A Psychospiritual Synthesis of Psychological and Spiritual Themes in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment

Abstract

Works of Fyodor Dostoevsky hold a special place in world literature for their detailed exploration of psychological, philosophical, existential and spiritual conditions of human existence. Though available scholarship on the works of Dostoevsky explores each dimension separately, little effort has been made to look at them collectively as a unified framework. Due to the separated analysis, his artistic vision was interpreted fragmentarily. To address this problem, this study proposes a concept of psychospiritual synthesis to examine the psychological and spiritual aspects projected in one of his works as a collective representation of the universal human condition. For investigation, Dostoevsky’s work Crime and Punishment has been taken up as a primary source. The identified psychological themes are conscience, individuality, the divided self, existential crisis and madness and psychological deterioration. In the same way, spiritual themes taken up for study include sin, confession and redemption. This study aims to investigate how these themes are interconnected with each other and represent the universal human condition. For analysis, qualitative textual analysis through close reading of the primary and secondary sources is used as the research method. The interconnectedness among the psychological and spiritual themes identified as psychospiritual synthesis reveals the psychological deterioration and spiritual transformation as inseparable aspects of a unified psychospiritual process. The study also unveils how the psychological struggles and spiritual consciousness remain fundamentally interconnected forces of the human condition through the depiction of Dostoevskian characters.