Crime and punishment

Recently, I moved from England to Canada to teach English in a French-speaking school. Having grown up surrounded by US culture, in music, TV shows and films, I was convinced that North America would be a 'home-away-from-home'. However, despite speaking the same language, it turns out that there are some differences they don’t show you on programmes like Desperate Housewives! Here are the top five differences I noticed between Canada and England:

1) Electrical plugs.
In England, electrical plugs for your laptop, phone, etc. are heavy and solid. In North America, they’re quite delicate and always fall out of the wall. Not great when you’re drying your hair! (Who decided to make British plugs so heavy, anyway?)

2) Water.
Seriously, in Canada water fountains are everywhere! Somebody told me this is because water is Canada’s greatest natural resource. It’s really convenient, especially in places like Walmart. Running around searching for bargains is thirsty work!

3) Deodorant.
It seems that spray-on deodorant is a rare species in Canada. Instead, it’s all roll-on, which can take ages to try and leaves stains on your clothes, but smells ten times nicer.

4) Adverts on TV.
A one-hour TV show in North America is actually only 43 minutes; the other 17 minutes are adverts. That means that for every three minutes of your TV show you watch, you have to sit through one minute of adverts. I’ll never complain about adverts on British TV again, especially when you consider that some British channels don’t have any adverts at all!

5) Stop signs.
Even when driving in the middle of the night, every Canadian I’ve seen dutifully obeys the stop signs in the street. This is definitely not true in England, where (a) there are far fewer stop signs, and (b) everybody ignores them anyway! It seems that Canadians are much more cautious drivers.

In conclusion, I have found Canada to be a better-hydrated and sweeter-smelling country than England. Just don’t work up a sweat sitting through all the adverts on TV!

Crime and punishment

By Fyodor Dostoevsky

Translated By Constance Garnett

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

A few words about Dostoevsky himself may help the English reader to

understand his work.

Dostoevsky was the son of a doctor. His parents were very hard-working

and deeply religious people, but so poor that they lived with their five

children in only two rooms. The father and mother spent their evenings

in reading aloud to their children, generally from books of a serious

character.

Though always sickly and delicate Dostoevsky came out third in the

final examination of the Petersburg school of Engineering. There he had

already begun his first work, "Poor Folk."

This story was published by the poet Nekrassov in his review and

was received with acclamations. The shy, unknown youth found himself

instantly something of a celebrity. A brilliant and successful career

seemed to open before him, but those hopes were soon dashed. In 1849 he

was arrested.

Though neither by temperament nor conviction a revolutionist, Dostoevsky

was one of a little group of young men who met together to read Fourier

and Proudhon. He was accused of "taking part in conversations against

the censorship, of reading a letter from Byelinsky to Gogol, and of

knowing of the intention to set up a printing press." Under Nicholas

I. (that "stern and just man," as Maurice Baring calls him) this was

enough, and he was condemned to death. After eight months' imprisonment

he was with twenty-one others taken out to the Semyonovsky Square to

be shot. Writing to his brother Mihail, Dostoevsky says: "They snapped

words over our heads, and they made us put on the white shirts worn by

persons condemned to death. Thereupon we were bound in threes to stakes,

to suffer execution. Being the third in the row, I concluded I had only

a few minutes of life before me. I thought of you and your dear ones and

I contrived to kiss Plestcheiev and Dourov, who were next to me, and to

bid them farewell. Suddenly the troops beat a tattoo, we were unbound,

brought back upon the scaffold, and informed that his Majesty had spared

us our lives." The sentence was commuted to hard labour.

One of the prisoners, Grigoryev, went mad as soon as he was untied, and

never regained his sanity.

The intense suffering of this experience left a lasting stamp on

Dostoevsky's mind. Though his religious temper led him in the end to

accept every suffering with resignation and to regard it as a blessing

in his own case, he constantly recurs to the subject in his writings.

He describes the awful agony of the condemned man and insists on the

cruelty of inflicting such torture. Then followed four years of penal

servitude, spent in the company of common criminals in Siberia, where

he began the "Dead House," and some years of service in a disciplinary

battalion.

He had shown signs of some obscure nervous disease before his arrest

and this now developed into violent attacks of epilepsy, from which he

suffered for the rest of his life. The fits occurred three or four times

a year and were more frequent in periods of great strain. In 1859 he was

allowed to return to Russia. He started a journal--"Vremya," which was

forbidden by the Censorship through a misunderstanding. In 1864 he lost

his first wife and his brother Mihail. He was in terrible poverty, yet

he took upon himself the payment of his brother's debts. He started

another journal--"The Epoch," which within a few months was also

prohibited. He was weighed down by debt, his brother's family was

dependent on him, he was forced to write at heart-breaking speed, and is

said never to have corrected his work. The later years of his life were

much softened by the tenderness and devotion of his second wife.

In June 1880 he made his famous speech at the unveiling of the

monument to Pushkin in Moscow and he was received with extraordinary

demonstrations of love and honour.

A few months later Dostoevsky died. He was followed to the grave by a

vast multitude of mourners, who "gave the hapless man the funeral of a

king." He is still probably the most widely read writer in Russia.

In the words of a Russian critic, who seeks to explain the feeling

inspired by Dostoevsky: "He was one of ourselves, a man of our blood and

our bone, but one who has suffered and has seen so much more deeply than

we have his insight impresses us as wisdom... that wisdom of the heart

which we seek that we may learn from it how to live. All his other

gifts came to him from nature, this he won for himself and through it he

became great."

Date: 2014-12-29; view: 737