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Abstract:

The novel Crime and Punishment, created by Dostoevsky in an era of liberal reforms and scientific discoveries, serves as an encyclopedia of Russian public life in the 1860s. This period was marked by heated debates surrounding numerous writings and articles by European—particularly German—philosophers and scientists. However, these scientific discoveries were often interpreted superficially, reduced to an exclusively atheistic interpretation, thus creating a confrontation between science and religion in people’s minds. In the novel Crime and Punishment Dostoevsky expresses his position in this dispute, using the book by George Henry Lewes The Physiology of Common Life as an unspoken interlocutor. References to Lewes’ book can be traced throughout the novel. First of all, Dostoevsky projects the symptoms of chronic starvation described by Lewes onto the mental and spiritual state of Raskolnikov. However, in considering the impact of hunger on human consciousness, Lewes spoke of the release of primitive instincts. Any crime in this case can be considered as an external or internal influence of the physiological reactions of the organism. Agreeing with Lewes about the existence of a connection between the physical and mental state of a person, Dostoevsky categorically affirms that the “primitive instinct” can and should not be the need for crime, but the law of morality. Dostoevsky was not worried about scientific progress as such, but about questions of scientific ethics, the widespread, violent and senseless transfer of the laws of organic nature to the field of social and religious-moral relations. Sonya’s religious consciousness, her natural mind, capable of comprehending the scientific realities of the new world, is one of the possibilities for the coexistence of science and religion, which Dostoevsky aspired to.

Keywords: Dostoevsky, George Henry Lewes, Ludwig Büchner, science, 1860s.