Crime and Punishment in War and Peace: The Counter-Chronological Etiology of the Murder-Apologia Disease

Abstract

This article dwells on the author’s initial discovery of a subtext from Crime and Punishment in War and Peace (1994) — something we hardly expect, given the timeline of the historical events addressed in each novel. Ideologically, however, the influence goes from Dostoevsky to Tolstoy, not the other way around. In the scene of the Fire of Moscow in War and Peace, describing how Pierre Bezukhov becomes afflicted with the idée fixe of the Great Man affording to murder for the benefit of humanity, an idea initially ascribed to Napoleon, Tolstoy intertextually dwells on the image of Rodion Raskolnikov, his story, and ideology, presented by Dostoevsky as clinical etiology.

Keywords

• apologia of murder
• order of narration vs. order of events in the plot
• counter-chronology of historical subtext
• ideology as medical etiology
• history of ideas as anamnesis
• napoleon/ napoleonic idea