ABSTRACT
A sound psychoanalytic interpretation of a dream rests on the dreamer’s associations. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could ask Dostoevsky himself for his associations to the many elements in Crime and Punishment? Where did he get the names for his characters, the repeated image of the cramped room with dirty yellow wallpaper, the idea of a self-destructive alcoholic husband (Marmeladov), the suffering horse? While we cannot ask him, we can treat the material that is available—The Notebooks, ideas expressed in his correspondence, information about his childhood, and recurring themes and images in the other novels—as if they all were associations. To put it another way: the analysis of Crime and Punishment in the last chapter is based entirely on the novel itself: here, this analysis can be confirmed by bringing in these “associations,” the surrounding material.
