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This article discusses Crime and Punishment with the objectives to: 1. analyze Raskolnikov’s project: to kill not a person, but a “principle”, that is the need for the Law in society; 2. explain the meaning of his gesture: killing the Law is an even more radical gesture than “the death of God” described by Nietzsche; 3. clarify the motive(s) for Raskolnikov’s action, adopting the theories of desire and the polysemy of identity. What drives Raskolnikov is the desire to be, an indispensable concept after Freud, but one which requires investigation on a philosophical level. If, undoubtedly, Raskolnikov’s first motive is the wish to affirm the distinction between ordinary and “extraordinary” men, there is, however, a second, less visible motive, which consists in trying to sever a deeper dependence, that with his mother. Crime and Punishment is alsothe novel of matricide. 4. The extraordinary semantic density of Dostoevsky’s prose is reached through relationships: he is the master of overcoming and ambivalence. Analyzing the fabric of relationships in Dostoevsky highlights the importance of the female figures belonging to the series of mothers and to the series of daughters, which can only be understood through a logic of overcoming, and its unsettling outcomes. 5. Finally, contrary to a common tendency to separate the content (the ideas) in Dostoevsky from the artistic form, this article affirms that a) in Dostoevsky there are no ideas: if anything, there is the Idea, as a manifestation of the Sublime; b) in Dostoevsky there are no idea-concepts, but only characters.

The article discusses ways in which David Foster Wallace engages with Dostoevsky’s life and works. The article points out that Wallace’s commencement speech, “This Is Water,” makes no direct references to Dostoevsky, yet the moral and spiritual values that he enunciates share common ground with those of the Russian writer. The article then turns its attention to Wallace’s review of four of Dostoevsky scholar Joseph Frank’s five volumes devoted to Dostoevsky’s writings, life, and the historical, intellectual, and cultural contexts into which they fit. Wallace admires the way in which Dostoevsky’s novels address important issues, including isolation and nihilism, facing Russia in the 1860s. The American writer sees a similarity between that isolation of the 1860s and the isolation prevalent in the United States in the 1990s. The article then analyzes Wallace’s 1996 novel, Infinite Jest, and the ways in which he indirectly weaves into the text references to Dostoevsky’s fiction, primarily, but not exclusively, The Brothers Karamazov. Also discussed are a few parallels with Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and Demons. The article describes Wallace’s focus on the detrimental effects that isolation leads to in contemporary America. The article explains that Wallace declared that in Infinite Jest, he wanted to reflect the distracted, fractured way in which contemporary people think. The article states that given this goal, it makes sense that the references to Dostoevsky’s works in Infinite Jest are also fractured. They are in bits and pieces.

For the Russian socialists, “America” was the promised land — a kind of metaphor of absolute freedom, making possible full self-realization of every person. In Dostoevsky's The Demons, Russian socialists Shatov and Kirillov find their way to America, subsequently break with the ideas of socialism, but nevertheless perish — either as a result of his past (Shatov), or his atheism (Kirillov). It is not without reason that even for Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment America also means the futility of the exodus for a Russian person who is not free from shame and conscience, and Svidrigailov's expression “to go to America” even turned out to be an allegory of suicide. This symbolism is to a certain extent preserved in Russian literature after Dostoevsky. The article demonstrates this by examples of Chekhov's play The Seagull and Gazdanov's story “Black Swans”. Although plots and images of the Crime and Punishment, Demons and The Brothers Karamazov differ, the similar artistic dialectics is observed in Dostoevsky's last novel, which, according to some researchers, allegedly ends with Dmitry Karamazov's flight to America. Unlike Herzen and Chernyshevsky, “America” in Dostoevsky's works appears not so much as a metaphor of freedom, but rather as an allegory of suicide.

Though originated from a different historio-geographical background, Mohammad Taghi Jafari’s definition of moral conscience in his book The Conscience helps to further explore Fyodor Dostoevsky’s thematic concern with the same notion in Crime and Punishment. The following study probes into the concepts of self-evaluation and repentance as reflected in the novel. It then explores the manifestation of a phenomenon called the «ugliness of conscience» and all its implications ranging from hallucinations and self-hatred to paranoia and nightmares in this classic work of fiction. Moreover, this paper also studies Dostoevsky’s narrative for any sign of emphasis on the priority of «moral conscience»over «intelligence» and «individuaity», as it is also philosophically proposed and stressed by Jafari.

This article explores compelling and specific cases from France during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in which animals were formally executed for crimes. The so-called ‘medieval animal trials’ were cases in which animals were accused and sentenced for harming persons or property. In secular cases, a domestic animal (generally pigs, horses, and bulls) could be charged for killing a human and consequently be condemned to death, usually by hanging. Receipts relating to such cases can be found in seigneurial accounts which duly note the costs associated with the execution.An under-studied source on the animal trials, these records reveal the rhetorical strategies used to inform the treatment of an animal accused of committing a crime. This article looks specifically at the role of procedure as a discursive frame that transformed an offending animal into a criminal. A close examination of the receipts reveals that the trials share several features, which not only highlights the importance of following certain legal procedures, but also places the animal and its actions into pre-existing legal categories (that of ‘criminal’ and ‘crime’). These procedures include providing the appropriate judicial personnel and the right equipment for the execution. The condemned animal thus occupied an ambiguous space as a nonhuman that had been placed in legal categories made by and made for human subjects.By treating the animal as a criminal, these records provide a window into the medieval story of legal personhood and the fluidity of its borders, while also challenging the history of the human-animal relation as one built on difference and inferiority.

This article studies the novels of Daniel Venegas, Jovita González, and Américo Paredes that they wrote between 1928-1938. Indigeneity, marriage, liminality, and volition are major themes in the works of each author, all of which analyze the state of Chicanos in the Southwest during the first decades after the Mexican Revolution. While their plots and characters differ, they are all rooted in the conflict between First Nations and colonial settlers and had to grapple with the existence of pachucos. Because it was necessary for pachucos and pachucas to mediate between their Mexican-born relatives and Euro-Americans, they best represented the state of Mexican America during that era.

Érico Veríssimo, Reader of Dostoyevsky. Crime and Punishment, a source of Olhai os lírios do campo. We analyze in this article Érico Veríssimo’s Olhai os lírios do campo, basing ourselves on the study of sources. We try to show from this point of view that Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment constitutes an almost unconscious source of Olhai os lírios do campo. To begin with, we will sum up very briefly the principles of the study of sources, and then we will compare Olhai os lírios do campo and Crime and Punishment. We will see that the two novels share a similar narrative structure that we will describe. We will study afterwards the characters of Eugénio and Raskolnikov on the one hand, and of Olívia and Sonia on the other hand, and we will underline their similarities. We will especially observe that Érico Veríssimo and Dostoyevsky convey the same values with Olívia and Sonia. We will also notice the presence of a passage almost identical in Olhai os lírios do campo and Crime and Punishment. Nevertheless, we will remind in our conclusion that even if the similarities between Olhai os lírios do campo and Crime and Punishment are deep, so are the differences, and we will mention the main ones: there is a kind of optimism in Olhai os lírios do campo and more generally in Érico Veríssimo’s work which is absent from Dostoyevsky’s; on the contrary, Érico Veríssimo does not share Dostoyevsky’s worship of suffering; and whereas Dostoyevsky reveals all his anxiety without trying to calm it, Érico Veríssimo manages to go beyond it.