s coat.

[boisterous-retribution]

i think it should be socially acceptable to talk about your favourite fictional character out in public for no specific reason at all. like if you were to come up to and ask me how i'm doing, you should be okay when i tell you, "hey did you know this dude that killed a pawnbroker and he happened to be a Napoleon fanboy? see how crazy is that?" which is more interesting? me or the Napoleon fanboy? you tell me.

[karamazovanon]

i have a question for any followers who speak russian: do you add an -a to the end of surnames for female ruslit characters or not?? e.g. would you say dunya romanovna raskolnikova or just raskolnikov, or nastasya filippovna barashkova vs. barashkov?? i've tried to google and i keep seeing conflicting answers and i want to get it right!!

[pavelkaramazov]

people will clown on me for this because he killed two people but I just love how sweet Rodya is. He is so cruel and mean and uncouth a lot or even most of the time, but then he does things like constantly thoughtlessly give the last of his money away to anyone who needs it more than him, cries when he’s in his psychotic episode and can’t remember who Razumikhin is, has that very sweet and tender moment with Polenka, begs the police to get a doctor for Marmeladov and says he’ll pay for it despite having nothing at all himself. At the same time he is capable of terrible things and is often terrible specifically to the people who love him and want to help, and oscillates wildly between the two. It’s that juxtaposition that holds so much of the interest of the narrative itself for me. A lot of people focus on how awful he is and while that is also honestly such a fun part of his character, that alone is not what makes him compelling to me. I have so much tenderness for his character despite what he’s done because he is just so mentally ill and has been through and been witness to so much hardship. He is not easy to love or understand but it’s so beautiful and sweet that Razumikhin, Sonya, his family and his other friends love him so dearly anyway. I truly think the suffering he is constantly surrounded by is the thing that has driven him to psychosis. Specifically I think of when he goes to the police station in part two and says he has been “shattered by poverty.” In these little moments of sweetness and lucidity towards others, even in the depths of his illness, we can still see the little boy in him who so desperately wanted to help that poor horse.

[everything-on-red]

i feel the need to add to the sonya propergander. because she is falling behind. this should not be happening.

like ok yeah dunya is composed. dunya makes sacrifices. dunya has a gun.

but so much of sonya’s entire heart and soul runs through the narrative’s veins. she has unspoken depths that she reveals through her devotion to god and her family and her father and raskolnikov, but these depths are not simple and pure. she has as fraught a relationship with god as she does with her family, but she loves them even more for this. she feels an unwavering obligation to the work of compassion and this scares her as much as it leaves her in awe of her own capability for forgiveness. she doubts the validity, the usefulness of her suffering. she feels the immense power of the small moments of love that lie all around in this story of grime and pain and finality. she is not a virginal paragon, she is not a self-flagellating hedonist, she is not a legal or moral or social genius, she is not a perfect victim. she is enough.

Dunya propergander: pls pls pls pls

Sonya propergander: Main girl. Love her, so nice & sweet & very nicesies

[wretchedvulgarian]

tiny sketch of baby irina with cat

[possessedbydevils]

Love how Raskolnikov is trying so DESPERATELY to justify his actions by comparing himself to Napoleon. He's trying SO HARD to convince himself that he isn't like the old woman he killed, Pyotr who wants a wife that will let him control her, and Marmeladov who uses the money Sonya gathers by destroying herself. Bro is so delusional for saying "Wait no, I'm better than them, they corrupt the youth and are the cause of bad things in other people's lives but I'm better because l killed the cause of it. Even though l killed her sister, who did nothing wrong, too, sacrifices must be made to erase the bad. Napoleon did TONS of bad things to other people, including his country, but the good things he did had more effect and therefore he is praised instead of insulted, so who cares if l murdered a girl who wasn't like her big bad sister? My good doing(killing the evil, old woman) will surely cover the bad thing l did, which is killing her little, insulted sister... Right?". Like that's a whole other level of hypocrisy.

[everything-on-red]

this is such cool analysis. i think i'll always associate the book more with summer, because i feel like that contrast is a lot of what gives the book its character, but i can totally see why someone would label it as a winter book. this definitely extends to a lot of other themes of contrast in the book, especially with light. where the world is perpetually bright, but raskolnikov's mind, and by extension his room, is dark and murky. another reason why i really love sonya's candle motif--her gentle introduction of light and faith into his life is not harsh and all-consuming, like the heat of summer and the midnight sun, but yielding and enduring, like warmth in the cold of winter. she herself is suffering through an internal winter of sorts.

still summer vibes for me though. maybe it's because i tend to get more heavily depressed in the summer, idk lol.

