How Crime and Punishment drew on Hamlet
A documented line of influence: Fyodor Dostoevsky demonstrably engaged William Shakespeare’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Hamlet
William Shakespeare · c. 1600
ShakespeareThe influenced
Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1866
The Age of the NovelRelevance
7/10
On Crime and Punishment’s page
- Raskolnikov is built on Hamlet — scholars read him as a deliberate 19th-century reworking of the type, and Dostoevsky agonized over the play in his notebooks while writing
- The same engine drives both: a thinking man immobilized by his own deed, intellect at war with conscience
- Hamlet gives you the template Dostoevsky inverts — the prince who cannot act, remade as the student who acts and then cannot live with it
On Hamlet’s page
- Dostoevsky read Hamlet in Russian and French and wrestled with it in his notebooks — How terrible! How petty is man! Hamlet! Hamlet!
- Raskolnikov is his Russian Hamlet: the brooding intellectual paralyzed by a deed, conscience turned against itself
- Where Shakespeare's prince agonizes over a murder he must commit, Dostoevsky recasts the type as the modern murderer agonizing over one he has