Crime And Punishment Anti-Marxism Analysis

Burn Down the State: An Analysis of Anti-Marxism in Crime and Punishment
The Government has been overthrown. After years of the upper class or bourgeois marginalizing the lower class or proletariat, the proletariat rebelled. Houses were destroyed. People were killed. The government was overthrown. But in its place, a new government appeared; a government that emphasized equality, but existed only to serve the upper class, a government under which proletariat suffering only exacerbated.
This is the world that Fyodor Dostoevsky, author of the novel Crime and Punishment feared. In the novel, Crime and Punishment, a deranged poor man named Raskolnikov kills a wealthy pawnbroker named Alyona Ivanovna. Then, after a long period of delirium

Dostoevsky achieves this through Razumikhin, a college student who dropped out of school because of the stress of poverty. Razumikhin perseveres and survives despite not having any money. Dostoevsky also critiques Marxism with the character Svidrigailov, a widower who has inherited large sums of money from his wife. In addition, he donates large portions of his money to the

While Raskolnikov murders Alyona Ivanovna, he swings the butt of an axe at her head. He is described as, “[landing] her another blow, and another, each time with the butt and each time on the crown of the head” (94). This murder is symbolic of the violent revolution that Marx describes because Raskolnikov repeatedly bashes Alyona with an axe which is very violent, like the revolution. Raskolnikov hits her in the crown of the head, symbolizes the proletariat killing the ruling class of Russia during the violent revolution that Marx advocates. Moreover, After Raskolnikov has confessed to the murder, he is sentenced to eight years of hard labor in Siberia, which is described as, “on the bank of a wide, lonely river there is a town, one of Russia’s administration centres; in the town there is a fortress, in the fortress a prison, “(637). Raskolnikov’s prison sentence is symbolic of the consequences of violent revolution. The wide, lonely river represents how the proletariat will become alienated from society because of poverty. Moreover, because Dostoevsky describes the river as described as wide, it also indicates that the alienation that the proletariat experience will become worse after the revolution. The town is also described as having a fortress. The fortress signifies the institutions of capitalism being impenetrable.