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Imperfect Murder: Reading Crime and Punishment

Module description

Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment is a classic novel. It’s also a murder mystery with a detective, a psychological thriller with a haunted hero, a critique of the sexual exploitation of women, a dreamlike portrait of St Petersburg – and a story of student debt. The hero, Raskolnikov, kills an old pawnbroker because he has no money to pay his university fees. What happens next is gripping…

Through close readings and seminar discussions of this fascinating novel, you will analyse literary style, identify subtexts, subplots, and character archetypes, and gain confidence accessing and evaluating critical literature. This module is open to students from outside Russian and so no prior knowledge of Russian required, but students of Russian should consult the texts in Russian.

Module aims - intentions of the module

• To enable you to situate Crime and Punishment within its historical and intellectual context.
• To enable you to assess and assimilate a range of critical approaches to the novel’s key themes.
• To facilitate your ability to perform close readings of the text (in translation) and to analyse the narrative technique and underlying symbolism of Dostoevsky’s novel.

Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)

ILO: Module-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 1. Demonstrate an advanced understanding of selected texts and key aspects of their historical, literary and cultural context
• 2. Demonstrate a familiarity with the main trends of critical discourse about Dostoevsky and this novel.

ILO: Discipline-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 3. Demonstrate an advanced ability to interrelate themes and characters specific to this module with prevalent trends in the nineteenth-century European realist novel and with major issues in subsequent literary and intellectual discourse.
• 4. Demonstrate an advanced ability to understand and analyse relevant theoretical ideas, and to apply these ideas to literary texts.

ILO: Personal and key skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 5. Demonstrate appropriate research and bibliographic skills, an advanced capacity to construct a coherent, substantiated argument, and a capacity to write clear and correct prose.
• 6. Through seminar work and presentations, demonstrate advanced communication skills, and an ability to work both individually and in groups.

Syllabus plan

The initial lectures will introduce the historical background to the novel Crime and Punishment, including Dostoevsky’s biography and Russian culture and society in the mid-nineteenth century, then will consolidate this material, explain the structure of the course, and allocate students to seminar presentations. Subsequent lectures will explore the novel’s major themes, followed by a concluding lecture.

In biweekly 2-hour seminars, students will analyse and discuss key themes and characters from the novel in the context of narrative analysis and/or sociohistorical issues, typically covering the following topics:

• Who Was Dostoevsky? Approaches to his critical and ethical legacy
• Napoleon or louse: what motivates Raskolnikov’s crime?
• Sonia and the portrayal of female characters in the novel
• The role of urban spaces in the construction of narrative
• The problem of character archetypes in Dostoevsky’s novel

Learning activities and teaching methods (given in hours of study time)

Details of learning activities and teaching methods

Formative assessment

Summative assessment (% of credit)

Details of summative assessment

Details of re-assessment (where required by referral or deferral)

Re-assessment notes

Deferral – if you miss an assessment for certificated reasons judged acceptable by the Mitigation Committee, you will normally be either deferred in the assessment or an extension may be granted. The mark given for a re-assessment taken as a result of deferral will not be capped and will be treated as it would be if it were your first attempt at the assessment.

Referral – if you have failed the module overall (i.e. a final overall module mark of less than 40%) you will be required to submit a further assessment as necessary. If you are successful on referral, your overall module mark will be capped at 40%.

Indicative learning resources - Basic reading

• Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment (preferably the 2014 Penguin translation by Oliver Ready). The Russian text is available here: https://ilibrary.ru/text/69/index.html

Indicative learning resources - Web based and electronic resources

• ELE – Faculty to provide hyperlink to appropriate pages
• http://www.mappingpetersburg.org/site/?page_id=36 (from Dr Sarah Young’s Mapping St Petersburg website)
• https://digitaldostoevsky.com/2021/07/16/introducing-digital-dostoevsky/  A Digital Humanities project analysing Dostoevsky’s major novels online and on “X”

Indicative learning resources - Other resources

• Bowers, Katherine and Kate Holland (eds). Dostoevsky at 200: The Novel in Modernity. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2021.
• Bird, Robert. Fyodor Dostoevsky. Critical Lives Series. London: Reaktion Books, 2012.
• Frank, Joseph. Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012.
• Kelly, Catriona. Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 2001.
• Leatherbarrow, W. J. (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Dostoevskii. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
• Martinsen, Deborah and Olga Maiorova (eds). Dostoevsky in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
• Martinsen, Deborah. Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment”: A Reader's Guide. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2022.
• Scanlan, James P. Dostoevsky the Thinker. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010.

Key words search

Dostoevsky, reading, literature, Russian