Crime and punishment Archive

Since his first major work Notes from the Underground was written in 1864, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s influence can be found in literature, philosophy, and even pop culture. Dostoyevsky’s ideas have transcended his original Russian audiences of the 19th century and are now...
“The highest and most characteristic trait of our people is the sense of justice and its thirst.”   ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky The summer of 2020 has us waiting in an infinite loop for new movies, such as Christopher Nolan’s much...
Women in Dostoyevsky: Brave and Beautiful Sonya from Crime and Punishment, Nastasya Filippovna from The Idiot, and Grushenka from The Brothers Karamazov… Written as women of beauty, readers see their struggles in  Dostoyevsky’s novels. But, in the words of...
In our upcoming vlog post (currently in editing) by Carolyn Ho and Kate Penney , we compared Raskolnikov, the tortured hero of Crime and Punishment, with a star of contemporary pop culture, Spider-Man, using the concept of vigilante justice as...
Independent director Larry Clark’s psychological crime drama film Bully–a depiction of the 1993 murder of Bobby Kent by his own circle of friends–was released in 2001 to sharply polarized criticism, the negative reviews targeting its allegedly gratuitous–and painfully straightforward–portrayal of...
Dostoevsky. The name alone conjures up a cascade of words: Mystery. Morality. Russia. Faith. Doubt. Goodness. Corruption. Murder. Redemption. His writings offer many rewards, many treasures, but to discover them the uninitiated must often pass through a shroud of...
The Dream For me, one of the most startling and moving passages in Crime and Punishment comes in Part One, Chapter Five. Wandering around St.Petersburg, contemplating the murder of pawnbroker Alyona Ivanonva, Raskolnikov falls into a vodka-induced sleep and...
Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the most esteemed (albeit easily misinterpreted) thinkers of all time, once referred to Fyodor Dostoyevsky as “the only psychologist from whom I’ve anything to learn.” This was, to be sure, long before Freud, whose first...
To be ‘big in Japan’ is not usually a commendation. The term was originally coined in the 1960s to describe Western music artists who were popular in Japan, but unable to garner interest in their home country. But Fyodor Dostoyevsky...