Capitalism and Alien Schizophrenia: Images of Modernity in Crime and Punishment

The article suggests the presence of a “specter of postmodernism” in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment. By this, the author means a specific relationship between economy and culture, where the latter appears as a kind of dream factory or, in the words of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, a culture industry. The artificiality and obsessiveness of culture in Dostoevsky’s novel are shown through the surrealistic coincidence of the city’s external space and the protagonist’s inner world. Raskolnikov wanders through the intertwining labyrinths of his own theory, feverish delirium, and the stifling Petersburg. However, this postmodernist inescapability of the labyrinth of imposed (“vulgar,” in Dostoevsky’s words) culture for the individual consciousness lost within it turns out to be “spectral” — the hero finds a way out. This possibility of escape relates the novel not so much to postmodernist literature and cinema as to those genres and currents of thought typically associated with the end of postmodernism: Nick Land’s cyberpunk, Robin van den Akker’s metamodernism, Raoul Eshelman’s performatism, etc. The “spectral” nature of postmodernism can be explained by the peculiar conditions of capitalism’s spread in Russia, which appeared not so much as a “natural” and inevitable result of historical movement but as an external invasion of Westernization. In this respect, Dostoevsky’s conservatism paradoxically aligns with the ethnocentrism of contemporary postcolonial scholars like Gayatri Spivak, Dipesh Chakrabarty, etc. The article examines this parallel primarily in the context of translation issues, which are key for both Dostoevsky and contemporary authors. The author proposes to reveal the image of capitalist modernity in Crime and Punishment through the postmodernist metaphor of schizophrenia, addressed by both Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, as well as Fredric Jameson, supplementing it, however, with these motifs of alienness and translation.