Crime and Punishment: The Delusional Man Who Made the World Delusional

This paper examines the unverified premise at the foundation of Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment — that Raskolnikov is intelligent — and traces how 160 years of readers, scholars, and institutions accepted this self-proclamation without questioning it. Using only the novel's internal architecture and Dostoevsky's own documented words, it maps four surfaces of a single structure — the title, Porfiry, Sonya, and the plague dream — all pointing at the same verdict that was present before page one. This paper examines Fyodor Dostoevsky as the origin of the mechanism it describes.