He has suffered a great deal and is still suffering from the idea that he could make a theory, but was incapable of boldly overstepping the law, and so he is not a man of genius.” (Dostoyevsky 507) He seems to have fancied that he was a genius too - that is, he was convinced of it for a time. “Napoleon attracted him tremendously, that is, what affected him was that a great many men of genius have not hesitated at wrongdoing, but have overstepped the law without thinking about it. As Svidrigailov states in his dialogue with Dounia, The crime he commits is provoked not so much by financial need as by his desire for self-assertion as a unique and heroic personality.

This latter approach is by large reflected in Crime and Punishment which was supposedly conceived as a novel titled “Confession” (Frank 60 Lantz 71).Ĭommitting murder under a fanatical belief that his unlawful and inhumane action could be justified by a higher purpose of liberating the world from an evil parasite, Raskolnikov represents a supercilious figure lost in lofty and overweening ideals which contrast his miserable daily existence. Traditionally, confessional genre was viewed as “a narrative in which the confessor recounted some secret crime or scene and then depicted the gradual reform and rebirth that resulted from pangs of conscience and expiation through suffering” (Lantz 364).īut while Rousseau’s confessor’s were represented as inherently virtuous beings, Dostoyevsky rejected such interpretation of the penitent and viewed the nature of man as not virtuous but “innately stupid and limited” (Lantz 365). Remarkably enough, Dostoyevsky repeatedly referred to Rousseau’s confessions, polemicizing with the latter’s interpretation of the genre. In the eighteenth century Jean-Jacques Rousseau widely applied this genre in his autobiographical writings. Augustine, the genre of intimate avowals of one’s secret sin enjoyed a growing popularity in European literature of the nineteenth century. The act of confession is one of the central themes in Crime and Punishment, since it is the climax point of the novel signifying crucial changes in Raskolnikov’s mental and physical state.Īs such, the genre of confession was not new for literature: started as early as 400 AD by the Confessions of St.

However, despite those exalted aims, Raskolnikov suffers pangs of conscience and mental anguish for a prolonged time before he finally ventures to confess his crime. Dostoyevsky’s famous Crime and Punishment features a poor ex-student Raskolnikov who commits a premeditated murder of an old prosperous pawnbroker excusing his actions by the demands of the greater good and the general justice. Delving unprecedentedly deep in the mysteries of human soul, he created his novels that present outstanding examples of psychological analysis of the most morbid issues and ideas.

Raskolnikov dostoevsky