How Crime and Punishment drew on Dead Souls
A documented line of influence: Fyodor Dostoevsky demonstrably engaged Nikolai Gogol’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Dead Souls
Nikolai Gogol · 1842
RomanticismThe influenced
Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1866
The Age of the NovelRelevance
8/10
On Crime and Punishment’s page
- Raskolnikov's fevered drift through the Petersburg streets has a clear ancestor in Gogol
- Dostoevsky knew Dead Souls by heart — read it aloud all night — and one of its passages reads like Raskolnikov in the Haymarket two decades early
- Read Gogol first and the disoriented, hallucinatory texture of the city stops feeling like Dostoevsky's invention and starts feeling like an inheritance
On Dead Souls’s page
- Dostoevsky knew Dead Souls by heart — by his own account he read it aloud all night
- Gogol's St. Petersburg, where a man drifts through the city in a feverish daze, is the soil Crime and Punishment grows from
- A single Gogol passage all but conjures Raskolnikov wandering the Haymarket — twenty years before Dostoevsky wrote him