ABSTRACT
Crime and Punishment is generally regarded as one of the world's greatest psychological novels. Crime and Punishment is about precisely this kind of destructiveness; it is also a novel about creativity, including on some level, the writing of a novel. Most frequently, Raskolnikov is thought of as a man driven by his sense of guilt to get caught, to confess, and to be punished. This novel seems to have provoked more intense reactions, more critical commentary, indeed more basic differences of interpretation, than anything else Dostoevsky wrote. The epilogue to the novel remains one of the most controversial areas of Dostoevsky criticism, specifically the question of Raskolnikov's moral regeneration. Raskolnikov's oasis fantasy is a typical manic fantasy of omnipotent or oceanic reunion with a good mother, with oral gratification and sleep resulting. Dostoevsky seemed to understand, at least intuitively, how mania and perversity can confuse good and evil, and masquerade destructiveness in the guise of its opposite.
