Crime and Punishment

Space and Place in Crime and Punishment

Petersburg had been the capital of Russia for more than a century and a half when Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote Crime and Punishment. The capital had been established in the early part of the 18th century by Tsar Peter the Great, who, like his descendents (Catherine the Great especially), was influenced by trends in European style and philosophical thought. With the liberation of the serfs in 1861, St. Petersburg went from cultural hub to the type of over-populated city full of all manner and class of people described by Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment. The influx of people not only reflected the social and moral atmosphere of Russia as a whole, it also reflected the deteriorating condition of the spiritual and psychological state of Dostoevsky's hero/anti-hero Raskolnikov -- a man whose name is literally inspired by the Russian term for "split"...
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