Arrived: A Mash-up of Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky and Tom Maremaa
Available now at Barnes & Noble Press at Chrome and Punishment, a mash-up
New Mash-up of a Classic
Welcome to Chrome and Punishment. This new work is not a parody of the original but rather a psychological mash-up, taking readers on a different journey than Dostoevsky probably ever imagined through the mind and experience of the novel’s protagonist.
Here’s the jacket blurb:
Crime and Punishment was originally published serially in a literary journal in 1866 before it appeared in book form a year later in 1867. The work has clearly stood the test of time and rightfully deserves its place as one of the great masterworks of nineteenth-century Russian and world literature. Enter now, a century and a half later, Dostoevsky’s work re-imagined and seen through the lens of postmodern fiction.
Welcome to Chrome and Punishment. This new work is not a parody of the original but rather a psychological mash-up, taking readers on a different journey than Dostoevsky probably ever imagined through the mind and experience of the novel’s protagonist. Here, in the steampunk-inspired world of 1861 St. Petersburg, we find Raskolnikov as a young prince living on the edge of poverty after dropping out of St. Petersburg Technical University, where, like Dostoevsky himself, he was studying engineering. The prince has been disinherited by his aristocratic father and his life is in total disarray. He rails against the rise of a new class of Russians—the Chromes—who wear chrome-plated outfits to protect them from the oppressive summer heat of the city, as well as the bitter cold of winter along the canals. The Chromes cast a dark shadow across all the action in the mash-up; they’re omnipresent, greedy, and all-powerful. Raskolnikov is against their rise in Russian society and sees their destructive power at work but is helpless to do anything about it.
Soon we meet another character who also claims to be Raskolnikov and acts as his double—a doppelgänger with sinister motives. Other characters also surface in the story: Dr. Hoffmann, a psychoanalyst who counsels the young prince; Raskolnikov’s father and his father’s new trophy wife Grushenka; Nicola Tesla, Raskolnikov’s university friend who has invented the first electric bicycle; the Godfather (in Russian the Krestnii Otets) who is boss of the Petersburg crime syndicate known as the Organizatsiya and his right-hand man Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, a young revolutionary with grand ambitions of his own; Konstantin Stanislavski, the director of the Moscow Art Theatre, now in Petersburg with his acting troupe, who recognizes the young prince’s acting talents and wants the young prince to join the troupe.
All of this takes place against the backdrop of the heinous crimes and murders that ensue in this postmodern retelling of Dostoevsky’s classic—which readers of the original, along with those coming to the work for the first are bound to experience in ways they haven’t seen or felt before.
Chapter I
On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young prince came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge.
He had successfully avoided meeting his landlady, a Chrome, on the staircase. His garret was under the roof of a high, five-storied house and was more like a cupboard than a room. The landlady who provided him with the garret, dinners, and attendance, lived on the floor below, and every time he went out he was obliged to pass her kitchen, the door of which invariably stood open. And each time he passed, the young prince had a sick, frightened feeling, which made him scowl and feel ashamed. He hated Chromes, a privileged class of denizens, identified by their chrome-plated skins that covered their bodies from head to foot and were used as protective shields against the harsh winters and scorching summers of his native Petersburg. As it happened, Prince Raskolnikov, stripped of his inheritance because of a falling out with his father, a selfish, despicable nobleman, was hopelessly in debt to his Chrome landlady, and was afraid of meeting her.
This was not because he was cowardly and abject, quite the contrary; but for some time past he had been in an overstrained irritable condition, verging on nascent paranoia and hypochondria. He had become so completely absorbed in himself, in his tinkerings and mechanical inventions, and so isolated from his fellow students that he dreaded meeting, not only his Chrome landlady, but anyone else at all. He was crushed by poverty imposed by his spiteful, venal father, but the anxieties of his position, a fallen prince, had of late ceased to weigh upon him. He had given up attending to matters of practical importance; he had lost all desire to do so. Nothing that any Chrome landlady, whose demands for rent were exorbitant, increasing every month beyond what any science or engineering student at the university could reasonably afford, could do had a real terror for him. But to be stopped on the stairs, to be forced to listen to her trivial, irrelevant gossip, to pestering demands for immediate payment, threats and complaints, and to rack his brains for excuses, to prevaricate, to lie—no, rather than that, he preferred to creep down the stairs like an alley cat and slip out unseen.
