The Extraordinary Men in Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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Dostoevsky’s theme of ordinary and extraordinary people is the basis of his work of literature, Crime and Punishment, which derives from his own life experiences. Crime and Punishment, is the story of a Russian man named Rodion Raskolnikov. Raskolnikov is an impoverished St. Petersburg habitant student who, “determined to overreach his humanity and assert his untrammeled individual will commit two acts of murder and theft” (Dostoevsky). To try to amend his actions, he uses the money he steals from the murdered to perform good deeds. Through his journey through the book, his mental state was full of grief, and he had plenty of moral dilemmas. Fyodor Dostoevsky is a Russian novelist. He was found guilty of involvement in revolutionary activities and initially sentenced to death, but was eventually ordered to 10 years “in labour camps and Siberian exile as a political prisoner” (Dostoevsky xi). Through the unbalanced life of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky shows the struggle and transformation him and Raskolnikov had being ordinary men, with an extraordinary mindset.

Raskolnikov’s main purpose of creating the article, describing the difference between the ordinary and extraordinary, was to detail the circumstances of the law of nature. The extraordinary man “has his own right to allow his conscience to step over certain obstacles, only in the event that the fulfillment of his idea calls for it” (Dostoevsky 259). All great men have to be criminals, or else it would be close to impossible for them to be extraordinary. Extraordinary men have the talent of speaking a new word in their environment and are inclined to destroy the present, moving the world and leading it toward a goal. Ordinary men only function to reprodu...

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...uide to Reading Between the Lines. New York: Quill, 2003. Print.

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Jay, Jennifer. “Dostoevsky and Autobiography-Prison.” Web. 20 March 2012 http://community.middlebury.edu/~beyer/courses/previous/ru351/studentpap ers/Autobiography.shtml.

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