Setting traditionally provides a base for a writer to create a storyline and the characters that populate it. In Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky paints the picture of a dirty, polluted city filled with drunks and prostitutes. This setting...

In superstitions, a mirror is thought to be a reflection of one’s soul; this is why shattering a mirror was and still is considered bad luck. In Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, the concept of the reflected soul is used as an important...

Though its many pages and complex themes and ideas may be frustrating to undergraduate students, it cannot be denied that Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel Crime and Punishment is anything less than a literary masterpiece. It explores a myriad of themes -...

In Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment he shows through Svidrigailov that there is potential goodness in even the most vicious men. Svidrigailov’s redeeming quality in the novel (similar to Raskolnikov with Sonya) is the pure female character that...

In absurdist fiction, authors and writers focus on characters who investigate the meaning of human existence in order to call into question existential notions. Some writers may utilize character’s confrontation with absurdism to either reject or...

In Feodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, the protagonist, Raskolnikov, murders an old woman and her sister because he believes himself to be an extraordinary man. Throughout the rest of the story, Raskolnikov deals with the repercussions of...

The character of Raskolnikov is an interesting one in Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. A failed visualization of the Ubermensch initially, there is leagues more depth to the character, not only in a psychological way but in the context of...

In “Part One” of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s famous 19th century novel Crime and Punishment, the beleaguered former-student Raskolnikov feverishly contemplates committing a “vile” crime, which is eventually revealed as the murder of local pawnbroker...

Can humans accept responsibility for their own deeds once they become aware that they have free will? Crime and Punishment is a platform for Dostoevsky’s own existentialist argument that attempts to answer the above question. Arguing against...

In Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s renowned novel Crime and Punishment, the radical theories of Raskolnikov (the protagonist) are a principal point of interest. One theory in particular, that of the so-called superman (a modern appellation, not Dostoyevsky’...

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment explores the philosophies of nihilism and rationalism common in Russia during the period and their subsequent consequences through its characters. Dostoevsky presents Arkady Svidrigailov as a foil character...

Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment explores the inner turmoil of the protagonist, Raskolnikov, through his murder of an old pawn broker. Raskolnikov’s internal divide is displayed throughout the novel through his bipolar behavior and his...

The Grand Inquisitor

The mind is its own place, and in itself

Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

- John Milton

The questions proposed in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Grand Inquisitor challenge the very essence of human existence. The idea of...

In Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, the Underground Man proposes a radically different conception of free action from that of Kant. While Kant thinks that an agent is not acting freely unless he acts for some reason, the Underground Man seems...

The central characters in the film Fight Club and Dostoevsky's novel Notes from Underground attempt to manage a serious psychological estrangement from society, each with a strategy that ultimately directs outward aggression inward. Fight Club's...

The most gripping aspect of Fyodor Dostoevsky's writing is his characters' compelling internal struggle. No matter how shocking or far-fetched his characters' struggles may first appear, one quickly discerns that these struggles are precisely...

Armed with a view that strongly opposes the ideas presented by rational egoism, Fyodor Dostoevsky conducts an all-out assault against the theory in his 1864 novella, Notes from Underground. The narrator is a sick, pessimistic man who remains...

Archetypes are an important foundation for building literary work. As “reoccurring patterns, images, or descriptive details” (Crisp 2), they not only define the identity of an author’s characters, but the course of the plot, the journeys and the...

Notes from Underground written by Fyodor Dostoevsky and Grendel written by John Gardner are both novels which contain characters who suffer immensely as the novel progresses. Notes from Underground is a novel about a man, deprived of beneficial...

In all of modern literature, there are few protagonists as self-effacing, miserable, indecisive, or morally contemptible as Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Underground Man. Given the Underground Man’s interminable Hamlet-like meanderings, one might surely...

Notes from Underground, completed in 1864, is considered one of Dostoevsky’s most deviously insightful works, famous for its gloomy description of not only the dark historical period but also the dark environment in which the protagonist lives....

On the surface, it appears that the Underground Man is no more than Dostoevsky’s attempt of a fascinating and contradictory refutation of Chernyshevsky’s proposal of rational egoism as a solution to an emerging hyperconscious culture. Fascinating...

Within the first few sentences of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, Dostoyevsky introduces the protagonist of the story, an unnamed man who narrates his life, as a bitter and emotionally distant man. These long-standing feelings and...

There has been a lot of critical investment on the lines of drawing parallels, comparisons and contrasts between Notes From Underground and Chernyshevsky’s sensationally Utopian novel What Is To Be Done?, but the primary importance of Dostoevsky’s...