ABSTRACT
Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Devils, A Raw Youth, and The Brothers Karamazov form, as D. S. Mirsky notes, "a connected cycle," dramatic in construction, philosophic in significance, and tragic in conception.2 The famous passage of a letter written by Dostoevsky to M. N. Katkov in September 1865, which bears re-quoting, both outlines the plan of Crime and Punishment and underscores the dramatic, the philosophic, and the tragic perspectives comprising the artistic and the ideational constituents of this novel:
A young man of middle-class origin who is living in dire need is expelled from the university. From superficial and weak thinking, having been influenced by certain "unfinished" ideas in the air, he decides to get himself out of a difficult situation quickly by killing an old woman, a usurer and widow of a government servant. The old woman is crazy, deaf, sick, greedy, and evil. She charges scandalous rates of interest, devours the well-being of others, and, having reduced her younger sister to the state of a servant, oppresses her with work He decides to kill and rob her so as to make his mother, who is living in the provinces, happy; to save his sister from the libidinous importunities of the head of the estate where she is serving as a lady's companion; and then to finish his studies, go abroad and be, for the rest of his life, honest, firm, and unflinching in fulfilling his "humanitarian duty toward mankind." This would, according to him, "make up for the crime" which is committed against an old woman, who does not know why she is living and who would perhaps die in a month anyway.
