“That movie of ‘Crime and Punishment’ was so bad it actually made me long for the good ol’ days of Classics Illustrated comic books! The performances were wooden, the characterizations tawdry, the dialogue delivered in a fever-pitched phony accent that sounded like Boris and Natasha in a rotten mood! The action was about as subtle as a nuclear warhead blowing up a roomful of Charismatics! The whole thing took place on a level of cheap, sensationalized tacky melodrama that’d make Danielle Steele spin in her grave, and it was supposed to be Dostoevsky?! What do you have to say for yourself?” “Can you hold, please?” I hung up.

Ha-ha, so the joke was on me. I hoped for Dostoevsky and got Mickey Mouse, which serves me right for being such a naive idiot (The Idiot?) in the first place. Television -- particularly network television -- is a moneymaking enterprise; it traffics in easily understood, garish stories designed to entertain (or sedate) the largest number of people possible at one time long enough that they’ll sit still for Subaru ads. Thus, its product (TV shows) are founded on an untruth: that human existence is easy, simple, readily coherent. And of all great authors, Dostoevsky lends himself perhaps most easily to simplification, since his plots are full of bravura and even bathos; much of his action takes place at a fever pitch, both because he wrote some of his best stuff in a hurry (to pay off angry creditors) and because his characters are often in the grip of a diabolical/divine madness that thrusts them into insane situations at a spasmodic pace.

It stands to reason that a TV movie of one of his novels is going to suck eggs. The fact that “Crime and Punishment” wasn’t even good TV (the dream sequences were lifted straight from the Tom Petty “Don’t Come Around Here No More” video, and the character development rivalled that of old “CHiPS” or “Incredible Hulk” episodes) doesn’t really matter either; the producers were looking for a fast buck, an easy event, and on the terms of their own medium, I can’t blame them. I blame myself. Yeah, that’s right, I blame myself. For what does it say about me (and, I suspect, many other curious tuners-in) that I hoped, in some dark corner of my mind, that “Crime and Punishment” would rewrite the book on effective dramatization? Or, worse, that in another, darker corner, I was expecting crap and wasn’t disappointed, but masochistically enjoyed the spectacle? In both cases, the problem is intellectual caste-mongering. I love all the Dostoevsky I’ve read because he had the guts to write as if he were nuts,

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crazy, and his insanity often strikes me as the truest and sanest thing around. So on the one hand, I was expecting that the magic name Dostoevsky would somehow force the TV people, who I’m sure never read more than ten pages of “Notes From Underground,” into paying reverent homage to the master of darkly believable lit by making a great movie.

On the other hand, I enjoyed watching the movie fall comically short of my expectations because it confirmed just a little more my secret, unstated and probably unearned pride at being one of the people who are “deep” and “dark” enough that books like “Brothers Karamazov,” in which a girl ritually and repeatedly slams her finger in a doorway and Ivan K. has arguments with the Devil himself, make perfect sense. Ergo, a novelist whose works should jolt and scare anyone with any sense has actually become an object of comfort to me in my secret, dirty little war against “low” culture. Ergo, I am a snob, and so were you if you kept on watching C ‘n’ P this past Sunday night just to see how long and sustained of a you-know-what session the producers enjoyed over Dostoevsky’s grave. Which is why I’m writing this overly revealing, somewhat self-indulgent diatribe -- somewhere between the part where Raskolnikov gave a butchered-for-prime-time dissertation on Men Who Are Beyond Good and Evil and the curiously flat murder scene (which is stomach-churning in the book), I realized that I expected the movie to suck and, like gawkers at a car accident, was watching partly just so I’d have something to react to.

I wanted the movie to confirm my worst assumptions about television (which it did) so that I could feel like some kind of pariah because I read books. Which is pathetic and sinful, and a danger to anyone who by quirk of birth and upbringing happens to like Shakespeare better than “Suddenly Susan.” What’s that got to do with anything? Well, in a word, elitism. Calvin is a community of people who for one reason or another want to be educated, and it’s just too damn easy for the people who can differentially equate (or understand “Ulysses”) to feel better than those who can’t. It’s called pride, and C.S. Lewis called it the king of all sins, since it’s often the root cause of the others.

I know -- from conversations I have, from things I see--that members of a community characterized by buzzwords like Discernment and Inquiry (both worthy causes) tend to find subtle ways of looking down their noses at those who aren’t part of such a community: I talked to a lit major at a near-Ivy League school who told me point-blank that “Mainstream culture doesn’t matter; they don’t know anything anyway.” I have friends who absolutely love the Jerry Springer show because, they say, “it’s fun to watch stupid people.” Sunday night I confronted the same demon in myself, and I’m naming him here so we can all be more aware of the mistakes we risk by choosing knowledge over ignorance. Comprende?

I realize this diatribe will strike some as wildly self-indulgent, which it may well be, but to simply condemn NBC for ruining a good book is not only way too easy, but somehow beside the point. My experience of watching “Crime and Punishment” had a lot to do with the realization that I was getting angry over a stupid movie, and that I was using that anger to sneer at the people I imagined buying the products advertised between breaks. So Dostoevsky taught me one more lesson about the kind of being I am, in a rounabout fashion, and that’s a heckuva lot more important than one more boring teleplay. Disclaimer: I did not actually call NBC to complain. I do have a life, y’know. Now if it’d been Catcher in the Rye...