STEFANO BOSCUTTI - “RASKO” (SHORT STORY)

You’re writing a screenplay based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment”.

A contemporary take on a classic story of murder and morality, of madness and reality.

“Rasko” is a crisp, compelling short story that looks at what drives the protagonist to slaughter. An unrelenting character study.

Does it capture the psychological intensity and dark humour?

Does it embody the rising dramatic tension?

1,000 words / 4 minutes of ominous reading pleasure

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‘What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope?’ Immanuel Kant

STEFANO BOSCUTTI

RASKO

Copyright 2024 Stefano Boscutti
All Rights Reserved

Rasko can’t really hear the cathedral bells ringing.

In the low-ceilinged basement they sound distant, muffled. He’s searching through the maze-like tetris of rooms for something to steal, something to pawn.

It’s dark and dank. Mosquitoes flit about. Rasko often comes down to the sprawling basement. Sometimes to get away from everyone, sometimes to do a little khanka or vint, sometimes to think. Especially on a ferociously hot day like today.

Most of the old timber doors between the rooms are rotten, their glass panes smudged or shattered. His scattered reflection leads him from room to room.

He had come to Saint Petersburg from the country to study law, to make his mother and sister proud. The city’s humid continental climate with short, broiling summers and long, cold, wet winters doesn’t suit his brittle constitution. He constantly worries about his epilepsy and ill health. Cheap opiates like khana boiled from poppy stems help a little. Cheap amphetamines keep his mind and thoughts from falling apart.

Rasko lives in a cramped, airless room in the tenement block above. At the end of a windowless hallway, next to a ruptured toilet and stained bathroom. The hulking apartment building at the back of Vasilyevsky Island is a filthy grey concrete mausoleum from the Soviet era. Stuffed with broken families and broken people. Stupid people, as Rasko sees them. Dull, ordinary people. Everyone is desperately poor.

He’s been here six months and already burned through any money he’d saved, any money his mother and sister had sent him. He can no longer afford his university fees. And he owes money everywhere - acquaintances, neighbours, especially the withered Chinese pawnbroker he rents his garret from. He hates the sight of her, hates how she cheats the poor, beats her own sister.

Rasko sees through people, understands their fears and worries. Knows how their God has forsaken them. How unremarkable and ordinary they are. How they will never achieve greatness.

Down in the clammy basement his reflection in a door is missing squares where glass panes are missing, probably stolen and sold off years ago. Black voids in his parallel self.

He slouches from room to room in the endless basement looking for something, anything he can grab. Anything he can pawn for a few rubles.

Even the greatest men had the most humble beginnings. Vladimir Putin’s childhood in Saint Petersburg was rife with hardship. One brother died in infancy, another died of diphtheria and starvation.

Like Rasko, Putin studied law at Leningrad State University - as Saint Petersburg State University was called in the nineteen-seventies. Studying by day, rolling through the streets with gangsters at night.

From a street hoodlum to secret service operative to president of Russia for a quarter of a century. Everything Putin wanted, he took with his bare hands. Money, power, women.

Putin’s ruthless, extraordinary ambition lifted him and Russia to greatness. He never forgives or forgets. Never surrenders.

Extraordinary people are duty-bound to transgress moral and legal boundaries for the greater good. It’s their inner right for the benefit of humanity. It’s their fate and their destiny. It’s what sets them apart from the ordinary. It’s what makes them, extraordinary.

Rasko hasn’t eaten anything today and he knows his mother would worry. But if he has no money, what can he eat? His textbooks? His essays?

Even in this heat he wears a long, threadbare coat over his tattered bones. His mind is a swirl of rising turmoil and paranoia. He swings from grandiose self-perception to crushing self-loathing. He has no time for other people, for lesser people.

Rasko is above conventional morality, above petty laws that keep ordinary people in check. He finds most social interactions a waste of time, burdensome, meaningless. People are just there to be used. Nothing but tools, cowards.

He prides himself on his extraordinary intelligence. How many times had he topped his class? His knowledge of the law outshines his professors. In his dreams, senior judges seek his counsel and guidance. In his dreams, he is a great man. He is a law unto himself.

Wandering deeper through the basement rooms, Rasko catches his reflection on a broken glass plane. The jagged edge cuts the reflection of his face in half.

His hair is already thinning, sweat gathers on his brow. He blinks, anxious. Maybe he’s running a fever. Perhaps an infection. He can’t hear the cathedral bells at all.

Rasko looks through the other side of the jagged edge and sees a heavy steel blade on a battered timber handle. It’s an axe.

But he doesn’t see his reflection on the dull metal.

All he sees is his shadow.

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Copyright 2024 Stefano Boscutti

All Rights Reserved

The moral rights of the author are asserted.

No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or copying and pasting, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing.

Stefano Boscutti acknowledges the trademark owners of various products referenced in this work. The publication or use of these trademarks is not authorised or sponsored by the trademark owner.

This is a work of fiction. While many of the characters portrayed here have counterparts in the life and times of various Russians and others, the characterisations and incidents presented are totally the products of the author’s rapacious imagination. This work is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It should not be resold or given away. Thank you for your support. (Couldn’t do it without you.)

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