ABSTRACT
Raskolnikov, who kills an old woman in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, is described as completely self-absorbed and so isolated that he dreads meeting other people. 1 At the end of the book he has a dream. The world is suffering from a strange new plague that causes people to consider themselves “so intellectual and so completely in possession of the truth” that they regard their decisions, scientific conclusions and moral convictions as infallible. But, like Raskolnikov, each individual believes they alone are in possession of the truth. They cannot agree on what is good and what is evil and this leads to conflagration, famine, and the destruction of the world. 2 The contemporary Russian author Boris Akunin explains that Dostoyevsky’s novel deals primarily with the nature of human existence. Dostoyevsky had a deep mistrust of rationalism and considered its development in the latter part of the 19th century, in Russia and the West, to be extremely dangerous and that it would lead to total catastrophe. 3
