"Merely admiring myself. I am an author." "You look it. Move along."
Oh, right--I promised you Crime and Punishment and zombies, didn't I?  Well, for anyone who was puzzled by my last entry, this is what I meant to address.

At the end of the story, Raskolnikov is in Siberia working out his sentence.  (I liked how he almost chickened out of confessing, when the only witness died, and yet he saw Sonia watching him and couldn't bear to disappoint her.  Hello, Miss Moral Compass.)  And he's hanging around in the penal colony, doing his work and stumbling through his life from day to day and paying his debt to society, but he still despises that society and can't make himself admit a reason why he should be sorry for anything he's done. 

Then he gets sick and has a fever for several days.  While he's ill he has a prolonged nightmare, in which a plague sweeps across the world.  This plague makes its victims lose all their ability to cooperate with one another, form societal units, have loyalties, or care about anyone besides themselves.  Civilization collapses, people starve where they stand, drop dead of sickness, struggle on in a bleak and uncaring world and then die alone.  People try to band together for mutual protection, but as everyone is infected by this point, they can't make themselves stick to their intentions, and they wind up fighting pointlessly or wandering apart.  Roving infectees stumble across Europe, and kill and eat each other when they can.  The whole human race dies out.

At this point, Raskolnikov wakes up and is horrified, and decides to be a better person.  Now, if the dream occurred in a work by a lesser writer, I'd call it a heavy-handed piece of moral-pointing.  Dostoyevsky's a good enough writer, though, that I didn't think of it as a falling anvil of morality.  For one thing, it's put into Raskolnikov's subconscious, and the realization is very much his, so much that I forgot it was the author's point as well.  For all the parodic psychoanalytic twaddle-speak from some of the characters early in the book, the author has a good grip of the way people's minds work.  For another thing, we've had enough reminders that Raskolnikov's conscience bothers him throughout the book, that it feels right that finally he would give in to himself.  Eventually, he had to crack.  His own subconscious is hitting him over the head with the cluehammer.

Now, I know that the dream is about Raskolnikov telling himself "What would the world be like if we all thought we were Nietzhean supermen?"  And I know there was no such thing as the Zombie Apocalypse in Dostoyevsky's time.  But doesn't Raskonikov's dream remind you of a zombie movie?  'Tis said, they eat each other.  It's got all the elements--a mysterious plague, roving dehumanized people who feel entitled to eat you up, desperate struggles to survive by refugees who can't really cooperate after all.  Zombie stories are what all the cool people are writing these days; I wonder if anyone else has ever put this in fiction.

And on a completely different note,  I've been watching excerpts from the 1935 Crime and Punishment with Peter Lorre as Raskolnikov, and it looks... well... bizarre.  The way that a really uneven Film Of The Book can be disturbing and yet fun.  They seem to have packed it down from a long, sprawling moral drama into a short, fast-moving thriller.  The old pawnbroker gets a lengthy scene that makes us hate her--y'know, so we won't feel bad when Raskolnikov gives her the chop.  And I think they try to give Raskolnikov a clearly-defined motivation, give him a lot more fun stuff to do, and generally remake him into the kind of antihero you can laugh and cry with, instead of the depressed young lump of misery from the book.  Of course, he's also played by Peter Lorre, so he has to have a chance to play with people's lapels and invade their personal space.  I'll suspend complete judgment until I've watched the whole film in order, but so far it looks misguided but fun.

You have to watch this one sequence.  If you have ever read Crime and Punishment, please, please watch this.  It's wonderful.  It's so wrong, but I love it so much.  The scene in the book bears no resemblance to this one at all, but, you know?  That doesn't matter.  They ought to have done all this in the book.  It's like Dostoyevsky as played by Harpo and Zeppo Marx.