Fall 2025 at the Newberry: Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Eugene Vodolazkin’s The Aviator

by Mikhail Shemyakin, 1964

Dostoevsky’s greatest St. Petersburg work, Crime and Punishment, will be read in Oliver Ready’s outstanding translation, known for retaining the intensity and vitality of the original, against Vodolazkin’s The Aviator, a contemporary St. Petersburg novel, which combines elements of love story, murder mystery, history, and science fiction.

Both Crime and Punishment and The Aviator show what happens when good intentions to change the world go terribly wrong. Both novels dive into personal trauma, raising thought-provoking questions about recurrent nightmares, guilt, punishment, retribution, aftereffects of incarceration, and whether redemption is really possible.

Through interactions between characters and exploration of various ethics systems, we will navigate the multiple levels of plot and ideas in both novels; readings will be supplemented by biographical, historical, critical information, and episodes from several film adaptations. Class participants will have the opportunity to explore each novel through a textual scavenger-hunt exercise, identifying and linking images, themes, events, and literary devices, searching for possible patterns, principal themes, and the overarching design.

The Fall 2025 class schedule will be available online and announced by mid-August. Online registration will open at 9:00 am CDT on August 27, 2025. I will provide links to the Newberry website as they become available.

Classes will take place via Zoom on Saturday mornings from 10:00 am to noon, starting September 27 and ending on November 15. For the complete class description and reading assignments, please click here. I look forward to seeing you for our first meeting!