No Crime, only punishment…

‘The victim never forgets the crime and the perpetrator, the punishment’

I am currently reading Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel, ‘Crime and Punishment’. The above lines do not feature in it, I just made it up.😝😄I am just two chapters in and I don’t intend to talk about the book here yet, but share a snippet about the author himself.

Fyodor Dostoevsky as a youngster was sentenced to death in Soviet Russia. His crime? He was caught reading and discussing controversial literature written by Nikolai Gogol.

Though Dostoevsky was pardoned while awaiting the death penalty, he was never informed of the same. He was taken in front of a firing squad instead and then let go. His cellmate accompanying him there turned insane post the incident. Fyodor on the other hand was sentenced to hard labor for the next few years. That was how Fyodor Dostoevsky, the now exalted writer’s life was. A rather tough one.

It makes one think, “Should a man be punished this brutally for something as trivial as reading cancelled literature?” Sounds preposterous at the very outset, doesn’t it?. However, the fact of the matter is, we aren’t very different today as a society from the then authority in Soviet Russia. The cancel culture stayed across nations, only to get rebranded. Having opinions different from the societal norm and voicing it remains labelled a…