Although the impulse to create a cinematic rendering of a literary masterpiece may be born of a commendable desire to introduce it to a wider audience, a director must be confident that the essence of that great work is indeed transferable across media. Unfortunately, Crime and Punishment is not such a novel.

This film itself, made in 1970 and shown as part of the Barbican’s recent Dostoyevsky on Film season, is not badly directed; the acting, given the difficult task, is acceptable if a little wooden. However, its problem does not lie in the way in which it has been made, but rather that it has been made at all. What we are presented with is a story, a this-happened-then-that-happened, which can only be a result of one of two things: a cursory reading and understanding of Dostoyevsky’s novel, or, more likely, an impulse to bring it to a wider audience that chooses to ignore the fact that the only way one can truly interact with Dostoyevsky is through his writing.

The works of Charles Dickens are often very competently transferred to film, and for a simple reason: Dickens is a master story teller. His art is in unravelling situations and incidents, in throwing his protagonists into unfamiliar environments, and exploring the way in which people behave. Dostoyevsky, however, explores the human psyche; his novels are more akin to a stream of consciousness than a story.

Of course, Crime and Punishment employs a narrative along which the reader travels from event to event, but rather than being central, as with Dickens, it merely serves as the vehicle in and by which a metaphysical journey is undertaken. The central narrative for Dostoyevsky is that which is unspoken in the mind of his protagonists. Almost everything important in a Dickens novel is either spoken directly to the reader or between characters, ripe for a translation into film. Almost everything important in a Dostoyevsky novel is spoken by a character to their self, far from the reach of the camera.

This is not to suggest that there are not mechanisms for communicating this internal dialogue to the audience. Many directors have devised such methods, and entire theories of film making have been spawned by attempts to deliver a narrative of consciousness. However, whether or not this is possible with a novel like Crime and Punishment is doubtful. And in this instance, the attempt is not even made.

A wonderful work exploring self doubt and confidence, elitism, poverty, murder as right and art, guilt, self loathing and more, is therefore rendered nothing more than a thriller, with not many thrills. There were even moments when the audience were laughing when they really should have been sharing feelings of turmoil and angst with our central protagonist.

Sometimes we do a great service to a piece of literature when we attempt to render it in another form, but when we forget that novels are novels and films are films we begin to betray the great wealth of human knowledge and experience that literature as a whole has and will bequeath to us. Today’s rush to make every ‘great book’ into a film has created a huge swathe of authors who are writing books for that sole purpose, and suggests to readers that if it can’t be, it ain’t worth reading.

Assuming the director’s laudable objective in creating such a film, it is therefore a shame that such an attempt to share great literature may have in fact contributed to its general dumbing down thirty years later, to the position of people like JK Rowling in our society as great writers, as opposed to competent story tellers. We have a responsibility to the art itself and to the future of the medium to make our choices carefully, however admirable our motives.