Crime and Punishment

Events in History at the Time of the Novel

Reform and reaction in nineteenth-century Russia. The specific concerns that spurred Dostoyevsky to write Crime and Punishment grew out of a larger pattern of reform and reaction that dominated Russian history throughout the nineteenth century. This pattern, in turn, stemmed from increased exposure to Western European ideas by the Russian upper class. Unlike Western Europe, Russian society continued to consist largely of peasants and lords, with a small, economically weak middle class. Dostoyevsky was alone among Russia’s major nineteenth-century novelists in belonging to that middle class, for the others all came from the small but powerful ruling class, or nobility. (Dostoyevsky’s contemporary Leo Tolstoy, for example, was a count.) Amounting to about one percent of the population, the nobility included large landowners whose estates subsumed entire villages, and who controlled vast numbers of serfs, the laboring peasants whose position resembled that of the slaves in the southern United States. Though nominally free, the serf was in fact bound to the land and the service of a lord. In Crime and Punishment the character of Svidrigailov (svih drih gai´ luhf), a landowner and serial child rapist who beats and sexually abuses his serfs, represents this system’s worst abuses.

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