A free-thinking character Rodion Raskolnikov wants to review the decisions on all the main life’s questions. In his crazy dream, he creates his own world, strange and vague, but so attractive that he can’t help thinking about it. In the given paper we will consider and try to explain the most interesting issues raised by Dostoyevsky in his outstanding novel “Crime and Punishment”.
Dostoyevsky is considered to be one of the writers-strategists. Strategic approach implies working out the plan of actions to serve one idea. It is interesting to trace how these decisions were shown by the author in the novel.
At first, Raskolnikov sees our world as a place of justice and good deeds. At first his own idea seems awful to him, when he hears the students’ conversation in the tavern in the first part of the novel: angry, sick, old and unnecessary woman on the one side and young power dying without any support on the other side. hundreds of good deeds, which would be possible to perform for her money (“Crime and Punishment”, p.2). This is the example of the first decision that belongs both to the student and to the whole society.
What ideas is the student talking about? What aim deserves such strategy? The main character of the novel is sure that all the people are divided into two groups: simple people and extraordinary individuals, who have a gift to say their own word. According to Raskolnikov, Lycurgus, Solon, and Napoleon are “extraordinary” and he also wants to become one of these great heroes who served one idea (“Crime and Punishment”, p.153). It is not by chance that he adverts to the figure of Napoleon as it was him who did not stop before killing thousands of people. He sacrificed a lot of lives in order to reach his goal. Hundreds, maybe even thousands of people can be saved from poverty, depravity, death for old woman’s money.