Raskolnikov

The idea for a work about a so-called “strong personality,” unafraid of either pangs of conscience or human judgment, began to take shape in Dostoevsky’s mind while he was still in prison camp. In the autumn of 1859, Fyodor Mikhailovich wrote to his brother that he planned in the near future to begin work on a confessional novel, whose main outlines had formed for him “on the prison bunks, in a тяжелая minute of grief and self-disintegration.” The plot of Crime and Punishment may have been suggested to Dostoevsky by the trial of twenty-seven-year-old Muscovite Gerasim Chistov, an Old Believer and member of a merchant family, who in January 1865 murdered two elderly women. The murder weapon was an axe; the criminal took money and valuables from a chest and carried them out of the apartment. Six months later, in August, the trial began. Fyodor Mikhailovich was familiar with the stenographic report of the case; in Leonid Grossman’s opinion, “the materials of this trial could have given impetus to his artistic imagination at the first stage” of work on the novel.