Dostoevsky's Button Collection

I read the first several pages of “Crime and Punishment” with a strange interest. I felt enveloped, not by the story, and from the first I didn’t find myself interested in the story. Here was a fictional character, one Raskolnikov, and he was going to interact with other fictional characters and a story would develop just as in any of countless movies I had seen, why should I care? But my brother had instructed me, and I was going to carry out his directions. I was going to read books, but classics only.

But it was as if a drug had been placed in my coffee, and as I read I gradually became intoxicated, not with the character, but with the way things were described, or elaborated. On the first page I read:

“He was in debt to the landlady and was afraid of meeting her.”

“But to stop on the stairs, to listen to all sorts of nonsense about commonplace rubbish, which he could not care less about, all this badgering..."

“He was so immersed in himself and had isolated himself so much from everyone that he was afraid not only of meeting the landlady but of meeting anyone at all.”

This was all on page one, and I thought, this Dostoevsky, he was in debt to a landlady, and he was a recluse, and he avoided people, he must have been. Otherwise he would not have described it in just this way.’ It was like the difference between a drunken person, and a person acting the role of a drunk on the stage. Dostoevsky was the true drunk, and his characters were himself.

But how could I have known at that time that on page one I was reading a synopsis of what the rest of my like was going to be about? Not that I was ever going to kill anyone, but the killing of the pawnbroker woman is just the story which I think can not be of any consequence to anyone. What is of consequence is the description of the strip of rag that holds the axe, the oil on the pawnbroker woman’s hair, the tin tinkle of her doorbell.

But I know now that what mattered to me, and what I was so enraptured with, and what altered my perception of the world, were just the things that everyone else skipped over to get to the “Story” and its “Significance" and "Meaning.”

The story, its significance and meaning have never meant anything to me, otherwise, how could I keep reading it over and over?

Finally, at the beginning of the second chapter I read this:

“He was dressed in an old, completely ragged frock coat, which had lost all its buttons. Only one managed to hang on, and this one he kept buttoned, obviously not wishing to shirk convention.”

At that point I closed the book and I felt like that character, whomever he was, was in the Bible, and he is listening to Jesus’ sermon where he says, “Having eyes you see not.” That was me, I was 17 and I had never seen or noticed anything at all. If a description of a button could so obviously tell the story of a person's life and character, then I had been going around blind, and I felt that it was time to start collecting buttons.

But I am not being fair to myself. In actual fact, I had started my own personal button collection as early as five years old. My buttons, however, did not tell stories, and they did describe characters. The buttons I was collecting asked questions about situations I was trying to figure out. These questions were, First: did my mother really love my father? Second: did my father really love my mother? And third: was I really stupid, as my mother and father thought I was?