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Chapter 5: Crime and Punishment 1.“The Stationmaster,” The Bronze Horseman, and The Queen of Spades: The Clerk, Petersburg, and Napoleon
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Dostoevsky was completing the last chapters of Crime and Punishment when he was forced to interrupt his work to write still another novel, The Gambler,which responded to aspects of The Queen of Spades that he did not take on in Crime and Punishment. However, most of Dostoevsky’s response to The Queen of Spades is found in Crime and Punishment. What is so unusual about Crime and Punishment is that Dostoevsky uses it as a vehicle for revisiting all of Pushkin’s works that had engaged him in the s, including The Queen of Spades, “The Stationmaster,” The Bronze Horseman, and The Covetous Knight, each of which becomes a subtext, in varying degrees, for Crime and Punishment.1 It would take a book much larger than the present one to deal in detail with Dostoevsky ’s response in Crime and Punishment to each of the above works by Pushkin, so in the next two chapters, I shall be focusing on the Pushkinian subtexts in Crime and Punishment that are most important for an understanding of the authors’ literary relationship. There will, therefore , be considerably less emphasis, for example, on “The Stationmaster ”than on The Covetous Knight, which will receive a full chapter, given that it deals directly, like Crime and Punishment, with the questions of power,crime,punishment,egoism,and ideology.From the point of view of influence, Crime and Punishment is significant because it constitutes Dostoevsky’s most critical engagement with Pushkin’s works. Furthermore , since Dostoevsky also uses Crime and Punishment as a vehicle for reassessing his earlier responses to Pushkin, he, in a sense, is employing chapter Crime and Punishment . “The Stationmaster,” The Bronze Horseman, and The Queen of Spades The Clerk, Petersburg, and Napoleon the novel to carry on a dialogue not only with Pushkin but with his former literary self.2 “The Stationmaster”: Psychology, Religion, and the Clerk Crime and Punishment is, in part, an updating of Poor Folk. In fact, Dostoevsky ’s plan for his major work of was to write a novel about the poor of Saint Petersburg, entitled The Drunkards. However, as a novella about a psychological account of a crime, which he was working on at the same time, began to develop into a much larger work (Crime and Punishment), the novel about the urban poor diminished in importance and was eventually incorporated into Crime and Punishment as an important subplot involving the Marmeladovs. Marmeladov seems in many ways a composite of the clerks Gorshkov and Devushkin in Poor Folk. Gorshkov is destitute, his family is starving; Devushkin is an alcoholic interested in the question of divine justice. The Marmeladovs, like the Dobroselovs, come from the country to Petersburg because of their difficult situation, only to find conditions much worse in the city. Dunya’s relationship to Svidrigaylov is a further exploration of the relationship of a rich sensualist (Bykov) and a poor, sensitive young girl (Varvara Dobroselova). Like Poor Folk, Crime and Punishment explores the question of the injustice of the social system and the problems of the modern city, though in greater detail and depth. But when we look at Crime and Punishment through the lens of Pushkin’s “The Stationmaster ,”what stands out is Dostoevsky’s focus on a father (Marmeladov) and his young daughter (Sonya).Whereas Poor Folk focuses on the relationship between an older man and a younger woman,to whom he was only distantly related, Crime and Punishment, as it were, restores the fatherdaughter pairing we find in“The Stationmaster.”It focuses,however,less on the relationship of father and daughter and more on their independent roles in the novel itself. Although it is clear that Poor Folk is responding directly to “The Stationmaster,” it would be overstretching to make the same claim for Crime and Punishment. Rather, what Dostoevsky is doing in Crime and Punishment in terms of influence is further developing the characterization that he worked out in Poor Folk as a response to “The Stationmaster .” Like Samson Vyrin from“The Stationmaster,” Marmeladov is a civil servant with a daughter. They both have serious problems with alcohol. After Exile It is implicated in their deaths, as it is in Devushkin’s. Any other plot similarities or contrasts are probably accidental. Marmeladov, on the other hand, is the “superb culmination”3 of Dostoevsky’s portrayal of the impoverished civil servant and Sonya of the impoverished young female. In Poor Folk Dostoevsky responded to the portrayal of Samson Vyrin in...