Crime And Punishment Psychology

Crime and Punishment, written by Fyodor Dostoevsky, is considered to be a masterpiece throughout the world. Even though, when many teens who read it, they think the story just describes a murder and consequences a killer faces afterwards but the whole story is more complex and is actually about human psychology. The author appears to be a gifted psychologist; he masterfully manipulates the novel(details) to achieve his goal and show the readers what people must do to survive. No wonder a Russian saying “family is sacred” was a part of the Russian culture a long long time ago, way before Dostoevsky was born. No small detail in the novel should be disregarded because everything Dostoevsky writes in it is important to the story or to some characters.

One might think this dream is just a way to fill up the pages with useless information but that dream plays a major role in the whole novel. It has at least five meanings. Firstly the dream gives the reader important information about Rodya. “ He was a child about seven years old, walking into the country with his father on the evening of a holiday(p57.)” Raskolnikov was raised in the family in which there was a tradition for a father to walk with his son. He also attended church and cemeteries to pay respect to the memory of passed away relatives. “...whenever he visited the graveyard he used religiously and reverently to cross himself and to bow down and kiss the little grave(p58.)” From those two quotes it seems that Rodya’s parents tried to raise him in christian traditions: attending churches, remembering the dead relatives and praying for the goodness of their soul, and also be spiritually close with his

In Raskolnikov's dream a mad crowd of people indulges in cruel entertainment - a beating of a poor horse. This “crime/act” portrays the dark part of a human’s soul that Dostoevsky wrote about. These people stopped being humans because it is hard to call someone a human after they torment an animal that did nothing wrong. those people are able to beat and stomp a living being and experience pleasure from its suffering and blood. Even an old who said “What are you about, are you Christian, you devil?” soon could not help smiling when the horse tried to kick because it got beaten so hard. This is a very dark episode of the novel; it seems more dark than the two