When we left our travels, we were in Russia with Dostoevsky, whose most famous novel is Crime and Punishment, about a young hoodlum in St. Petersburg, who commits crimes and is punished.

If I wasn’t a Web site programmer, I might like to teach English literature. I’ve thought about topics for papers where the students might be challenged to read and compare similar books like 1984 and Brave New World, or Catch 22 and Slaughterhouse-Five.

One of those combinations could be Crime and Punishment and Richard Wright’s Native Son, which is about a young hoodlum in Chicago, who incidentally commits crimes and is punished.

Wright was a card-carrying Communist in his youth, and he had a thing for Russia and similarities between the plight of the Russian working class and that of African Americans. I tend to think that Native Son is somewhat of a tribute to Dostoevsky’s famous novel. I don’t know if Wright intended it as such, but I like to think of it that way.

They are both powerful works. The St. Petersburg tale traps you in the mind of a murderer, raging with mania and guilt, while the Chicago tale steps outside of the mind, just to let you watch and observe the crimes and the necessary punishments. We watch as life happens to Bigger Thomas, whose world on the south side of Chicago is out of control, and when he takes control for a brief moment, he abuses that control and loses it forever.

Needless to say, Native Son is not something you want to read during the hectic month of December, but it might be a challenge for the new year. If you haven’t read it, you should know, it’s a lot easier to get into than Ulysses. It’s just seriously heavy.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 27th, 2006 at 10:23 pm and is filed under Russia, US and Canada. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.