How Crime and Punishment drew on Fathers and Sons
A documented line of influence: Fyodor Dostoevsky demonstrably engaged Ivan Turgenev’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Fathers and Sons
Ivan Turgenev · 1862
The Age of the NovelThe influenced
Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1866
The Age of the NovelRelevance
7/10
On Crime and Punishment’s page
- Raskolnikov's theory has a pedigree — the nihilism Turgenev coined in Bazarov, pushed to murder
- Dostoevsky knew Turgenev personally (he borrowed money from him in 1865) and answered Fathers and Sons by drawing its abstract ideas to a bloody conclusion
- Read Turgenev first to meet the calm, theoretical nihilist; then watch Dostoevsky ask what happens when a man actually acts on it
On Fathers and Sons’s page
- This is where "nihilism" entered the bloodstream — Turgenev's Bazarov gave the idea a face
- Four years later Dostoevsky took those floating nihilist "incomplete ideas" to their violent extreme in Raskolnikov
- Even the disciples carry over: Crime and Punishment's Lebezyatnikov echoes Bazarov's caricatured followers, Sitnikov and Kukshina