The Family in Crime and Punishment

Abstract

It is well known that Dostoevsky was in part reacting to Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s theories, in particular his 1863 novel What Is to Be Done?, as he conceived Crime and Punishment. In her book Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism: A Study in the Semiotics of Behavior (1988), Irina Paperno has shown that Chernyshevsky’s experiments with family structure are rooted in Hegelian theory as mediated by Russian thinkers in the 1840s. I examine Chernyshevsky’s novel as well as writings on the family and gender in Russian journalism of the early 1860s, especially Mikhail Larionovich Mikhailov’s articles and Apollinaria Prokofievna Suslova’s short stories in Dostoevsky’s journals Time and Epoch, to deepen our understanding of the family structures that appear in Crime and Punishment.