Richard Wright and Fyodor Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment as a Praetext of Native Son and The Outsider

Richard Nathaniel Wright repeatedly acknowledged that Dostoevsky was his literary mentor, and that he owed much of his literary career to reading Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky shaped Wright’s intellectual, moral and aesthetic quest, and his individuality as an author. In the late 1920s–early 1930s Wright, engaged in selfeducation, read in public libraries and later acquired Dostoevsky’s most acclaimed novels and two collections of his short prose (translated by C. Garnett). Wright’s two major works, Native Son (1940) and The Outsider (1953) were strongly influenced by Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Striking similarities between Dostoevsky’s and Wright’s novels are evident in plot construction (detective story formula, provocative chatters of the criminal and the detective, etc.), setting, atmosphere, characters and their relationships, as well as in philosophical dilemmas and conflicts. Multiple allusions and reminiscences in Wright’s novels emphasize their close connection with the source text. Wright, however, does not copy Dostoevsky, but features powerful, typically Wrightian scenes focusing on the experience of an African American and, more broadly, 20th century Western man. Comparative analysis of Native Son, The Outsider and their source text, Crime and Punishment, reconstructs Wright’s journey from Marxism and social protest novel to Existentialism and philosophical novels with their complex symbolism and transformation of racial issues into universal metaphor of the human condition. “Dostoevskian complex” in Wright’s prose is a mark of integrity and individuality, something that shaped his literary genius and made his works easily recognizable