How Dostoevsky's Psychoanalytical View Of Crime And Punishment

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When reading a novel that deals heavily with the mind, it can be fascinating to explore the mind--facets that influence it, shape it, control it, and ultimately how to control it. Psychoanalytical criticism deals with the idea that a text is a implicit expression of the author’s unconscious desires and thoughts. Most of the time, “the author 's own childhood traumas, family life, sexual conflicts, fixations, and such will be traceable within the behavior of the characters in the literary work” (Delahoyde np). In the case of Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky centers his novel around the idea of death and the emotional toll it can cause. It is interesting to note how Dostoevsky was surrounded by death all throughout his childhood as mentioned in the above brief biography. The idea of death being a somewhat trivial matter to Raskolnikov and the university students before the murder took place might be due to the large quantity of death and suffering Dostoevsky experienced throughout his life--thus devaluing his view of life itself. This idea is widely present in …show more content…

I was in a hurry to overstep . . . I didnt kill a human being, but a principle! So I killed the principle, but I didn’t overstep, I stopped on this side . . . I was only capable of killing” (Dostoevsky 234). This quote not only shows Raskolnikov’s broken state of mind, but also that he is still a believer in the concept of Nihilism and the greatest good for society. Instead of being upset for the murder he commited, Raskolnikov is upset that he couldn 't collect more monetary belongings from the landlady. Raskolnikov’s obvious belief in Nihilism suggests that Dostoevsky might have been struggling with this concept as well. Ironically, six years before Crime and Punishment was published, the Nihilist movement took place in 1860 in Russia. Because of this, Dostoevsky was inevitably surrounded by principals of Nihilism, resulting in Dostoevsky most likely toying with the idea through the character of

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