This evening, however, on coming out into the street, he became acutely aware of his fears.
“I want to attempt a thing like that and am frightened by these trifles,” he thought, with an odd smile. “Hmm . . . yes, all is in a man’s hands and he lets it all slip from cowardice, that’s an axiom. It would be interesting to know what it is men are most afraid of. Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what they fear most. . . . Or the power of these Chromes to rule over us, dictate what we say and do . . . But I am talking too much. It’s because I chatter that I do nothing. Or perhaps it is that I chatter because I do nothing. I must get back to my inventions, which will change the world . . . change it for the better no doubt. I’ve learned to chatter this last month, lying for days together in my den thinking . . . of Jack the Giant-killer. Why am I going there now? Am I capable of that? Is that serious? It is not serious at all. It’s simply a fantasy to amuse myself; a plaything! Yes, maybe it is a plaything. I am stoked on that fantasy; I live and breathe it every day of my miserable life. It holds me by its grip and won’t let go. Not for a moment. Never.”
The heat in the street was terrible: and the airlessness, the bustle and the plaster, scaffolding, bricks, and dust all about him, and that special Petersburg stench, so familiar to all who are unable to get out of town in summer—all worked painfully upon the young prince’s already overwrought nerves. The Chromes had it better: their chrome-plated shells blocked or filtered the stench from their long noses held high up in the air. There was still the insufferable stench from the pot-houses, which were particularly numerous in that part of the town, and the drunken and stoned men whom he ran into continually, dropouts from the university like himself, slackers and low-lifers, although it was a working day, completed the revolting misery of the picture. An expression of the profoundest disgust gleamed for a moment in the young prince’s refined face. He was, by the way, exceptionally handsome, above average in height, slim, well-built, with beautiful dark eyes and dark brown hair: a born aristocrat. Soon he sank into deep thought, or more accurately speaking into a complete blankness of mind; he walked along not observing what was about him and not caring to observe it. From time to time, he would mutter something, from the habit of talking to himself, to which he had just confessed. At these moments he would become conscious that his ideas, particularly about the ascendancy of Chromes, were sometimes twisted and tangled in nefarious plots of his own devising. His body had grown very weak; for two days he had scarcely tasted a bite of food.
He was so badly dressed for a prince that even a nobleman accustomed to shabbiness and scruffy apparel would have been ashamed and embarrassed to be seen in the street in such tattered rags as his. In that quarter of the town, however, scarcely any shortcoming in dress would have created surprise. Owing to the proximity of the Hay Market, the impoverished area around Sennaya Ploshchad, the number of establishments of bad character, the preponderance of the trading and working-class population crowded in these streets and alleys in the heart of Petersburg, types so various were to be seen in the streets that no figure, however queer, would have caused surprise. But there was such accumulated bitterness and contempt in the young prince’s heart, that, in spite of all the fastidiousness of youth, he minded his rags least of all in the street. It was a different matter when he met with acquaintances or with former fellow students, whom, indeed, he disliked meeting at any time, especially if they were nobles like himself. And yet when a drunken or stoned man who, for some unknown reason, was being taken somewhere in a huge wagon dragged by a heavy dray horse, suddenly shouted at him as he drove past: “Hey there, German hatter” bawling at the top of his voice and pointing at him—the young prince stopped suddenly and clutched tremulously at his hat. It was a tall round hat from Zimmerman’s in Germany, fit for a nobleman, but completely worn out, shabby with age, all torn and bespattered with dirt from the street, brimless and bent on one side in a most unseemly fashion. Not shame, however, but quite another feeling akin to terror had overtaken him.