Crime & Adverbs

Because I do not know Russian,¹ all quotes and material are from the Constance Garnett translation of Crime & Punishment, the Dostoyevsky (magnum) opus.

With a long layover between graduating in May and starting work in September, I found myself almost immediately bored. What was I to do with myself whilst sitting at home? There is only so much Food YouTube to digitally satisfy my hankering for good-looking meals and cultivate my appreciation of tiny whisks. Only so many hours to devote to meaninglessly meandering through the depths of Twitter.² So, I decided to read Crime & Punishment, a Russian novel ostensibly about Crime, but also Punishment.³

Sure, I could comment on the intense psychological journey through which Raskolnikov — the main character — travels. But, in typical fashion for this blog, that would become a bit too serious. Instead, I’d like to focus on something much more up my alley: adverbs.

Adverbs are oft decried for being superfluous, a crutch used exclusively by bad writers (a group to which I belong). One of my professors asked all of her students to revise our drafts and cut all adverbs. I was appalled. My favorite phrase construction in high school was woefully un- (e.g. woefully unprepared, woefully unsatisfactory, woefully unsound). Though almost always used infelicitously, this syntactic structure evoked in one of my closest friends and me a non-trivial amount of laughter. Others tended not to be (as) amused.

Early in C&P, I realized the importance of adverbs to the transmission of semantic meaning. It was not enough to say Raskolnikov was indebted to his landlady, but rather he was “hopelessly in debt” (p. 7). Marmeladov did not just pounce on Raskolnikov for conversation but rather pounced “greedily” (p. 25). Dostoyevsky (and/or, perhaps, Garnett) deserve(s) credit for not following invented grammatical prescriptions and rather communicating via my favorite part of speech. To quantitatively assess whether my heuristic had some merit, I looked up word counts and adverb counts (proxied by -ly frequency via Cmmd+F) for a random assortment of novels:⁴

Adverb Frequency, by novel

C&P’s adverb frequency is quite a bit higher than its comp set. But, are they actually conveying useful information? Consider some of the following examples:

1. It left him strangely cold. (213)
2. Mechanically, he drew from a chair beside him… (243)
3. She was intently and uneasily watching her brother. (404)
4. …was morbidly given to self-admiration. (547)
5. This creature would be slavishly grateful. (549)
6. Raskolnikov smiled malignantly. (809)
7. His still trembling lips slowly broke into an angry mocking smile. (871)
8. He trembled nervously and woke up. (893)
9. He began ill-humouredly staring at the houses. (900)
10. Raskolnikov smiled bitterly. (912)
11. “To her heart I confided much of what has been so hideously reali[z]ed.” (917)
12. Raskolnikov had so hopelessly, stupidly come to grief through some decree of blind fate. (954)

I, for one, would be hard-pressed to argue that the adverbs in the above examples don’t add a significant amount of meaning. This fairly random assortment of adverbial phrases paints a perfect picture of Raskolnikov, with his bitter, malignant smiles and his nervous, mechanical energy. All of this is to say, Professor Coleman, Dostoyevsky has a bone to pick with you.⁵

Raskolnikov, about to commit a Crime & then face Punishment.

An exercise left for the reader: What’s my adverb frequency?

[1] I did not learn the language because 1) I have no interest in working for the intelligence services (though, of course, if I did, I would/could not reveal such proclivities) and 2) it seems—and I cannot stress this point enough—hard.

[2] Key Takeaway: NFTs are concomitantly valuable, invaluable, & not valuable.

[3] The Russians really have a penchant for directness. War and Peace being another canonical example.

[4] Please reach out if you have issues with this scientific design…or don’t.

[5] This article is the ne plus ultra of faux-intellectual, useless grievance-airing. And this footnote was specifically added to allow the author [me] to use ne plus ultra.