Crime and Punishment as a Novel of Consciousness

Abstract

The article proposes a genre definition of Dostoevsky’s novel as a novel of consciousness. The term has been used relatively recently, mainly in English-language literature of the last decades. In this article, it is used in a slightly different sense, emphasizing not the plurality of consciousnesses, but the universalization of consciousness in general. The difference of Crime and Punishment from the tradition of Western European and Russian social and psychological novel was already felt by its first readers and formulated initially by critics N.D. Akhsharumov, N.N. Strakhov, and Fr. Theodore (A.M. Bukharev). The unique fusion of the novel’s hero with the reader was achieved by Dostoevsky on the basis of the postulated common nature of human consciousness. The new aesthetics found its expression in the narrative structure, as the use of improper direct speech builds the communicating vessels (author-hero-reader) of the flowing unified “all-human” consciousness.

Keywords

• dostoevsky
• crime and punishment
• novel of consciousness
• allhumanity
• receptive strategy
• improper directed speech