The Literature Book

174

P

sychological realism is

the depiction in literature

of the personality traits

and innermost feelings of a

character, shining a spotlight

on their conscious thoughts and

unconscious motivations. The plot

itself often takes a secondary role in

works that focus on psychological

realism, and is there to set out

the relationships, conflicts, and

physical settings within which

these mental dramas are played out.

Delving into the psyche of a

character in this way marked

a radical departure from Romantic

fiction, in which plots typically

saw wrongdoing punished and

virtue rewarded. Literary works

had, however, long explored the

workings of the human mind,

though uninformed by the

emerging science of psychology.

For example, mental machinations

are central in the 11th-century

Japanese story The Tale of Genji;

in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet

(1603), it is the inner conflicts of

the hero that drive the drama;

and the 18th century saw the

heyday of the genre known as

the epistolary novel, in which

personal letters and journal

entries were used to give the

reader an insight into a character’s

intimate thoughts and feelings.

Exposing minds

In his masterpiece Crime and

Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky

introduces the reader to his

antihero, the student Rodion

Romanovich Raskolnikov, also

called Rodya or Rodka by the few

people who love him. The author

dissects—by means of a third-

person narrative—Raskolnikov’s

psychological motivations in a way

that presages the work of Sigmund

Freud and other psychoanalysts.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky Fyodor Dostoyevsky was born^

in Moscow, Russia, in 1821 to

parents of Lithuanian descent.

He trained and worked as an

engineer before writing his first

novel, Poor Folk (1846), which

depicts the mental as well as

the material condition of poverty.

In 1849, Dostoyevsky was

arrested for being a member of

the Petrashevsky Circle, a socialist

intellectual group. After the

torment of a mock execution by

firing squad, he endured several

years of hard labor in Siberia,

where he began to suffer from

epilepsy. After his release, issues

with creditors prompted his

voluntary exile in Western

Europe. After the death of his

first wife, in 1867 he wed Anna

Grigoryevna Snitkina, who gave

birth to their four children, acted

as his secretary, and managed

the family’s finances. Haunted

by infirmity, he died in 1881.

Other key works

1864 Notes from

the Underground

1866 The Gambler

1869 The Idiot

1880 The Brothers Karamazov

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

IN CONTEXT

FOCUS

Psychological realism

BEFORE

c.1000–12 Murasaki Shikibu’s

The Tale of Genji offers

psychological insights into the

lives of its characters.

1740 English writer Samuel

Richardson’s sentimental novel

Pamela explores the inner

nature of the novel’s heroine.

1830 The Red and the Black,

by French author Stendhal,

is published and is seen by

many as the first psychological

realist novel.

AFTER

1871–72 George Eliot’s

Middlemarch traces the

psychological landscape of

a provincial English town.

1881 The Portrait of a Lady, by

American author Henry James,

delves into the consciousness

of the character Isabel Archer.

All is in a man’s hands

and he lets it all slip

from cowardice.

Crime and

Punishment

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