crime and punishment
...red from epilepsy ,and his wife and brother both died in the same year ,he was forced to leave the country because of owing money to people .No modern writer has been so well acquainted with evil and misery as he was . Starting from Flaubert’s Madame Bovary in 1856 novels started to shift from settings of another time and another place to very specific times and places ,and from subjects of otherworldliness to subjects familiar to common readers.Contemporary urban settings ,believable events ,true-to-life characters filled the fiction of the Realist. In Russia Dastayovsky distinguished himself as an early realist with Crime and Punishment in 1866. Writers of realistic literature explored and exploded what they considered to be dangerous ,outmoded ,and misguided attitudes of their time . What makes the novel compelling to modern readers is that Raskolinkov ,though separated from us by thousands of miles and over a hundred years ,seems as familiar as an old classmate or next-door neighbor .Raskolinkov is not a rare ,inhuman beast with no heart or soul .He is an intense ,sensitive ,intelligent good looking young man who carefully and with great deliberation ,decides to kill .He could be anyone .He could even be you .And that chilling possibility is what has drawn generation after generation to Dastayovsky’s masterpiece . Dastoyevsky never wrote anything more tremendous than the portrayal of anguish that seethes in the soul of Raskolinkov after he has committed the crime .In the domain of social psychology and pathology the great novelist owes nothing to anybody.At Dastoyevsky’s time .In this book Dastoyevsky considers the negative effects of nihilism and rational egoism in the minds of Russia’s youth .He advances this objective by employing themes of suffering ,resurrection and death .Suffering is the dominant theme of this work .Immediately following Raskolinkov’s crime he begins to suffer .There are also two important scenes related to suffering .One is when Rasklinkov confesses his crime to Sonia ,she cries out :We must suffer and suffer together…we must pray and atone …let us go to prison .”Thus we are led back to the writer’s favorite idea,the Russian’s fundamental conception of Christanity: the effectiveness of atonement ,of suffering and its being the only solution to all difficulties . The other scene is when Raskolinkov kneels before Sonia ,Sonia is terrified and begs him to rise ,Then Raskolinkov says “ It is not before you I am kneeling but before all suffering of mankind .” That is what Dostoyevsky himself does in this and in all his books ,but in none the theme of suffering of mankind is more vividly shown and in none of them his act of kneeling before it is so impressive . Dastayovsky hates no one .Thus his wicked people are never introduced into his books either to glorify hi s hatred of them or to make a plot with their wickedness ,but he is much concerned with their souls .He has a Christian sense of their equality .It is not merely rich and poor or clever and stupid that are equal to him ,but even good and bad .He does not introduce his characters like Dickens to make fun of them .He respects the drunkard ,Marmeladov. He does not insist on feminity in his women .He knows women but he knows them as human beings like men. Indeed he was an artist purified by suffering as saints are purified by it. Dastayovsky show s us wickedness more than we had ever imagined ,wickedness which if we saw in real life we would have believed in human monsters without souls and then he shows us the soul ,one just like our own behind that wickedness ,and we believe in the one as we have believed in the other (London times 1913). This research will try to show why the protagonist of Crime and Punishment is more likely to be a victim rather than a criminal . Rodion Romanovitch Raskolinkov ,the story’s protagonist is a poverty-stricken but proud student who believes that “extraordinary” men are different from “ordinary” men and not subject to any law but their conscience .That idea is the motive or justification for his crime ( Margaret Brantley 654) .In this world –the urban world of St’ Petersburg where he has been for three years –Raskolinkov appears incongruously innocent and immature .Despite his obsession with the idea of murder ,he knows neither love nor vice ,it seems .The altruism in his nature has ,we learn from Rasumokhin in the epilogue ,led him to look after a fellow-student at university and that student’s father ;he saved two small children from a burning house ;he was for a time engaged to his landlady’s daughter ,but this curious relationship ,which his mother was glad to see ended ,seems to have been based on pity rather than love .His immaturity must be stressed .Alien to his urban environment ,with deliberate incongruity ,like a peasant (the common criminals penal servitud...