Достоевский и мировая культура: Филологический журнал (Jun 2024)
Crime and Punishment and British Gothic of Horror
Abstract
The article considers Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment alongside several works of the British Gothic tradition of horror (Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk, John William Polidori’s “The Vampyre”) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus that essentially is the first representative of science fiction in British literature. The fantastic element in the gothic of horror was very important for Dostoevsky as a visible manifestation of the level of being beyond the material plane. “The Vampyre” and The Monk manifest certain commonality of themes and motifs with both Dostoevsky’s oeuvre in general and Crime and Punishment in particular. These include “vampiric” descriptions of heroes (Svidrigailov and Stavrogin), the consequent motif of the “living dead,” the theme of sensuality. These parallels are particularly topical for Crime and Punishment as they emphasize Dostoevsky’s key recurrent motifs that are not always immediately visible in Svidrigailov. However, the most interesting typological parallels emerge between Dostoevsky’s overarching plot (human beings’ attempts at self-deification, i.e. at going beyond their nature and toward godhood) and the plot of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. While the subject of self-deification as such is not innovative (Shelley’s and Dostoevsky’s predecessors in this regard include epic poems of different peoples and eras, tragedies by Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare), Shelley and Dostoevsky pioneered the subject of human inability to rival God not in their creative or destructive power, but in their ability to love. Inability to love in a true Christian way was also part of The Monk, but it was Shelley’s work that foregrounded it. Therefore, the English gothic of horror and Dostoevsky’s oeuvre are connected both at the level of individual themes and motifs and at the level of religious and philosophical conceptualization of human teleology.
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