How Crime and Punishment drew on Eugene Onegin
A documented line of influence: Fyodor Dostoevsky demonstrably engaged Alexander Pushkin’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Eugene Onegin
Alexander Pushkin · 1833
RomanticismThe influenced
Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1866
The Age of the NovelRelevance
7/10
On Crime and Punishment’s page
- Raskolnikov belongs to a type Pushkin invented — the "superfluous man," too clever for the life in front of him
- Dostoevsky treated Eugene Onegin as scripture, praising it as the truest embodiment of "real Russian life"
- Read Pushkin first and you see the bloodline: Onegin's idle brilliance curdled, a generation later, into Raskolnikov's deadly theorizing
On Eugene Onegin’s page
- For Dostoevsky this was scripture — in his 1880 Pushkin Speech he called Onegin the place where "real Russian life is embodied with creative power and perfection"
- Onegin is the original Russian "superfluous man": brilliant, restless, useless — the type Dostoevsky would turn into his intellectual antiheroes
- Raskolnikov's clever paralysis starts here, in Pushkin's bored aristocrat