AP English Literature and Composition MAJOR WORKS DATA SHEET Title: Crime and PunishmentAuthor: Dostoevsky Date of Publication: 1867 Genre: Psychological novel Biographical Information about the Author Fyodor Dostoevsky was born in Moscow in 1821. His mother died in 1837, and his father was murdered a year later. He studied at the Military Engineering College in St. Petersburg, graduating with officer’s rank. In 1849, he was arrested and sentenced to death for political activities; he was reprieved at the last minute but was sentenced to penal servitude. Until 1854, he was in a Siberian prison. He called Crime and Punishment a “psychological account of a certain crime.” He wrote short stories and other novels, including The Brothers Karamazov.He died in 1881. (Books, Harry L.) Historical Information about the period of publication “Dostoevsky inCrime and Punishmentand in his other great tragedies responds also to the European philosophical context of his time. The ideas of the German idealist philosophers were very much in the air: Russian intellectuals were profoundly shaken by the works of Kant, Hegel, Marx and others, and Raskolnikov’s ‘exceptional man’ is something of a brutalized reading of Hegel’s world historical figure. Other competing and interpenetrating ideas came from the utilitarian thought of John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, and William Godwin (the husband of early feminist Mary Wallstonecraft), echoing in such phrases as “the greatest good for the greatest number.” To round out the picture, we see notions borrowed from French utopian socialismà laCharles Fourier, nihilism (most simply, morality does not inherently exist), and the cult of Napoleon. In his novels, Dostoevsky often represents Western European ideas as dangerous diseases infecting, or as spirits possessing his morally shaken characters.” (Columbia University)Characteristics of the Genre Place more than the usual amount of emphasis on interior characterization, and on the motives, circumstances, and internal action which springs from, and develops, external action. The psychological novel is not content to state what happens but goes on to explain the why and the wherefore of this action. In this type of writing character and characterization are more than usually important, and they
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