Podosokorsky Nikolai Nikolaevitch – Candidate in Philology, Senior Researcher; Research Centre “Dostoevsky and World Culture”, Institute for World Literature RAS; ORCID: 0000-0001-6310-1579
The article is devoted to the great legislators of mankind mentioned in F.M. Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment (1866). Rodion Raskolnikov, expounding to investigator Porfiry Petrovich his theory about “extraordinary” people who are allowed to shed blood according to their conscience, names only six legendary names of the founders of the new laws: Lycurgus, Solon, Mahomet, Kepler, Newton and Napoleon. The article explores why Raskolnikov named these names, and how they are interconnected with each other in the light of the Napoleonic myth, which plays a fundamental role in the fate of the hero. It is shown that Rodion Romanovich evaluates in a very peculiar way the new things that these figures have brought to world science and politics, and builds his relationship with fate in a completely different way than those whom he seemingly seeks to imitate.
Crime and Punishment; the theory of Rodion Raskolnikov; the Napoleonic myth; Napoleon; Newton; Lycurgus; Solon; Kepler; Mohammed.