Articles on Crime And Punishment

A significant proportion of the readers of Crime and Punishment identify quietly with Raskolnikov. The identification is not usually about the murder, which most readers correctly find horrifying, and not usually about the brilliance, which few readers actually have. It is about a specific psychological structure Dostoevsky captured with unusual precision — the tension between the theory the analytical mind builds about its own exceptionality and the moral apparatus that refuses to let the theory close.