Crime and Punishment is a story of salvation through suffering. Suffering for Dostoyevsky was an article of faith. The ‘truth’ is the realization of suffering. Dostoyevsky’s life in Siberia as a prisoner threw open to him a world of suffering. When he suffered intensely, the teachings of Christ that salvation was possible through suffering, sustained him. His prison life provided him rich and ample material for the study of lowly and the lost, the insulted and injured. . Dostoyevsky writes about intellectuals, merchants, and the social outcasts of the urban areas. Dostoyevsky describes himself as, a realist in the highest sense because he has depicted the depths of the human soul. He is very much interested in abnormal and extreme characters …show more content…
During his 20s he started his career in the field of writing. Poor Folk, his very first novel, were published when he was just 25 years old, in the year 1846. His works include, Crime and Punishment (1866), The Brothers Karamazov (1880), Demons(1872), The Idiot (1869). Fairy tales, legends, and multiple books by Russian authors, introduced Fyodor Dostoyevsky to the world of literature. The title of one of his major novels is The Insulted and Injured, the heroine of which is Natasha, who suffers and makes her beloved suffer. Dostoyevsky’s novels center on the topic of man as a subject of his atmosphere. His novels can be seen as “a means of penetrating into the hidden depths of human psychology and tearing of all the different kinds of veils and masks which conceal the nature and content of man’s inner world” (Frank, 1976). The “plot is exceedingly complex but this very complexity tends to emphasize a similar quality in the nineteenth century Russian life” (Welleck, …show more content…
In Crime and Punishment Raskolnikov, a rationalistic nihilist, once proud and haughtly, learnt humility and compassion through suffering and the love of Sonia. Never proud and haughtly like Raskolnikov, Sonia belonged to the ‘meek type’ of character, and was the symbol of crushed and suffering humanity. Raskolnikov imagined himself to be an extraordinary man, not to be governed by conventional rules of society and morality. According to Dostoyevsky, “there is no reason, but only reasoners; behind every rational formula there is a formulator; behind every generalization there is generalizer” (Dostoyevsky, quoted in The Encyclopedia Philosophy,