Schiller’s Motifs in Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Abstract

Friedrich Schiller was one of the most important Western authors for Dostoevsky. The importance lay both in being inspired by Schiller’s ideas and their creative development, and in direct controversy to the point of ironic criticism. In the novel Crime and Punishment frequent appeals to Schiller are not followed by precise quotations or recognizable allusions, and as a result they require decoding and commenting. This article attempts to do this. The influence of Schiller’s heritage in the novel can be traced on different levels: common ideological motives (the polemic with the concept of schöne Seele; a theodicy based on the philosophical concepts of love and beauty); aesthetic positions (an aestheticization of suffering and crime as “sublime”); anthropology (the creation of an ideological hero; the judgment about the deep disharmony in the nature of the contemporary man, which leads to an unlimited “largeness of the soul” to the point of a terrible moral ambivalence), and innovative methods of psychologism (a depiction of a criminal’s psychology from the inside, with an effect of empathy). Of particular importance for the ideological content of the novel Crime and Punishment was Schiller’s drama The Robbers; in terms of psychological analysis, the dramatic passages of The Misanthrope and the story The Criminal of Lost Honour also played a significant role. The latter are first introduced in academic commentary on Dostoevsky’s novel.

Keywords

• dostoevsky’s novel crime and punishment
• ideas of romanticism
• schiller’s drama the robbers
• criminal psychology
• anthropology
• aesthetic system and moral problems of schiller and dostoevsky