Crime and Punishment
A student kills to prove he is exempt, then spends the book unable to carry it. The guilt arrives before the confession.
Whether or not we subscribe to Dostoyevsky's solutions, his diagnosis of the condition is as relevant and revealing as ever.
Raskolnikov, an impoverished former student in St Petersburg, kills a pawnbroker and her sister, then moves through a city of airless rooms and chance encounters, circling the examining magistrate Porfiry and the young woman Sonya, who reads to him the raising of Lazarus. His theory of the extraordinary man, licensed to step over ordinary law, meets something in himself it never accounted for.
Freud read the novel in Dostoevsky and Parricide (1928), setting the murder beside the dead father and the writer's own epilepsy and gambling; since then the book has served analytic thought as a case of punishment sought before any court arrives. For a clinician it shows guilt at work ahead of the deed's full acknowledgement, shaping fever, sleep, and the pull toward the one listener who can receive an admission. Raskolnikov half-engineers his own capture, the need outrunning any wish to get away. The order stays visible throughout: the suffering first, then the act it seems to answer.
About the author
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821 to 1881) was a Russian novelist whose fiction examines guilt, freedom, faith, and the divided self. Works such as Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, and Notes from Underground trace how conscience and doubt press on ordinary lives. His own experience included a mock execution in 1849 and years of Siberian exile, which shaped his later writing. Freud drew on his work in the essay Dostoevsky and Parricide.
Details
- 1866
- Russian
- 752
- 9780141192802