Classics of Russian Literature | Inside the Troubled Mind of a Criminal (Lecture 13)

Lecture 13: The tortured mind and heart of the intelligent young criminal leads us through the gallery of psychological doubles, mates to various sides of Raskol’nikov’s fractured personality: Svidrigailov, the apogee of evil and malice, who yet turns out to have a better side; Sonya, a young girl forced into prostitution to support her family, uses the great Russian version of the New Testament to push Raskol’nikov in a very different direction, toward salvation; Porfiry Petrovich, the investigating prosecutor looms like an almost supernatural doom over the protagonist, yet offers a kind of legal salvation in the end. All of them, together with other penetrating psychological portraits, make Crime and Punishment a conflagration of passions and arguments that hypnotize the reader.

Suggested Reading:
Joseph Frank, DostoevskyThe Miraculous Years, 1865–71, vol. 4.