I spent some time at the Nashville airport last week where I discovered a paperback copy of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov sitting on a sectional near one of the gates in a bustling concourse. There was a boarding pass inside the book so I took to them both to the nearest gate in case someone came looking at the airport lost and found. The discovery of the book reminded me of reading Crime and Punishment, and what a reading-changing experience that was — it’s an astonishing book that evokes the most immersive world I’ve ever encountered on paper. Sitting down to write up this post I immediately stumbled across this video from Open Culture — its a 30 minute animated adaptation of the book…

In this darkly poetic animation, the Polish filmmaker Piotr Dumala offers a highly personal interpretation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s classic novel, Crime and Punishment. “My film is like a dream,” Dumala said in 2007. “It is as if someone has read Crime and Punishment and then had a dream about it.”

Dumala’s version takes place only at night. The story is told expressionistically, without dialogue and with an altered flow of time. The complex and multi-layered novel is pared down to a few central characters and events: In the Russian city of Saint Petersburg, a young man named Raskolnikov lies in his dark room brooding over a bloody crime.

Here’s the animated Crime and Punishment…

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