Blog

Murder He Wrote: Why Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crimes Stories Are to Die For

By today’s standards, Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) would not be considered purely a crime writer, even though many of his books, including Brothers Karamazov, Demons, House of the Dead, and Notes from Underground, deal with social and criminal justice in Tsarist Russia.

But according to a recent New York Times article, “today’s true crime resurgence has an antecedent” in Dostoyevsky’s work, most notably in his seminal novel, Crime and Punishment.

The article goes on to say that “Dostoyevsky was obsessed with the judiciary. He spent considerable time watching trials, debating with lawyers about the nature of innocence and guilt, visiting the accused in prison and trying to sway public opinion about certain cases.”

He not only researched the topics that would eventually end up in his plots, but—whether wittingly or not—also influenced the judicial system.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Dostoyevsky and his writing, the article notes, became deeply engraved in the country’s legal consciousness—so much so that defense attorneys “were known to invoke Rodion Raskolnikov, the charismatic murderer-protagonist of Crime and Punishment when seeking sympathy from the jury.”

We don’t know whether these attempts had sometimes been successful—in other words, if art inspired real life.

But it may well be that life inspired art. Raskolnikov was reportedly based on a real French criminal, Pierre-Francois Lacenaire, who killed two people in 1834. And in another Dostoyevsky novel, The Idiot, character Yevgeny Pavlovitch talks about Lacenaire when discussing another character’s suicide.

This goes to prove that Dostoyevsky not only wrote murder stories, but read them too.

Recent Posts

Vladimir Nabokov’s Long Lost Superman Poem Found

A long-thought lost poem of Russian-American novelist and poet Vladimir Nabokov, who would have turned…

2 months ago

New Book on Albert Einstein Offers an Accessible and Engaging Introduction to the Influential Physicist’s Life and Work

NEW YORK, NY, FEBRUARY 14, 2021 — Albert Einstein is the best-known scientist, and one…

4 months ago

The Cat’s Out of the Bag: What do Erwin Schrödinger and T. S. Eliot have in common?

At first glance, a Nobel Prize-winning Austrian physicist and American-born poet stand as far apart as…

6 months ago

Immortal Beloved: Beethoven’s Music is Still Bringing Joy

It is said that before composing, Ludwig van Beethoven  (1770–1827) had a habit of dipping…

6 months ago

In Memoriam Scott Donaldson, biographer, critic, and scholar of American literature

The Paris Husband, published by Simply Charly in 2018, explores one of the key events…

6 months ago

Simply Charly Ranks Among Top 100 Education Blogs

Teach100, a resource to help educators and those in the field of education find the…

6 months ago