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Abstract:

The article is devoted to the significant presence of George Henry Lewes’s The Physiology of Common Life in Crime and Punishment — the only book explicitly mentioned by Marmeladov as part of his daughter Sonya’s “education” — and to the accompanying point that Sonya’s historical education concluded with Cyrus of Persia. It proposes which history textbook Marmeladov may have used to tutor Sonya. Both the figure of Cyrus the Persian and The Physiology of Common Life are examined in terms of the kind of philosophy of life they may have engendered or reinforced in the minds of the heroine and the reader. The article demonstrates how information from Lewes’s Physiology proves to be important for understanding Raskolnikov’s changing mental and psychical states, how it explains the strange appeals made to Raskolnikov by Porfiry and Svidrigailov — “You need air!” — and how Dostoevsky consistently draws a parallel between the human body and humanity as a whole, elevating the physical to the metaphysical. An extended table of contents of Lewes’ Physiology is also provided to offer a partial insight into the book, differing from the impressions drawn by twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholars and commentators of Dostoevsky’s novel based on reviews published shortly after its translation and on reviews of Crime and Punishment that mention Lewes’s book.

Keywords: Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, George Henry Lewes, The Physiology of Common Life, physiology as philosophy, Cyrus of Persia, Semen N. Smaragdov, Ivan K. Kaidanov, 19th-century textbooks on ancient history.