What is it about?
Lay Summary: Matricide as Hidden Dream Motive/Motif in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment Why did Raskolinikov, in Dostoevsky's novel, Crime and Punishment, kill the old money lender? Some would say it was simply out of desperate need; others that he wanted to save his sister from marrying a rich man in order to rescue her family from imminent poverty. Or that he resented the fact that a prostitute had to sell herself in order to feed her destitute parents. Or did Raskolnikov commit a murder for an ideal purpose: to put into practice his Napoleonic theory, and by so doing save the world from its misery? I propose that we find the answer to these questions in one of Raskolnikov's frequent dreams, in which the murder is re-enacted, but where the victim refuses to die. With the support of Sigmund Freud's analysis of dreams, I maintain that the money lender is a disguise for the dreamer wishing his mother dead because, as I shall show, he has been the victim of his mother's duplicity, and it is only with her decease that the son is restored to mental health.
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Why is it important?
Much has been written about Raskolnikov's motive for murder, but I am here proposing something controversial with the support of dream analysis: matricide.
Perspectives
Crime and Punishment is a novel known to many but which many may not have read. I would hope that my summary would attract the lay reader as well as academics.
Antony Johae
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Matricide as Hidden Dream Motive/Motif in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, The Dostoevsky Journal, September 2020, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/23752122-02101006.
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