Crime & Punishment is winter, Brothers Karamazov is autumn, The Idiot is spring, argue with the wall

[hamliet]

Hey first just wanna say it’s cuz of you that I caught an intrigue for Russian literature, and have decided to read most of dostoevskys bibliography, and I just finished crime and punishment. Obviously I’m absolutely floored by the entire thing but someone that stood out to me was svirdgailov. Those last couple scenes of him were absolutely amazing and had me reeling, I wanted to know your opinion on him

Hello! And ahhh I'm so happy to hear that!!

Svidrigailov is indeed a very interesting character. He's an antagonist, but the vast majority of his crimes are in the past. Yet they're significant: he rapes an underage girl and she commits suicide. He murders his wife. He propositions Dunya and then corners her. But he also then does some charitable things like actually providing for Sonya's stepsiblings after Katarina dies, and giving Sonya enough money to leave her profession and move to Siberia with Raskolnikov.

So, he's done the worst deeds imaginable in the story--worse than Raskolnikov. And rather than face guilt, he kills himself. Yet, he also is the one who provides for others for absolutely no benefit to himself.

You'll often find Sonya and Svidrigailov compared as foils who represent two alternate paths for Raskolnikov: life or death, suffering or escape.

Rask is obviously another foil. Raskolnikov's name means "schism." and that's because he's both extremely generous and extremely cruel--kinda like Svid. He also donates all his money to Marmeladov's family before he even knows them, when it benefits him not at all. Yet he murders Alyona to benefit humanity... and Lizaveta to protect himself.

The guilt over his crimes haunts him and forces him to face suffering via turning himself in and serving his sentence. But he's in part only able to do this (and eventually to truly repent) because of love. His family and Sonya love him. Svidrigailov wants Dunya to be his Sonya; however, there are some key differences. Raskolnikov empathizes with Sonya, but Svidrigailov doesn't empathize with Dunya very much.

I'd say he desperately wants to use Dunya to feel better about himself. And he wants her to love him, because he's incredibly lonely and lost. When she finally convinces him that she never, ever will, he then donates all his money to Sonya (whom he sees as Raksolnikov's Dunya, and Dostoyevsky makes this especially clear when Svidrigailov literally eavesdrops on Sonya and Raskolnikov's conversations) and commits suicide.

Yet the problem is that Svidrigailov doesn't see Dunya in the same human sense that Raskolnikov sees Sonya--he sees her as a Good Girl who can save him from himself, but doesn't actually try to explore what makes her "good," or what she wants out of life. Even his chasing Dunya down comes after he betrayed her by propositioning her while he was her married employer, then allowed her to be badmouthed and fired which could have destroyed her entire life, and then he made amends... yet murdered his wife to chase after Dunya. That would be like Raskolnikov murdering Katarina Ivanovna and Sonya's siblings to chase after her. It kinda provokes a different response.

Svidrigailov wants to be saved from himself. But the way to save himself is to look at himself at his core, to kiss the earth and confess, as Sonya tells Raskolnikov to do. Raskolnikov's motives are also very interior, and they have always been so--he wanted to prove himself an ubermensch of sorts, but failed. Svidrigailov's seem to be more about avoiding himself, yet still, as with Raskolnikov, the truth of who they are still seeps out despite attempts to avoid it.

You can only run so far from yourself.

Svidrigailov is a tragic character, and if you were drawn to him, he's also a prototype for other characters in Dostoyevsky's works: Rogozhin from The Idiot, and most obviously, Stavrogin from Demons--in which essentially the entire book revolves around the enigma that is Stavrogin.

[cowboyunderscore]

marmeladov’s death scene: is it a metaphor for raskolnikovs descent into nihilism?

marmeladov had essentially had a death wish for a while, drinking excessively to deter his suicidal thoughts, but as soon as the carriage hit him, that was it. he was dragged to his apartment, cared for frantically by his family and friend, to no avail. when the doctor came in, he told them it was already too late, and that anything they did now would be useless, as the damage was done. next, the priest comes in, and marmeladov dies surrounded by the people whose lives he stole.

raskolnikov had been spiraling within his napoleon theories and poverty for some time, falling deeper and deeper into a nihilistic pattern of thought. when that happened, it seemed like the ultimate irredeemable, lost forever to his hopelessness, action (the carriage) his friend and family nurse him through sickness, combat his ideas, but its little use (raskolnikov and katerina’s attempts to revive marmeladov) svidrigailov, fully down the path of nihilism, becomes who raskolnikov will become should he refuse to surrender. its the only thing to do, but anything he does will be of little use (the doctor revealing marmeladov is “on his last gasp”). he finds some semblance of faith (the priest entering the room) through lazarus, through sonya, and ultimately confesses and avoids becoming “a svidrigailov” (avoiding the fate foreshadowed by marmeladov dying).

so, given the parallels: is marmeladov’s death a physical manifestation/representation/foreshadowing of raskolnikov’s potential fate???

thoughts?

[everything-on-red]

c&p vent art i made a few days ago with a banger quote.