Crime and Punishment is one of the most famous works by the Russian novelist Fydor Dostoevsky. The novel begins with the double murder of an elderly woman and her sister. They were murdered by Raskolnikoff. While at first it seems like he committed the murder because of his need for money, as the story develops his motive seems to be seeing if he could get away with the crime. Much of the action of the novel revolves around exactly that question: will the murderer get away with the crime.
However, the text is not a detective story. Rather, it is a psychological examination of the murderer, and the changes that happen to him as a result of the crime, and being investigated by the police. Over the course of the story, the psychological pressure becomes too much for Raskolnikoff, and he cracks, and confesses to the murder. He is sentenced to prison for his crime, and while there discovers that he had fallen in love with Sonia, a girl he spent a great deal of time with while free.
There is little doubt that Crime and Punishment is one of the world’s great works of literature, and the book has exceptional literary merit. Dostoevsky is a master of psychological storytelling, and his portrait of the murder is what makes the book a work of great literature. Another reason Crime and Punishment is a work with literary merit are the many elements of literature in the text. For example, there are many allusions in the novel. Allusions are a literary device which an author uses in order to make a reader think about or recall another work of literature.
In other words, something in text A, like an image or a character will remind the reader of text B, and the reader will gain insight into the new text from the connection. One Shakespearean allusion, or reference that Dostoevsky makes is with the character Marmeladov, whom Raskolnikov meets in the tavern in “chapter two” of Crime and Punishment. Marmeladov, I believe, is an allusion or reference to Shakespeare’s great character John Falstaff. Falstaff appears in several of Shakespeare’s plays, including Henry IV and The Merry Wives of Winsdor.
Falstaff is a fat man, who is supposedly a knight, but spends all his time drinking in the Boar’s Head Inn. Falstaff never has any money of his own, but always gets money to drink by begging for it or borrowing it. He is considered a funny character, and always entertains the other people in the tavern with his tales, boasts, jokes and flattery. Marmeladov reminds the reader of Falstaff in several ways. First, he hints he was in “the service”(24). However, it is his behavior and appearance which truly act as the allusion.
Like Falstaff, he is fat and around fifty, and his overall appearance makes him look both like a clown and a drunk, matching the appearance of Falstaff. However, even though Marmeladov is a drunk, and has been sleeping on a hay barge for a week, there is some noble element within him, as “there was something very strange in him; there was a light in his eyes as though of intense feeling-perhaps there were even thought and intelligence” (Dostoevsky 23). Likewise, the other tavern goers enjoy listening to “the funny fellow… vidently Marmeladov was a familiar figure here” (Dostoevsky 27).
Another type of allusion that is common in literature are religious allusions. These can take the form of allusions to the holy books of one of the world’s religions, or the central figures of the religion, or to the religion’s teachings. In Crime and Punishment Dostoevsky has several of his characters, especially the female characters Dunya and Sonia make allusions to Christianity, and specifically to Christ’s suffering on the cross.
In some forms of Christianity, it is taught that the great suffering the Christ endured while on the cross purified him of his sins; in other words, since Christ was part man, he was tainted by the same original sin that all humans are. It was through his suffering on the cross that Christ was purified of the original sin within himself. However, this suffering also redeems all of humanity. Because Christ suffered on the cross, all of humanity has the chance to be forgiven of the original sin, and then let into heaven. This is what Christians mean when they say Christ suffered and died for your sins.
Both Sonia and Dunya take Christianity very seriously, and believe in its teachings. This is why they urge Raskolnikov to turn himself in and accept his punishment (the other word in the novel’s title) because only by suffering from his punishment does Raskolnikov have any chance of being saved. At first, Raskolnikov holds out, and says “they say it is necessary for me to suffer! What’s the object of these senseless sufferings” (Dostoevsky 917). Sonya and Dunya keep telling him why he must suffer just as Christ suffered, so that he may be forgiven for the sin he committed.
These allusions to sin and suffering serve to connect the novel with some of the concepts of Christianity in the reader’s mind. Dostoevsky also makes a political allusion in “Part Five, Chapter Four”, when Raskolnikov is explaining to Sonia why he committed the murder. After explaining he didn’t do it for the money, he explodes, “Yes, that’s what it was! I wanted to become a Napoleon, that is why I killed her…. Do you understand now” (Dostoevsky 734).
Sonia does not understand what Raskolnikov means by this, so he continues, “I asked myself one day this question—what if Napoleon, for instance, had happened to be in my place… o begin his career with, but instead of all those picturesque and monumental things, there had simply been some ridiculous old hag, a pawnbroker, who had to be murdered (Dostoevsky 734). Doestoevsky is obviously making a political and historical reference to Napoleon, the great French general who made himself Emperor of France, and then, though war, Emperor of all of Europe.
Napoleon almost conquered Russia as well, and was only defeated because his army got caught in the Russian winter. The point of the allusion, as Raskolnikov explains, is that Napoleon was a man who would ave done anything to achieve his goals, including murder. In fact, he was probably responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people. Thus, he is a symbol of a person who acts without a conscience, and who does not think of the human cost of reaching a goal. All in all, Crime and Punishment is a novel which is still relevant for today’s readers. Real crime dramas and the tales of serial killers are very popular forms of entertainment, and Dostoevsky’s novel would fit right into that genre today.
