The Hero’s Journey in Dostoevsky’s Early Works and Crime and Punishment

Abstract

The article proposes to consider how the early work of Fyodor Dostoevsky and the novel Crime and Punishment correlate at the level of their internal symbolic stories created by the author behind the external plots of the works. In this work, the hypothesis is put forward that Raskolnikov manages to follow the path of spiritual transformation, which the writer sought to find for his heroes of the 1840s, but then he failed to fully realize it. Despite the ongoing debate in the academic community about the role of the epilogue in Crime and Punishment, it can still be said that this novel, the only one from the Five Great Novels, shows the hero’s path from a complete fall to a directly prescribed spiritual resurrection. The article attempts to show that Raskolnikov follows the path along the “trajectory” described in the early texts, but obviously with some fundamental changes that allowed this path to be realized. The article is a description of the first steps in the development of this topic.

Keywords

• fyodor dostoevsky
• crime and punishment
• dostoevsky’s early work
• the motif of the sun
• solitude
• hard labor