Paul Barber’s Books

 About this book

Dostoevsky’s subject in Crime and Punishment is personal epiphany, and he chose to write about it by creating a character whose name means “schism” and then turning the pieces of Raskolnivkov’s shattered mind into separate characters.  But these can fight in public, turning an invisible mental struggle into a particularly vivid story.  Raskolnikov’s friend Razumikhin is named from a word meaning “reason”: whenever he shows up, someone gets a little smarter.  The name of the main female, Sonia, is a diminutive of Sophia, Greek for “wisdom” (and in the Orthodox world “divine wisdom”).  Whenever she shows up, someone gets wise to himself.  The fabled “coincidences” that scholars find in this novel aren’t coincidences at all on the metaphorical level.

     Dostoevsky is well known as a narrative genius.  Examining Dostoevsky’s narrative choices in Crime and Punishment (as this book does) lays bare the fundamental processes by which novelists make—and are forced to make—choices as they write.  Each choice entails particular types of results for the story: desirable, useful, awkward, or even hopeless dead ends.  This mode of analysis, honed during years of studying the practical problems of creating vividness in fiction, is based on rigorous use of evidence and deduction.  The results as applied to Crime and Punishment are both revealing and startling.

     Dostoevsky doesn’t exactly conceal from the reader that his characters are all parts of Raskolnikov, but he can’t make it too explicit either.  If he did, the reader’s ribs would get sore from all that nudging.  But he does put in plenty of clues.  For example, Svidrigailov, late in the story, remembers something that had happened not to him, but to Raskolnikov when the latter was all alone.  At another point the narrator even gets the name of a character wrong (little Lidia becoming Lenia— diminutive of Helena, the name of a key Byzantine saint), and it stays “wrong” from then on—unless a casual mention of a name-day ceremony is a hint that the change was purposeful.

     As the destructive parts of Raskolnikov’s mind are killed or evicted, he moves toward wholeness.  But Dostoevsky’s choice here creates a serious problem.  When Raskolnikov kills the pawnbroker Aliona, his mental and emotional state becomes worse, so Aliona must represent a good part of his mind, deteriorated by neglect.  If that’s so, wouldn’t she have to revive for Raskolnikov to recover?  But don’t take our word: Dostoevsky will be happy to show you his solution himself. 

     The results of all this analysis not only reveal the devices of fiction and of Dostoevsky, but move the reader from perceiving Crime and Punishment as merely “gripping” to seeing it, including its much-dismissed ending, as one of the most splendid and touchingly beautiful novels ever written.

About the 3 Authors:

PAUL … 

(author of Vampires, Burial, and Death, 1988, and Words of Uncommon Shape: How Writers Create Vividness…, 2014, among others)

…started it all!  When in college, he read C&P for the first time and said to himself, “I do not understand this book!”  After studying for his PhD at Yale with Prof. Peter Demetz (a master of techniques for studying literature) and others, while teaching at Princeton he was asked to help teach a literature course that included C&P.  “Aha!” he thought. “Now this famous professor will show me what it’s all about!”  Nope; no insights from him.  So the novel continued to bug Paul…and eventually he met Mary.

MARY… 

(translator of Durova’s memoirs, The Cavalry Maiden, 1988, and Shklovsky’s Five Billion Vodka Bottles to the Moon, 1991, among others) 

…had a PhD in Russian from UCLA and had become a close family friend when the Barbers moved to Pasadena.  “Aha!” Paul thought. “Now I can ask an expert in Russian lit about weird details in C&P!”  And the more Paul asked, the more the seeming “coincidences” in the book began to unravel.  Fascinated, Mary then read most of the material written in Russian about the novel.  It became clear that two key elements in the book were the names of the Orthodox saints after whom so many characters were named, and the traditional beliefs and customs of Russian peasants and city-folk.  

ELIZABETH …

(author of Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years, 1994, and The Dancing Goddesses: Folklore, Archaeology, and the Origins of European Dance, 2013, among others) 

…has degrees in linguistics, Greek, and archaeology, and had learned Russian just because she had a life-long love of Slavic folklore.  She kept chiming in, “Hey, do you know that custom?” or “Do you know what that name means in Greek?”  And as the book took shape over several years, she read C&P in Russian, providing etymologies here or some folklore there…and kept peace between the two main authors as they argued everything out!

Presented with warmth and wit, this book provides a theoretical and practical guide for those who want to understand how effective writing is achieved.
Building on observations of how human brains are built for absorbing information, Mr. Barber reveals the internal engines driving the composition of interesting fiction and non-fiction: successful (and unsuccessful) structuring of plots, characters, and symbolism; apt and vivid use of language and imagery; and even the sources of disastrously unintended humor. generously studded with examples obscure and familiar, he shows how great writers have made their writing so great and what would-be writers should keep firmly in mind to emulate them.Since the principles are the same for both fact and fiction, and for old literature and new, the examples are drawn from the literature of a wide array of periods, genres, and cultures, from Aeschylus to Zorro, both to demonstrate universality and to address readers with a variety of backgrounds and interests.
This book will be of use to writers of novels and short stories of any genre; teachers and students in writing classes; scientific writers who want to keep their readers awake; teachers and students of ancient and modern world literature (including English); screen writers, playwrights, and people creating any sort of theater (including choreography and cinematography); designers of advertisements; linguists; and cognitive scientists.