The old woman who once sliced our front garden hose with a knife has just walked past our home without pausing. Not long after the hose incident I confronted her with what she had done and she denied ever walking along our street, let alone cutting anyone’s hose, or even carrying a knife.

In fact she emptied her bag for me and there was no knife in it. I had been searching on the web about strange behaviour among the elderly and one source noted that it is not uncommon for aged women to carry a knife in their bag. I am not sure what this means, but each time I see the old woman (and I see her often on our street), I feel reassured when she manages to pass by our front garden without a glance in the direction of the hose – though the lingering question of the motive for her crime remains.

I am rereading Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment 60 years after first being enthralled by it, with the idea of testing myself against an experience I’ve long been convinced upended me as a teenage reader, then shaped me as a university student of the 1970s who channelled his version of Dostoevsky’s protagonist, Raskolnikov – a name that means something like “heretic”, or one who cuts themselves away from their community.

Rereading is a risk, of course, for the book might fail to stand up to my memory of it as powerful, original, frightening, scandalous and utterly compelling. It might no longer surprise me and I might have to shrink it back to a diminished place among books that are not, after all, lastingly great in my reading life.

Early on, a first surprise for me is that Raskolnikov was handsome. In my memory his figure is physically as repulsive as his psyche. But no, on the first page of the novel Dostoevsky is at pains to tell the reader that his student was attractive. Later, Raskolnikov’s sister, Dunya, who looks just like him, is repeatedly the subject of men’s desires on account of her beauty.

My second surprise in these early pages is the drunkard, Marmeladov, saying he’s drinking up his eldest daughter’s income from “the yellow card”, that is, from her work as a prostitute. Did I even know what the man was talking about when I was 14?

I was a Catholic boy from a family of nine children and being the first son, I was the one who would go into a monastery at 18 and last there for two years of study, silence and prayer. How was it that I had even come across such a novel on the faintly rural fringe of early-1960s Melbourne in the outer suburb of Watsonia, where soldiers of the second world war had been given blocks of land at bargain prices?

I had been a comics reader as much as a book consumer through my childhood and early teens, and Classic Comics had introduced me to a world of “classic” stories, including Dostoevsky’s. Classic comics made the stories look dramatic and serious. I wanted intensely to go further into that realm.

Like any young reader discovering the world’s rich history of storytelling I wanted to read what was beyond my understanding and capacity. The thick weightiness of Crime and Punishment (first published in 1866), a handsome paperback, its ultra-thin pages, the adult gravity of such small print and the dully serious, high-art cover, all of this made me feel I had arrived at something worth curling up with for days on end. The novel took a grip on me even through the fog of a devout Catholicism and the security of a tightly-guarded family circle.

Soon after we meet him, Raskolnikov receives a long letter from his mother promising money in a few days’ time, while going on to narrate a brief and apparently fortuitous courting of his sister by a vain and forceful businessman more than twice her age. And yet, his mother writes, this suitor appears to be kind and, as he says himself, without prejudice. She ends her letter remembering Raskolnikov as a child babbling prayers on her lap. “I fear in my heart”, she writes, “that you may have been affected by this latest fashion of unbelief.”

Not softened by his mother’s love, her generosity, or even by her fears, Raskolnikov goes out into the streets of St Petersburg with a face “distorted” by a “nasty, lugubrious, jaundiced smile snaking across his lips” as he vows never to allow his sister’s marriage to take place.

Throughout the first vodka-soaked chapters, not only does a man confess to living off his daughter’s prostitution, but a drunken teenage girl on the street, only partly dressed and most likely already abused, is openly followed by a man who wants her for his pleasures, and Raskolnikov recalls, or dreams (it is unclear) the beating of a horse to death, after remembering that he used to play in a certain cemetery where his brother, who died at six months, was buried.

In each episode, Raskolnikov seems to be both an element of Petersburg’s abject street life and a lone figure of sobriety, decency and compassion. He protects the young girl on the street until she is safe. He suffers for the horse. But we are also witness to the fact that he has already condemned his own soul for indulging in the desire to kill an old woman.

Reading anew the passage describing the beating of a horse outside a drinking house, (in my Penguin edition, translated by David McDuff), I remember that as a child I had seen a man do just this to a horse. Is it a true memory though? When I was a child I used to accept rides on a milkman’s cart in the mornings on my way to the local church to serve as an altar-boy at early mass, so it was not unusual to see horses in mid-1950s Melbourne.

Or perhaps while reading this passage I was reliving my first encounter with it as if it was a scene I had witnessed myself. I can’t be certain. The scene in the novel, horrific and gothic, is barely realist though utterly real. In my memory I have an image of my father driving me past a patch of grass........

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