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Abstract:

The article proposes defining Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment as a novel of consciousness. The term has been used relatively recently, primarily in English- language scholarship over the past few decades. However, this article employes it in a slightly different sense, emphasizing not the plurality of individual consciousnesses but rather the universalization of consciousness as such. The distinctiveness of Crime and Punishment in relation to the tradition of Western European and Russian social and psychological novel was already noticed by its first readers and formulated by critics N.D. Akhsharumov, N.N. Strakhov, and Fr. Theodore (A.M. Bukharev). Dostoevsky achieves a unique fusion of the protagonist with the reader by postulating the common nature of human consciousness. This new aesthetics found its expression in the novel’s narrative structure, as the use of improper direct speech creates a system of interconnected vessels (author-hero-reader) within the flowing unified “all-human” consciousness.

Keywords: Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, novel of consciousness, all-humanity, receptive strategy, improper direct speech.