The Power of an Idea: Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment

Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, the central figure in Dostoyevskys Crime and Punishment is one of the best-known characters in the world of the novel, as well-known, perhaps, as Hamlet in the field of tragedy. Like Hamlet, however, Raskolnikov has proved to be a rather perplexing subject for critics. Why exactly does he murder the old pawnbroker and her sister? And why, in the days that follow, does he suffer a form of psychological breakdown and eventually give himself up to the police? Raskolnikov plots and carries out a murder to assert his freedom, asserts one critic.1 Raskolnikov commits murder out of spite against himself, writes another.2 Raskolnikov is driven to confess his crime because he has burdened himself with enormous guilt, contends Kenneth Lantz.3 Raskolnikovs psychological breakdown, argues well-known Dostoyevsky authority, Joseph Frank, is due to a mental disorder and to his eventual realization that he killed not for altruistic-humanitarian motives but because of a purely selfish need to test his own strength.4 And a more recent writer, influenced perhaps by the notions of dialog and monolog that Mikhail Bakhtin has applied to Dostoyevskys novels, locates the cause of Raskolnikovs downfall in a state of mind that is exclusively monological, an example of the perverted heroism that is not a means for any end but becomes its own goal, redemption becoming possible only when Raskolnikov discovers what life in a dialogue means.