358 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor
can be gained by a true humanitarian enterprise.
A political activist, Mary explains late in The Big
Money what is at the root of unhappiness: “ ‘It’s the
waste,’ she cries as she leaves a cocktail party, ‘the
food they waste and the money they waste while our
people starve in tarpaper barracks.’ ”
Success in the trilogy coexists with gender issues:
While most of the men seem to feel successful if
they have money in their pockets, the women (while
still happy to have money, in many cases) define suc-
cess as achieving independence. For Mary French,
whose last act is to leave New York to organize a
labor protest, success is something more than just
money, more than just independence. Success, for
Mary French, means helping humankind reach
some semblance of equality. In Dos Passos’s U.S.A.
trilogy, she is the last hope for the success of Ameri-
can society and an example of a woman motivated
by her awareness of poverty and inequality.
K. E. Birdsall
DOSTOYEVSKY, FYODOR Crime
and Punishment (1866)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–81) wrote Crime and
Punishment in 1866; it was published in the Rus-
sian Messenger in monthly installments that year.
The novel is set in St. Petersburg, Russia, at a time
when Alexander II was seeking to modernize Rus-
sia following the examples of Western Europe.
Dostoyevsky explores the problems that come with
rapid urbanization: poverty, alcoholism, crime, and
disease. The main character of the novel, Rodion
Raskolnikov, is a student who has recently dropped
out of college and is unemployed.
The novel is aptly titled: It begins with a crime
and ends with a punishment. Early in the narra-
tive, Raskolnikov murders a pawnbroker and her
pregnant assistant, Lizaveta. As the police investi-
gation develops, Raskolnikov falls under suspicion.
As he tries to convince himself that he has com-
mitted no crime—he did not commit a murder
because he killed unimportant people—he befriends
a prostitute named Sonia. She was friends with the
pawnbroker’s assistant, which makes it difficult for
Raskolnikov to rationalize his crime away.
Although Raskolnikov attempts to deny his
guilt, he undergoes suffering nevertheless. He
cannot sleep, he lapses into fugue states, and he even
returns to the scene of the crime. He and the lead
investigator, Porfiry Petrovich, play a game of cat
and mouse as Raskolnikov seeks to stay one step
ahead of the police. Although he confesses the crime
at the end, he is not fully discharged from his guilt.
He must learn that there are not just legal conse-
quences but spiritual ones as well.
Dutton KearneyGuilt in Crime and Punishment
Like many great works of literature, the main
themes of Crime and Punishment are found in its
title. At the beginning of the novel, Rodion Ras-
kolnikov commits an armed robbery that escalates
into a double murder, and for the remainder of the
book, he suffers various modes of punishment for
his crimes. Because he thinks of himself as being
above the law, he believes that he has done nothing
wrong. However, his guilt follows him throughout
the novel, and his failed attempts to escape both the
police and his conscience lead to his confession of
the murders at the end.
When he was a college student, Raskolnikov
wrote a journal article that distinguishes between
two classes of people in history—the ordinary and
the extraordinary. On the one hand, the ordinary
class is made up of those who “must live in submis-
sion and have no right to transgress the laws.” The
extraordinary class, on the other hand, has the right
to commit any crime, provided there is a greater
benefit to humanity in general for having commit-
ted it. Raskolnikov imagines himself to be a member
of the latter class, which is why he believes he has
done nothing wrong. As his guilt gradually over-
whelms him, he realizes that he is not a member
of the extraordinary class of human beings after all,
and further, he realizes that such a class does not
even exist. No one can escape the guilt of his or her
crimes when those crimes directly affect another
individual.
Culturally, Russians often do not think of
themselves as individuals but as participants in a
brotherhood and sisterhood born from a common
source—Mother Russia. The Russian word for this