Crime and Punishment Themes
Criminality
As you might have guessed from the title, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment is obsessed with crime, criminality, and vice. Like many of the best books, it asks more questions than it answers...
Justice and Judgment
Crime and Punishment is very interested in the idea of judgment: judgment of self and others, judgment of and by society, and judgment of and by religion. The novel asks us to judge not only the ch...
Love
Since violence and criminality dominate much of Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, we often have to peel back layers of text to get to the love. Most of the novel's "romantic" relationships...
Violence
You could say that Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment is a book about an ex-student turned murderer who wanders around St. Petersburg, Russia, trying to save children and young women from bad...
Versions of Reality
Dreams and hallucinations, as well as questions of madness, sanity, and existence, are huge parts of Crime and Punishment. The novel is deeply psychological and most of us can relate to at least so...
Suffering
We dare you to find a chapter in Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment without some form of the word "suffer" in it or without some person (or animal) suffering terrible physical and/or psycholo...
The Home
We get some grim visions of "home" in Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Often, the home is a site of violence, abuse, and extreme poverty, a trap that seems impossible to escape. Eviction a...
Drugs and Alcohol
There's plenty of alcohol in Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, and it isn't romanticized or celebrated in any way. In this novel, alcohol is nearly always a symbol or symptom of weakness, a...
Education
We never see the outside of a school, much less the inside of one, in Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Yet, we would argue that this is a "college book" because two of its main characters...
Religion
As novelist and critic A. N. Wilson says, "[Fyodor Dostoevsky's] views on religion are notoriously hard to pin down with confidence." (Source) Hearing this is a bit of a relief, isn't it? Some vers...